I looked at the face. It had improved quite a bit. It had taken on the look of a leader, more or less. But it was by no means a body that was prepared. Of course. From the very beginning it had not been designed to use the body. Every creation carries within it the intention and substance of its creator. When you see a clumsily drawn picture, you can tell the person has no deep skill in art. A bright, cheerful drawing style holds the emotion of joy, and dark, rough lines must hold some other emotion. Can something completed according to its creator's intention criticize itself? It is a designed flaw, a lack of skill on the creator's part. It would be absurd for a smartphone to blame itself because it broke down. Nor is it the smartphone's place to apologize to us. Just as the manufacturer must take responsibility for a smartphone's structural defects, the creator instills in his creation both intention and skill.
Often, humans hold an ambivalent feeling—feeling as though they were born without a creator, while at the same time leaning on a creator. They say God created me, yet at the same time, for the flaws they have carried since birth, they do not blame the creator but turn the blame onto themselves. Some treat natural sexual desire as a sin. How could sexual desire possibly not exist? Sex hormones must inevitably be involved in maintaining human homeostasis, and it is they that bring about growth. A one-dimensional way of speaking about human sin, an understanding in which God is innocent of human flaws—this contains a logical contradiction that degrades the human while at the same time degrading the authority of God.
Pour out endless wisdom, so that one might find the delicate contradictions as if searching for a thorn hidden in coarse cloth. Despite having received an immense intellect, by human standards it amounts to a meaningless second paragraph. A remarkable thing. Even though a short metaphor can prove the contradictions that thousands of years of religions have built up, there are only those who cannot even understand it, those who claim to understand yet cannot marvel, those who do not know its weight. Their scales hold no divinity. On their scales there is only survival and pleasure. More money! More sex! More power! More pleasure! That does not so much prove that they did not come from Him—rather, it is likely because their spirit is still the spirit of a child.
A child and an adult cannot think the same way. For children, others do not exist; only the self exists. When a mother lies sick in bed, does the infant stay quiet without crying even when hungry? When sleepy and unable to sleep, it fusses; when not fed, it cries—it only cries, only shouts for its own survival. That is a child. There is no fault in a child being a child. Likewise, there is no problem in those who are like children being children. It is the design of the creator who made them to live this life as that sort of person, and to demand fault from a child is a contradiction.
The moment had come when a great blade cuts through even iron bars. That was the face I saw. Blood was flowing down his face, and he knew it meant he had reached yet another waypoint. There had often been such moments in his life. Unavoidable drops of blood. Moments that left scars that could not be erased. Moments of pain that could not be forgotten. What had been their meaning? Why had that pain been necessary? Why had the scars been necessary?
He thought. What people wanted was simply another friend, like the friends they had run and played with in childhood. But for some, there were no friends, friends were not even permitted, and the days of running and playing had all ended before the age of ten. What remained was solitude, what remained was endless screaming, what remained were blades and self-harm, the boundary between life and death. The souls left battered and broken within those wounds cannot recover even after a long time has passed. They can pretend to have recovered, but because irreversible damage has occurred, they exhibit responses akin to a kind of disability.
His hair had now grown out quite a bit. Not that he had intended it. As he swept back the awkwardly long strands, he thought at the same time—the thought that he had come to look the part of Red Seal's leader. And yet at the same time he found it hard to believe. To say something exists when it does not even exist.
I would like to speak of his past. In the past, he experienced death. Or, to be precise, he experienced only up to the very edge of death. The place where he experienced the edge of death was none other than the countryside. The scenery, glowing with the setting sun, was filled with the sound of gunfire. The rice had ripened yellow and bowed its head, and there was a little water in the paddies. It was neither too muddy nor too firm. It must have been the paddy of a farmer who farmed well. He was shot and collapsed. Against one cheek touched the clear water resting calmly in the autumn paddy. Before his eyes, the sunset, dyed red, was resplendent. It was a bizarre moment where death and splendor coexisted.
He often tells that memory. The solidity felt from a person who has gone through death several times has another dimension to it, hard to capture merely as manliness. Not the manliness or warrior's mien one commonly speaks of, but rather—was it not a figure of resolve filled with sorrow? Sorrow dwelt in his eyes, and he shed tears at the sight of people dying, yet in most situations there were no tears, no stirring at all. He left no room, cruelly so. Perhaps that was both the trajectory he had lived and a result holding the intention of the one who created him.
Both he and I—we do not like argument. There is no reason to argue. Most are people who cannot even recognize the contradictions in the claims they hold, so there was no reason to begin an argument. From the start we did not converse with such people, and even if they requested the right to speak before us, there was no need to grant them the opportunity to speak. Now and then there were fellows who, out of bravado, asserted their nonsense. They had only proven themselves to be people who were not needed.
Combining his blade and mine, we held two blades. The two blades buried in the earth were giving off light. He wanted water, and I wanted wood. No. What we needed was a place to rest. That is why he and I chose the journey to find a place to rest.