The purple wasteland ended without warning, like someone had drawn a line and stopped.

  Beyond the ruined horizon, the world looked freshly cut— color spilling out of it.

  Yurie stopped.

  The Gamaguchi rode heavy on her shoulder, the strap biting her collarbone.

  One more step and the air would change. Glossy sweetness. Flat, artificial perfume. And over it all, a hard swipe of disinfectant—like someone had painted it on.

  The moment she crossed the boundary, the ground answered with a dry sound she didn’t recognize.

  Squeak. Squeak.

  “…What is this place?”

  Sound itself felt thin here. Not silence—worse. As if the world had turned the volume down until it started to itch under her skin.

  Only her footsteps had any body, scraping and lingering a beat too long, creaking right behind her eardrums.

  Yurie looked down and swallowed.

  This wasn’t soil. Not sand.

  Plastic—smooth enough to throw the light back too hard. A seamless coat of full-color resin ran to the horizon, lacquering the world into a single flat shine.

  She took one step—and her foot slid.

  Her shoe skated a few millimeters as if it had a mind of its own. She caught herself, and something inside her ankle snapped with sharp, stinging heat.

  A fizz of static.

  Pain without depth. Surface-only.

  Hospital floor. That shiny kind you get scolded for slipping on.

  The thought chilled her spine before the scent could finish changing.

  As far as she could see, a garden overflowed with deep crimson roses— blooming like madness.

  But the petals never moved. No matter how long she waited for wind.

  When she touched one, her finger met not living softness but the hard give of vinyl pushing back. Along the stems and leaf edges ran thin, sharp seams—factory mold lines.

  Even each leaf carried precise veins. And where sap should have been, cold clear resin filled them instead, packed in like clotted blood.

  “Tasteful,” Mermi said with a snort. “A dollhouse for psychos. Or an expensive inorganic room you never get to leave.”

  She glided over the plastic “grass,” so smooth she couldn’t even dig her claws in.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Mud from the white-sand corridor—still stuck in her golden coat—dripped onto the spotless, vivid green beneath them.

  It was the only filthy foreign thing in this still world.

  And at the same time— it made everything else look like a lie.

  Even the plop of the drops sounded thin.

  All that remained was the tacky pull underfoot.

  At the edge of Yurie’s vision, a small honey-colored bead rolled. Pretty as a glass marble.

  Too pretty.

  She couldn’t avoid it. Her toe brushed it.

  A cold chime ran up her leg.

  Her sole sank, like the floor took a slow breath.

  For a split second, it felt like her foot was about to be preserved there.

  Her heart jumped.

  “Yuri. Don’t step on that.”

  Mermi used the clipped nickname again—Yuri, sharp as a warning bell.

  “It sticks,” she said. “Smells like paralysis.”

  It wasn’t said like certainty.

  And yet Yurie’s body believed first.

  She tore her foot free and staggered. The Gamaguchi’s strap bit her shoulder and stopped her from falling.

  The smell here was thick. Sweet. Suffocatingly rich—and yet with no depth, like fake flowers.

  Over it, ruthless disinfectant scrubbed everything flat.

  Every inhale froze the back of her lungs.

  Bleached white sheets. A windowless corridor. An endless electronic pulse at a bedside that never stopped.

  Not a memory.

  A reflex.

  Scent grabbed her spine before thought could.

  “Mermi—look. There’s a pond.”

  At the garden’s center sat a square pool, like a clear tank sunk into the ground. But when Yurie knelt at the edge, no ripples spread.

  What filled it wasn’t liquid. It was hardened, transparent resin.

  Goldfish inside were trapped in the exact moment their tails had fanned open, sealed in thick layers. Even the bubbles spilling from their mouths were frozen as pearl-like spheres, hanging in place.

  They weren’t swimming.

  They were specimens— sealed into an oxygenless chamber called eternity. Beautiful enough to be obscene.

  “It doesn’t move,” Yurie whispered. “…It doesn’t move at all. Like it isn’t dead. Like it’s just… not moving.”

  She reached toward the false surface.

  That was when—

  Clink.

  A hard, pretty sound—like a gemstone striking the floor—split the hush from deep in the garden. At the same time, another honey-colored bead rolled toward them.

  Across the plastic. Making only that clean little chime.

  “Who…?”

  At the garden’s far end, she sat.

  A gigantic throne tangled in plastic vines, twisted like living veins.

  The Empress.

  A lush body wrapped in a heavy velvet dress. The hem spread across the plastic ground, and even the fabric looked wrong—an artificial sheen that promised to bite skin with static if you touched it.

  Above her, a crown of twelve stars shone with their own light.

  Her gentle smile promised: I will take all the pain of this world upon myself.

  —And yet.

  That divine face had no eyes.

  The organs that should have observed the world were gone. Beneath her lids yawned deep hollows of darkness— open like forgotten caves.

  From those empty sockets, the Empress spilled large tears without end.

  Clink. Clack. Clink.

  The tears hit the ground and, the instant they touched air, lost heat too fast— becoming clear, honey-colored amber.

  They fell warm and landed cold. Heat bled away in midair. By the time they hit, they were already hard.

  The Empress did not look at the mud Yurie and Mermi had brought in. She did not touch their disorder.

  From those hollow caves, she kept pouring resin called “love”— to make this garden more beautiful, and more unmoving.

  Mermi bristled, a low rumble in her throat.

  “What a greeting. If she keeps crying like that, even my inner ear will get soaked with the humidity.” “Don’t you think emotional leakage is the worst kind of pollution?”

  Slowly, the Empress turned her unseeing face toward Yurie.

  Without eyes, it didn’t pass through the filter of sight.

  It went straight into the softest, most frightened place at the bottom of Yurie’s heart— precise, as if invisible tendrils had reached out to feel for it.

  Yurie clenched the strap until it dug into her shoulder.

  Inside the Gamaguchi: that unpleasant, lukewarm pomegranate mud.

  In this too-clean, too-still paradise, she could feel it— thump, thump— a strange heat pulsing like a heartbeat.

  Fine hairs rose along her cheek.

  The air brushed her face like fingertips.

  Before she could be seen, she was touched.

  And where that touch had been, a numb print lingered.