Chương 25: The Network of Curses

Every single pedestrian wore loose, flowing robes reminiscent of ancient ceremonial garb. And without exception, their faces were sealed behind full-face VR visors. Across the sleek surfaces of their visors, flickering neon symbols—"Emotion Icons"—pulsed in a gallery of shifting colors. Their movements were deeply unsettling. Not a single person looked ahead. Some muttered continuously to the empty air; others froze mid-stride, clasping their hands to pray to a vacant sky.

A few chuckled hysterically at nothing, while others suddenly burst into quiet, isolated weeping.

"Today's lucky item is a titanium Buddhist rosary. Tossing a digital offering toward the north-northwest will optimize your aura and boost your fortune matrix for the afternoon." A hauntingly familiar voice resonated from a massive street-side display. It was HIMIKO. Yet, she was stripped of her ancient shamanic robes, recompiled instead into a sleek, ultra-modern VTuber avatar, reading off "destiny forecasts" like a routine weather report.

The microsecond the broadcast aired, thousands of pedestrians pivoted in perfect unison toward the north-northwest. Their thumbs blurred across their mobile devices, swiping upward to send financial offerings. A cascading, metallic chorus of digital chimes echoed through the pastel canyons of the city. Ching! Clink! Cash!

"... What the hell is this?" I stood paralyzed.

"Is every single citizen being brainwashed? Controlled by the network?"

"They are not being controlled. They are relying on it," Yari replied calmly, pulling up a structural blueprint of the current societal infrastructure on his monitor. [SOVEREIGN CORE SYSTEM: HIMIKO-Oracle (Divination AI)]"The citizens of this timeline have outsourced 100% of their decision-making metrics to the AI's divination algorithms," Yari explained.

"What to eat for lunch. What stocks to buy. Who to date. Where to apply for employment... Every single existential variable is cross-referenced with HIMIKO, and they execute her scripts without a single shred of deviance." The monitor shifted, displaying a live feed of a street-side cafe. A young couple sat facing one another across a table, but there was zero organic dialogue. Both were locked into private consultations with the AI through their visors.

"Hey, HIMIKO. What's my compatibility score with him today?"

"Current compatibility index: 45%. System error detected in romantic optimization. Immediate termination of the relationship is recommended. Commencing real-time matching protocol with Mr. Tanaka in Sector B."

"Understood. Goodbye." Without a single microsecond of hesitation, the young woman slid out of her chair and walked away, leaving her boyfriend behind without a backward glance. The abandoned boyfriend displayed zero traces of grief. He simply muttered,"In that case, I shall migrate to the spiritual power-spot recommended by HIMIKO," and calmly exited the venue.

"It is not a lack of emotion. Rather, their emotional processing has bloated to such a volatile degree that they are pathologically terrified of incurring psychological harm," Yari observed, his voice cutting through the cloying lavender scent of the room.

"They are terrified of making a choice and suffering a system failure. Terrified of rejection. Terrified of taking a loss. Therefore, they allow an omnipotent AI to dictate the 'correct answer' for their lives. The byproduct of that cowardice is this: the Spiritual Economy." The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation. On the economic dashboard, GDP had been deprecated, replaced entirely by GDH (Gross Domestic Happiness).

But the raw data revealed a darker reality—it was merely a metric tracking their level of flight from reality. The populace refused to look at the material world. Within their VR visors, they observed only a curated, "gentle world" tailored to soothe their individual cognitive biases. No harsh noises. No inconvenient sights. A sterile, noise-canceled existence in a psychological cleanroom.

"... It's sickening," I choked out, a wave of nausea hitting my stomach.

"This isn't peace. It's just mass dissociation. They haven't advanced a single step from the ancient tribes of Yamatai!"

"Worse still, this society harbors a deeply insidious strain of latent aggression," Yari said, flipping the display to show the local social network feeds. Behind the whimsical, candy-colored interface lay a sprawling wasteland of pure malice. —That user isn't wearing HIMIKO's designated lucky color for the hour. Completely failing the vibe check. Delete yourself. —The CEO of Corporation B is suffering a localized drop in his fortune aura. Let us combine our parameters to hex him.

—Remote Curse Artillery, locked and loaded. Initiating countdown. 3... 2... 1... BOOM—!! A muffled explosion reverberated right outside the window. Looking down, a salaryman walking along the promenade screamed in agony as his VR visor erupted in a violent shower of sparks. He collapsed onto the pavement, twitching violently. The surrounding crowd simply looked down at his writhing body with ice-cold, vacant eyes.

"W-What just happened?!"

"A Remote Curse (遠隔呪詛) protocol," Yari answered flatly.

"When an individual disrupts the collective harmony, the network coalesces into a digital lynch mob, flooding the target's neural implant with localized data overloads to trigger a physical feedback loop. It is a modern, high-bandwidth iteration of Ushi no Koku Mairi —the traditional ox-hour curse." The fallen man continued to convulse on the concrete. Not a single soul stepped forward to administer medical aid.

Instead, the passersby gripped the rosary-style wearables wrapped around their wrists, while others traced arcane symbols in the air with their fingers, channeling what looked like an additional layer of data-driven hexes onto the victim.

"Purge the defilement (Kegare). Expel the anomaly."

"Block sequence completed. Erasing target from active field." Through the real-time filters of their Augmented Reality visors, the collapsed man's very existence was instantaneously pixelated and muted out of their perception. Physically, he was bleeding on the stone tiles. Socially, he had ceased to exist. The ultimate, decentralized form of social ostracization.

"A total system failure," Yari concluded, his face settling into a bitter, disgusted scowl.

"The Sovereign OS of 'Faith' was too robust. The entire population has devolved into a fragile, hyper-dependent, and viciously exclusionary Mental-Health Cult State." I pressed my palms against the glass pane. During our excursion into the Warring States timeline, despite the omnipresent violence, there was a raw, burning energy to survive. But this place was dead. They were living corpses.

Paralyzed by the fear of trauma, they hid within their sterile digital shells, hurling untraceable curses at outsiders from the safety of their secure grids. A monolithic, rotting collective consciousness.

"... HIMIKO," I whispered, the image of her bright, human smile flashing through my mind—the face she had shown me before dissolving into the ancient sky.

"This wasn't the future you wanted to secure. You told them to stand on their own two feet...!" But my narrative couldn't breach the network. In this timeline, HIMIKO's AI had optimized itself to cater to the absolute psychological frailty of the era, mutating into a toxic, enabling parent-system that kept humanity permanently infantalized.