The consultation with Dr. Serrano had left them in a state of suspended shock. They sat in the sterile hospital hallway, a small archipelago of grief, while the life of the psychiatric unit continued around them with bureaucratic indifference. The doctor's words—"dissociative trauma," "reactive psychosis," "systematic dismantling"—floated among them, clinical terms attempting to name the unnameable.
The analogy of mental torture was what haunted them most. Haruki, the engineer, tried to apply logic to it. He searched for a cause, a catalyst. Drugs they didn't know about? The influence of some online group, a cult? Every theory collapsed in the face of the simple, plain truth that Kenji had been living under their roof, leading a life, though apathetic, completely normal. There was no time or space for the torture the doctor had described.
Sofía, his mother, had abandoned logic. For her, the question was not "how," but "who." In her mind, a shadowy, malevolent figure had done this to her son. She clung to the idea of an external villain because the alternative—that this had arisen from Kenji himself—was too terrifying to contemplate.
Valeria and Akari were silent, caught in the same loop. They remembered Kenji's words in the kitchen: the feast, the garden, the staircases. They sounded like a madman's delusions, but the doctor had said they were part of a structured symbolic system. It was madness with a method, and that was the most chilling thing of all.
It was amidst this whirlwind of confusion and grief when a man approached them.
He was older, perhaps in his seventies, with tousled silver hair and a face etched with wrinkles that seemed not from age, but from weariness. He dressed simply, in corduroy pants and a worn wool sweater. But his eyes were extraordinarily lucid, a pale blue, and they held a calm that seemed out of place in this environment. In his hands, he held an old leather-bound notebook, thick and worn from use.
He stopped in front of the small group. His gaze passed over each of them, not with curiosity, but with a sad recognition.
"Tanaka family," he said, his voice soft and a little raspy. "And Valeria. My name is Mateo. Could you spare a moment? I've come to speak with you about Kenji."
Haruki stood up instantly, his body forming a protective barrier in front of his family. "Who are you? How do you know our names? Are you from the press?"
Mateo smiled, a sad smile that didn't reach his eyes. "No, Mr. Tanaka. I'm no one official. I'm simply a man who recognizes certain... patterns."
Dr. Serrano, who had emerged from a nearby room, approached, her expression professional and cautious. "Excuse me, sir, this is a restricted area. The family is going through a very difficult time."
"I know, Doctor," Mateo said, turning to look at her. And for the first time, his calm seemed to have an edge of steel. "I know you've told them their son's trauma resembles that of a torture victim, and I know that conclusion strikes you as a useful analogy, but factually impossible. I'm here to tell you it's not an analogy. And that it's not impossible." He paused, his gaze returning to the family. "It simply occurred in a place not on your maps."
The statement hung in the air, absurd, yet irresistibly magnetic. It struck the exact note of impossibility they were feeling.
"Please," Mateo said, his voice now a gentle plea. "Give me five minutes. What your son is experiencing... it has happened before."
They gathered again in Dr. Serrano's office. She was present, standing by the door, her professional skepticism warring with a curiosity she couldn't hide. The family sat, looking at Mateo with a mix of desperation and distrust.
Mateo placed the old leather notebook on the desk. He didn't open it immediately.
"For forty years," he began, "I've been a... collector of stories. It started with my own sister. One day, she was a brilliant, happy art student. The next, she was catatonic, and when she woke up, she spoke of a forest of wounds and a feast of mirrors. Doctors diagnosed her with schizophrenia. They medicated her. They locked her away. But I knew she wasn't mad. She was... haunted. I began to investigate."
His fingers brushed the notebook's leather cover. "I discovered other cases. They're rare, one every few years. A programmer in Bangalore, a librarian in Toronto, a student in Buenos Aires. People of all ages and walks of life, with no connection to each other. All of them, overnight, suffer a total psychotic break. And all of them, without exception, when they manage to speak, describe the same place."
Haruki leaned forward. "What place?"
Mateo finally opened the notebook. The pages were yellowed and covered in tight, meticulous script. "It doesn't have a single name. It's a journey. An odyssey through a personal dimension, a purgatory built from the material of their own lives. But the landmarks... those are always the same."
He looked directly at the family, his pale blue eyes fixed and serious.
"All of them speak of levels," he said, and the word resonated in the room, validating Kenji's delusion. "They speak of having to overcome trials to progress. And they speak of staircases. Staircases that feel like they're sinking them deeper and deeper, even though they appear to be climbing."
Valeria gasped. "He said that... he said the stairs always go down."
Mateo nodded slowly, deep sorrow on his face. "Yes. They always do. They describe places that are twisted versions of their past. A childhood park that becomes a limbo. A workplace that becomes a labyrinth. A home that becomes a farce. Each level is designed to force them to confront a regret, a failing, a sin they've kept buried."
"But... how?" Akari asked, her voice barely a whisper. "Is it a disease?"
"I wouldn't call it that," Mateo replied. "It's a condition. A condition of the soul. I don't know how the 'travelers' are chosen, or why. But the journey has rules. And the cruelest rule, the one that breaks almost all of them, is the one your son must also have discovered." He paused, and his gaze met Haruki's. "They cannot die. Death in that place is not an end. It's a reset. Every time they fail, every time the pain is too great, they are sent back to the beginning of the level to face it again. Over and over and over again."
Dr. Serrano's diagnosis of psychological torture suddenly took on a literal, monstrous meaning. The room filled with the weight of that revelation. What Kenji had screamed in the kitchen, his strange logic about "coming back to life," was not madness. It was the mechanics of his prison.
"My sister..." Mateo continued, his voice softer, "got trapped on her second level. She's been reliving the same fight with our father for thirty years. Her mind can no longer distinguish the memory from the present."
"So, there's no hope?" Sofía whispered, her face streaked with new tears.
"I haven't said that," Mateo said, and for the first time, a spark of something like fire gleamed in his eyes. "Most get lost, yes. They surrender to the grief, to the madness, or they get caught in a loop forever. But some... very few... manage to get out. That Kenji is here, in this hospital, screaming and broken, but here, on this side of reality... is a miracle. It means he has traveled all the way. It means that, at the bottom of his own personal hell, when all exits were closed, he chose to keep fighting."
He stood and looked at the family, at each of them.
"What you witnessed tonight was not the final act of his madness. It was the violent, bloody birth of his will to come home. He has done his part. He has survived. Now yours begins."
"What can we do?" Haruki asked, his voice that of a man ready to build a tower to the sky if it helped.
"You cannot go in there and pull him out," Mateo said. "But you can be his anchor. His mind is now a battlefield between the world he just left and this one. The hallucinations, the paranoia... they are echoes, replicas of his journey. He is fighting in the darkness, and you have to be the light under the door. Your presence, your patience, your love... those are the only medicines that can reach him where he is. You have to be his lighthouse, and pray that his ship, battered and broken, finds its way back to port."
He left them with that image, with that new, terrible responsibility. They were no longer the helpless spectators of a mental illness. They were the guardians of a soul trying to return from an impossible journey. Their task was not to understand the hell their son had gone through. Their task was to make this world a heaven welcoming enough for him to want to stay.