WE WENT TO ANOTHER WORLD
—Azusa, can you hear me? I’m speaking directly into your mind.
As I was making lunch in the kitchen, a voice rang in my head.
This was probably Goodly Godly Godness using her god powers. That’s all fine and well, but…
“You have the volume on way too high! Wait, does telepathy have volume…? Anyway, you’re making my head rattle!”
Oh, I’m sorry! It is rather difficult speaking to you. How about thi—? EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE, WOOOOOOOOOOM!
“Was that feedback?!”
Why were her powers acting like cheap communication equipment…? Was this good enough for a god?
Gosh, gosh, speaking to someone, speaking to someone, in the same world, in the same world, comes with its own difficulties, comes with its own difficulties.
“Now you’re echoing! I hear everything twice!”
Only some people could probably understand what I mean by this, but listening to her was making me sick. In my past life, making phone calls on messaging apps with a bad connection sometimes sounded like this.
“Is something wrong, Mistress?”
I was yelling my comebacks out loud, so Flatorte was now eyeing me strangely. I agree, this is strange.
“It’s nothing, Flatorte… Don’t worry about it.”
Hmm, hmm, these settings are— Khhhch… Beeeeep, beeeeep, beeeeep—
“The line cut!”
Her lack of dignity in this was getting impressive now.
“What line cut, Mistress? Are you angry with something? If you are, then I, Flatorte, will go and pummel it for you anytime.”
“No, nothing violent. It’s not that big of a problem.”
After a little while, the connection came back.
—Khhhccchhhhh, um, Azusa? Can you hea—? Cchhhhhhhh—
“The static is really bad, but I can pick up some sound? Isn’t there a spell that can make telepathy a little easier…?”
I am still—kkkhhhhhccccchhh—a god, so I should use— Kkkkkkccchhhhhh—
Oh, sounds like I could just communicate with her in my mind without speaking. I just tend to retort out loud when things don’t make sense.
I was trying out something new to pass the time, so I was wondering if you would humor me? Beep beep, beep beep. Oh, another god is calling me.
“This telepathy function needs some work!”
Why did it have ringtones? Actually, I’d say it was more of a shock that she wanted me to humor her just because she needed to kill the time.
That said, I still owed her because it was Godly Godness who reincarnated me into this world.
Very well. If that’s okay with her, I’ll participate.
Thank you! I’ll be right there!
What? She’s coming here?
Thirty minutes later, Goodly Godly Godness arrived at the house in the highlands.
“Hello~ It’s me, Goodly Godly Godness! I hope we’re living virtuous lives by collecting virtue stamps! Let’s all try to do one good deed a day!”
I didn’t really want her coming over, but she had before when Nintan was angry with her. Because of that, the family treated her like a friend.
Laika gave her polite thanks. “Thank you very much for all your help.”
Shalsha talked to her from a scholarly angle. “I want to hear about the divine psychological world. I believe it will have a major impact on theological studies.”
I think it would probably change theological studies forever, actually, so please don’t.
Everyone else accepted her easily.
To be honest, I did think we were a little too accommodating. Someone here had to have common sense; otherwise, our values would get skewed, and we might make some major mistake.
“Thanks to your help, the virtue-stamp-card system has reached far and wide. There are more people giving up their seats on carriages and more dungeon-diving adventurers leaving signs that say, All treasure chests beyond this point have been opened, so there’s no point in going farther. I believe the world is truly becoming a better place.”
I wasn’t completely convinced that was true, but I guess it didn’t matter right now so long as things weren’t getting worse.
“Well? What was that new thing you were trying out?”
“Here we go. Ta-daa!” Godly Godness pulled out a perfectly round crystal ball.
“Are you going to start fortune-telling? I think it’s a bit mean-spirited for a god to tell fortunes.”
“Oh, Azusa, equating crystal balls with fortune-telling is so uninspired.”
She just insulted me. Ouch.
“This is, in a word—a world!”
I couldn’t believe it! “Huh? What do you mean by ‘a world’…? Uh, what…?”
My comprehension hadn’t caught up yet.
“See, it may be possible for higher beings to create worlds, and those beings must necessarily be gods, yes?”
With the way she worded that, it was hard to tell if they created them or not.
“For me, I can only create simple worlds. See, you all can construct a pond in your garden, let fish swim free in it, and make a new mini ecosystem. This is similar, but to a greater degree. I suppose you could even call it a pocket world created within this world~”
She was talking casually about it, but there was no doubt this was an extraordinary topic. Case in point, Shalsha fainted dead away on the spot.
“Oh no, Mommy! Shalsha is frozen with her mouth open!” Falfa was shocked by her little sister’s reaction, too. “I’ll hug her. I’m sure she’ll go back to normal soon!”
I lifted Shalsha up to cradle her, and she immediately recovered.
“Shalsha has a question… What is the world? What is space? What is truth…? The missing link…”
“Calm down, Shalsha! You’ll freeze up again if you think too hard!”
I guess when a god shows up out of the blue, all the rules go out the window.
“Oh, I’m so sorry. I suppose it was too much stress for little Shalsha.”
And as always, Goodly Godly Godness was the relaxed one here.
I was starting to sweat, imagining this crystal-ball world falling on the floor.
“Oh dear, my hand slipped! I almost dropped it.”
“This is scaring me! Please just put it on the table!”
I would be unbelievably traumatized if I saw a world destroyed in front of me, so please just keep it together!
We laid down a purple cloth on the table, and Godly Godness put the crystal ball on top of it. I didn’t think it would roll around now, but the cloth made the place look even more like a fortune-telling house.
“This crystal world has a very simple makeup. Creating worlds is generally too much for me to do on my own, but I did this in my spare time as a fun little project.”
“No need to be so humble. I’ll start feeling bad for the people in that world…”
“Oh, no, no. There aren’t any intelligent life-forms in there~ There is still only one type of creature.”
That does sound simple.
I wonder what the ecosystem looked like. I was actually having a harder time imagining a world with only one kind of life-form.
“And if I may get straight to business…” Godly Godness used her free hand to point to the crystal world.
“Please play in this world as one of the life-forms!”
There she went, saying these wild things like they were nothing…
“I will explain it in a way that will make it easy for you to understand, Azusa. It’s like VR.”
Yes, it was easy for me to understand. Me and literally no one else.
In short, I guess that meant that from the perspective of this world, where Godly Godness was, the crystal world she made was just a simulation.
“Even if you enter the world I made, it will not have any effect whatsoever on your physical bodies. It is not like entering another world by some mistake and finding yourself suddenly unable to get back. You will definitely, definitely be able to return.”
“Please don’t say that twice. It’s just making me more nervous.”
This is what you call jinxing yourself…
“I am interested, though I would be lying if I said I was not uncertain…” Laika was looking dubiously at the crystal ball. As she should be.
“This sounds fun. I, the great Flatorte, will be among the first to explore your world!”
“I suppose if everyone else is going, I will, too,” Halkara added.
“Will it work for a ghost like me?”
And so we threw together the party of Flatorte, Halkara, and Rosalie!
“Hey, are you sure you can just casually say yes to entering another world like that? You do realize how unbelievable this is, right? It’s okay to stay on the safe side every once in a while. You do know that?”
“Both you and Laika worry too much. I, Flatorte, don’t mind at all!” Yeah, Flatorte wasn’t the type to think too deeply about anything…
“Madam Teacher, she said it was all right, so it is most definitely all right.”
Whenever Halkara said something was most definitely all right, that immediately added to the danger. To her, most definitely meant she was about 60 percent sure.
“I’m dead anyway, so if we do run into trouble, I’ll just cross that bridge when I get to it. I’m already sticking around on borrowed time.”
Rosalie thought like a ghost, but that was hard for the rest of us to sympathize with!
“Shalsha is not so much interested in experiencing the world, but in how the world itself was put together.”
“Falfa wants to see the world for scientific reasons!”
My two girls were very enthusiastic scholars.
“I see~ I could explain it to you now, but the knowledge could be beyond your comprehension and drive you to madness~”
“Please do not explain it to anybody, then!”
That was really dangerous.
“Can I photosynthesize in this world?” Sandra asked a very plant-like question.
“This world has no concept of plants, so I doubt that will be a problem at all~”
I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t unsure about this, but if it was that dangerous, then she wouldn’t have come all the way to the house in the highlands to make us try it out. Goodly Godly Godness wasn’t spiteful.
“Very well. I don’t mind heading into this world,” I said.
Everyone else in the family said they would go in. I guess nobody wanted to be the only one left behind.
“All right, then! Go on in~!”
Just as the crystal ball flashed—my consciousness suddenly went black.
When I came to, I was on a gray ground.
“I guess this is the world she made.”
The sky was pure white. I couldn’t tell if it was cloudy, or white for another reason.
At that moment, I couldn’t see anything besides those two colors.
“What am I anyway?”
There were no mirrors here, so I couldn’t tell.
I could move around, but the most I could do was slide around on the ground and jump. Plus, I could think, but I couldn’t talk.
These creatures probably had no concept of conversation. Conversation itself was extremely high-level anyway.
“Staying still won’t accomplish anything, so let’s try going somewhere.”
I silently moved forward.
I didn’t feel tired at all, but with nothing but a flat horizon ahead of me, the place felt empty.
Now that I was this weird little creature, I couldn’t really tell the passage of time, but I finally met something besides myself.
It was—a slime.
It was a normal slime. The kind I’d find around the house.
It was jumping up and down.
Was that a threat? But there was no creature weak enough to be intimidated by a slime.
Since there was nothing else around, I got closer and closer, until I finally made contact with it.
—Bwom.
Then a strange sensation overcame me, like my body had absorbed the slime—or like I had been absorbed.
The slime in front of me was gone.
“I wonder what that was? I guess that means I integrated the slime into me…?”
But I learned right away that it wasn’t so simple.
“Whaaat? The slime before me, the great Flatorte, vanished.”
Hmm?
“A thought that sounded a lot like Flatorte just crossed my mind.”
“I felt a sensation that was like something Mistress would think! What does this mean?!”
So Flatorte was here!
I decided to calmly analyze the situation.
Flatorte had been aware of the slime. So had I. And now there was no slime around me.
There was only one thing I could think of.
Flatorte and I had been separate slimes, but then when we got close to each other, we combined!
Now that I thought back on it, Godly Godness did say there was only one type of creature here.
That meant this world—was a world full of nothing but slimes!
“Do you think so, Mistress? Whoa, I can read your thoughts!”
“Yeah, I can hear what you’re thinking, too.”
Now I understood the point of this world that Goodly Godly Godness had created.
She had made a slime world as a thought experiment, then tossed us in here to see what would happen.
As I thought about that, my body started moving forward.
Strictly speaking, it was Flatorte who was moving.
“Let’s keep going, Mistress. That’s the only thing we can do, after all.”
“You’re right. Let’s go.”
I was hearing Flatorte’s thoughts as my own, so I was feeling a little off.
“I’m gonna smash everything that pisses me off. I’m gonna punch everything that pisses me off. I’ll beat everyone who gets in my way. I, the great Flatorte, will create a path in front of me. Even if no one’s done it before, I, the great Flatorte, will be the first!”
“Your thoughts are so violent!”
“But, Mistress, when you’re mad, it’s unhealthy to hold it all in. If it makes you angry, fight it. You’ve gotta pummel people who don’t make any sense, right?”
“That might be the right way to think for dragons, but I wish you’d calm down, just a bit…”
I didn’t know how much time passed, but as we kept going—
—a slime appeared before us.
“I wonder who it is this time. Or maybe it’s a slime native to this world?”
“Yeeeaaah! Let’s beat ’em!” The hotheaded Flatorte rushed forward!
“I’m telling you, be more careful! Observing is just as important!”
“Mistress, it’s better to ask forgiveness than permission! First, we step up to the challenge!”
“I know those words sound cool together, but your head is just empty!”
Our slime collided with the other slime.
—Bwom!
There was that feeling again of mutual absorption.
“Oh my, the slime before me has vanished. I wonder where it went? It rushed right at me…”
“This inner voice sounds like Laika’s.”
I couldn’t hear the actual sound aloud, but I could tell who it was by her ladylike manner of speech.
“Hmm? Was that slime you, Lady Azusa?”
So we did indeed combine with a slimeified Laika. But that brought some big trouble.
“Why do I, the great Flatorte, need to be combined with Laika?! This is the worst!”
Flatorte was raging!
“Ugh! Flatorte is here, too…? Please let me leave!”
“That’s what I was going to say! Get out!”
The slime was wiggling every which way!
“Argh, our body’s twisting everywhere! Stop, stop!”
We were twisting in all sorts of weird directions!
“What are you doing?! Flatorte, please do not behave so oddly!”
“Shut up! I’m trying to get you out of here!”
“We’ve already combined, so I don’t think it’s going to work…”
The slime, which included me, was hopping all over the place and squishing flat on the ground. I guess this is what happens when you have one body, but three minds!
After a little while, both Laika and Flatorte settled down.
It was just a guess, but they were probably tired. I was in the same body, so I could feel it, too. Apparently that’s what happened after going through these weird motions over and over again.
“I don’t know how to get you out of here…”
“I don’t seem to have the option of cutting you out, Flatorte… I am not even sure where I stop and you begin.”
Yeah, exactly. We were all one slime right now. I couldn’t differentiate which part was me, which part was Flatorte, and which part was Laika.
“Essentially, I am one with Lady Azusa right now…” Laika was blushing—at least, that’s what it felt like. “Wh-what an honor! An honor more than I deserve!”
“Is that something to be happy about…?”
“Yes! Though this may not be the real world, I am very happy!”
Yeah, it’d be a tragedy if something like this happened in real life. I guess I should be glad I got to experience something so weird personally.
But one of us didn’t think that way.
“Waaah! I was one with Mistress, but then Laika got involved! She’s a contaminant! What a waste of this whole thing!”
Laika and I sharing a body meant Flatorte and Laika were sharing a body.
Flatorte seemed to recognize that again.
Oh no, another fight was about to start…
“Please get along, you two… Even if you don’t, we’re still sharing a body, which means your arguments won’t accomplish anything…”
“If you say so, Lady Azusa…”
“Then I’ll obey…”
I tried thinking about how much of us was the master and how much wasn’t, but then I quickly realized that was too difficult.
But they could probably hear my thoughts…
There wasn’t a whole lot of common sense in this world.
And so we the slime traveled across the wasteland.
I don’t know if slimes understand the concept of travel, though. Also, I say wasteland, but the only thing in this world was this empty field.
Just as Goodly Godly Godness had explained, plants probably didn’t exist here.
We moved forward, sometimes rolling, sometimes hopping.
“Hey, do you know how much time has passed?”
“I have absolutely no idea. It does appear the sun neither sets nor rises in this world.”
Maybe a slime didn’t have much sense of time.
As for food, we were probably absorbing something from the wasteland or the air. Or maybe the concept of nutrition hadn’t been set up in this world.
“Just sleep when you’re sleepy and eat when you’re hungry. I don’t feel like doing either right now.”
I had a feeling that this world was best suited to Flatorte.
As we moved straight forward—we encountered a massive slime.
This was probably because several slimes had already combined there.
“We do, in fact, have the option to run. What should we do?”
“Mistress, we can’t run—that’s embarrassing! I, Flatorte, am going to fight!”
“Lady Azusa, one cannot retreat without beginning the fight. We must first engage; otherwise, we are not running. We are simply not doing anything.”
With a good hop, step, and a jump, we managed to get right on top of the slime.
However, the moment we made contact, I felt that unique sensation again, but I didn’t go unconscious.
“Wow, Falfa can hear so many people thinking! Amazing!”
“Mom is here. This is a miraculous experience.”
“It’s a lot louder now. But I’ll hold my tongue. Plants are good at that.”
Wait, could this be…?
“Gasp! I’ve merged with my daughters!”
I could barely contain myself, so I hopped in place.
Apparently, if anyone wanted to move, even if everyone inside wasn’t on the same page, the slime would move.
“There is nothing more miraculous than becoming wholly a part of my daughters. What an amazing experience! Thank you, Goodly Godly Godness! This is the best, the absolute best! I can feel how sweet and good you all are! Is feel the right word when we’re all the same?!”
“Calm down, Mommy, calm down.”
“I believe she is temporarily excited due to this unique experience. She will relax eventually.”
“Argh, you’re all so loud! Animals don’t know how to sit still!”
My daughters were very blasé about all this, and that made me a little sad. Maybe I had overreacted.
Oh yeah—back in college, I did hear a mother could truly smother a child with love, so I guess this was something similar…
If a parent can’t separate from the child, then the child can’t develop independence… This was difficult… But they were all like children to me, so I guess they would still let me smother them a little bit as their mother.
“Shalsha has not learned enough about this. I cannot say anything about this.”
“I don’t think anyone has ever pinned down how to define a child, after all~”
“You really like those difficult topics, don’t you…?”
My daughters sure were levelheaded…
“But Falfa is very happy to be the same as you, Mommy!”
“Thank you! That’s what I wanted to hear!”
“Shalsha is happy, too. But I am uncertain whether to conclude this is love for another, or love for the self.”
“This is a really difficult topic considering this slime form we’re in… Well, think hard and think lots… Thinking hard is a good way to study anyway.”
“The animal world is much simpler than the plant world.”
“Sandra, I am not entirely sure if slimes are animals.”
Meanwhile, Laika and Flatorte were having their own conversation:
“We’ve gotten quite big.”
“Let’s keep going and be the biggest in the world!”
Everyone could hear everyone else’s thoughts, but it seemed like we could have individual conversations among ourselves.
Afterward, we just kept going forward, forward, forward.
I wondered how far we had come—but it couldn’t have been too far. We were moving at a slime’s pace, after all.
But we moved forward.
There was nothing else to do. This wasn’t a figure of speech or anything; there really wasn’t anything else to do.
I seriously wanted to know what enjoyment slimes got out of life… Or maybe this was just a special case because the slimes were the only ones here, and slimes in our original world had more to think about?
But we could use our knowledge from our original world, so—
“I’ll take it with my knight.”
“Then I will move my sentry into the space in front of it.”
Shalsha and Laika were playing some chess-like game.
I didn’t know who was better, but I bet it was a good match.
—And finally, we absorbed the Halkara-and-Rosalie slime.
That meant the whole family was in one slime now.
“My body feels heavier with you, Madam Teacher… Oh, this is rather sexy…”
“Halkara, no funny ideas.”
Was sexy even a concept in this world?
“I’ve felt heavier before… Is there something weird about that?”
“Miss Rosalie, that is simply because your ghost body was passing through a person’s body…”
Halkara pointed out the inconsistency.
We were now one big happy family, but that didn’t mean we’d “won” somehow. Our only choice next was to keep going forward…
I thought there might not be any slimes left in this world, but that wasn’t entirely true.
We discovered some other native slimes that weren’t a part of our family.
But as our slime got bigger, the way we thought changed.
I was starting to sense that everyone couldn’t say what they were thinking anymore. Like their personal opinions had dwindled. I guess it was because the local slimes didn’t have any of their own thoughts.
We had to absorb more.
We needed to absorb more.
We…I must absorb…
And I moved forth.
…
……
I proceeded through the world, doing nothing else.
When I found a slime, I approached and absorbed it into myself. That was my goal, an act that would bring us to some decisive conclusion.
At some point, I was made of over one thousand slimes.
And eventually, I stopped finding them.
At last, I stopped seeing any other slimes.
That was not all—the ground and sky I was once aware of no longer existed.
I could infer why that was. I was so great, so large, that I had absorbed them all.
At one decisive moment, I came to the following conclusion:
I was now the entire world.
Slimes, ground, sky—the “other” no longer existed in this world. Everything was now contained within “me.” In essence, I was “one,” and I was “all.”
I stopped in place.
Perhaps it was fair to say I no longer was aware of the concept of movement.
I would exist here forever!
Suddenly, an entity within me thought:
“Even if the whole of this world is within me, what would happen if there are other worlds besides this one? Would I still be able to call myself one and all?”
Another within me responded:
“This is an interesting thought experiment, but it is a paradox. If I am not one and all, then I would be able to move. But If I am indeed one and all, then there exists no place for me to move. I am already this entire world itself, and therefore, I have stopped.”
My immobility was proof that all existence was already contained within me.
Therefore, other worlds could not logically exist.
However, there were entities with counterarguments within me.
“This simply means I am incorporated with this world. So long as I am within this world, there is no separate entity to observe me moving, which is seen as being unmoving. But that does not prove there is no outside.”
“Wait, what does that mean…?”
“Apologies. Things have gotten so complicated, I’m not sure anymore… My essence seems to have been bad at studying…”
“Let me build a metaphor for you. Say this world is a ball, and I am the ball itself. The ball will ostensibly seem to be permanently frozen in space. That is because there is nothing but the ball.”
“That’s easier to understand now!”
“But then say the ball eventually collides with a wall, breaks the wall, and enters the outside. In that case, whoever is on the outside will then be cognizant of my movement. This is just a possibility, of course.”
It sounded like the point was that there might be worlds out there besides me.
I agreed. If there was even the slightest chance that I was the whole of everything, then I should be able to move.
Then when I find this other entity, I will incorporate it into myself.
However, in order to be cognizant of my movement, I must enter another world. Until then, I could not tell the difference between moving and staying still.
But in my perception, I intended to be in motion.
Then, after a long, long time passed, I sensed an “other” for the first time in an eternity—something akin to a wall collided into me!
Oh…I finally found it…
I was not all. There were other things that still existed!
I would break this wall and absorb everything in the world outside!
“Now it is time to incorporate everything into……… Huh…? Oh, it was a dream…”
I was collapsed on the dining room floor. Other members of my family were also lying on the floor, or asleep at the table.
But we started waking up all at the same time.
All except Godly Godness, who sat with a crystal-ball-like world on the table, sipping on tea.
“Well done, everyone. Thank you for participating in my experiment.”
“All I can remember is dreaming about being a slime…”
I felt like we were talking about something grand and philosophical at one point, but I couldn’t really recall.
“Yes. I made a world of only slimes, but to be quite honest, it was a bust. The slimes absorbed one another and eventually became the world itself.”
Shalsha crossed her arms, closed her eyes, and nodded. She was acting as though she understood.
“That is already a problem, but it was even looking to leap into worlds outside its own,” said Godly Godness. “And if it incorporated other worlds into itself—”
“Then it would have become a kind of abyss sucking in everything. If such a thing existed, many worlds would come to be destroyed, and even space itself would vanish. There was a risk of every single world turning to nothing.” Shalsha put together the rest.
“That’s terrifying, Shalsha.”
“To put it in a way you understand, Azusa, if there was a world that was nothing but slimes, it would eventually become a black hole and end up absorbing everything, including other planets~”
Black holes were really scary.
No, maybe slimes were the true terror?
A little while later, I would shiver whenever I killed a slime.
“How awful it would be if this world was all slime…”
I was so glad there were things here besides slimes. So glad for all the different things in my world.
“What’s wrong, Mommy?”
“I can tell you are on edge.”
Falfa and Shalsha, who had come along with me, were worried about me.
When I looked at their faces, a switch flipped in me.
“I’m so glad slimes exist!”
Because if they didn’t, then I wouldn’t have my little slime spirits!
“I love both of you!” I squeezed them both in a tight hug.
“Falfa loves Mommy, too~!”
“Shalsha does not need to speak of this.”
It was a good thing that nothing was in extremes—moderation, moderation!
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