Chapter 1: The Book of the Heart

Across countless parallel universes, countless Earths exist. Among them is one thoroughly insignificant little place where the story I'm going to tell takes place.

In this world, at the end of the twentieth century, a single power used overwhelming military force to sweep aside every barrier of ethnicity, national borders, and faith, making subjects of all humanity before anyone realized what was happening. Within two years, everyone who dared resist had been wiped out.

In 2000, humanity completed the unification of the entire planet under one authority. From that year on, the concept of national borders ceased to exist on Earth. Former “countries” were all redesignated “prefectures” or “commanderies”; only the names of individual cities were retained.

A word long unspoken returned to the stage of history—emperor.

For better or worse, at least in this universe, the people of Earth ultimately united as an empire rather than a federation.

Actually, taking the long view, if a bunch of monkeys, or bugs, or even things like robots were to invade from beyond the Milky Way some years down the line, the Earth Empire would certainly put up a better fight than an Earth Federation.

Of course, nothing like that is going to happen in this story just yet.

Our story begins in December 2100.

Sakura Prefecture was one of the world's smallest “prefectures.” The Empire had originally intended to incorporate it into the Dragon Commandery, but it lay out at sea, had been prone to earthquakes and tsunamis since ancient times, and even had a volcano that was still active. There was no telling when the whole place might sink into the sea. The Dragon Commandery already covered a vast territory, so in the end, the Empire's higher-ups decided to make Sakura Prefecture a separate “prefecture” after all.

That winter, a teenage boy was running breathlessly down a street in Hokkaido, the bitter morning air cutting at his face like knives.

He was neither tall nor short, neither fat nor thin, with an unremarkable face and glasses whose lenses were as thick as the bottoms of beer bottles. He wore a black school uniform and carried a shabby backpack over both shoulders. From his sideburns to his collar clasp to his trouser cuffs, there wasn't a thing you could fault. A model student.

But this model student was late yet again.

“Oh, Ikeda-kun. You've come running in all sweaty again today, I see. All right, sit down.” The speaker was a balding middle-aged man surnamed Matsuo, Ikeda's homeroom teacher. He taught mathematics.

It was a very good school, ranking fairly high among Sakura Prefecture's college-preparatory high schools. Compared with the academies attended by the nobility and royalty, though, it was hardly worth mentioning.

Ikeda lived rather out of the way, so getting to school on time meant catching a bus that ran very infrequently. If he missed it, his only option was to run for about forty minutes. Try as he might, something always made him miss the bus a few times a month, leaving him late.

Matsuo was a snob, and Ikeda was exactly the sort of impoverished student he despised. He often used Ikeda's slightest mistake as an excuse to embarrass him in front of everyone. Luckily, Matsuo seemed to be in a decent mood today. He went on with the lesson without humiliating Ikeda any further for his own amusement.

Relieved, Ikeda darted to his seat, quietly put down his bag, and took out his textbook.

Since he had arrived late, the first lesson ended just over ten minutes after he sat down.

Matsuo wasted no more words. When the bell rang, he walked out of the classroom, but at the door he turned and gave Ikeda a hostile look. Ikeda distinctly saw a sneer at the corner of his mouth.

“Hey, Soggy Mosquito Coil. I've got something to tell you. Come up to the roof.” Miura, the class representative, was a tall, powerfully built fat boy from a very rich family. His father was reportedly the director of a large hospital, which was why the snobbish Matsuo had made Miura class representative despite his average grades.

“Oh, okay…” Ikeda showed no reaction to being called “Soggy Mosquito Coil,” since the other boys in class, and even the girls, called him that all the time. The mosquito coil referred to his ridiculous glasses, and a wet mosquito coil was, of course, useless. So the nickname was basically the same as calling him “a waste of space.”

Since this was a college-preparatory high school, there were very few actual delinquents, but people like Miura, who used their position to bully others, could be found throughout the universe. From kindergarten to adult life, this was the one kind of person you could find anywhere.

Miura bullied Ikeda all the time. Besides running errands and doing chores for him, Ikeda had to do his homework and things like that. Teachers like Matsuo naturally turned a blind eye.

Once they reached the roof, Miura beat Ikeda up without a word or any apparent reason. He hit hard and showed no restraint. Throughout it all, Ikeda simply curled into a ball with his arms over his head. He showed no sign of getting angry enough to fight back; he only gritted his teeth and endured it.

Perhaps he was used to it. When he first entered the school, older students had picked fights with him just to beat him up. Later, even students in his own year came to see him as the easiest target. Now in his second year, Ikeda was still just a useless idiot in the eyes of the first-years. They didn't treat him as a senior at all.

The bell rang for class. Miura stopped hitting him and turned to leave.

“Why?” Ikeda forced the word out.

“Huh?” Miura spat, then replied as though nothing had happened. “A reason? Guess I was bored. Haven't beaten anyone up in a while.”

The door to the roof closed. Ikeda was still lying on the ground, his self-respect perhaps more badly hurt than his bruised body.

Perhaps he should have cried then, but he had long since run out of tears.

For a student like Ikeda, transferring schools or suicide seemed to be the only two ways out.

Unfortunately, he had neither the means to transfer nor the courage to kill himself.

All he could do was go on living like this.

…………

The evening of December 10.

The bell rang for the end of school. To Ikeda, every day of high school felt like a year, and once he got home he still had plenty of housework to do, because his gambler and drunkard of a father spent all day drunk. Generally, his father did three things: throw drunken fits and find new ways to disgrace himself, beat his son for exercise, and sleep with drool running out of his mouth.

Ikeda trudged down the familiar streets. The whole world seemed utterly bleak to him, and every moment of his life was torment.

As he reached a more secluded area, Ikeda suddenly stopped and looked at a shop beside the road. “Was there always a bookshop here?” he murmured to himself. He vaguely remembered an empty lot here when he passed that morning, but now a single-story building covering a few dozen square meters stood before him. The sign read “books.” Behind the street-facing window, books were piled so high that he couldn't see inside.

Perhaps out of curiosity, or simply because he didn't want to return to his filthy, untidy home too early, Ikeda pushed open the door and went in.

Inside, the place seemed a little larger than it had looked from outside. The room was roughly cross-shaped. Besides the shelves lining the walls, several tables pushed together in the middle were piled with books. More books stood in stacks in the corners and on the floor. Haphazard piles filled the space, leaving almost nowhere to stand or walk.

The distinctive smells of paper and leather filled the air, though they weren't exactly unpleasant. A few steps farther in, a desk came into view. In an upholstered chair behind it sat a man who looked to be in his twenties or thirties. He had messy hair and wore a black suit over a black shirt with the collar open. He looked thoroughly unkempt.

Tian Yi made no response to the arrival of a customer. He went on reading a book held in one hand while slowly stirring a cup of coffee on the desk with the other.

“Um… sir… could you tell me…” Ikeda's first impulse was to ask where on earth this bookshop had come from.

Tian Yi didn't let him finish. Without taking his eyes off his book, he simply put down the spoon, languidly raised his arm, and pointed at three rows of bookshelves in the corner to his left. “What you want to read is over there.”

Ikeda found the situation strange in a way he couldn't describe, but he still walked woodenly toward the shelves. He didn't know why he was doing as Tian Yi said, as though the shopkeeper's simple remark could lead him to the answers to every question in his mind.

Only when he reached the shelves did Ikeda notice that all the books had black covers. There was no way to tell their contents from the outside, so it didn't matter which one he picked up. He took a book at random, then turned to look at Tian Yi again. The man was still reading and drinking coffee, completely ignoring him.

“What a strange guy…” Ikeda muttered, opening the book in his hands.

The first page was blank. He turned to the second, where the title was centered a little above the middle of the page.

The name was written in green ink that was deeply unsettling just to look at—Ikeda Nozomi.

“My name?” Goosebumps instantly broke out all over Ikeda. He thought, “A coincidence? A prank? One of those TV shows that plays tricks on people?”

He flipped forward a few pages. Apart from the title, the text was in perfectly ordinary black print, but what it said almost made Ikeda cry out in fright.

“Someone like Dad should just die.”

“That bastard Miura. I really want to push him off a building.”

“I want to be a popular guy like Fujita.”

Ikeda rapidly leafed through the entries, his face gradually filling with horror, shame, and anger. Roughly two-thirds of the way through the book, the text stopped. All that remained were dozens of blank pages.

The final two lines read, “A coincidence? A prank? One of those TV shows that plays tricks on people?” and “How is this possible?!”

Tian Yi finally put down his book, took a sip of coffee, then turned to look at Ikeda. “Put the book back. Let's talk business.”

Ikeda trembled and hesitated, torn between his instinctive fear of something he couldn't understand and his reluctance to put down a book full of his own “innermost thoughts.” For a moment, he failed to do as Tian Yi said.

Tian Yi sighed. “Put the book down and come over here, or I'll chop you up and feed you to pigs.”

Ikeda gave in. He put the book back on the shelf, carefully memorized its position, then walked nervously toward Tian Yi's desk.

Tian Yi gave him the fakest smile imaginable. “Ikeda-kun, that business about feeding you to pigs was just a joke. Don't take it to heart. What you just read was free, but only this once.” He raised the book he had been reading ever since Ikeda entered the shop. It, too, had a black cover.

“The title of this book is Miura Kazuya.” Tian Yi was very pleased with Ikeda's expression at those words. In an enticing tone, he continued, “Just do one thing for me in exchange, and you can read what's inside.”