To say the pain was immense was to compare a trip down the stairs to a fall from the fiftieth floor.
Every inch, every fiber of his core, felt like it was on fire. Yet, despite that, his outer skin seemed like it had been frozen, like it was about to surrender to frostbite and peel off, leaving nothing beneath but bloody, flaming viscera.
Yet, Sho knew, this could not be the case.
His outside and his inside could not be experiencing such different experiences at once without limiting the other.
His mind travelled to an old song that one of his uncles had song to him as a child -
♫Heat never travels from the cooler to the hotter, you can try it if you like but you're much better not to, heat never travels from the cooler to the hotter, cos that's a physical law♫ Ignoring the sheer nerdiness of that uncle for a moment, if his internal organs were truly facing such blistering heat, they should have been cooled by whatever was happening to his skin.
This, Sho was certain, was an illusion. A stimulated feeling of pain without any actual cause. His organs could not be shutting down from overheating, because otherwise his body would be dulling the pain, would be reducing it rather than allowing it to grow hotter and hotter by the second.
It was like how a papercut paradoxically had the potential to hurt far more than an actual broken finger. After a certain point, the human mind simply couldn't conceptualize pain, and so it would begin to cut it off.
Though, as comforting as the fact that this pain was phantasmal was on a conceptual level, it sure didn't stop it being incredibly painful. In fact, if anything, he wondered just how this would actually help him reach the enlightened state they clearly wanted him to reach, togetherness with the earth.
Then the smoke came over the room, the stones lit up, and the chakra entered Shosuke. The world span. It went dark.
---
When Sho's eyes opened, he was in darkness.
The pain was gone, that was the first thing he noticed. He let out a gasp of air, a sigh of relief, and yet heard nothing. Nothing came from his mouth, even as he willed himself to talk.
It was an unpleasant experience, and yet he was certain that he was speaking, he simply could not hear it. His tongue was hale and hearty and moved just as it would if he was having a regular conversation with someone. This, he was certain, was more sensory manipulation.
So, he thought, his eyes seeing nothing but black, this was it. This was what it felt like to feel nothing. In its own dark, absurd way, it was almost comforting. Like an old friend that he had come from and would one day return to, an oblivion of sense.
Bizarrely, it reminded him of a fairy tale that he had heard from the same uncle as mentioned earlier - the Invention of Zero. A long time ago, the number system was founded, created in order to count numbers of flowers needing planting or grains of rice harvested. They formed ten numbers - One, two, three, four, and so on until they reached ten. Then, they began again, this time with the base being ten + one, ten + two, until they made twenty.
But now that people could count what they had, they had to consider what they had not.
To not have, to be devoid of, to lack. This state of blackness, blindness, reminded him of that. A perfect, conceptualized zero-state. An infinitude of emptiness. Unlike everything else in the universe, it was neither of yin, nor of yang. It simply was, and it was not, all at once.
But then that emptiness was violated. Vanquished, beaten back, all by something as simple as a pulse.
BADUMP. He could feel it, out there in the darkness. Denying him the comfort of absolute zero yet providing him something in its place. It was faint, implacable, distant. Yet, it was all there was, the only thing in this world without quantum states. Where all else was naught, it remained in flux.
BADUMP.And so, he reached out for it.