Novel Bin Chapter 1
Chapter 1
According to the Buddhist world view, people are reborn when they die. However, they arent necessarily reborn as human, and it isnt necessarily only humans who are reborn. A man could be reborn as a cow, a dog could be reborn as a woman, and a demon could be reborn as a hermit.
This theory is, perhaps, how I died by hitting my head while falling down the stairs in 21st century Japan and got reincarnated into a mountain. No, I wasnt a man as big as a mountain or something like that. I literally became a mountain.
The land surrounding me was barren, with no grass growing as far as the eye can see. There were no signs of living things, and there were no other mountains than mine. There also werent any rivers, nor were there any birds flying in the sky. The world was cold, with thick clouds covering the sky so that barely a patch of blue could be seen. Occasionally, dust was blown around by the wind.
I was confused at first. I didnt understand what was happening.
Why did I become a mountain?
How was I seeing without any eyes?
How was I thinking without a brain?
I wanted to cry, but no tears came out. I had no voice at all.
However, I was able to sleep, so I closed my eyes and slept while praying that someone would do something about this.
As time passed by without anything happening, I began to be able to accept my current state of being. I had become a mountain. Therefore, from now on I had no choice but to live as a mountain. I had no idea why or how this happened, but I simply had to accept this as fact and move on.
There were some things I found out while I was sleeping. First of all, I didnt seem to get hungry. Apparently, I received nourishment by absorbing heat from a lava pool thats under the mountain. And, even though I wasnt doing anything, occasionally lava spilled out of the mountain and became hardened rock once it cools. Like this, my body (the mountain) gradually grew in size. It was weird. Do normal mountains also grow using such a method? If I remember correctly, dont they form from changes in the earths crust? I didnt really get it, but in any case, the lava was nourishing, so I got used to it.
Humans store extra nutrients as fat, and it seems like, as a mountain, I had a similar function. I discovered that some of the energy absorbed from the lava had been crystallized in the center of the mountain. It was only about the size of a grain of sand, but it was certainly an ultra-pure energy crystal. If the lava ran out, I could live off of the crystal for a little while.
For the time being, I knew I could live without doing anything. I had no idea how long Id live for though. Since I was now a mountain, I didnt have to worry about disease or anything like that. I could end up living forever. The sense of incongruity I had from no longer being human disappeared after the initial confusion. Its like how, when I went to junior high school from elementary school, I felt a little strange, but I soon got used to it. Or how, when I entered high school and started a new club, I felt alienated, but I soon got used to it. It the same, Oh, my new life has started again kind of feeling. Though this was far from a new life. I dont know why I got used to it. Its much better than continuing to suffer from discomfort without getting used to a new body forever.
Once I calmed down, I managed to even take pleasure in this wilderness world. There were no signs of life, and I could rarely see the stars through all the clouds, but the meteorites that occasionally pierced the cloud cover were pretty. They fell five or six times a day. Thats just the number that I could see, so if I include the ones I couldnt, it was probably more. It was hard to see the meteorites in the daytime, but I could easily see and hear the aftermath of them landing. At night, the meteorites had a thin tail of light, so it was easier to pick them out. My hobby was counting meteorites (its true, I swear).
Seriously, I had only that much to do, and it was a little fun to think about why meteorites were falling so much. My guess was that this was the Earth after the fall of mankind. Nuclear war destroyed all life, all the rivers evaporated and the mountains blew up, and the atmosphere changed or maybe the Earths axis shifted anyway something like that changed and caused the meteorites to fall. Maybe. And maybe via the super technology of the near future, my consciousness was transplanted into a mountain and I became the sole survivor. Its sad.
I looked up at the sky every day while immersed in sentimentality. But, one day, something happened. First, the sky suddenly became dark. Originally it was dim even in the daytime because of the thick clouds, but it became as dark as night.
What is it, an eclipse? I wondered.
I thought that was it, but then the dark sky burst into flames. It wasnt just the red tinge of sunset. It was real fire. Suddenly the sky became a sea of fire. If I had a heart it wouldve stopped, and if I had eyes, I wouldve doubted my eyes. It was an undeniable reality of mythical beauty and horror.
Then, out of nowhere, things changed again. Something terrible appeared from the sea of fire. I didnt know what it was for a few seconds, but then I understood a little. It was a meteorite. An unusually huge meteorite had fallen into the atmosphere, ignited, and was rushing to the surface while blowing up.
AHHH, ILL DIE!!! If it hits me, Ill be blown away!
I was just a mountain. I didnt have any hands or feet. A moment later, the shock ran through my whole body and shook me from the ground up. It was a terrible sight. The earth was blown into the air like the sand in a sandbox being kicked up by a child. It then instantly melted into magma droplets due to the high heat of the collision. The meteorite digging into the surface of the ground while turning up the bedrock was reminiscent of an iron ball dropped in a full bathtub.
It was a despair-inducing scene. It was beyond the scale of just a mountain. It was even beyond the scale of a natural disaster. It was on a cosmic scale. It took almost a whole day for it to settle down, and I watched it the entire time. And even at the end of the day, it still wasnt completely over. It seems that while falling, that damned huge meteorite collided with the center of the earth, as if to grazing its edge, rather than hitting it cleanly. A large amount of red-hot rock was thrown up in the air and blown into outer space, but the earth managed to endure and not shatter.
At the price of endurance, the landscape of the earth had changed from the cold wilderness of just a day ago. There was nothing but red as far as the eye could see! Once the dust settled, I could see that the earth had become a sea of magma. It was what remained after the high-temperature evaporation earlier. Even the air was burning; the burning lava had scattered into the air and even into space, causing it to be unclear where the sky starts and the ground begins.
Small meteorites fell constantly like rain, and stirred the ground. My mountainous surface was struck by them numerous times, and one time I come close to death as one nearly split me right in two. I suffered through countless magma tsunamis; no sooner did one tsunami fade away then another, usually bigger one would strike.
Updat𝒆d fr𝒐m nov𝒆lb(i)n.c(o)m
It felt like I saw nothing but red for years, perhaps even decades. For all I know, it may have even continued on for hundreds of years. It seemed like I lost the ability to see any other color except red. It was a terrible time that could not be tolerated by the human spirit. But since I was now I mountain, I was fine (?).
Eventually, there was a break in the unchanging red world. Black came into view between the red. It took me years to realize that it was the night sky. Then, a ridiculous amount of years later, the sky was finally black part of the time and red part of the time, which I took to be the distinction between night and day.
Once the meteorites stopped falling, the Earth really resembled Saturn. That is to say, and asteroid belt had developed around it. The lava that had been blown into outer space was gathered by the gravity of the earth. The ring, which should be called a collection of small meteorites, became smaller year by year. Some fell to Earth, others collided and coalesced and become larger chunks. Apparently, the ring of meteorites was coming together to form a small object. It was much smaller than the Earth, but it was made out of a similar substance.
The small red-hot object, which had not yet even cooled, was gradually increasing in size by sucking in the ring of small meteorites with its gravity as it orbited around the Earth.
If this continues, wont it stabilize and orbit around the Earth like a satellite?
Then, I had a realization.
Its the moon, isnt it? Now that I think about it, I have seen stars shining in the sky between thick clouds, but I have never seen the moon. I cant think of anything else it could be except the moon.
Huh?
But that means
This is Earth before the birth of the moon?
WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON!!??