Chapter 60

Osamu Dazai looked at the simple floral wreath on his wrist.

The spring flowers felt utterly incongruous with his impeccably tailored, luxury suit—as comical as holding a gun to someone's head while enveloped in a sinister, bone-chilling aura, only for a rose to suddenly bloom out of the barrel.

"Hah—"

Dazai stared at his wrist, letting out a sound that hovered somewhere between contemplation and distaste. "Are you trying to humor me with child's play?"

"You crafty bastard, you should be saying 'okay' right now and figuring out how to gift me the winter," Takizawa Sei muttered with dissatisfaction. "Give me something more surprising than this; I came all this way to find you with a very complicated state of mind."

Dazai raised his wrist, holding the wreath up against the wall sconce. "But this trick is genuinely cheesy. People don't even use this method to woo women anymore, let alone how many times you've already tried it on me. Remember before when you said you'd give me summer and showed me the magic of summer? It turned out to just be exploiting the phototaxis of flying insects to create glowing specks flickering in the dark."

"Wasn't it pretty?! Wasn't it pretty?!" Takizawa Sei widened his eyes. "You had a very happy look on your face when you saw it."

Dazai pouted.

Even when making such an expression, the young man didn't look awkward at all. Takizawa Sei looked at his face. "Even though everyone knows that insects have phototaxis and just scatter into random specks of light when fluttering around a lamp, very few people ever think to use the beam of a flashlight to guide their flight path—anyway, I did something that surprised you."

Dazai showed him his wrist again. "Surprising? Is that what you mean?"

"Nag! Just tell me whether you forgive me or not!"

Dazai closed his eyes briefly. "……Let me think about it."

Takizawa Sei denounced him, "You're cold-hearted! Ruthless!"

"You're the one yelling at me—"

"You kicked me too!"

"Ah, my shoulder hurts so much. Could it be because someone pinched me way too hard?"

"Dazai……"

Dazai looked at him with half-lidded eyes, only to hear Takizawa Sei say once more, solemnly, "I'm sorry."

"……" The dark-haired youth fell silent. His gaze felt somewhat viscous before he broke into a smile. "You have nothing to apologize for."

"My attitude just now was a bit weird." Takizawa Sei scratched his hair somewhat awkwardly. His gaze involuntarily drifted elsewhere, but he forced it back under tight control, looking sincerely into those hazel eyes. "I mean, I shouldn't have taken my emotions out on you, nor should I have treated you so roughly."

Ah……

So this is the kind of person you've always been.

Dazai suddenly felt the heartbeat he had been consciously trying to control since a moment ago grow bizarrely calm.

Everything in the world seemed measurable.

Even before mastering human psychology, Dazai could instinctively observe what people desired and leverage those demands to achieve his desired outcomes. And after he mastered the skill thoroughly and applied it at every single moment, he discovered with a mixture of dread and exhilaration—

Everything in the world could be measured.

Except for emotion.

It could make people retreat infinitely, or draw infinitely close.

It freed human actions from the control of worldly interests, and thus a more abstract concept was born: trust.

"Under the same circumstances, you've already performed remarkably well," Dazai said, sounding almost like a sigh. "If we only needed calm, straightforward statements without any emotional release, wouldn't that just be far too harsh?"

He looked at Takizawa Sei's hand. The young man with turquoise eyes had his fingers tightly wrapped in bandages, significantly reducing the probability of skin-to-skin contact.

If both of them stayed alert and minded that detail, avoiding *No Longer Human* was actually quite easy.

Takizawa Sei took Dazai's hand.

He clearly felt Dazai stiffen. Come to think of it, this seemed to be the first time they had performed such an intimate gesture since their reunion.

"I'll tell you everything I know and perceive," Takizawa Sei said. "In exchange, tell me what you've been thinking, and what you've been doing all this time, alright?"

Such a request naturally received an affirmative answer.

How strange. Just a few hours ago, they had been at each other's throats, neither bearing any real malice yet thoroughly tormenting one another.

But now—

They had both taken a step back. Complaints, anger, dissatisfaction, and pain—after grinding all of that away, the only goal left was mutual understanding.

"Aren't you cold on the floor?"

"Huh? I really like the carpet. I like sitting cross-legged on the floor."

Thus, two minutes later, the two of them were each holding a cup of hot tea, choosing not to sit properly on the sofa, but instead leaning back-to-back against the sofa's backrest, their legs casually bent as they gazed out the window at the sprouting tree branches and the blue sky.

If anyone entered the room at this moment, they would panic, thinking the room was completely empty because the two of them were tucked away in a blind spot.

"Let me think, where should I start?" Dazai rested his hands on his knees, tapping his fingers lightly. "When I first learned you had returned……"

"Wait, let me go first," Takizawa Sei assumed the posture of someone with a backlog of things dying to be said. "I've held it in for so long. You guys always love to give me these tragic, deeply tormented storylines. I'm going to get PTSD."

Dazai's eyes widened slightly in surprise, but he quickly relaxed and compromised, "Alright, go ahead."

"First, and most importantly, I was not manipulated or coerced by anyone. Coming back was entirely my own personal will."

"Mmm-hmm."

"Second, I have no dissatisfaction with my current state, nor am I in pain."

Dazai cast a pointed glance at his neck.

"……There's nothing to be done about that part, though it actually doesn't hurt very much." Takizawa Sei felt he wanted to say something else, but held back out of caution. "—I can live forever as a living corpse."

He didn't care about that aspect. "You know, that human top-ten evil... what was it... the vampire count, he lived from a very long time ago, and by the time he survived to the present, he didn't have a single confidant left by his side."

"Even though you say that……" The man in the luxurious suit showed a stubborn streak. "I won't give up on finding a way to save you, Takizawa."

"I won't stop you; I'm not a masochist." Takizawa Sei leaned slightly toward him, their shoulders and arms brushing against each other intentionally or otherwise. "You should have said earlier that you wanted to grant me release; I would have been thoroughly cooperative—ah, but not through being erased by *No Longer Human*. That isn't a release to me; it's a curse."

Takizawa Sei's expression turned somewhat chilly at that moment. "If you did that, I would b—blame you, Dazai."

The word he originally wanted to use was far too heavy; Takizawa Sei felt like sucking in a breath of cold air himself.

Dazai slumped his shoulders and, as if in total surrender, leaned his head back. "Fine, I get it—I won't do anything like that."

"Third, um... how should I put it? Actually, my resurrection wasn't outside my expectations; it was even the result of my own hard work."

This piece of information directly contradicted what Dazai already knew. He turned his head sharply, his gaze turning somewhat piercing.

"How should I describe it to you……" Takizawa Sei also found it a bit headache-inducing. "The first few days after coming back were indeed quite painful, but not because of the resurrection itself—it was the clash between my ideals and my current reality. In short, I wasn't prepared."

He didn't actually want to give up on any of it. Promises weighed a thousand pounds, and forgetting was the most hateful thing of all.

It was like ignoring the suffering of others while selfishly sinking into a tender illusion all by himself.

Yet his personal capabilities were truly limited, and this forced departure undoubtedly defied his will.

His relationship with the Transmigration Bureau left Takizawa Sei mentally exhausted; it was the powerlessness of facing a massive organization all by oneself.

Yet Takizawa Sei had never thought of giving up. He could rebuild his mental state after a breakdown, he could search for loopholes in the Transmigration Bureau, and find a way to escape forever that left them helpless—because there were thousands of worlds, and he wasn't the only rogue tool.

Weren't there several hundred cases ahead of him? Were all those tools really rounded up and dragged back?

Probably not. He had never heard of such a thing.

Instead, Takizawa Sei occasionally picked up gossip from his seniors. One senior had once been depressed by a mission and vented their inner gloom to him, talking about resigning, or even harboring the exact opposite ambition—climbing up to the Transmigration Bureau's management.

What was the management? Takizawa Sei had never even thought about it.

How much authority did the management have? Takizawa Sei hadn't considered that either, but now he felt a sense of curiosity and yearning.

"There's a question I've wanted to ask for a long time," Dazai said, a faint glimmer in his eyes. "Who on earth are you, Takizawa?"

Who on earth are you?

"I am Takizawa Sei."

The young man said in a deep voice, "But my identity is not limited to what you know."

They still possessed pasts unknown to each other.

"Just like I don't know what happened to you in the past, Dazai, you are entirely ignorant of the first half of my life. That ignorance is different from the scraps of intel you managed to gather."

Takizawa Sei slid a hand down his own neck, letting it rest over his heart.

"That is the secret of my resurrection."

This world was so vast, filled with unknowns that humans could never imagine.

The young man before him was obscurely revealing just a corner of a colossal, closely guarded secret.

Dazai's breathing hitched slightly, his heart accelerating as his thoughts raced.

As Takizawa Sei had said, this world was indeed full of irrationalities.

Dazai said, "I thought... based on the intelligence I had gathered, I initially assumed your corpse had been read by *Thou Shalt Not Die*, which left you dazed and self-loathing."

"Stop right there! I was neither dazed nor self-loathing!"

"You were," Dazai said, staring steadily at him.

Takizawa Sei's bravado deflated. "Fine, please allow me to have had a period of temporary mental instability, but my self-healing ability is very good." He accused, "So you were avoiding me because you thought I was targeted by *Thou Shalt Not Die*—wait? Why *Thou Shalt Not Die*? Big Brother Rantpo and I barely had any interaction!"

"……"

This would drag up matters from a long time ago.

"Rantpo gave up attacking us, most likely because he saw something in you that touched his soul, which made him back down. Perhaps 'softened' would be a more fitting description."

"*Thou Shalt Not Die* can only read corpses, so how could he acquire information from a living person?"

"That's also what I've always wanted to know." Dazai looked out the window. "So later on, I never figured out why he left. Maybe he really just changed his mind on a whim, but the anomaly at the time, his special reaction to you, made it very easy to suspect he had left a singularity inside you."

Takizawa Sei: "……"