I sat meditating for about an hour and a half, trying to collect my thoughts and focus my mind. I was in a small, one-room building. In the center was a small, low table, located on a pattern of four and a half tatami, four rectangles around a square. In front of it I knelt. To my left and right, small square windows showed a dark gray sky outside, lit by lightning from time to time. Right now, the room was the entire world, an island in the sea of chaos, the wooden walls of the hut demarcating my inner ‘village’ from the untamed wilderness outside the Sacred Barrier. Myself: the center, the turmoil of my mind: the all-consuming darkness outside.
There was a knock at the door. In response, I made the small beads that were scattered on the floor ascend and hang motionless in the air all around the room. “Come in,” I said.
A tall woman entered and walked towards the table at which I sat. She was wearing a brick red skirt and a loose black shirt with salmon trim on the neck and sleeves. Most of her hair was clipped into a loose ponytail that hung slightly to the left. She gracefully knelt down, looking directly at me. Her face bore no expression, but her body language conveyed that she was confident but not arrogant, and intent but not threatening.
	As soon as she had knelt down, she spoke, “Hidenori Inoue? I’m Saki Watanabe, the head of the Kanto Ethics Board. Call me Saki. You can put the balls down for now; you should save your concentration.”
	I quickly replied, forgetting courtesy of introduction, “But how will you be protected from—“
	She held her hands up in a ‘calm down’ gesture, and replied, “I’ll explain that later, but for now you can rest assured that I’m not in any danger for the time being.” She shifted her posture into a more comfortable pose, then continued, “To start with, tell me about yourself. The better I know you, better I can help. Though, from what I’ve seen outside, I’ve already gotten some sense of how your mind works: fragrances of rancid flowers and rotting fruit, landscapes of thorns and colored glass, a sky of lightning and finely powdered snow…”
	I felt myself blushing. “That’s embarrassing, for you to see that,” I said.
	She gave a little laugh and replied, “I’ve looked into the sun of your mind, and I haven’t been blinded. I’m able to look right at you and accept you.” It sounded like she was being serious, but also playfully mocking my embarrassment. It diffused some of the awkwardness that had plagued the conversation up until that point. I gently set all the beads down again.
	“I’m Hidenori Inoue. I was born in 614, so I’m 18 years old now. I’m from Bamboo Village, and I just graduated from the Unified Class.”
	“From what I hear you’re quite the star student, both in terms of book learning and development of your Power.”
	“I try my best. Science is what I’m most interested in. My plan was to apprentice with the Library and Research Committee, and eventually do original research.”
	“That would serve you well, I’m sure. Head Priest Hideyoshi says you are able to create bronze from copper and tin at room temperature. How do you do that? What’s the visualization you use?”
	“I see the tin atoms, and flow them through the copper like tadpoles swimming in a stagnant pond.”
	“That’s amazing! I’ll have to try that myself some time.”
	“It’s funny how quickly things change. Just a month ago I had succeeded at making the bronze, my last personal assignment for the Unified Class, and my crowning accomplishment thus far. A week ago I was spending my days on the beaches of Whitesand, eating the hamanasu rose hips with Atsuko, making love with Hiroshi… And then, I became a… a Karmic Demon.”
	Even though I knew it was ultimately the purpose of this conversation, I had a bit of a hard time saying it out loud.
There was a moment of silence before Saki spoke. “I’m so sorry this happened to you. I talked to your parents. I know that you were isolated from other people very quickly and didn’t get a good chance to say goodbye. They say they love you very much, and that they know that this isn’t your fault. I also spoke with your friends from school. They wanted to tell you that their memories will hold no ill recollections toward you, that your influence on their lives has been a good one.”
“Thanks for doing that. Tell everyone I miss them and wish I could be with them.”
“I will. I take it Head Priest Hideyoshi has explained to you about your condition?
I nodded. “It’s a little different than the folklore and what we’re taught in school: Ogres and Karmic Demons, the two faces of evil, the victory of the enemy within. Head Priest Hideyoshi told me that I have lost conscious control over my power, and my subconscious is affecting the world around me, corrupting it into a bastardization of my own image. I never thought it would happen to me. The way they teach it in school, they try to emphasize that this is something you should be concerned about, and that it could in theory happen to you, but there’s the implication that this kind of thing will only happen to ‘bad’ people, like people who are selfish or arrogant. When you read the stories, you think of it as a good lesson for your peers, that this might be what some of them need to hear. You never think that you would be the one to fall from grace. That’s what ‘sins lie within us’ really means, isn’t it? The lesson in the ceremony isn’t for you to feel satisfied in your victory after chanting ‘demons, begone!’, it’s to show you what it feels like when it’s your turn to wear the mask.”
Saki responded, “You’re probably right, but as a general statement I’m not sure there’s much point to those rituals myself. Everyone else seems to like that kind of thing, though. I think it’s mostly for reasons of cultural bonding. I must confess, that’s not something I ever really understood. Cultures are pretty arbitrary and ephemeral, and can be as volatile as the temperature in spring. It’s the self-expression of the individual, be it artist, scientific, what have you, that will really stand the test of time... The phenomenon known as Karmic Demon, or Hashimoto-Applebaum Syndrome, is caused by a failure in the mechanisms that block most subconscious thoughts from being realized by Power. We all are leaking Power all the time at a low level, but for those with Hashimoto-Applebaum Syndrome, the lid has come off completely and there is little to no regulation. Karmic Demons turn the world around them into their own living nightmare, unable to stop themselves from distorting their environment beyond recognition.”
“Let me ask, what are you here to do exactly?”
	Saki replied, “I want to try to treat you. I want to see if I can save your life.”
	I responded, “But isn’t ‘Hashimoto-Applebaum syndrome’ always fatal? My Power couldn’t be sealed, so I can’t see what could be done.”
	“All the others before you did not survive, yes, but if it’s possible for this to be overcome, there has to be a first survivor. I want to try to make you that first survivor. I only have bits and pieces of answers, nothing definite, but I’m going to try everything I can.”
	“So, how is it that you can resist the effects of my leaking power? Head Priest Hideyoshi told me that at this stage anyone who was in proximity to me for more than a few minutes would be risking serious damage or even death.”
	“…Hidenori, how old do you think I am?”
	To be honest, I couldn’t place her age. Her hair had a scattering of gray strands mixed in with the brown, and her skin was very slightly loose, but her musculature and breasts were very well-formed and defined, like those of someone in their 20s. I found her very attractive. I finally answered, “I can’t really tell. Probably at least 30.”
	She laughed again, “A very conservative response. Well, you’re technically right. I am older than 30… Currently, my age is sitting at 422 years.”
	I was absolutely floored by that. The question was out of my mouth before I could even process what I heard, “How are you still alive? What makes you different from everyone else?”
	“I can use my Power to repair my own telomeres. Telomeres are regions on the ends of our chromosomes. Each time a cell divides, it cannot replicate all the way to the ends of the DNA, so the telomeres function as a buffer that shortens each time the cell divides. However, this buffer eventually runs out and cells reach the limits of their replication. Organisms with telomere problems do not live as long, and cancer cells exhibit abnormal telomeres. So the telomeres are involved in the aging process and regulation of cell division, and my control over them retards aging and prevents tumor formation. In addition, I can control my body’s repair signals to promote regeneration over scarring in the event of injury or illness. Finally, I have gained the ability to control my DNA’s methylation state, or Epigenetic Clock. Methylation of DNA is the signal that turns different genes on and off in different cells, and these levels are indicators of aging. We don’t completely understand what is happening there, but I have learned how to halt those methylation changes to a standstill.”
	“So, those are the only things you need to do to be immortal? Not that it sounds easy to physically do, mind you, but I wouldn’t think it would be possible with such a small number of changes.”
	“My predecessor, Tomiko Asahina, could also repair her telomeres. She was the grandmother of my first husband, Satoru. I asked her the same question you did when she told me about her age. To quote her response, ‘No one knows what forever is like.’ The only definitive claim I can make is that by doing these things I am able to live much longer than anyone else, but four hundred years is only a drop in the oceans of history. ‘Forever’ is almost a foreign concept to our intuitions. Nearly 1700 years ago was the first time someone got a glimpse into the true abyss of time. He was a man named James Hutton, and he lived on the other side of the world, in a place then called Scotland. The prehistoric civilizations of the time believed the world to be only several thousand years old. Hutton noticed that with each rain, some soil was washed away and carried to the ocean by rivers. He became concerned that eventually all the land in the world would be eroded away and the rains their crops depended on would one day bring an end to human life. Then, he saw an exposed rock face with all kinds of horizontal and vertical rock strata. Eventually he realized that the land he stood on came from sediment deposited by erosion that had welled up and folded over itself to form land. And this process of destruction and rebirth of land occurred on scales of time utterly incomprehensible to human intuitions. And the multiple groups of strata showed that this immensely long process had repeated countless times, with ‘no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.’ As his associate said, ‘The mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far back into the abyss of time; and whilst we listened with earnestness and admiration to the philosopher who was now unfolding to us the order and series of these wonderful events, we became sensible how much further reason may sometimes go than imagination may venture to follow.’ So, will I live forever? Who can say? I can say I plan to make it as long as I can. Ah. The reason I got on this is as follows: at its current levels, I will incur no cellular damage from your leaking Power that I cannot easily repair. I should be safe near you until the spill gets significantly worse. And then I have other techniques that will be able to protect me for a time.”
She idly levitated a piece of paper that had been sitting on the table, and cleanly severed a strip off to make it square. She let the sheet float above her upward pointing index finger, and started making a series of origami folds in it.
“What happened to Tomiko Asahina? Is she still alive too?”
“She was killed in Yakomaru’s War.”
That was when an intuitive sense of Saki’s age hit me. Yakomaru’s War was about 400 years ago. It predated events like the Kanto unification, the Azami Congregation, and the Hamaomoto Articles. It was ancient history to me, something that just as easily could have happened in another universe. But she was there. She lived through that personally, and knew people who fought and died there. Her age also implied that she was born and raised in the Age of Mist, which is the period before what is commonly considered to be modern times. The Age of Mist was so named because while society had begun to take on something similar to its modern form, there were few documents produced in that time period, and there was little contact between districts, and none with societies outside the Japanese archipelago. The way it was discussed in school was that this was when psychologically modern humans first came to exist, but society had some trouble in finding effective ways of managing itself. I replied, “I’m sorry to hear that. It gives me a better sense of what 400 years is like, to have a historical event to anchor it to. You must have been through so much.”
Her origami work had split into several pieces, then recombined again to form something like a stellated dodecahedron. The ins and outs of its surface kept shifting and folding in on themselves, iteratively increasing in complexity. The details were now on the scale of a millimeter. It was evident that she was only partially paying attention to the origami. I only knew a couple of people who could achieve that kind of precision and control even with complete focus.
“I’ve seen many good and bad things in my life. The darkness you face now is no less than what I’ve had to deal with. But I’m not going to lament the human condition or sing sickened praises to our supposed helplessness. You don’t serve almost 400 years as the head of Ethics with that kind of philosophy. One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is that it’s ok to be happy about one thing while sad about another. Life is all hilarious and terrible and amazing at the same time. I’ve had very few ‘pure’ moments in my life, where there’s only one thing going on. I think the only ones I remember were from my childhood, before my Power awakened. But, that might have partially been because the society at the time kept children ignorant of many things… adults as well for that matter. For example, me and my friends got in pretty big trouble for learning about the ancients.”
“What happened exactly?”
“It’s a complicated story, full of tangents, non-sequiturs and explanations of context. I think we have to come back to the matter at hand. But it is a fascinating story. I promise to tell it to you sometime if you survive.”
“I’ll take you up on that… So, do you have any thoughts as to how a Karmic Demon could survive?”
“I don’t have many definitive answers, but I can state the problem in the most specific way I can. Karmic Demons die because their uncontrolled powers eventually destroy their bodies, be it through chemical alteration or mechanical damage. There is even one report of a victim in what was called the Chinese mainland who… actually I’m not going to describe that now. If you become aware of it your subconscious may end up running down those tracks. For a time, the instinct against harming one’s own body prevents this, but since the disorder worsens progressively over time, this barrier eventually fails. But, even if we could prevent the self-destruction without stopping the leak, the Karmic Demon would still be a great danger to others. In other words, the leak must be stopped. We have to return you to the state you were in before the problem started, or at least something like it. I’ve had a great while to think about how to do this, but there hasn’t been an occurrence in 100 years, so I haven’t been able to test my most recent ideas.”
“How many Karmic Demons have you witnessed?” I asked.
“You would be the seventh. One was the first boy I loved.”
“The frequency must be decreasing then, if you’ve seen seven in your lifetime and none before me in the last century.”
“Yes, but only because there were four in the years following Yakomaru’s War. Children who had been orphaned, children raised by traumatized parents… it was not a good time for emotional stability. Thankfully, things returned to the background rate after a couple decades, but not before considerable damage was done. The war had already caused more than enough devastation and loss of life, but its aftereffects continued to plague us for some time.”
“That’s terrible. Were you at least able to learn something from what happened? It sounds like that gives insight into the reasons people become Karmic Demons.”
“I suppose we did learn some things, but nothing really constructive with respect to solving the problem at hand. See, the increase in cases was due to the increase in stress and trauma at the time, and we have known for a long time that those things can cause emotional instability. But we were already trying our hardest to prevent emotional instability, because we also already knew that it leads to these kinds of problems, not to mention the suffering it causes in and of itself. But personal or parental trauma are not sufficient to explain all of the incidents. Of the other three that I’ve seen, yourself included, none of them could be reasonably attributed to those causes, and only one is even a debatable case.”
“So what are your most recent ideas? I’m ready and willing to try.”
“The first thing I want to try is deep meditation with the purpose of becoming more aware of your subconscious self. I have a hypothesis that a disconnect between the desires of the conscious and subconscious mind might be partially responsible. If we can integrate those desires, we may be able to decrease the leak. Does that make sense? Are you ready to begin?”
“Yes, let’s start.”
Over the next few hours Saki led me into a semi-conscious state, into the depths of my own mind. After a while I became aware of thoughts and imaginings that I otherwise would not be. They didn’t appear to have much to do with the changes I was effecting outside, but maybe my conscious self was just unable to see the connection. As a test, she had me try embracing some things, and rejecting other things. Regardless of my actions, Saki couldn’t see any changes in the leak. We decided to give up and think about where to go from there. We spent ten minutes or so talking about ways in which what I saw during the meditation might have some kind of relevance, and eventually we got onto the topic of my emotional state.
“How are you feeling right now?” She asked.
“I’m just kind of s—s—scared!”
I was surprised by how quickly the feelings of fear and despair bubbled up and overwhelmed me. I suddenly found myself sobbing uncontrollably. Saki’s response was almost comically rapid. She sort of vaulted over the table and grasped me with a tackling embrace. Some part of my mind independently operating in the background noticed how funny this reaction looked in the abstract. We found ourselves both on the ground, her arms tightly wrapped around my back, her hands stroking the back of my head. In between my sobs I found myself shouting, “I’m gonna die!”
The words were coming out before I could fully process what I was saying, which was ironic given the problem I faced. Saki kept patting my head and stroking my back, saying “You’re not alone. We’ll try to work this out. I’m trying my best for your sake. We’ll go through this together.”
I nuzzled my face into her shirt and continued to cry, my attention drifting toward the feeling of our contact, the rhythm of her breathing and stroking, the sound of her voice. Slowly, I began to calm down. We lay there like that for a few minutes until eventually I pulled away and sat up, wiping my eyes. She sat up as well and put her arm on my shoulder. After a pause, I said, “I think I’m ok now.”
	For the next couple of hours, we kept the conversation going. Saki talked a lot about her views on things, often going off on relevant tangents to talk about her personal experiences and things she had read about. Her age enabled her to have a deep wealth of experience and wisdom that made her come at things from a different angle than other people could.
	I felt the corruption start to well up in me, like the gathering cumulonimbus before a thunderstorm. I lifted the beads to divert the flow. I could feel that this time was going to be bad. I told Saki, “You should leave. It’s flaring up again. It’s going to be bad. I think this might be the one that does me in.”
	“Ok. I can stay for a while. I’ll feel it when I have to leave.”
	The air around her took on a slight optical distortion, not unlike heat blur, but with some kind of prism effect. I recognized it as the oft-warned-about spatial distortion that came from clashing Power of multiple people. The shape this distortion took made it look a little like she was sitting inside a giant soap bubble. She said that at low levels, she could oppose my Power around her body safely.