The hard snap of the Gamaguchi’s metal knobs flipped behind Yurie’s ears, warping into a high, wrong whine that gouged at her inner ear.

  Her heartbeat kept tapping an irregular rhythm at her jaw hinge.

  She wasn’t falling.

  And yet she kept falling.

  The illusion seeped into bone.

  Yurie crawled up the slope on her hands, but the white sand never stopped running beneath her. It skinned her fingertips raw until sensation went numb.

  Sand was light.

  Light—and the moment it slipped under her nails, it became a blade.

  Each time she dug in, the white creaked and scraped—a dry rasp, and nothing else.

  At the edge of her vision, Mermi had her claws buried deep in the slope, shoulders hunched as if she could physically wrestle gravity into behaving. Mud tangled in her golden coat, making the corridor’s “cleanliness” look like a cheap lie.

  Mud had been here from the start.

  “Clean” was just paint.

  But the High Priestess sitting ahead—only her—was thoroughly sealed away from that filth.

  Her veils didn’t flutter. Sand didn’t cling.

  Around her, everything looked… stopped.

  Like a different world had been cut out and pasted here.

  “…Hey. You can hear me, right?”

  Yurie spat out grit-laced sand and lifted her face.

  The High Priestess’s veil was far too vertical for this warped slope. No wind. No vibration. A frozen hush. Her whiteness was so intense it floated apart from the corridor’s flowing landscape—an unnatural cutout, like a photograph pasted on top of reality.

  “Why are you staying silent? Mermi’s slipping all over the place and the whole world is bent like this—” “…Don’t tell me you can’t see it.”

  The High Priestess didn’t twitch.

  The eyes that should have been behind that veil didn’t spare a glance for the mud-smeared girl. They fixed on something far away—some “clean ideal” beyond the corridor.

  Intellect. Purity. Stillness.

  Here, those words turned into naked violence: ignoring—a refusal sharp enough to prick Yurie’s skin.

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  “You’re not quiet because you don’t know, are you?” “…You’re hiding it. That’s why you get to stay so white—because you shove everything dirty under your feet!”

  Her shout vanished into the sand. The sand drank it.

  The scream died. The sand kept running.

  Mermi snorted and forced her slipping paws into the slope.

  “It’s pointless, Yuri.” “Her ears are designed to reject anything but hymns that flatter her.” “And heaven’s gatekeepers always call the mud splashing up from the earth ‘filth.’ That’s what they are.”

  As if answering that line, the High Priestess’s fingertip moved—only slightly.

  —It moved, and yet it felt like the world stopped instead.

  The boundary of her “vertical stillness.”

  Just outside it, on sand where the mud had begun to mix in, a single piece of fruit lay rolling in place.

  A pomegranate.

  Its skin held the exact same porcelain-white as her veil—perfect, spotless, without so much as a smudge. A flawless sphere, not even a dent.

  It looked like the crystallized residue of the “orderly everyday” Yurie had believed in until yesterday. A room without bad smells. A life where everything sat “correctly” in its place.

  (…If I touch it, I’ll understand something.)

  And at the same time—

  (I don’t want to touch it.)

  As if invited, Yurie reached for the white fruit.

  Her fingertip met a surface that was cold and hard.

  Too cold. Not a living temperature.

  Crack.

  A dry, ominous sound.

  “…Ah.”

  In the next instant, that perfect white burst from the inside, as if it couldn’t bear its own purity.

  What spilled out wasn’t rich honey.

  It was—slurp—sticky mud.

  And seeds. Red-black seeds packed together with no order, as if they’d forgotten the shape they were supposed to make.

  It oozed out like vomit, smearing the High Priestess’s pure boundary as it flowed.

  “…What… is this…?”

  Yurie jerked her hand back on reflex.

  Too late.

  The lukewarm texture of mud was already clinging to her fingers. Slick. Stringy. Refusing to come off. The surface had played “proper daily life,” but inside—inside it was this.

  Filth, swollen in places she’d never been allowed to see.

  She didn’t understand the cause. She didn’t know why Mermi’s legs tangled. She didn’t know why the world had tilted.

  But she understood this, instantly:

  The inside of this burst pomegranate was the unhideable truth of what was happening to them.

  “…You’re a liar.”

  Yurie’s gaze speared the High Priestess’s veil—still not moving by even one millimeter, even as it took splashes of bloodlike mud.

  “You knew, didn’t you?” “You knew it was this messy inside.” “…And you hid it. You acted clean. You stayed quiet—” “You’re pretending you’re pure!”

  The High Priestess’s silence pressed down on the corridor—heavy, deep.

  It wasn’t ignorance.

  It was refusal. The arrogance of something above them, processing the collapse of reality as “inconvenient noise” and discarding it without even looking.

  “Yuri, don’t you stop!” “That mud is what you picked up!”

  Up ahead, Mermi carved out a step, gouging the slope with her claws.

  Yurie stabbed her mud-smeared hand into the white sand. Pomegranate seeds tangled around her fingers, crawling with a vivid disgust that invaded her “clean, pure neatness.”

  —And yet.

  That invasion was the only reality they could share here.

  Their shadows stretched long across the purple waste. Yurie tried to put a name to that smell—the one she'd been running from. Nothing came. The Gamaguchi throbbed, quietly satisfied.