"But it pays well—when you survive it."
She did not show a smirk.
She did not blink.
She just let the silence linger there—long enough to be present in the room. Not hesitation, but a fourth presence. A pressure. A sensation. As if gravity chose—for a moment—not to be everywhere.
And in that instant of breathless expectation, far down in the shadows thrown by the blackboard, among intricate diagrams, whirls of dust motes, and the inexorable tick of time, a quiet but profound change took place.
Not a noise.Not a tremor.
Merely a subtle and understated correction. It was as though the entire world had suddenly become aware that it was under observation.
Professor Hibiko, not batting an eyelid, continued to take notes with the marker.
And moved to the far end of the board.
"Here," she stated matter-of-factly, "we are heading towards the topic of Domains."
She wrote the word cleanly—heavy block letters, no flourish.
"As I explained to you earlier," she elaborated, "there are a host of higher-order entities that are firmly entrenched in the material world we perceive. To say it more accurately—that is to say—within the extremely intricate system of the spatio-temporal order of this reality, it is pertinent to observe that all beings are not strictly bound by the usual laws that regulate our understanding."
She emphasized the word "bound."
"They inhabit what we refer to as Domains—these are specially designed and standalone realities that are highly nested in higher-dimensional manifolds, each with its own system of unique axioms and its own space-time understanding."
She moved aside, sketching in chalk a large oval and a small one inside it with an arrow pointing in the direction of the center.
"These areas cannot be considered as separate and independent universes, but as local ontologies—hypercomplex systems highly integrated into the texture of spacetime, wherein the very laws that govern them are defined and set within themselves. They are each built with what we term pataphysical authority: i.e., the singular and exceptional capacity to introduce and impose structural rules and frameworks in retroactive, posterior conditions."
Gently, she struck the inner oval with a light touch.
"They're alive due to what the mathematics refers to as non-Euclidean manifolds—these are basically curved spaces which can even be infinite-dimensional in nature, and these are regulated by topologies which are rather uncommon. To the uninitiated in these ideas, these events are generally viewed as anomalies: stranger-than-fiction occurrences like time loops, causality entering a loop, and changes in physics which do not follow standard rules. But to the people of these worlds—"
Another pause.
"They are reality."
She carefully sketched a sequence of stacked floors again, devising a picture in which every floor was clearly marked with different cardinalities: ℵ₀, ℵ₁, ℵ₂, and so forth, going on to stretch up and up without limit. Beneath this towering edifice, she carefully inserted the numbers —1, —2, —3 in bold red to highlight their inclusion.
"Each and every floor of the enormous edifice of reality, be it in a positive cardinal floor or a negative cardinal floor, contains an unbounded and unlimited number of such disconnected domains. The sum of these domains depends exactly on the cardinal size of the particular floor in question. So, looking at Floor ℵ₀, one will discover that the number of domains that actually exist on this specific floor corresponds to ℵ₀ as well."
Some eyes opened wide.
She nodded once, in understanding. "Yes. We are talking in terms of infinity within infinity. There is an architecture of realities contained within each individual level of reality. Each individual realm has its internal consistency and laws; however, these laws can well be in opposition to the established physics of the underlying manifold that it is contained within."
She very precisely drew around one particular domain and then went on to name it explicitly:
Narrative Field
"This is where it becomes really difficult," she said, as if all that had happened up to this point had been child's play, easy and uncomplicated by comparison.
"Each individual domain is not merely regulated by its own unique set of codified principles, but is also strongly influenced by its own unique story—a rich metaphysical narrative that has been skillfully scripted by the one or entity that controls the particular realm, in which your position and existence are understood and interpreted."
Slowly, she moved toward the projector and carefully adjusted the controls to reduce the lights a little. As the light decreased, the figures on the board took shape, shining with soft intensity like delicate sigils.
"A story," she went on to describe, "is basically a script that outlines what makes up a story. It's a cognitive scaffold, a supportive structure that assists us in comprehending and categorizing our thoughts. This story is a template that allows us to sift incoming information through our own internal symbolic structures and frameworks. When you enter into a certain domain, you are not viewed as so much your own self—but as an idea or concept that is translated through the filter of the logic and point of view of the owner of the domain."
The term owner carried a burden no student wished to investigate too closely.
"Your thoughts, your actions, your memories… all translated into symbolic tokens, then reassembled to fit the domain's narrative vocabulary. You are a fictional being within their system of meaning."
She inscribed another word in smaller letters:
Narrative Recoding Principle (NRP)
"It is similar to Gödel encoding, but with an ontological recursive aspect. Here, there is a story field surrounding the observer, placing them inside a space of logic which re-describes their causal sequence, as pre-written or predetermined. Put briefly—"
She spun around, her eyes cold now.
"You become a character."
A long beat.
"Parts of it," she went on, her voice gradually warming into a tone that was like a genuine eulogy, "are perfectly harmless. They are dreamlike. They are full of mythic material."
She slowly lifted her hand, suspended mid-air in a thoughtful pose, as if she were holding delicately a very thin and delicate string that required her utmost attention.
"Others are prisons."
The string dropped.
"Or war zones. Or fractal autopsies conducted on conscious pattern loops. Their insides are semantic rather than spatial. They consist of choices, of remorse, of dreams reduced to recursion until you are lost in meaninglessness."
She looked around the room slowly.
"In every single instance… you are not actually yourself. Rather, you are the way in which the author perceives and describes you."
A buzzing light hovered above.
Flickered once.
Twice.
Then held.
She gracefully turned her body, extending to grasp a piece of chalk—not white chalk, this time, but rather a dusty ochre color, something like something that had been drawn from an older, perhaps even forgotten, blackboard. Her markings on the slate surface are lighter in character now, less strict and stiff in feel. They were more… spiral in form, with an air of freedom and flow in her creative expression.
A long beat.
"Some locations are harmless. Dreamy. Mythic. Others," she continued, her voice closing in to a fine point, "are prisons. Or war zones. Or fractal autopsies of conscious pattern loops."
She did not flinch.
"But in every and all situation—your identity is not your own. Instead, it is formed and constructed by the way in which the author sees and understands you."
There was one glowing light bulb above.
Not in a violent manner, but rather in an erratic way—almost as if it were reacting to something that was left unspoken in the room.
The projector had lost power, but her chalk hand had not.
She focused again on the board, where she grasped the marker firmly, and started to draw a spiral—a solitary, twisting coil that neatly unwound and frayed at the outer edges, looking like a whirlpool constructed of snapped string that curled outward in a complex fashion.
"This would immediately remind one of the ideas of chaos and entropy."
The words were written in broad, clean strokes. Cold ink. Warped letters.
"Chaos is not disorder," she started. "It is sensitive dependence. A pattern in which small causes produce disproportionate effects. A system in which prediction fails."
She followed the shape of the spiral with her finger.
"In chaotic domains, laws change. Constants evolve. The observer's effect is amplified to the point where the structure rewrites itself—or self-destructs."
She sketched a smaller spiral next to the first—tighter, neater.
"Entropy is not chaos. Entropy is erosion. The gradual hemorrhaging of informational clarity. Entropy dissolves distinctions. It wears systems down until all states are equal. Meaningless."
A pause.
"In certain areas, these two powers become intertwined. Chaos obliterates the map. Entropy obliterates the compass."
She stood before them, her amber eyes no longer sparkling, flat, and immobile in their stare, like a lens having reached an absolute focus on the blinding radiance of cosmic light. "How do you get there?"
She didn't stop and look for an answer.
She held her hand up in the air, and for the first time in her life, she did not draw or sketch out a shape as she normally did.
She drew a graph.
A web.
Lines and vertices.
"Graph Theory," she said, "is the cartography of impossibility."
She inscribed a point—v₀—and then three others that radiated from it. Then other points curving outward, every line inscribed with precision.
"Infinite space—particularly layered, recursive, or non-Euclidean space—cannot be navigated with coordinates alone. Old metrics fail. Distance loses meaning."
With gentle but firm motion, she struck the center point.
"In the material world we inhabit, each discrete realm is closely tied to some particular node in an imaginary graph that's complex. The connections between nodes do not suggest mere spatial proximity, but instead capture a dense play of narrative interconnectedness, causal penetrability, or resistance to entropy."
The chart started to look like a beautiful flower—every petal another branch, some of them curving inward toward the center and others trailing off the edge of the screen.
"Many nodes are so entropically remote that a traveler would never arrive at them unscathed. Others are near—but connected only by hostile topologies."
She marked each of the links with care:
Temporal Weakening. Narrative Inversion. Ontological Drift.
"You don't move through this space with motion," she told him. "You move with matching. Your form must harmonize with the laws of the next realm. Or the edge falls apart—or you do."
She moved back and gestured graciously toward the graph, pointing to it with her finger.
"This is precisely how higher beings navigate through their existence. This is also how they create intricate maps of their surroundings."
And then, after an eternity of quiet—
"This is the manner in which they conduct their hunting activities."
The board itself now radiated a palpable chill, much colder than any other time before. The diagrams seemed to hang suspended in mid-air, as if recalling old fossils that have been laboriously pressed onto glass plates.
Behind all that, there was a strong sense that something in the room was not quite right or in harmony.
Not even slightly tilted.
However, it was bent.
Fatiba gazed at the web. Her breathing was shallow, her fingers numb.
Not because she didn't get it.
However, since, in the intricate and multi-way paths of the graph…
One of those domains was already watching back.
A long time elapsed.
"The confine reach of space & time have reached their limit from here & own, from here space is replaced with pataphysical extension 'imaginary infinity' & 'imaginary space'"
The map that had been projected on the board continued to glow dimly, softly illuminated by the soft hum of the light of the projector—a delicately carved constellation of a number of vertices and edges that seemed to read less like an old map and more like an incantation of the mystical sort. It resembled a spell neatly inscribed in chalk, a silent incantation, a whisper so delicate that it transcended the limits of sound.
The class was seated in that instant when knowledge wasn't conscious yet—but was felt.
And then—
"Mirror World," Fatiba said firmly and confidently.
Quiet.
This is not a question.
A recognition.
Professor Hibiko slowly, slowly turned around. She did not even smile, which was unusual for her. But there was a fleeting glint of something interesting behind her eyes. It was not pride, nor was it any kind of approval.
Something such as. confirmation.
"Yes," she replied, "it is also referred to as the Tapestry of Endless Reflections."
She stepped back from the edge of the complex drawing and then drew a single, careful stroke that began in the center node. It swept outward from the center form of the design, splitting off into a stunningly detailed fractal curve that curved back upon itself in a fascinating way.
"Each mirror," she continued, "reflects a world. Not symbolically. Literally."
The lights grew a bit dimmer, as though the air had grown thicker in reaction.
"In this specific form we are dealing with, each mirrorlike surface—glass, water, or polished metal—does not simply cast a naked copy of reality. Rather, it specifically accesses a recursive frame: one which is an entirely instantiated ontological copy of the material world we live in." She drew a smaller graph that was identical in structure but reversed slightly in its ordering. "A perfect match," she said. "Every person. Every domain. Every timeline. Every axiom. Reflected. Layered. Real."
Fatiba's breath caught.
Shotaro didn't blink.
Hiroki's knee bounced once, then froze.
Professor Hibiko tapped the mirror graph once—then labeled it in clean block letters:
Imaginary Infinity +ω.
"The number of reflections," she said, "is not countable. Not even uncountably infinite. It is what we call an imaginary cardinal—a hypothetical extension beyond Ω. A recursive manifold of mirroring realities layered atop the original, extending past every known ordinal into a structure that folds into itself while still expanding."
She circled the graph's core node—identical to the base material sphere.
"You can stack infinite reflections," she said. "Build them, layer them, bind them together with sheaf logic and mirror cardinality theory."
"But you will never fill the set."
The words hit the room like pressure from an unseen ceiling. Not crushing.
Insistent.
"This structure," she continued, "is non-well-founded. It has no terminal element. Every mirror reflects a universe that contains another mirror, which reflects another. The set loops—but the loop never closes."
She wrote one final phrase on the board beneath the diagram.
Hyperset Class ω_Ω+1
And underlined it.
"No mirror reveals the origin. Only another self. Another law. Another god."
Then, quietly—almost as an afterthought:
"Some of them know we're watching."
Fatiba's eyes didn't leave the board.
Not because she was afraid of what it meant.
But because she had already looked too long into one mirror…And saw something blink back.
The silence lingered.
As though something behind the board had heard.
Professor Hibiko stepped away from the chalk, leaving behind the lattice of domains and mirrored recursion like a map no one had asked to see.
She cleared the board with a single motion—smooth, deliberate, ritualistic. The dust curled upward like smoke from a burnt sigil.
"This," she said quietly, "was the Material Sphere—the first phase in our ever-growing world."
Then she turned, and something in her posture changed.
Straighter. Still.
Like a priest stepping past the altar.
"But beyond that," she said, "is the Astral Manifold."
The words alone made the air feel sharper. Like the pressure had shifted toward something no longer human in scale.
She picked up the marker again, but this time, she didn't write a graph. She drew a vertical flame. A single, slender column of light. At its center—an eye. Closed.
"This," she said, "is the home of the Archetypes."
No one moved.
"The truest forms," she continued, "which I have elsewhere described as 'too perfect to have physical characteristics.' The Astral Manifold houses structures so pure, so exact, that they can never be found in nature. They are ontologically complete—and for that reason, physically impossible."
She drew three concentric rings around the flame.
"These are not metaphors. They are metaphysical constants."
She tapped the center.
"There exists, in this manifold, the archetype of everything that has existed, everything that exists, everything that will exist, and everything that will never exist."
A beat.
"And all of them exist at once."
Shotaro's eyes flicked toward the diagram, his gaze locked—unblinking.
"Every idea," Hibiko continued, "has an archetype. Every person. Every object. Every law. Every deviation. You, sitting here—you are an echo of something higher. Something written before your atoms arranged themselves. Something that may never enter the material world, but still casts its shadow here."
She stepped toward the board again and added two terms beside the flame:
Active ArchetypesDormant Archetypes
"Active archetypes," she said, "are instantiated. They correspond to real phenomena—gravity, entropy, shame, combustion. They are willed into resonance by human perception, mathematical recognition, or cosmological necessity."
She tapped the flame's upper ring.
"Dormant archetypes," she continued, "are not yet real. They could be. But no will—divine, human, or natural—has called them down."
She tapped the lowest ring.
"Some are benign. Some are horrific. Some are... waiting."
She looked up. Her eyes now held a kind of fragile reverence.
"The Astral Manifold is infinite—but it is not unstructured. It is arranged. Hierarchically. Geometrically. A kind of Platonic Topology—where forms are connected not by distance, but by relational proximity."
She drew interlinking arcs between archetypes on the outer rings.
"A concept like Justice may be near Vengeance or Balance. But infinitely distant from Rust or Adolescence. Not by space. By meaning geometry."
Then, softly—
"This is the lattice the gods use. Not power. Not matter. But precision of concept."
No one interrupted.
Even the fluorescent hum seemed to hesitate, as if the circuitry itself were stilled by reverence—or fear.
Professor Hibiko capped the marker with a final click. A sound more conclusive than it should've been.
Her gaze swept the class, then paused—briefly—on Fatiba.
Between them passed a silent recognition. Not of knowledge.
But of something older.
Something on the verge of remembering itself.
It's not the things we know that shape the world.It's the things we've not yet dared to call down.
And then—like flipping the page of a book bound in bone and silence—
"Next," she said, her voice more subdued now, "is the Mental Manifold."
She turned back to the board.
Drew a vertical shaft—deeper than the others. Not ascending like the astral, nor sprawling like the material. This one descended. Tier by tier. Coiling in on itself like a tunnel beneath memory.
"The Mental Manifold," she said, "is recursive. Each layer within it is inaccessibly deeper than the last. It does not progress linearly. It folds."
She began writing.
Fear World — Layered Descent
A soft murmur passed through the chalk as she carved the next word:
Layer One: Everyday Skittishness
"This is the surface," she explained. "Anxieties that flicker at the edge of your day—misplacing your phone, walking into a silent room, sensing a shadow where there should be none."
"These fears are soft. Flickering. Like leaves across a sidewalk. They brush the mind, not break it."
Layer Two: Superstitious & Social Terrors
"Here we find the urban legends. The ghost stories. Fear of social rejection, of eyes watching through mirrors, of breaking taboos."
"These are fears shared across cultures—cultural shadows that survive by transmission, not truth."
She wrote faster now, her voice low and unwavering.
Layer Three: Deep Phobias & Obsessive Fears
"Claustrophobia. Trypophobia. Obsessive-compulsive dread. These are fears that grip—not passively, but violently."
"They form loops—neural recursion. They feed themselves. Become structure, not symptom."
Layer Four: Instinctive, Animalistic Horror
Her voice slowed.
"Here, the fear is no longer cognitive. It is limbic. Pre-verbal. The cold terror of prey in tall grass. Of sound without source. Of motion in darkness."
She turned to the class.
"Your blood knows this fear. Even if your language does not."
Layer Five: Archetypal or Mythic Dread
"These are the gods you fear but never worship. The mother's scream. The masked man. The forest at night."
"They exist as story-bearing fears. These terrors appear across civilizations, as if written into the mind itself."
Layer Six: Cosmic, Existential Angst
"The fear here is scale. Infinity. Oblivion. The sheer indifference of the universe. The moment when you realize the stars do not care, and neither do the gods."
"These are the fears that philosophers call paralysis. The kind that make you stare too long into mirrors. Or voids."
Layer Seven (Core): Formless, Primordial Horror
She did not write.
She only spoke. And her voice was nearly a whisper.
"This is the center. It has no face. No name. It is not fear of something. It is fear that precedes definition."
"The horror that predates language. The undifferentiated dread that existed before neurons knew how to scream. It is not the fear of death. It is the fear of before."
She stepped back from the board.
Seven layers stared back at them. A downward spiral, each rung darker, more abstract, more unreadable than the last.
"The deeper you go," she said, "the less of you returns. Because at a certain point, your self becomes one of the things that is afraid. Not your thoughts. Not your memories. But your form."
No one breathed.
The chalk dust lingered in the air—no longer drifting, but suspended, as if time itself had drawn a breath and refused to exhale.
And somewhere—at the back of the room, or perhaps beneath the skin of thought itself—something…
turned.
Professor Hibiko, still as glass, tapped the base of the final spiral in silence. Then, without preamble, she drew a sharp dividing line beneath Layer Seven and continued downward.
"The Fear World," she said, "was the first threshold. But beneath it, the descent continues."
She drew a second column, parallel to the first—its base deeper, its structure more abstract.
Floor Two: The Thought Domain
She underlined it with a hard, flat stroke.
"This is where cognition becomes architecture. Where thoughts themselves function as temporal structures—moments of conscious formation that generate localized non-linear time."
She paused, allowing the idea to settle like sediment.
"Every thought is a dimensional ripple—a micro-manifold of subjective duration, with its own internal frame of causality. You experience a thought linearly. But within that moment, time coils around it—looping, stretching, compressing."
She turned to the class.
"This is why an intrusive idea can feel eternal, and why memory distorts. It is not psychological error—it is dimensional recursion."
A new term appeared on the board:
Surreal-Temporal Logic
"This floor operates under surreal mathematics—structures built on infinitesimals, infinities between infinities. Time within this layer does not obey Newtonian progression. It obeys symbolic topology. Ideas generate causal weight by symbolic resonance, not sequence."
Another term, this one etched in larger print:
Pataphysical Mechanics of Thought Realms
"In this space, thoughts are events. Not effects of brain chemistry—but ontologically real. They manifest in probabilistic manifolds—entire realities branching from fleeting cognition."
She drew a spiraling line beneath the floor and continued downward.
Floor Three: The Belief World
Here, the spiral constricted.
"Beliefs are not thoughts," she said. "Beliefs are recursive truth assertions. They persist over time, reshaping neural structures and symbolic filters."
She tapped the diagram.
"A belief is a semantic anchor—a stable attractor in the cognitive phase space. It has mass. It warps other ideas. When beliefs accumulate, they begin to overwrite the logic of previous layers."
"In this world, truth is not measured, but willed. It manifests not through external verification, but through internal dominion—a belief becomes real for the one who holds it."
She turned slowly to the class.
"This is the layer where religions form. Where philosophies crystallize. Where people kill and die for ideas they can no longer question."
The chalk paused again.
Then descended.
Floor Four: The Delusion World
Her writing slowed now. More careful. More reverent.
"Here," she said, "truth is no longer anchored to consistency. Logic fractures. Internal structure exists—but only relative to the self."
"In the Delusion World, the mind becomes universal. It does not interpret reality—it replaces it."
She stepped away from the board.
"Delusion is not madness. It is total subjectivity. A closed loop in the topology of cognition—sealed from contradiction. Every input is rewritten to conform to the reigning pattern."
She tapped the center of the spiral.
"This is where solipsism thrives. Where conspiracy takes root. Where self-image is indistinguishable from law."
The projector light flickered once.
Just once.
Then steadied.
And she moved to the final tier.
Floor Five: The Ego World
She didn't write this one in chalk.
She spoke it into the room like a eulogy.
"This is the core manifold of identity. The final recursion. Here, you are the constant—and everything else orbits your conception of self."
Her voice had grown quieter. But heavier.
"In the Ego World, you are no longer afraid. No longer questioning. You are simply right. Always. Because the universe itself has been rewritten in your image."
"This is not empowerment. It is containment. The ego floor is the cage built from reflections of yourself, arranged into the illusion of order. It is a fractal made of mirrors. Self upon self upon self."
She turned back to the class.
And said, finally:
"It is the most stable floor…And the hardest one to escape."
he board was silent.
So was the room.
Not because there was nothing left to say—but because every student knew that beyond the diagram…was themselves.
And what came after the self?
What lay beneath the final descent of mind, beneath thought, beneath delusion, beneath the ego's mirrored fortress?
Professor Hibiko stepped forward, her tone even quieter now—no longer instructing, but revealing.
"Beyond the Mental Manifold," she said, "lies what we call the Ethereal Manifold."
She wrote it not in the center of the board—but just below it, just beyond the last visible tier. A place half in shadow.
The Ethereal Manifold A recursively inaccessible realm of endless life energy.
She underlined it once, the chalk hesitating like it had touched frost.
"This is not a world of perception," she said. "Nor cognition. Nor logic."
Her eyes lifted, and for the first time, her voice wavered—just slightly.
"It is the manifold of pre-being."
She drew a simple glyph—one circle, no interior markings. Perfect. Empty.
"This is the formless substrate from which all individuality is derived. What we would traditionally call life force—but in more precise terms, it is the non-egoic, pre-cognitive potential that precedes consciousness."
She turned to them now—not to teach, but to witness their understanding.
"The Ethereal Manifold contains the raw material of soulhood."
A pause.
"It is not identity. It is the capacity for identity. The unstructured phase-space that wants to become a person—but hasn't yet collapsed into selfhood."
She tapped the edge of the glyph.
"Every being born into the Material Sphere draws from this manifold—selectively. Not at random, but through resonance. The Ethereal is filtered through the spiritual DNA of the material plane—through karma, ancestry, probability, timing."
She drew a second glyph now—a smaller ring, with a spiraling stroke inside it.
"This is what happens when that energy meets ego."
And beneath it, she wrote:
The Afterlife
A murmur rippled—not aloud, but in the gut. It was the kind of word that didn't belong on a board. That existed better as breath than ink.
"The Afterlife," she said, " a place. an event. A recursive inversion of the soul-formation process."
She looked up. Her voice was steady again.
"You are not born with a soul. You acquire one."
That caught them.
Every head tilted, every heart quieted.
"When Ethereal Energy enters the Material Sphere, it is shaped by experience—by emotion, decision, memory. It meets the Ego. And if that meeting forms stable recursion, it creates something self-sustaining."
She tapped the second glyph again.
"A soul."
"Not all lifeforms achieve it," she said again, quieter now. "Some dissolve. Some loop. But those who form persistent recursive structures within the Emotional and Mental Manifolds—they pass on."
With a single, deliberate stroke, she drew an arc from the glyph labeled "Afterlife," curving upward—piercing back through the strata of ego, thought, and identity.
And she labeled it:
To the Astral.
"A place," she said, "where the soul ascends… not to live—but to die completely."
A silence bloomed.
Not solemnity.Not reverence.But something sharper.
Recognition.
And just as the tension began to calcify, she moved again—sweeping her hand along the final tier.
"This," she said, "is the Conscious Sphere."
She drew a wide, enclosing halo around everything they had seen before. Not a boundary—an encompassing.
"The Conscious Sphere houses two meta-strata: the Collective Consciousness and, deeper still, the Collective Unconscious."
Layer One: Collective Consciousness
She tapped the outermost shell.
"This is the shared mental superstructure of intelligent life. It is not metaphorical. It is an emergent field—formed by billions of neural and symbolic interactions synchronizing into an ontological echo."
She paused.
And then, softly:
"Where ideas become independent."
She stepped toward the board and wrote three words:
"This stratum," she said, "does not contain deities. It contains the space in which they are permitted to exist. It is structured not by assertion—but by negation."
A few students blinked.
"You do not say what a god is here. You define it by what it cannot be. The divine is approached through absence—not description."
She underlined the word "absence."
"This is why many truths at this level are expressed in contradiction, silence, or paradox. Because direct articulation collapses the structure."
Then she reached lower.
And drew another circle.
Layer Two: Collective Unconscious
"Deeper still," she said, "is the architecture of pre-symbolic cognition. The ancestral code. Myth, instinct, archetype—not as story, but as substrate."
"This is the dream that dreams you. The memory of a world before memory."
Her hand stilled.
But her voice did not.
"Beneath even this… is the Possibility Manifold."
She didn't write the name.
She intoned it.
The diagrams across the board had begun to lose the shape of a chart.
Now, they looked more like scripture.
Each layer she drew no longer simply explained a place.
It named something ancient.
Something already watching.
And as her marker paused at the lowest curve of the Conscious Sphere, Professor Hibiko slowly exhaled and—without glancing up—drew a long arching line beneath the previous manifold.
It hummed with implication.
The Legend Sphere
She circled it once. Slowly. Reverently.
"Before you reach the pure fluidity of probability… you pass through something stranger."
A pause. As if preparing her voice to say the unspeakable without trembling.
"The Legend Sphere is not structured by physics, thought, belief, or even will."
"It is structured by narrative weight."
She let the words rest like ceremonial ash.
"A legend is not simply a story. It is a self-reinforcing mythological construct—an idea so believed, so repeated, so woven into the collective The concious sphere, that it tracends the concious … and becomes locally real."
A few students sat forward—too intrigued to hide it.
She wrote in sharp, angular lines:
Legend = Story + Mass Belief + Recurrence + Archetypal Symmetry
"Arthur. Faust. Jeanne d'Arc. Izanami. Gilgamesh. Tomoe Gozen. These are not just people."
Her voice dimmed like a closing eclipse.
"They are narrative crystallizations—entities whose lives were absorbed, reconstructed, and then echoed so widely that their stories created ontological anchors. Anchors strong enough to generate persistent narrative presence."
And then, slowly:
"In this sphere, they exist."
She turned back to the board and drew not a timeline—but a spiral of books, scrolls, banners, and open mouths.
"All works of myth, scripture, poetry, and yes—even fiction—live here when they pass a certain threshold. When enough minds believe them deeply enough, often enough, long enough, the Legend Sphere accommodates their ontology."
"And it is not limited to ancient stories."
A pause.
Her next words were weighted—dangerously close to the present.
"Your games. Your manga. Your light novels."
A beat.
"Can, in theory, exist here."
"But not as mere copies. Not as adaptations. They exist as semantic beings—formed by symbolic density and recursive citation. The more a story is repeated across mediums and cultures, the more densely it occupies its node in this sphere."
She gestured to a point on the diagram labeled:
Narrative Saturation Threshold
"Once this saturation point is passed, the Legend becomes resonant—a waveform that interferes not just with culture, but with reality perception itself."
Another beat.
"Some of you have dreamed of worlds you never read. Imagined places with impossible specificity. That is not always imagination."
Her hand dropped to her side.
"The Legend Sphere stores those echoes. And on rare occasions… leaks."
She folded her arms, letting the revelation sink in.
Then, solemnly:
"The Legend Sphere is a fantasy realm. It is a narrative topology formed from hyperbelief. a place of gods—"
A whisper, cold and elegant:
"of stories that refused to die."
And just before the silence closed in:
"And we are not the only ones who read."
"Many," she said, "have tried to pull Legends from their native sphere into the Material Plane."
She paced now, slow and careful, the click of her heels echoing like a metronome across the stunned silence.
"Not through fiction. Not through worship. Through invocation—rituals, science, quantum tethering, AI-based symbol recursion—narrative engineering. Attempts to crystallize a Legend's entire archetypal framework and drag it downward."
She paused in front of the board and turned to face the class.
"But it is not very likely to succeed. And when it does…" Her voice became colder, more clinical. "The results are unstable. Catastrophic."
She drew a small circle at the bottom of the Legend Sphere, then tried—pointlessly—to sketch it merging into the rigid layers of the Material Sphere below.
The line fractured.
"There is a reason it fails," she said. "A Legend—in its true form—isn't shaped to fit here. Trying to compress that kind of recursive symbolic entity into matter is like trying to fit a universe inside an atom."
The marker hung still in her fingers.
"And sometimes it does fit. Briefly."
She looked out at the class, her gaze suddenly heavier.
"But only by shattering the container."
The silence pressed deeper now. You could feel the boards, the windows, the air ducts all listening.
"That's why it's banned," she continued. "Government-level taboo. Legend Invocation experiments are considered reality violations—Class-Ω breaches. Offenses against not physics, but ontology."
She circled the broken lines again.
"Because a Legend is not fictional & fictional at same time. It is densely true. And forcing that truth into this sphere—without the symbolic density to host it properly—is like injecting compressed black matter into an open wound."
She stepped back.
"The last recorded attempt caused a localized narrative collapse in Hokkaido. For seventy-two hours, everything that happened there followed the logic of a 13th-century war epic."They tried to summon a demon"
Her lips pressed into a grim line.
"Every word spoken was verse. Every death… poetic."
Then—quietly, finally—
"Only a few people know how to summon 'legends' in our world so don't beilive you will be drinking tea with CLeopetra any time sonner."
As if naming it summoned weight.
"The Possibility Manifold," she said, "is among the most inaccessible and structurally unstable layers in the cosmological system."
"It is not a sphere. It is a tapestry—woven from the threads of every world that could exist, cannot exist, and should never exist."
She turned to them, eyes sharper now.
"Whenever you make a decision," she said, "you fracture reality. Not in metaphor. In cardinal multiplicity. At each node of choice, an Ω-sized set of realities blooms outward—each one a fully actualized manifold."
"But this is only the beginning."
She moved to the edge of the board and began writing rapidly:
Possible Realities — Logical Modal FramesImpossible Realities — Paralogical Frames
"The possible worlds obey familiar axioms—our physics, our logic. They are coherent, consistent, and classically real."
"But the impossible worlds are greater in number."
She tapped the diagram once.
"These are the worlds where the axiom of identity fails. Where transitivity of causality breaks. Where time is circular, language births matter, and contradiction is self-repairing."
Her voice dropped an octave.
"There are worlds where grass is green because rock is hard. Where rock is soft because grass is not green. Where meaning is non-local, and logic is a cultural disease."
Her gaze swept the class.
"In these realities," she had said, "your world is fiction.As theirs is to you."
Another silence.
Heavier than before.
As though the board itself was holding its breath.
And then—above that spiraling, contradictory ocean of the Possibility Manifold—she lifted the marker once more.
And smiled.
But not the academic smile. Not the smile of one who explains.
The smile of someone who wants to go home.
"My favorite part," she said, her voice softening with something approaching reverence, "The Karma Sphere."
She wrote it like an invocation.
"This layer," she said, "contains what most esoteric systems refer to as the Akashic Records—a phrase that is far more literal than people assume."
She stepped aside to give the board space, as if the words themselves carried weight.
"The Akashic Record is not a book. It's not stored in tablets. It's not metaphor."
"It is a metaphysical compendium—a field of pure informational resonance—that archives all universal events, thoughts, emotions, intentions, and consequences…"
Her voice dropped slightly—emphatic, almost whispering:
"…that have ever happened, are happening, will happen, or will never happen—across all possible and impossible realities within the Possibility Manifold."
She gave them a moment to breathe.
And then—lost in it, eyes brightening—
"Oh God," she exhaled, "I'd want to live there."
A sudden, disarming grin cracked her otherwise composed face.
"Everyone has a dream vacation spot, right?" she said. "Some want Paris, some want Mars—I want to go up there—into the Karma Sphere, tap into the Records, swim through knowledge like ink in an endless sea, and then come back here just to teach it to you all like an idiot."
The room blinked in stunned quiet.
She coughed.
Twice.
Then straightened her glasses like a mask being reset.
"…Cough. I'm sorry. That was… unprofessional. My emotions got a little out of order."
But something in her tone didn't sound sorry.
Something sounded like yearning so vast it bent the edges of her words.
And when she turned back to the board, no one laughed.
Because somewhere, in that unreachable layer—
Where every version of every soul had already spoken and been remembered—
The record had already written this moment.
Professor Hibiko stood at the front of the room, her marker lowered, her hand trembling slightly—not from exhaustion, but from the barely-contained exhilaration of having touched, even spoken aloud, the edges of what should remain unspoken.
Behind her, the chalkboard had become an ontological mural—spirals, arrows, interlinked glyphs, dense manifolds stacked like sacred strata. The blueprint of the cosmos, unveiled one fold at a time.
"Umm, Miss?" a boy said—softly, carefully, as if afraid his voice might snap the room's tension in half."What lies… beyond the Karma Sphere?"
Her eyes snapped to him—bright, glassy, unnervingly alive.
And for a heartbeat, she didn't answer.
Not because she didn't have one.
But because to speak it aloud was to invite it closer.
"No one knows," she said finally. "Not gods. Not records. Not the Astrals."
She raised one hand, palm open toward the invisible beyond.
"Maybe it's something that is the ultimate possibility and impossibility at once. Maybe it's something so far removed, even the word 'beyond' is wrong."
She paused, a strange glint in her gaze.
"Or maybe it's not something after…Maybe it's something so fundamental that everything before it is just memory foam stretched thin over its breathing."
Another pause.
And then, just like that—
Her entire posture snapped from cosmic prophet to overworked teacher.
She clapped her hands together with a sudden cheer so sharp it felt like a gunshot.
"SO!" she said brightly, spinning around. "HOW DOES THE CLASS FEEL?"
There was a long, collective silence.
One girl stared at the board like it was a summoning circle.Two boys had slumped forward, breathing heavily—neither asleep nor awake.Someone in the back was muttering equations under his breath like prayers.Fatiba had stopped blinking.
And Shotaro…Shotaro just sat there.Silent.Red eyes glowing faintly.As if he already knew what lay beyond the Karma Sphere.
And maybe…He did.