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As fun as it was, I felt as though some part of my mind was blurry, and as though my life carried the sweet yet putrid odor of rotting fruit. It was a vaguely unpleasant feeling, but I was reluctant to break free from this dormant state and once again give everything my all.

I suspect many people don’t like the idea of involving religion in a story. To a believer, religion is a precious source of strength that’s vulnerable to attack. Meanwhile, to many nonbelievers, it’s nothing more than a ridiculous set of fictitious beliefs. This is why many believers become insular, and conflicts easily arise when two religions run up against each other.

“I don’t live to provide entertainment for you,” I told her bluntly. “I won’t do something just because you want to see it.”

I had no desire to go back anyway. I felt more like a man who’d married the wrong woman and been given a sense of freedom once he’d finally divorced her.

For him, it was all about how much value could be found in the facts he’d brought to light as he crawled through the boundless darkness of undiscovered truths; that was the measure of an academic’s worth.

Heroes weren’t something anyone could just create—they appeared naturally. That lack of artificiality was part of what made them heroes in the eyes of others.

We need to buy time for the children to grow up in peace

The other method isn’t to get rid of weapons and soldiers—it’s to remove the need for them. In other words, we’d need to give people a means to solve their problems without violence.

Compliments scared me. It was something I’d never grown used to—I was never sure whether I should be happy. Taking them to heart could inflate the ego, and for some people, using compliments to manipulate others was like second nature.