2. The House with a Garden Where Cherry Blossoms Bloom on the Ground
I stepped through the torii.
No—more accurately, I was made to step through it.
Manually, forcibly.
Before I could refuse, I was drawn in. Of course, even back on Mars, before I came here, I had already accessed data about this town through remote communication.
My assigned residence had been preloaded in a virtual environment.
So, rather than saying I was "invited," it would be more correct to say I "arrived as scheduled." But the instant I passed under the torii, the light of the world changed.
In a blink, noon became twilight.
Just a moment ago, the sun had been directly overhead—
and suddenly, the world was bathed in a purplish, misty dusk. "…What is this?"
I murmured and turned back.
But I couldn't move forward—or back.
A transparent membrane stretched across the air before me.
Like an AT Field, an invisible wall divided the world in two.
When I tried to touch it, I felt it—solid, unyielding.
I couldn't pass. It was like a game's undeveloped map area:
background drawn, but inaccessible to the player.
An unreachable zone, now real before my eyes. I turned to call out.
"Hey, Rin."
But she was gone.
Nowhere.
She had been right here—of that I was sure.
Yet now, it was as if she had never existed at all.
Not a trace left behind.
The brief exchange we'd had felt almost like a hallucination. The world around me was shrouded in violet twilight.
A soft, mistlike light enveloped everything.
Venus's dense atmosphere made the air feel heavy against my limbs.
It looked like a fairytale from long ago—painted over in pastels. "…Anyway, I have to move forward."
The words slipped from my mouth naturally—
as if spoken by someone else, as if commanded by a player beyond a monitor.
With the torii at my back, I walked deeper into the village. "Rin."
No response.
Again, louder—
"Rin!"
Only the wind answered. Maybe she hadn't responded because I'd used her name in Japanese, not the original character reading. I tried again, pronouncing it carefully.
"Lin! Where are you!?"
Still nothing. I gave up and activated the watch wrapped around my wrist.
A holographic interface bloomed to life, projecting a map of the residential area.
My house's location blinked on-screen.
I headed toward it. As I walked, I looked around.
No houses yet.
Grass grew wildly on both sides of the road.
The pavement was cracked, the asphalt and cement melting together like half-thawed ice cream.
Every step felt uncertain—neither hard nor soft. Trees lined both sides of the path.
Or at least, I thought they were trees.
From afar they looked like willows, but up close, I saw their branches were hung with countless metallic fragments—tiny parts like robot joints, dangling where leaves should be.
Instead of veins, faintly glowing fiber optics ran through them. Things pretending to be trees.
They stood in perfect intervals, like conveyor-belt components in a factory line. The purplish mist thickened as I went on.
I moved through it as though swimming. Eventually, I reached a fork.
I chose the southeast path.
From there, the forest deepened.
The distant hills and fields vanished behind a wall of trees. A dense green tunnel.
Sunlight could no longer reach me; instead, incandescent lamps stood at intervals.
Their light was too bright—harsh and sterile, making me feel as if I were walking through the stomach of some artificial creature. And then—finally—I saw it. A solitary house, standing deep in the woods,
isolated even within this desolate corner of Venus.
My new home. It was a single-story house, modeled after traditional Japanese architecture.
A wide living room, and a garden.
Half of the garden was grass.
The other half—was filled with something unbelievable. Cherry blossoms.
But these weren't trees.
They bloomed from the ground itself.
Not from branches, but from the soil—flowers alone, rootless, carpeting the earth. Their color wasn't pale pink, but nearly white—
petals like melted moonlight spreading in every direction.
It wasn't so much a "carpet of flowers"
as if the very surface of the world had become cherry blossoms. The exterior walls of the house mimicked wood but were made of concrete—
a special ivory-toned composite material, durable enough to endure Venus's atmosphere.
The finish was rough, almost unfinished, lending it a strangely human warmth. Deep burgundy tiles lined the roof,
the red harmonizing with the white walls and the faintly glowing garden below.
Old Japanese beauty fused with alien coldness—
a curious, haunting kind of architectural harmony. I took it all in, then stepped into the garden.
The ground blossoms crunched beneath my feet.
The petals broke apart silently, emitting a faint light.
They seemed to scream without pain,
crushed but never losing form. I approached the engawa—the narrow wooden walkway linking the garden and living room.
As I lifted my foot to step up, a sound came from inside the house.
I froze.
A metallic creak—
the sound of joints under strain. A few seconds passed.
Then, the sliding door opened.
A humanoid emerged. But this one wasn't the lifelike kind—
not like the girl I'd met before, Rin.
No, this one was old. The kind of "robot" humans once imagined in ancient times.
Stiff joints.
Expressionless gaze.
It looked like a relic that had escaped from a museum exhibit. So mechanical, so crude, that I nearly laughed.
But I restrained myself—it might take offense. The robot turned its head toward me.
It had no face, only a dark visor—
like a biker's helmet, a black reflective screen staring silently back at me. Then, a flat, synthetic voice spoke:
"Nice to meet you." As those words echoed, I noticed something.
Across its apron—tied over its chest—
a vivid red stain. Dried blood. The voice repeated, identical in tone, as if prompting me for a reply:
"Nice… to meet you."