Even though most people remained unaware of the detail of Kukai’s teachings and the fact that he was the one responsible for spreading the first systematized doctrine of Esoteric Buddhism upon his return to Japan, the name most commonly associated with him, Kobo Daishi, became a household figure and appears in many legendary anecdotes. It was said, for example, that water would spring wherever his staff struck the ground, that he could heal the sick with touch alone, and that he was able to tame fierce demons, converting them into his followers. Countless such legends proliferated throughout Japan, and people did not have to consult weighty tomes like the Konjaku Monogatari to find them. After his death, Shingon Esoteric Buddhism would go on to form over 200 different schools. Today, the Mt. Koya school alone has over three thousand temples devoted to it.
And now, Kukai’s body had been stolen.
“Kukai,” Hosuke muttered.
“Yes,” Enjaku said, holding back the irritation in his voice. His face had slowly regained its color. His breathing was more composed, but his features hinted at an exhaustion that was greater than before. “Have you heard the word Yuina before?”
“Yuina?”
“It is the title of an appointment within our order at Mt. Koya.”
“An appointment?”
“Yes. I wonder if you are aware that at Mt. Koya, no matter what service is being performed, there is always a monk dressed in an amaranthine robe. That is the Yuina. The amaranthine robe is transferred from generation to generation each time a new monk succeeds the role. The robe is a symbol of the position. It is the Yuina’s role to watch over Kukai. He resides in a burial chamber beneath the mausoleum of the Inner Sanctuary.”
The mausoleum’s conical roof is fashioned from cypress bark. Inside the building, about 4.5 meters below ground and roughly 1.8 meters long on each side, was a tomb of 5 stone sections of different shapes and sizes. This is the room that Kukai was said to have entered for his final meditation, or samadhi. The Yuina’s role is to provide Kukai with a change of garment and to carry offerings of food each morning and evening, as would have been performed if he were alive. The Yuina’s status equals that of the head priest, and each generation of Yuina is sworn to secrecy regarding their observations in the burial chamber, which applies to their colleagues and friends at the temple as well as their family. People, of course, have been known to speculate.
History records only two examples where someone other than the Yuina has gained entrance to the burial chamber. In official records, the first was the monk Kanken from the Toji temple in the 19th year of the Engi era (919 AD), 84 years after Kukai entered his final meditation. In the Konjaku Monogatari, the episode is described in the following way:
As I entered the Shrine of Reposed Contemplation, a dense fog gathered and it became as dark as night. I could see nothing. After a moment, the fog began to clear. A wind stirred, gusting through [Kukai’s] decayed robes; they billowed as dust into the air. It settled into the form of the Grand Master himself. His hair had grown to a shaku in length. I bathed and dressed myself in clean robes before returning to the room, where I began to trim the Master’s locks with a fresh blade.
According to the Eiga Monogatari, Michinaga Fujiwara was said to have entered the burial chamber in October of the third year of the Jian era (1023AD). Kukai is described to have had ‘lustrous locks of hair’ and to have appeared as though he were ‘merely asleep’. Both extracts mention that Kukai’s hair had continued to grow after his death. Other historical texts, such as the Shoku Nihonkouki, suggest that his body had been cremated, through references to his ‘consumption’. The truth behind these stories remains unknown.
Only the Yuina know whether his mummified body actually exists or whether their role is merely ritualistic. Within Mt. Koya, the monks believe that Kukai is still alive, abiding within the mausoleum in a state of eternal meditation. If you were to ask why they believe this to be so, they would simply reply that it is part of their teachings.
“So, you’re saying that Kukai’s mummified body actually exists,” Hosuke mused.
“That’s right.” Enjaku nodded. “I have previously held the position of Yuina.”
“Now we’re getting somewhere.”
“So...”
“Now I understand why you don’t want this to go public.” In many respects, Mt. Koya was nothing without Kukai’s body. If it became known that his remains had been stolen, it could trigger the total collapse of Shingon Buddhism in its current form. This was not just some statue. Something that should have been impossible to steal had been stolen. It was something the temple just could not have allowed to happen. How could something that was not supposed to have existed in the first place be stolen?
Hosuke raised his massive frame from the sofa. He glanced at Biku, scratching his head. “It looks like your little trip into the mountains was worth it.”
“I see.” Biku looked back at Hosuke, bowing his head in response.
“You will accept the proposition, then?” Enjaku said, standing as well.
“Okay then, give me the details.” Hosuke’s eyes burned with excitement.
5
The room had been rigged with a huge machine connected to a computer.
The Psyche Converter, a cutting-edge positron computer tomography device exclusively designed to interface with PET/CT brain scanners. While a dive was in progress, the machine was able to project a full-color image of activity in the subject’s brain onto a bank of monitors.
“Awesome,” Hosuke Kumon said as Biku stood next to him.
“It’s here on loan,” Biku replied, “but it’s quite special. One of the top three of its kind in Japan.”
“I’d imagine so.” Hosuke whistled as he folded his arms. The technicians he had just been introduced to were, he knew immediately, the best in the business.
A Psyche Converter synchronizes the brainwaves of a Diver with those of the subject. It is a combination of the most advanced technology at the frontier of electrical engineering and neurobiology. The device enables Divers to explore other people’s minds.
While a dive is in progress, a visual facsimile of the subject’s brain activity is rendered and recorded by the PET/CT scanner. CT, or Computed Tomography, is a form of layered digital mapping. First the subject is administered a dextrose solution containing the positron-emitting radioisotope C11. The solution carries the C11 into the body emitting positrons as it enters. The positrons travel until they combine with nearby electrons, which cancel their mass and cause the emission of radioactive energy equal to the value of the mass. The radiation released inside the brain is measured by the positron scanner and translated into a real-time image.
There were two beds attached to the rig, a man lay in one of them. The other was empty; it would be Hosuke’s. In just one hour he would execute a dive into the other man’s consciousness. The man looked young, probably in his mid-to-late 20’s. No inquiries had been made to help determine his identity, and he had nothing on his person that had helped.
What did this man’s accomplices want with Kukai’s body? If it was money, they would have already issued their demands, but more than 20 days had passed and they had heard nothing. It did not make sense, just what had happened that night at Kukai’s tomb? Hosuke recalled something Enjaku had said after they had finished negotiating the contract the previous night.
“Strange things have been known to happen there,” he had uttered the words out of the blue. “There’s a mysterious ki in the air, an energy of sorts. In modern terms I guess it’s a little like a magnetic field. It has always been strongest around the Grand Master himself. I have seen flashes of light and heard unintelligible mutterings. I have seen the air congeal and slither toward dark corners. Once, the air took on a wraith-like form, a ghostly figure. It is difficult to put into words.”
“Hmm.”
“I remember a few years ago, when I was still Yuina, there was a time when I discovered a monk at the chamber’s entrance. He was fl
at on the ground.”
“Dead?”
“Unconscious. When he came around it was as though someone had wiped his memories. From that day forward, he began losing his grip on reality.”
“Do you think something happened inside the chamber?”
“I cannot say,” Enjaku paused for a moment, “It’s not too difficult to get into the chamber if you have knowledge of the temple’s workings. We never discovered if he had breached the threshold of the chamber. The door was closed. He may have collapsed trying to enter the room, or he may have just happened to be in the vicinity when he passed out. The third possibility, of course, is that he had gained entrance to the chamber but was somehow knocked unconscious as he left, after closing the door behind him.”
“Hmm.”
“He was blessed with an incredibly sharp mind. His name was Geshin, a genius in many ways.”
Hosuke felt the name tug at something in his memory. Was there a link between the current case and Geshin’s? The two men had both been discovered lying unconscious outside the mausoleum, but that was where the similarities ended. Geshin had lost his mind; the other man was still out. It could be either a similarity or a divergence. The only certainty was that Hosuke was about to dive into the mind of the latter.
Hosuke hovered on the border of the man’s subconscious. His ‘presence’ was nothing more than a metaphor, having lost all semblance of physical mass, it was Hosuke’s consciousness that peered into the interior of the man’s mind from its perimeter. He saw only silence and darkness.
He was at a loss, unable to find anything into which he could dive. Within the darkness there was a shape that contained a deeper darkness. It was a hole, a void in the shape of a person, a presence broadcast only by the emptiness within it. Like a hollow, only the outline was visible. There should have been faint elements of light pulsing across the surface, wisps of thought that would bubble up to the outer consciousness, but there was nothing. Something was very wrong. Even the mind of a newborn baby exhibited activity, but it just was not there.
A Diver cannot work without a sea to dive into. The fact remained, however, that an A-grade Diver had already breached the black, maybe transparent, abyss that he perceived before him. Hosuke began to construct a psyche suit from elements of his own mind, placing his consciousness inside it. Then he jumped upward and began to slowly ascend. There was no resistance as he crossed into the interior of the man’s mind. This first area would be the surface consciousness, usually the most chaotic area of the human mind, but he encountered only darkness.
Where the hell do I go? There was no way to get a feel for which way led ‘down’ toward the subconscious. He needed to locate something of the man’s self, part of a trauma would do, in order to determine direction. He moved tentatively forward. There was almost a total lack of mental pressure. He was at Level-1 depth, but he had not experienced even a tenth of the expected increase in pressure.
Hosuke caught sight of a small, turquoise, fog-like sphere. Its form was slightly elliptical, oscillating as it drifted. Hosuke moved closer and tried touching it. No response, it was not related to emotion. Hosuke decided that it was probably a fragment of surface consciousness, a visual memory. Hosuke ‘ate’ a section of it.
He saw desks, windows, and part of a room the man had seen somewhere. The contents of the room were warped, tangled, and fused together in a surreal way that reminded him of a Dali painting. This was basic stuff, the type of mental construct he typically used when building his psyche suit, nothing that could threaten a Diver.
There was something unnatural in the way everything had melded together. It was not the type of distortion he was used to seeing. Hosuke suspected that the objects had come together from a sudden increase in mental pressure, some kind of shock event. Hosuke stretched the mist until it thinned, then he wrapped it around the exterior of his psyche suit for temporary protection if he were to stumble into an unfriendly element of the man’s self.
He ventured forward.
There was a subtle but definite rise in pressure as the density of mental flotsam continued to increase. Hosuke spent time inspecting each item. It was strange, nothing he came across bore any connection to the man’s emotion or self. The floating elements were all neutral and harmless.
Hosuke stumbled over something invisible, a hole in the air, only visible from a particular direction. He saw something wriggling inside it, black, creepy, and sinister. It reminded Hosuke of the demon inside of Professor Rozimoff, but even the demon had contained vestiges of humanity. Whatever he was looking at now was utterly inhuman.
As Hosuke moved to touch it, the thing suddenly pounced on him. It felt like he had put his hand in a hole only to have a viper strike out. It plunged its teeth into Hosuke’s psyche suit and began to coil around. Hosuke thought he could hear an abrasive whistling from the gaps between its teeth. He could almost smell the thing’s odious breath. Hosuke ripped it off of his suit, but it persisted, coming back biting each time. The thing was clearly mad with hunger like the physical embodiment of insanity, a hungry demon from a hell scroll. Hosuke removed a fragment of the blue surface consciousness from his psyche suit and covered the creature with it. That should hold it for a while.
He collected his thoughts.
The void he was in appeared to be the result of some kind of trauma, but for some reason the trauma was nowhere to be seen, and it had taken the majority of the man’s consciousness with it. He saw something red inside the hole, something flabby, like a half-decomposed jellyfish. Hosuke pulled it out. It was definitely alive. Faint tremors rippled over its surface as though it was trying to wriggle free from his grip.
Bingo. It was connected to the man’s emotion, maybe his self. Hosuke removed a portion and ate it.
It was a scream. It was horrific, grounding through his insides, causing him to gag as a retching wave of nausea surged over him. The scream did not translate into a sound; Hosuke was hit with the full naked force of the emotion behind it. It was the same scream that had woken Jichiei from his sleep over 20 days earlier.
What the hell could make someone scream like this? There was no doubt that this was the man’s last scream, issued moments before he had lost consciousness.
Hiyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy...
The mental assault lasted only a few milliseconds. Hosuke experienced confusion, terror, lust; meaningless fragments of thought, images and sound in quick succession before they all blended together again:
...death (no!)
terror (hateful)
help! (hopeless)
what (what)
this (this)
terror, beast, teeth, light!--screamscreamscream!
why (death)
me (death)
woman (genitals)
thrust (death)
money (death)
nothingness...
All of that contained in one minuscule part of a scream, like all of the graffiti scribbled on the walls of public toilets in a big city, concentrated and released in an instant of horror. The man’s whole consciousness must have sparked red in that moment. Hosuke had stumbled across a single fragment of a greater whole. Like glue, the scream would have held together the various fragments of the man’s consciousness before it had been ripped apart; this was one of those parts.
What happened outside the burial chamber that night? Where was the man’s mind? He had been attacked, that much was obvious now. But by what? Hosuke had no idea, and even if the man had been attacked, Hosuke found it difficult to understand how it would have resulted in the loss of his mind. The mind always persisted, even when the subject was unconscious, even when they suffered amnesia. Could whatever attacked this man have somehow launched a direct attack on his consciousness?
The scream, still in the form of a flabby red jellyfish, squirmed into a ball as though in pain. Something black crawled out from inside like a grub bearing its head after eating through the host’s guts. It was the same as Hosuke had seen before, writhin
g, living excrement. It wriggled and glistened like a leech. Hosuke was sure it would have his hairs standing on end if he had been physically present. The creature had eaten its way through the jellyfish from the inside. There was no way it was part of the man’s consciousness. There was not a scrap of anything human about it. It belonged in hell.
It attached itself to the surface of Hosuke’s psyche suit and began to worm its way upward. The sensation was like a caterpillar or a spider crawling over naked flesh. Hosuke grabbed it. It swelled in his hands with the consistency of a mollusk. He ate it.
Eating it allowed Hosuke to absorb it; by doing so he was exposing it to a section of his own mind and combining the two. The sensation was like being forced to drink steaming vomit. He felt a faint twinge of pain. As Hosuke ate the creature, in return it took a bite out of his mind. It was only a scratch, the kind you might get walking through tall grass. Hosuke closed the tiny part of his suit he had opened in order to eat the creature. The taste still lingered on his tongue. It was sickening.
...destroy...destroy...destroy...
The thing was gelatinous, driven by the sole desire to consume. There was something terrifyingly inhuman about it. Hosuke sensed that it was part of a greater whole, like a drop of sweat or fluid from something that was clearly not human. The creature had been impregnated with the thing’s ego.
Hosuke readied himself to dive into the void left by the trauma. It would be easy enough, as the trauma itself no longer remained. Once inside he would find a way into the man’s self, if it still existed. He gathered a few more elements of surface consciousness and appended them to his psyche suit. If there was any trouble he could use them both as a weapon and a shield.
The gap appeared spherical at first glance, but it was in fact a cross-section of the various layers of consciousness, a four-dimensional tree diagram with branches that delved into the multifarious levels of the mind. Hosuke knew that the roots of such trees often penetrated as deep as the self.
The Psyche Diver Trilogy: Demon Hunters Page 9
