Do you know what it feels like for your blood to dry up and kill you?
It was an expression used when someone suffered so terribly that they wasted away and died, usually when enduring long, relentless physical and mental torment.
That is exactly what we are right now.
The feeling of your blood drying up.
“……”
“……”
For three days.
Trapped inside a Ghost Story, feeling the terror of death, waiting for companions who never came, I am learning firsthand what state a human being ends up in when they can neither sleep nor eat properly.
Do you know this?
If a person goes a full three days without proper sleep, normal thinking slowly becomes impossible.
We take turns napping for one hour at a time in the food court on the second floor, but even that has reached its limit. Every hour, we repeat the same state of feeling our lives are in danger and having our nerves stretched to the breaking point.
‘Perfect conditions for going insane.’
…Especially if the companion with you is a minor who got dragged into a Ghost Story for the first time.
“Hik! W-where are we n-now….”
“…It’s 56 minutes. Let’s move.”
The high schooler I had to rescue got up with a limp.
The mental strain was probably even worse for them than it was for me. Little by little, they had stopped staggering because of the ankle and started reeling from dizziness instead, and instead of crying, they had begun muttering nonsense into the empty air.
They no longer even had the energy to cry or get angry.
‘Because they haven’t been able to eat properly either.’
Naturally, the safe food you could get in this damned mart was extremely limited, and most of it was the kind of thing a normal high school student would never have put in their mouth.
…Things like rats or cockroaches.
Things that, no matter who looked at them, could never be considered products sold by a mart.
‘The kind of lineup anyone would say they’d rather starve through for at least three days.’
Rarely, shoppers would already have checked out and then lost something afterward, and those lost items would occasionally turn up in the food court. We had to search through those for food.
In three days, I saw that happen exactly once.
Had there ever been a time in my life when I’d been so happy to see a banana?
‘Which, put another…