Chapter 92.

For the second night in a row, the two of us slept on the same bed. I forcefully kept my eyes open by holding my eyelids in place with my fingers while I blankly stared up at where the ceiling should be. Due to my inability to feel anything, I never actually felt drunk. That was likely the only reason I could still stay awake in spite of ingesting so much alcohol.

Even in spite of that, I occasionally found my eyes rolling backward. There were several occasions where I half passed out in a state of blankness. For the second night in a row, the only thing I could focus on amidst the silent night was the sound of her breathing as she peacefully slept by my side.

When morning came and she woke up, we inevitably had a conversation similar to the one we had yesterday. She didn’t push for me to go to sleep, but I knew I was already at my limit. She didn’t ask me to do anything today out of concern for my health. Instead, she quietly stayed with me by my side on the bed. I couldn’t see what she’d done, but at some point, my body was forcibly moved by her. Now, instead of her breathing coming from my side, it came from overhead. My head had been repositioned on top of something. If I had to guess, it was likely her lap.

My hair occasionally moved about in front of my eyes as though she were rustling her hand through it. Contrary to the previous day, she didn’t talk nearly as much. The majority of the time we spent together today was in silence with the occasional random topic brought up.

With how the day passed by, it really felt like I was on my deathbed.

I was still scared.

However, all things must come to an end. No good thing would last forever. Man must sleep, lest he dies a vain death. Even if that man felt no pain, that did not mean he could avoid sleep.

Against my will, I eventually passed out.

…

I had another strange dream. It was a very short one. I was laying on the ground looking up into the void with listless eyes as blood flowed down the side of my head out of my ears. A pool of blood formed on the ground behind my head, but I didn’t react to the pain almost as if I hadn’t noticed it at all.

The same scene repeated endlessly in my head, over and over again.

…

When I woke up, I could immediately tell something was wrong. I expected to not hear anything, but there was something slightly off. The sensation was similar to being underwater in a small concealed room.

I heard the sound of air as if it flowed by my ears, but it echoed out endlessly inside my head. It reminded me of a time in university during an extremely cold winter where I was left with quite a scare. I never fully understood it, but back then both my ears felt like they’d popped and caved in. 

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I was left with a very uncomfortable feeling in both of my ears back then. I was no biologist, but I did take an AP biology course in high school. I vaguely remembered there was a sac with a certain fluid in the ear. It kind of felt like the fluid in that sac had decreased or compressed due to the excessively cold weather that reached as low as minus fifty degrees Celsius with the wind chill. 

The result was every sound I heard echoed nonstop inside my skull until I felt nauseous and dizzy to the point of collapse. I couldn’t stay on campus and I immediately escaped to somewhere quiet. The only way I was able to fix my ear problem was by applying negative pressure. I pushed water into my ear with my palm while I simultaneously applied suction by creating a weak vacuum force with the palm of my hand..

Unfortunately, it wasn’t just the weather that caused this problem for me back then. It also happened anytime I slept on my sides. It happened whenever my head was pressed firmly against the pillow. I would sometimes wake up in horror to find I’d partially lost my hearing like this.

In all honesty, losing my hearing completely would have been less scary than being put into my present state where any sound I heard left me feeling disoriented and sick to my stomach.

It was the absolute worst-case scenario that could have happened to me. I wouldn’t be able to function at all with my hearing in this condition.

“D-d-d-d-d-di-d-d-d-o-d-d-di-o…”

“Ahhhhhhh!”

“A-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-Ah-Ah-Ah-Ah…”

After I let out a scream, I raised my hand up forming a stop sign to signal her to not say anything.

Even my own words echoed endlessly in my head. Was this done to simultaneously take away my ability to speak? Just how much would be taken from me? Why was this happening to me?

I formed a few hand signals to explain my situation to her. I asked her to not say anything and informed her of how everything I heard echoed inside my head.

Even the sounds she made when slightly moving around left me feeling ill. However, Val really didn’t drop the ball, she immediately came up with a countermeasure when she understood the situation. She bought the best sound-canceling ear muffs money could afford. It helped quite a bit and the magnitude of the echoing in my head was substantially reduced. The echoes were still there to a certain degree, but it wasn’t to the point that I couldn’t stomach it.

However, I still wasn’t able to talk like this and I could only use sign language to communicate with her. In a way, it really wasn’t only my hearing taken away from me, my ability to speak was simultaneously taken as a byproduct.

It was truly malicious. Like someone or something was upset that I still had a way to communicate despite losing all my senses, so they’d taken away my ability to speak as a bonus. Two for the price of one, I really got the shittiest bargain sale in the world.

By this point, there really was nothing left to be taken aside from my life. If I could live through this hell, would things really return to normal though? Or was all of this just my new everyday reality?

The longer this went on, the more uncertain I grew. Anxious was far from enough to describe how I felt.

My body was casually pulled around by Val the entire day and once again, she took me to work. I really didn’t know why I was there anymore. I had no way to accomplish anything, and instead of pretending to work at my desk like I’d done last week, Val kept me by her side in her office.

Unbeknownst to me, my nightmare had only just begun. The day came and went by without me accomplishing anything. I just sat there and occasionally had a few conversations with Val through sign language every now and then. Leaving her office was dangerous as my coworker’s casual chatter in the background constantly echoed out loud and left me on the verge of collapse. It was to the point I’d pass out even with the earmuffs I had on.