Extra Story 3: The Girl Who Ran Away to the World of Numbers (1/2)

For some period of time, Monica had forgotten how to understand human speech.

When her father died, her uncle took her in, and Monica lived in fear of him every day.

Her uncle hated Monica's father—no, you could say he loathed him.

Whenever her uncle spoke ill of her father, Monica desperately tried to refute him. It wasn't my father's fault, she said.

So every time Monica opened her mouth, her uncle would throw his fist at her.

Shut up. Stop talking nonsense.

His fists would swing down along with his curses. In the worst cases, she would get kicked in the stomach and beaten with a chair. Sometimes meals were taken away from her, which was not uncommon.

Whenever she went out, people in town would talk behind her back. All they whisper was how bad her father was.

Her mind and body were slowly being worn down little by little.

Gradually, Monica found herself escaping into the world of numbers when times were tough.

When her uncle beat her, or when she was forced into the barn in the middle of winter, Monica would just repeat in her head the formulas from the books she read in her father's study. In this way, she can forget the pain in her body and the cold of winter.

After some time of escaping into the world of numbers, Monica's perception began to become distorted.

At first, she couldn't recognize people's faces anymore.

The size of the eyes, the width of each eye, the angle of the corners of the eyes, the length, width, and height of the nose, the angle of the chin… she can recognize these in numbers, but she cannot recognize them as a human face. To Monica, a person's face was nothing but a mass of numbers.

Next, she could no longer recognize human expressions.

When her uncle got angry, his eyebrows would move this much, his mouth would open this much, the angle of his mouth would change by this many degrees, his eyebrows would move this many times in three seconds—everything would be converted into numbers.

However, Monica could not recognize the ”anger” that her uncle's face meant. All Monica could understand was the number of how many parts of his face had moved.

Her uncle had kicked the desk, and the desk moved this much, so the amount of force needed to move… and so on as her mind began to calculate the numbers.

But Monica couldn't understand why her uncle had kicked the desk.

All Monica could understand was the numerical value of the force needed of the kicked desk.

By the end of it, she couldn't recognize human speech.

She could understand what her uncle was saying, but her mind could not perceive the meaning of his words. Since she can't understand what was being said, Monica combined the number of sounds into a mathematical equation, calculated it, and let the result leak out of her mouth.

When his uncle saw Monica mumbling those numbers, he kicked her, saying she was creepy.

Not recognizing what had been said to her, Monica calculated how many seconds it would take for her nosebleed to coagulate.

And so, by the time a year had passed since her uncle took her in, Monica had become so broken that she could not recognize anything but numbers.

She simply immersed herself in the world of beautiful formulas that never hurt her, turned her eyes away from reality.

Her body grew to the point where it was barely able to survive, and her originally thin body became as thin as a stick.

In such a situation, a woman reached out to Monica.