37. Reverse Flow Shrine
And thus, straddling a dolphin-sized salmon, I began to ascend the sulfuric acid river.
The flow of the river was fierce.
Swimming against it seemed to be no ordinary feat; I could vividly feel through my thighs pressed against its back that the salmon was struggling considerably.
Moreover, this salmon had its eyes crushed by me. Searching for a route upstream with zero visibility must be extremely difficult.
However, perhaps the pitiful sight of its vision stolen by absurd violence struck a chord with its kin.
Before I knew it, other salmon had gathered around us.
They carried no foreign object like me, and their eyes were intact. They swam gracefully without any struggle.
They had, so to speak, volunteered as pacemakers in a marathon.
Dozens of salmon began to swim ahead of us as one unit.
For their pitiful brethren who had lost its eyes and was burdened with the absurd calamity that was me, they became a "moving wall."
The fierce reverse flow of sulfuric acid pushing from the front was parried by their school like a barrier.
Thanks to the formation woven by the multitude of fish, a kind of slipstream—a new hydrodynamic order—was born there.
The blind salmon carrying me, by surrendering itself to that "correct flow," was able to swim surprisingly smoothly.
They—the salmon—knew the way.
Just as salmon in spawning season follow an advanced navigation system called instinct to return to their final place.
A search of their collective intelligence revealed that the destination for these Venusian salmon, especially the population breeding in this water area, was undoubtedly the "Reverse Flow Shrine."
Perhaps the strange name "Reverse Flow Shrine" itself originated from the ecosystem where salmon swim up the torrent to spawn in this place.
I skimmed through speculative articles floating in the sea of the net as elegantly as flipping through a magazine on a yacht.
Then I returned my gaze to the front.
Not too far away, the destination came into view.
First, a torii gate.
The torii standing in the water gave me a sense of déjà vu.
Yes. I have lost my memories, but my intuition tells me.
When I first landed on Venus—whenever that was—this was the gate I had to pass through first and foremost.
And the place where I first met Rin.
In other words, this might be the origin, or the very "womb," for Rin and me.
The salmon carrying me and the legion of countless salmon leading it pushed through the reverse flow with tremendous momentum and plunged into the torii.
The torii had its roots in the water of the sulfuric acid river.
We passed through that barrier.
In that instant, the flow of the river stopped dead.
The water current that had been raging until now halted, ignoring physical inertia.
It was no longer a river.
It had become a pond.
I looked back. Beyond the torii, the violent torrent of sulfuric acid still swirled. But bordering the line of the torii, that flow was cut off, like an event in a separate painting.
I faced forward again.
Here, the water surface was as calm as a mirror.
The moment the salmon entered this pond, they slowed down significantly. Decelerating, they scattered, spreading out like ripples.
But what spread like ripples was merely the formation of salmon, not the water surface itself.
The water surface did not move an inch.
Audaciously ignoring the laws of physics, it didn't raise a single wave, maintaining a perfect flatness almost blatantly.
I let go of the eye-socket handles and gently touched the water surface.
My fingertips sank. Still, no ripples occurred.
It was as if surface tension didn't even exist.
Or conversely, perhaps the high-concentration sulfuric acid had increased its viscosity to the extreme, behaving like a kind of non-Newtonian fluid.
Perhaps the static molecules showed a strong bond, instantly absorbing and diffusing kinetic energy from the outside.
My hand slipped into it smoothly, as if passing through a hologram image.
The bottom of the pond was a deep green.
Deeper than the Mariana Trench, a bottomless darkness spread out. In that abyss, there was a presence like unknown life forms said to lurk under the thick ice of Saturn's moon Titan.
I could sense super-gigantic marine creatures squirming silently but surely, so as not to wake a newborn baby greedily enjoying its first sleep.
The salmon took their respective positions, filling the vast pond while drawing multiple circles instead of ripples.
Then, the spawning began.
Countless small eggs were spewed out like bubbles.
They spread evenly, like foam drifting on the water surface.
The laid eggs, upon touching their parent salmon, entwined and attached themselves to the fish's body like leeches.
The parasitism of the offspring began.
The eggs started to devour, using the parent's body as a seedbed.
From each small egg, sharp teeth grew.
The sight was reminiscent of a character from a famous arcade game that once existed. That game where a yellow sphere opens and closes its mouth, eating up dots in a maze.
With the momentum of escaping the maze of the parent's body, the eggs exploited the parent gradually, sequentially, and steadily.
As they devoured the sweet flesh of the parent salmon, the eggs grew larger.
The spheres, initially a youthful hue close to orange, turned redder as they sucked the parent's flesh and blood dry, changing into a vivid crimson.
By the time all the salmon that reached the pond were devoured, the eggs had grown to a diameter equal to the height of a normal humanoid robot. Like balance balls, or giant gym balls, they floated abruptly on the silent pond.
Thousands of eggs, fully matured in both color and size, filled the vast water surface.
The salmon I was riding was also devoured without exception.
Having lost my vehicle, I ended up having to paddle with my own limbs again.
I couldn't just keep floating in the center of the pond.
I aimed for land.
Ahead of my gaze, I could see a shrine building like an ordinary shrine and the land leading to it. I swam toward it.
Crawling up from the pond, I dragged my sulfuric acid-soaked body ashore.
Underfoot was a well-tended gravel path.
In front sat a house-style shrine pavilion, surrounded by a vast and meticulously calculated Japanese garden.
Giant black pine trees, seemingly hundreds of years old, stood tall, twisting like dragons ascending to heaven, and moss-covered stone lanterns at their feet breathed quietly, casting profound shadows.
A space far too composed.
The silence was fatal, creating the illusion that the world had died out and I, a single humanoid robot, was the only one allowed sound and movement.
Suddenly, the double doors of the shrine opened.
From there, a headless girl-type humanoid robot appeared.
She wore a modern yukata scattered with geometric patterns. Printed diagonally on the fabric, as if exposing a rebellious spirit, were the words "The best part is no part."
And in the place where her head should be, there was only void.
The headless girl left the shrine pavilion, wearing wooden clogs on her bare feet, and walked to the edge of the pond where I stood.
Her footsteps were nonexistent.
Complete silence.
It was a quietness so profound it gave the illusion that the phenomenon of "silence" itself was being generated by her steps.
When she came close to me, she tilted her body toward somewhere. Assuming that was her "gaze," I looked in that direction too.
There, the head of Ability Emi, which had been used as a toy for ball games downstream just moments ago, was rolling.
No, rather than rolling, I should say it was placed carelessly on the ground and abandoned.
The head had its eyes closed.
The lively vibrancy it showed when it was a ball had vanished, drifting with the stillness of a severed head just cut from the torso after execution. Or perhaps, it just looked like it was sleeping peacefully, breathing quietly.
The headless girl approached totteringly while emitting a noise like a chorus of cicadas from nowhere, and squatted in front of the head.
She lifted the head carefully with her small white hands.
Eventually, she raised it above her own neck and installed it.
Kachin.
A clear sound rang out.
It was the fitting sound of a soul finally returning to where it belonged, as if predetermined from the moment of the Big Bang.
A binding sound that felt incredibly pleasant and perfectly harmonious.
The tone also resembled the sound of a wind chime swaying in a breeze.
I intuited.
That this elegant resonance was the system startup sound heralding the beginning of something.
The tone of the wind chime felt too dazzling, so I held up my hand and closed my eyes as if protecting my visual sensors.
Eventually, I lowered my hand and slowly opened my eyes.
The girl-type humanoid robot standing before me again had become complete by gaining a head.
It was Rin.