Chapter 539

I think of the blood and potion running down beneath the mask, but the thought is forgotten as they soak into my collar. I am looking up at the firmament.

[Nikolaus Ernst has won.]

[Just before 6:30 PM, our Kingdom of Bavaria succeeded, after years of preparation and effort, in eliminating one-third of Pleroma, unlike the claims of the French Empire, which has strongly insisted that Germany bears responsibility for the damage, arguing that the German Empire did not do everything in its power to eradicate Pleroma. At present, one-third of the personnel from all of Pleroma’s dioceses are trapped within the spatial magic prepared in Bavaria. This is an unprecedented achievement and a declaration of war. As a member of the German Empire, our Kingdom of Bavaria will do everything in its power to contribute to the safety of our homeland and the continent. The achievements of His Majesty King Hildegard and His Excellency Nikolaus Ernst are lighting up the Empire tonight!]

[This Easter evening, our Bavaria has won!]

When I emerge through the Archdiocese of Bamberg, Nuremberg spreads out before me once again.

I take in the smell of earth, the dust from the plaster on the buildings, and the scent of life rising from nature.

The voice amplification technology developed after the model of Pentathlon lifts the spirits of Bavaria’s citizens and reassures them, while ensuring that the news reaches the newspapers beyond the city.

The resounding voice flows unhindered across the vast territory, rivaling Pleroma’s own broadcasts.

Yet a single voice alone stops it.

Screams fall silent all around me.

Faces smiling through tears flash across my vision.

Hands raised toward the sky, waving wildly.

Their bliss.

I look at those fingertips reaching toward the sky alongside a procession of numbers descending without end.

Be careful, Jesus warned them. Watch out for the yeast of the Pharisees and that of Herod. They discussed this with one another and said, It is because we have no bread.Aware of their discussion, Jesus asked them, Why are you talking about having no bread? Do you still not see or understand? Are your hearts hardened? Do you have eyes but fail to see, and ears but fail to hear? And don’t you remember?¹How is it you don’t understand that I was not talking to you about bread? But be on your guard against the yeast of the Pharisees and Sadducees.²

No matter how many hundreds of millions of times the words spoken two thousand years ago are read, black remains letters and white remains paper.

The words slip through my fingers.

Perhaps, just as a thought cannot escape the confines of one’s mind, Christ’s atonement cannot escape the plan of the heavenly realm.

It is not that I am saying Jesus accomplished something in vain. I am asking whether His plan was simply too far beyond us.

Burned arms that can be held, clear eyes that can meet my gaze, a face that can be spat upon, palms that can bleed, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani³…

Even though there was no way He could have come any closer than that, was He still too far away from us?

I ask myself that today, just as I did then, because in essence, nothing has changed.

Jesus showed with His own body that a human being could enter through the narrow gate. Yet when it comes to another person, is it not simply human nature to misunderstand and distort their intentions and their position, to praise or condemn them, to praise or condemn others according to one’s own understanding?

And is it not also human nature to say, “I have seen through you—I know the truth about you”?

I am asking what we are supposed to do with that sad yet brilliant nature.

There is no such thing as seeing someone exactly as they are.

The moment I pass through eyes, words, writing, light, and vibrations, I cease to be myself.

It becomes you.

Your anxiety.

Your love.

I have already become you, altered by your biases or your beliefs, transformed into light refracted at a different angle, only to return to me again.

Whether that is a gain or a loss is for me to decide. And whether I become disappointed, frustrated, hopeful, amazed, indifferent, or accepting of the image of me that is no longer truly me, of the version of me that you believe you have judged, and of those two eyes through which you see me—that too is mine to decide.

Inside, everything is utterly still. No emotion settles there.

It simply flows, like a river breaking apart beneath the sunlight.

There is only one thing I want to ask.

How much authority does another person have when it comes to misunderstanding someone?

If you believe I am that way, must that truly become who I am?

If my sincerity—that I never intended the destruction of any ideology, the extinction of ethics, the wounds inflicted by filth, death, sex, virtue, and countless connections—cannot have any bearing on determining the truth, and the only thing that matters is your whim, then am I truly supposed to bear all of it myself?

To be dragged through the mud, nailed to a cross, or worshiped simply because of your whim?

In other words, can your whim kill me and bring me back to life?

Does it come before my truth as the subject of all this, and is it more important than that truth?

If so, then what is this?

Suicide?

Or murder?

How far must I go to prove myself, and what must I do to convey my true intentions? What does it take to make something truly understood? If Jesus had to be crucified because no one could make the Logos reach their hearts, then how many more deaths must we witness before we can truly strive to enter through the narrow gate?

How shallow is understanding. You claim to know everything when you know nothing at all. I do not understand you in the slightest. I could say it twice, three times over—I never tried to find out whether you existed, yet you deny yourself while trying to know me. But I am not there. All you see is yourself. And then, mistaking yourself for me, did you not point your finger at me?

And what, then, is this praise? Is it not praise for an incarnation of your own righteousness, your own prayers, and your own desires?

Are there not hundreds upon hundreds of mirrors between you and me…?

“Sir Ernst!” Herr Ernst— The repeated chant pierces my ears.

— [Your Excellency, since you are in Nuremberg, please move to Munich. I will call out the temporary coordinates.]

The past lies in the future, and the future lies in the past.

I think of the cheers pouring down over my head like a waterfall. I think of the faces filled with emotion as people who had watched from afar gradually draw closer, one by one.

I take their hands.

They pull my hands toward themselves and press them against their hearts, their cheeks, and their foreheads.

Sarah Hohenfels, lying on the ground, looks straight at me and speaks. ｢You knew me.｣ ｢What have you done? Listen! Your brother’s blood cries out to Me from the ground.⁴｣ ｢I merely did what I believed was right. Did You not look into my life, if only for a moment? I was simply reaping what I had sown.｣ ｢Now you are under a curse and driven from the ground, which opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand… When you work the ground, it will no longer yield its crops for you. You will be a restless wanderer on the earth.⁵｣

I remember the moment I drove my staff down into Sarah Hohenfels’s heart.

White light pours from my hand and flows over people’s heads. Like a river.

Pleroma says, 「My punishment is more than I can bear.⁶」

The cries of countless people’s blood rise toward the heavens. And today, the procession of cheers raining down from above drags her into the depths.

Pleroma says, 「Today You are driving me from the land, and I will be hidden from Your presence. I will be a restless wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me.⁷ Did not the Anointed One surely say, ‘I tell you, whoever publicly acknowledges Me before others, the Son of Man will also acknowledge before the angels of God. But whoever disowns Me before others will be disowned before the angels of God’⁸? Have You forgotten what You said?」

But the LORD said to him, 「Not so! anyone who kills Cain will suffer vengeance seven times over.」Then the LORD put a mark on Cain so that no one who found him would kill him.

(TL/N: Genesis 4:15)

Sarah Hohenfels, dying beneath my feet, sneers and says, 「The meaning of killing is different from what I know. Lord, was it not You who killed me?」

Wrong.

When Pontius Pilate, the governor of Rome, asked the chief priests, the elders, and the crowd which of the two, Jesus or Barabbas, they wanted him to release, they said, 「Let Jesus be crucified.」

「Why? What crime has he committed?」asked Pilate.

But they shouted all the louder, 「Crucify him!」

When Pilate saw that he was getting nowhere, but that instead an uproar was starting, he took water and washed his hands in front of the crowd. 「I am innocent of this man’s blood,」 he said. 「It is your responsibility!」

All the people answered, 「His blood is on us and on our children!」

(TL/N: Matthew 27:23-25)

That is the death that death refers to.

“I understand now.”

I murmur the words as I hand my divine power over to the hands of the people holding onto me, sending their praise, their awe, and their gratitude aside.

“Now I understand.”

I understood why God had given Cain his mark. Ah. Now I understood. Do not dare claim that you know His will, Satan… Satan, begone.

I felt my heart emptying out. I could not close my eyes.

I thought of the words of Hadrian, as created by Yourcenar—the sharp observation that even Alexander the Great could never have been fully understood through Plutarch⁹, and that direct observation of a person was an even more imperfect method than the accounts of historians who lost the truth while trying to assign cause and effect to every event, so that in most cases, it ended up as nothing more than a crude form of verification that satisfied human malice.

I wondered whether those who devoted themselves to praising the Son of Man who had fallen to the ground with his forehead pressed against the lowest place truly tried to enter through the narrow gate.

I wondered how different the fervent cheers raining down upon my head were from the endless numbers descending before my eyes.

I wondered whether praising the Son of Man, converting even one more person so that they would not burn to death in the fires of hell, and condemning the evils of the age truly meant that they had fulfilled their duty to enter heaven—to enter through the narrow gate.

I wondered whether the Son of Man, praised by those who walked the broad road, had truly wanted any of this…

For a moment, I was shaken by the philosopher who said that even if the categorical imperative existed, the afterlife was necessary for justice in this world; that there had to be a life beyond this one to resolve the inequalities of the present world; that we needed a God who would make us live according to the categorical imperative.

Perhaps he was right that universal moral principles like the categorical imperative existed for humanity, but that God’s existence was necessary for those principles to be maintained.

And so, for someone like me who had turned away from the metaphysics of Christianity, it was as though he were beckoning me to lean on God once more.

I was born a Christian and chose for myself not to remain one, but contrary to what believers who heard that I had become an atheist might think, I have never harbored any ill will toward God, religion, people, or even life itself.

Freud¹⁰ is not a thinker I particularly favor, but if childhood becomes a path that cannot simply be severed even in later life, then perhaps I will never be able to completely escape the Christian worldview.

And this time, in a distinctly different sense, I think atheism and religion can coexist for me on separate levels. Because I have never truly stepped even one foot outside Christianity, I can hold this belief despite my clear atheism.

For me, atheism is the greatest respect I can offer the adult Jesus.

Could you understand someone like me?

Then you cannot apply the same reasoning to Yahweh. Yahweh was, from the very beginning, omniscience itself, worthy of reverence.

Yet if there are those who argue that the reasoning I have given above is insufficient to establish that I am an atheist, then their argument must be flawed from its very foundation and its order of reasoning.

That is because I am speaking from a position in which I have already turned away from the metaphysics of religion, yet still regard the subject of the New Testament—the new covenant unique to Christianity, which branched out from the Abrahamic tradition and distinguished itself from Judaism and Islam—as a saint, while remaining an atheist.

Strive to enter through the narrow gate. When faced with right and wrong, their blades and their tongues no longer mean anything. Yet I did not want to do anything to them.

I do not despise you. You will all attain Buddhahood in due time…

Everything connects. Everything flows.

With every step I take, people lean their bodies outward and cry out as though they are about to pour toward me. I wanted to press my forehead to the ground just like this and close my eyes.

Beneath the waterfall of their cheers, I close my eyes.

In the meantime, tens of thousands of people have gathered, packed so tightly that they are nearly trampling one another—

I grip my staff and lower myself. I put one knee on the ground and lean my body against the staff firmly planted in the earth.

Jesus began to speak first to his disciples, saying, “Be on your guard against the yeast of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy. There is nothing concealed that will not be disclosed, or hidden that will not be made known. What you have said in the dark will be heard in the daylight, and what you have whispered in the ear in the inner rooms will be proclaimed from the roofs…”

Dozens of hands reach for me. I realize someone is pulling my body out of that place.

“Be angry.”

I hear a familiar voice taking shape beside me. Someone was pleading with me. Before my forehead can touch the ground, I hear that voice again, pulling me back.

“I’d rather you did. If you can’t do it for yourself, then do it for me, at least.”

Translator Note

1. Mark 8:15-18 ↩︎
2. Matthew 16:11 ↩︎
3. ‘Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani’ is a phrase spoken by Jesus on the cross, meaning ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ ↩︎
4. Genesis 4:10, when God confronts Cain after he kills his brother Abel. ↩︎
5. Genesis 4:11-12 ↩︎
6. Genesis 4:13, Cain’s answer to God ↩︎
7. Genesis 4:14 ↩︎
8. Luke 12:8-9 ↩︎
9. Refers to Plutarch’sLife of Alexander, a famous ancient biography written around 100 A.D. that explores the character, virtues, and flaws of Alexander the Great. ↩︎
10. Refers to Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic view that childhood experiences and conflicts can have a lasting influence on a person’s adult life. ↩︎