The fire in my chest was my only companion on the ascent up the seventh staircase. Each jagged, black rock step was a challenge, and I accepted it. My hands, one healing and the other freshly wounded by the mirror, gripped the ledges, and the sharp pain was an affirmation: I am here, I am fighting. The sensation of descent was now an old acquaintance, the gravity of my own past pulling me down. But now, I pulled upward with renewed force.
This was no longer a journey of passive atonement. It was an escape. A desperate flight towards the light, towards the possibility of amendment. The face of Valeria, of my parents, of Yuki... they were the faces I saw in the darkness, not as accusations, but as a destination. A duty. My mantra was simple, a drum beating to the rhythm of my racing heart: I have to get out. I have to go back. I have to fix it.
I reached the archway at the summit, my body aching but my spirit burning. I had no idea what hell awaited me, but for the first time, I was ready to face it. Not to endure it. To confront it. I crossed the threshold, ready for battle.
And I entered a nightmare hospital disguised as a forest.
The air was the first thing. Dense, humid, still. It smelled of damp earth, yes, but also the unmistakable scent of iron, of blood, and the subtle decay of flesh. It made me recoil, an instant nausea.
The landscape was a biological abomination. I was in a forest, but the trees were not made of wood. They were of a pale, taut substance, like stretched tendons or unpigmented skin, twisted into postures of silent agony. Their "barks" were covered in scars, some old and silvery, others fresh and red. From the cracks and wounds of these fleshy trees, a thick, dark reddish liquid—a sap that was undeniably blood—slowly dripped, forming dark puddles on the ground.
The ground beneath my feet was neither earth nor grass. It was a spongy, elastic carpet of reddish-brown moss that seemed to tremble slightly with each step, as if I were walking on a living organ. And the sound... it was the constant, sticky dripping of blood from the trees, and beneath that, a barely audible chorus, a murmur of a thousand sighs of pain.
I looked up. The twisted branches had no leaves. They were covered in thorns. Black thorns, needle-sharp, of all sizes, pointing in every direction. This was not a place of death. It was a place of perpetual pain.
My fire of determination did not extinguish, but it was doused by a wave of visceral horror. I understood this place on an instinctive level. This was violence. The wounds. The ones I had inflicted.
There was no path. The forest was a dense, impenetrable tangle. To advance, I would have to force my way through. I would have to touch the trees.
I took a deep breath of the stale air, and took a step into the thicket. I gently pushed a pale branch aside to make my way. The contact was minimal, but one of the black thorns grazed my forearm. It was a superficial scratch.
The pain was blinding.
A disproportionate, white-hot, searing pain exploded in my arm. I cried out, stumbling backward. I looked at my forearm. A thin red scratch was clearly visible, blood welling from it. But the pain was that of a deep, festering wound.
And with the pain, came the memory. Not an immersion, but a flash, a psychic echo. I was fourteen. I was arguing with my sister, Akari, over some trifle. The TV remote. In my frustration, I pushed her. Not hard, just an irritated shove to get her out of the way. She stumbled and scraped her elbow against the plaster wall. A small scrape. I had completely forgotten it.
But now, I remembered everything. I heard her gasped cry of surprise and pain. I saw the tears that welled in her eyes, more from humiliation than from the injury. And the whisper that seemed to emanate from the tree I had just touched was that same gasped cry, an echo across the years.
I looked at the fleshy tree. In the exact spot where I had grazed it, a new scratch had appeared on its taut bark, and from it, a fresh drop of blood began to form and drip.
The mechanics of this hell revealed itself in all its perfect, monstrous symmetry. The forest was the collective body of all those I had harmed. To advance, I had to wound them again. And every wound I inflicted, I would receive myself, multiplied in pain. It was a test of exquisite cruelty. To reach my goal of redemption, I had to commit the same sins again, and feel the pain from both sides of the blow.
For a moment, I stood paralyzed. How could I do this? How could I, with my newfound resolve to cause no more harm, force my way through the personifications of my victims?
But the image of the staircase on the other side of this hell, the image of a world I could return to and make amends, burned in my mind. Future atonement required present cruelty. This was the price.
With teeth clenched until my jaw ached, I stepped back in.
The ordeal began. Every step was an agonizing decision. I tried to move with the grace of a phantom, to glide between the trees without touching them. But it was impossible. They were too close together, their thorny branches intertwined like a barbed-wire cage.
My hip brushed against a thick, gnarled trunk. A long, slender thorn dug into my side, just above my hip bone. The pain was sharp, like a hypodermic needle. Flash. I was sixteen. I was at a party. A girl I barely knew, Laura, confessed she liked me. I, in my awkwardness and desire to appear "cool," laughed. It wasn't a kind laugh. It was a mocking laugh. "Sorry," I said, "you're not my type." I saw her flinch, her face pale. The whisper from the tree was the sound of her heart breaking, a small, silent, devastated "oh." The pain in my side was the wound of her humiliation. I ripped the thorn out and limped forward.
A low branch struck my face. Several thorns scratched my cheek. Flash. The school office. My voice screaming, "I hate you!" The pain on my face was my mother's pain, the way her eyes widened with a breathless shock. It was my father's pain, the way his jaw tensed, a crack forming in his calm facade. The whispers from the tree were their wounded silences.
I became entangled in a thicket of thorny vines hanging from a massive tree. I struggled, but the more I struggled, the more the thorns cut into me, opening dozens of tiny gashes on my arms and torso. Flash. Valeria. All the small cruelties. All the times I ignored her needs. Each cut was a night she cried herself to sleep silently beside me while I snored, oblivious. Each thorn was a broken promise, a canceled plan, a word of comfort I didn't offer. The act of tearing myself from the vines, of rending my own skin to free myself, was a physical recreation of how I had torn myself from the relationship, leaving her tangled and bleeding.
I pulled myself free from the thicket, gasping, my body covered in a hundred bleeding wounds. I was no longer a man. I was a raw piece of meat. But I kept moving forward. The fire in my chest was now an agonizing ember, but it still burned. I have to get out. I have to go back. The mantra was the only thing keeping me upright.
The forest seemed endless. Every tree was a new sin, a new wound. A shove on the schoolyard. A muttered insult under my breath. A lie to avoid an uncomfortable situation. Physical violence, emotional violence, verbal violence. I discovered I was a far more violent man than I had ever imagined. My weapons hadn't always been my fists, but my words, my silence, my indifference. And each one had left a scar on the forest, a scar that I now also carried on my own skin.
Finally, almost blind from sweat and blood dripping into my eyes, I saw the end of the forest. A clearing. And in the clearing, the silhouette of the next staircase. Freedom was a few meters away.
But blocking my way, there was a final tree.
It was different from the others. It was smaller, twisted in on itself like a tortured bonsai. It was pale, almost white, and I recognized its shape. It had the shape of my own silhouette, shrunken in pain. And its thorns, instead of pointing outwards, were turned inwards, digging into its own fleshy bark, from which slow, thick drops of blood welled.
I stopped. My breath hitched in my throat.
This was me. This was the tree of self-inflicted violence.
It was the memory of me, jumping out the school window. It was the memory of me, hitting my head and scratching my arms in the garden of unspoken futures. It was every thought of self-loathing, every wave of self-pity, every time I chose pain because it felt familiar.
To reach the staircase, I had to pass through it. I had to push it. I had to wound the tree that represented me.
The fire in my chest met a whirlwind of ice. How could I do this? Hurting others in the name of my atonement was one thing, a monstrous equation I had accepted. But hurting myself again? Recreating the act of my own despair? A part of me, the part that still yearned for oblivion, wanted to simply sit down and die at the foot of this mirror-tree.
But the fierce voice, the one that had been born in the void, refused. That person, the one who wants to die, is also part of the past. It is also a wound that must be overcome. You cannot move forward if you leave a part of yourself trapped here.
With a trembling, bloodied hand, I reached out to the tree of myself. It was not an act of aggression. It was an act of surgery. I had to cut away this last, sick part of myself to survive.
My hand touched the inwardly-pointing thorns. And the pain I felt was not a cut. It was a total immersion. I felt the hopelessness in the classroom again, the madness in the garden. I felt the desire not to exist. The pain was not just physical; it was spiritual. It was the pain of a soul that hates itself.
To move forward, I had to push against that hatred. I had to choose life, not as an abstract concept, but as a physical, painful act. I had to assert my right to exist by pushing through the embodiment of my desire to die.
I closed my eyes, clenched my teeth, and pushed. The thorns dug into my hand, and I screamed, a cry that was both pain and release. I was pushing through the last, deepest wound. The one I had inflicted on myself.