Disclaimer

Since I’m Korean, I wrote down the original post in Korean and translated it into English. So some expressions can be awkward. And this article could be a mere collection of interpretations the community has already made.

TL;DR

1. Canto 9 contains two points of dissonance. One is that, despite being Ryōshū’s canto, the larger mysteries surrounding Limbus Company as a whole are brought more to the forefront than Ryōshū’s own personal narrative. The other is that Faust seems to be confirming something with the Gesellschaft that she should already have been able to infer on her own. That very sense of dissonance is likely a key clue deliberately planted by the writer.
2. Through the lens of Chekhov’s gun, the “unfired setups” still hanging in the air include Faust’s fear, the “branch” Sinclair mentioned, the phrase “the First Smoke War,” the Gesellschaft’s direct appearance, clues related to Hohenheim, and the recurring expressions “world” and “flow.”
3. Looking at events such as the LCE assault, the most natural conclusion is that this was not a mere technological breakthrough, but rather an intervention by someone in Limbus Company’s internal upper echelon with sufficient authority.
4. Faust is more than capable of suspecting as much, yet she still chooses to ask the Gesellschaft. That suggests the core issue is not that she doesn’t know, but that having it confirmed would be dangerous enough to shatter her plans going forward.
5. A Mirror is like a parallel world: a separate possibility with no continuity with the current world. A branch, on the other hand, is a divergent future that split off from the same starting point at some point later. This distinction matters because what Sinclair witnessed was not merely another Sinclair from another world, but rather a future branch continuous with the current timeline.
6. By tying together the statements of Hohenheim, Faust, and Vergilius, we should read “flow” not as a simple metaphor but as a coercive force that acts to preserve a particular worldline. Vergilius is a being capable of sensing that flow, which is why he was necessary as Limbus Company’s guide—not merely because he is powerful, but because he can read and steer that flow.
7. Dante’s clock-head is not a device for measuring time, but a device for regulating flow and branching. Therefore Dante’s resurrection ability is not ordinary revival; rather than “bringing someone back after death,” it is closer to nullifying the branch in which death occurred and rewinding to an earlier flow. In that sense, Dante, the clock hands, preservation of the manager, and control over flow all connect into a single theme.
8. The theme running through Lobotomy Corporation, Library of Ruina, and Limbus Company is in fact desire, will, and the future. The City’s illness is the loss of will; the Light sought to rekindle that will. The difference between Distortion, Peccatula, and E.G.O lies in how desire and will are handled. Peccatula are a state in which only desire remains, with both past and future lost. Distortion is a state in which the self remains, but is devoured by desire. E.G.O is the state in which desire is consciously recognized as will, thereby creating a future.
9. The Golden Bough is not just a MacGuffin, but a condensed mass of future possibilities branching out from a branch. In other words, the Golden Bough symbolizes “the innumerable branches and possibilities, and the future born from will.”
10. The Gesellschaft is a system in which Fausts across multiple worlds cooperate to gather possibilities, nurture them into fruition, and create a future. That would unify Faust’s obsession with the Golden Bough, the future, Administrator Faust, and the Gesellschaft into a single goal, and would also let us read the suspicious elements raised in Canto 9 as foreshadowing in that direction.
11. If N Corp is linked to the phenomenology of Heidegger and Husserl, it becomes clearer why it is so bound up with experience, fixation, nails and hammers, and hatred of prosthetics. From this angle, if Limbus stands on the side of “opening possibility and the future,” then N Corp stands on the side of grasping possibility through experience and fixation, which helps explain their opposition.

All Answers Begin with the Remaining Questions

This Canto 9 was a delight even for someone like me, who has read nearly every story in Project Moon, because it brought back so many familiar faces from the broader Project Moon multimedia universe. It also felt like a crucial node where many stories that had long remained scattered fragments finally aligned in one direction. And yet, despite how well Limbus Company’s storytelling has matured over time, two things in particular struck me as deeply dissonant. At first, I let them pass because the afterglow of the canto itself was so strong, but the more I mulled over them, the stranger they felt. And after a long time spent organizing my thoughts, the starting point of those question marks converged into the following two branches:

1. This is Ryōshū’s canto, so why do larger themes—Limbus Company, the future, and such—take center stage over Ryōshū herself, while her own story, though emotionally powerful, seems somewhat lacking in the delicacy of its process?
2. On reflection, it is fairly easy to infer that Limbus Company’s upper management intervened in this incident, and even the other Fausts in the Gesellschaft point it out. So why did the “naive Faust,” another “genius,” go so far as to endure being humiliated and fossilized into “stupid Faust” just to obtain explicit confirmation?

When something in a well-crafted story stands out or feels abrasive, more often than not that is where the creator’s intention is most deeply at work. Put differently, that discomfort is precisely where the creator’s intention becomes most visible on the surface. So in answer to the first question, I arrived at the following hypothesis:

It is because the sections that fill the space where Ryōshū’s emotional arc might have been developed instead are where Limbus Company’s important story had to be told.

Come to think of it, there are many other strange points as well. Even the defeat text abruptly changed from the intuitive system-language of “Defeat” to “Fate lost” in several battles. Faust’s anxiety—something not especially emphasized in other cantos—was also directly and repeatedly brought up. And the second question I posed above belongs to the same category.

You may already know this, but one of the most famous literary devices for strengthening a story’s theme and guiding its narrative efficiently is Anton Chekhov’s “Chekhov’s gun.” Most people are familiar with it, but the principle goes like this:

If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don’t put it there.

Writing a story is an act that consumes an extraordinary amount of an author’s mind and time. Any part of the story that the author bothered to put down at the cost of mental effort must have meaning. And I think the reason consumers of Project Moon’s stories stay attached to this universe is precisely because they are moved by the intricate chain between “the gun” and “the firing.” At the very least, the writer we have seen in Kim Ji-hoon up to now may not necessarily convey every single narrative material with the depth of an entire academic discipline, but he has never been the type to consume those materials merely for style.

Stories That Have Not Yet Been Fired, Only Piled Up

From this perspective, if we organize the things that feel off—in other words, the guns that still have not been fired—this canto gives us the following:

1. Unlike in other cantos, Faust, who supposedly knew everything, expresses a great deal of fear
2. Sinclair has a future that went down “a certain branch”
3. In that branch’s future, the Smoke War is called the “First” Smoke War, which in turn implies that something comes after it
4. The Sinclair of that branch tells Faust, “Don’t grieve everything all at once.”
5. Among the various teams, the Ring battle team includes Hohenheim, who is only level 45 in gameplay terms, unlike the others that include at least one Color
6. The Gesellschaft is not merely mentioned, but appears directly for the first time
7. Faust endures humiliation in order to demand an answer to her question

And if we tie this to prior stories, there are many other “unfired guns” we can add:

1. Faust’s use of the word “world” in Ricardo’s fight in Canto 5
2. In the LCB regular medical checkup, Hohenheim’s phrase: “a world of flow where the manager is preserved”
3. Vergilius’ repeated use of “flow” dating back to Leviathan

Everything I have mentioned so far can easily be recognized as relating to a single keyword: foresight.

So let us begin by dissecting the part that first stood out so sharply as strange: Faust’s question. Considering that Faust is one of the greatest geniuses in the City, and that this genius also has access to observational information from multiple worlds, it is very strange that she could not infer the root cause that allowed the House of Spiders to attack the LCE. This was the kind of information even we could easily guess by intuition alone. In particular, given that nearly all the major characters from previous works appeared while only Dias went unmentioned, it would have been easy to suspect that the root of it all was Dias. But that is a conclusion reached from the perspective of the reader, who is more omniscient than “Faust” within the story, so we should first ask whether this could be inferred solely from what “naive Faust” herself already knows. The facts Faust should already know, even without consulting the Gesellschaft, are roughly these:

1. As much as she may hate to admit it, Hohenheim is a genius capable of rivaling her. He does not openly show it, but he still bears scars from the events of old Lobotomy Corporation, and the protection system he built to avoid repeating that trauma is not the sort of thing that could be breached by ordinary means, even if Hohenheim himself may not possess authority over the scope of what it protects.
2. The House of Spiders is an armed group, not a technical one. If we insist on stretching the point, the Ring—associated with the domain of “knowledge”—is at least somewhat academic, but fundamentally it is aesthetic in orientation, so it is hard to imagine them bypassing such technology. The Thumb, Middle, and Pinky are even more irrelevant. It would therefore be a stretch to say that the House of Spiders or an affiliated group independently discovered a way to crack it.
3. As was directly established in Limbus 7.5, the LCE was thoroughly secured through collaboration between Faust, the Gesellschaft, Hohenheim, the now-vacant W Corp seat, and various others across different fields. A security system built with that degree of company-wide rigor should not have been so easily pierced.
4. Even a force like Uzet’s was disarmed with far too much ease, and at far too convenient a timing.

Since the assault in the main story was no small matter, if all of these impossibilities are resolved by adding only one small additional assumption, then that is the best explanation. Therefore, it seems obvious that all of this involved not a technical problem but a problem of authority—that is, someone capable of directly or indirectly intervening in all of this from within Limbus Company itself. And if we assume such a being exists, then considering the scale of the damage and Dias’s information-gathering power as portrayed in Distortion Detective, it would be irrational to argue that he did not know. Therefore, if Faust is as intelligent as she is, it should be very easy for her to infer that all of this was either directly carried out by Dias or at the very least happened with his tacit approval.

Which leaves us with the remaining question: Why did “naive Faust” ask the Gesellschaft anyway, even at the cost of becoming “stupid Faust”?

The first answer that comes to mind is the aftermath of that conclusion. If it is true, then it is far too dangerous. Faust is currently part of Limbus Company because several people there have aligned interests, and because she is pursuing a goal of her own that has not yet been explicitly stated. But if she cannot trust someone within that group—especially someone who holds more authority than she does—then her plans going forward will inevitably suffer major setbacks. Then couldn’t she avoid that danger by continuing to ask the Gesellschaft about the hidden aspects of those plans? The conversation in the Gesellschaft seems to confirm the answer, and the Gesellschaft itself does not appear to be ruled by Dias. On top of that, within the current world, no one besides Faust can access the Gesellschaft anyway. Even if the proof came in a ridiculous form, we all saw that during April Fools’. Unless Faust’s body contains a mind other than Faust’s own, the Gesellschaft should not be vulnerable to other people. So why is Faust this anxious?

The Mirror, the Branch, and the Flow

What drew the most attention in this canto was probably the mention of the “First Smoke War,” but what caught my eye even more was the word “branch.” Because it is subtly different from the “Mirror,” one of the most interesting pieces of worldbuilding Limbus Company began exploring after the previous works.

The Mirror functions much like the parallel worlds we are generally familiar with. In each parallel world, the “Sinners” of our worldline occupy the places corresponding to “someone else’s role,” creating another worldline where stories unfold that are similar to, but different from, the stories of the current world’s “someone” and “Sinner.” But the beings inside Mirror Worlds are ultimately separate existences from the Sinners of this current world. Ring Student Yi Sang and Pinky Apprentice Sinclair, for example, have no continuity with the Sinclair of this worldline. Setting everything else aside, they have never belonged to the LCB. Just as the image inside a mirror and the thing outside it can never actually touch, Mirror Worlds reflect similar possibilities, but their inhabitants can never truly connect. Because the starting points are different. The inside and outside of the mirror only look at each other; there is never a moment in which they merge into one. Perhaps that is why, among the derivative technologies of the glass window, the Mirror is the most stable: the two cannot merge. That would also explain why one can be corroded by an E.G.O drawn from an Abnormality, yet not by an identity from a Mirror World. E.G.O is, however briefly, an act of identifying with that being, whereas an identity is merely borrowing a separate being from a Mirror World and overlaying it onto the Sinner of this world—in other words, draping the original image with the light of that possibility.

But a branch is different. Smoke War Sinclair definitely belonged to the LCB. He says so himself. That means he must be a Sinclair who continued onward from the point this worldline had already reached and arrived at some branch beyond it. And because a branch necessarily means that, from a larger flow, “one breaks away and a new flow begins,” we could just as well revise the term clearly into divergence. In other words, this is not a Mirror, because it is an existence that began from the same starting point and only later diverged decisively. It is not a separate timeline, but something that traveled along the same timeline and then branched off at a certain point. So I would call the decisive difference here continuity of existence through time. Mirror Worlds do not share that continuity with the Sinners of the present worldline, whereas different versions of Sinners along a branch do share it across different points in the same divergence.

Then that settles the distinction between the two expressions:

1. Sinclair has a future that went down “a certain branch.”
2. In that branch’s future, the Smoke War is called the “First” Smoke War, which implies that something comes after it.

Even so, there is still more that remains. Let us bring back a few related pieces:

• Among the various teams, the Ring battle team includes Hohenheim, who is only level 45 in gameplay terms, unlike the others that include at least one Color
• Faust’s use of “world” in Ricardo’s fight in Canto 5
• In the LCB regular medical checkup, Hohenheim’s phrase: “The flow of this world is that the manager will be preserved”
• Vergilius’ repeated use of “flow” dating back to Leviathan

Of these, let me connect the latter three. Hohenheim gives the most decisive hint, because he brings “flow” and “world” into the same sentence. More importantly, since these are expressions used after Limbus Company began, the “world” Faust referred to and the “world of flow where the manager is preserved” Hohenheim mentioned are likely equivalent concepts. But even if the wording is similar, is the “flow” Vergilius refers to really the same thing as the “flow” Hohenheim talks about?

There is something we have to consider here. Readers of Leviathan can readily guess why Vergilius needs Limbus Company. That reason likely has something to do with Garnet and Lapis, with the rage he feels toward the City that forced the two of them into emptiness, and with his regret over the past. But why, from Limbus Company’s side, did it specifically need Vergilius? A contract requires benefit on both sides. Even if Vergilius had strong motivation, if there were no concrete benefit for Limbus Company, the contract between them would not stand. And given that it was not Vergilius who came seeking out Limbus Company, but Limbus Company that sought out Vergilius, it would be strange to leave that reason blank. If raw force were all they needed, there were other Colors they could have considered. Limbus Company clearly had reasons for Dante’s prosthetic form and for choosing these specific twelve Sinners, so it seems implausible that they selected Vergilius as their guide simply because he was strong. It is more reasonable to assume there is some reason why it had to be Vergilius in particular. And perhaps if we look again at the thing he should not have done, we can see a hint of the role he had to take on through a contract with Limbus Company. Let us return to what Vergilius says in Canto 6:

Ah, so much for my determination to follow the great flow. … But I simply could not permit this stench, this sight to exist any longer. Even if it meant that I must swim against the flow.

And in Leviathan, Vergilius says the following:

Still, there was never a time ignoring that sensation creeping coldly up the back of my neck turned out well. It was an unpleasant, difficult-to-defy pressure, as though something had climbed onto my shoulders and was pointing a finger, telling me this was the way I had to go. I called this “the flow.” As I continued my life as a fixer, that pressure grew stronger and clearer in its guidance. Perhaps it was merely accumulated experience erupting into something like instinct at moments like this.
I placed Garnet upon the flow. And I was sailing forward, borne along by the flow that blew in.

To begin with, both of these expressions strongly present conforming to the flow as the default. The descriptions are sparse, but even within those short phrases—especially in Canto 6—that point is emphasized so strongly that, given our limited information, I think it is reasonable to see them as referring to the same thing. And as another basis for connecting them to Hohenheim’s expression, I think we cannot overlook the phrase “a difficult-to-defy pressure.”One could interpret Vergilius as merely saying he has, through experience, a kind of intuition for “what is about to happen next, and what choice must be made to draw out the best possibility.” But in typical Project Moon fashion, when read together with the other expressions, it seems more likely that this is an ability to perceive a coercive supernatural force tied to causality itself. If so, then the reason Vergilius had to be the LCB’s guide from Limbus Company’s perspective is precisely because he possesses that ability. Hohenheim’s phrase, “a world of flow where the manager is preserved,” could then be restated as “a worldline upon which a coercive force acts to preserve the manager.” If we tie that to Sinclair’s wording, then perhaps it can be read as a worldline in which the coercive force preserving the manager acts across all branches—at least up to a certain point. And if what Limbus Company needed from Vergilius was the ability to perceive what useful smaller divergences could be created within that structure, then that would explain why it absolutely had to be Vergilius as the guide.

Now let us think further by adding Faust’s wording into the mix. Faust says that the Middle’s intervention was not part of the “plan,” and although she changes course as a result, she very clearly pressures Dante into self-destruction for the sake of preserving the “world.” At a glance, if we take that together with Dante’s Golden Bough and Vergilius’ expressions, it may look like she is only talking about Dante’s clock hands. But what if the meaning is actually something like this?

In a worldline where a coercive force is acting to preserve the manager, an unforeseen exception occurred when the Middle intruded and effectively nullified the larger flow that was meant to preserve the manager. And if you are annihilated, there is no telling where that coercive force will go or what repercussions it may cause; fate itself may be lost. So from any direction, I am finished in the flow of this world—but to preserve at least you as you continue through the chain of this branching flow, invalidate the version of yourself that exists in this branch.

Read that way, it makes sense that Faust specifically used the word “world.” But if that is the case, then further questions arise:

1. If it is a coercive force, why can it be nullified?
2. Where does this sense of “plan” within the flow come from, and what function does it serve?
3. What exactly does an exception to that plan mean?

Dante’s Head, the Clock Hands, Resurrection That Violates No Taboo of the Head, Advancement, and the Gesellschaft

In Canto 6, Faust clearly says that the reason Dante’s head takes the shape of a clock is “shape was not determined randomly and without intent” Then what properties does a clock have? Many people think of a clock as something used to tell the current time, but at the same time, its second, minute, and hour hands change their representations according to the flow of time. In other words, a clock expresses the flow of time and has the function of fixing and identifying a specific point in time. And yet, as is joked about repeatedly in-story—and I do not think Project Moon tells jokes without purpose—Dante’s clock-head does not actually function to tell the time. If so, then the function left to Dante’s head as a “clock” is its relation to the flow of time.

As many people already know, Dante “rewinds” time to revive the Sinners. But if we connect the concept of the flow of time with the concept of flow discussed earlier, could we not also read it like this?

He returns the Sinners to the earlier point before the branch in which they died or the branch in which the battle was lost occurred.

That is: if we connect the concept of time’s “flow” with the concepts of “branch” and “a world of a certain flow,” Dante’s head can be consistently understood as a clock-shaped representation of the ability to control branches within a world of a given flow. This differs from the ordinary concept of resurrection. Ordinary resurrection means that “the continuity of life is stitched back on after death,” but here it is a matter of nullifying the branch called death itself. If so, then one might also guess that the Head does not punish LCB’s rewinding because this distinction is extremely important to the Head’s logic within the City. And as can be gleaned from the fact that Vergilius, in his wording, emphasizes not the clock itself but the hour and minute hands, perhaps what he is protecting above all is precisely this control over flow. Dante’s monologue in Canto 5 can further reinforce this interpretation:

Maybe I summon the flow of time to turn the hands of my clock…

… to find the paths for the endlessly wandering Sinners.

For all those who are lost.

So that I may not be lost.

Since this interpretation fits consistently with the earlier explanations, let us go one step further. In Cantos 4 and 7, unlike the other Cantos, Dante’s minute hand advances at the end of the epilogue. Various theories have been proposed about this: that it advances when a Sinner’s employment conditions and wish are fulfilled; that it advances when the LCB recovers a Golden Bough on its own; that it advances when a Sinner directly kills someone closely tied to them; that it advances when the Sinners comprehend the Sephirot’s virtues from Lobotomy Corporation; and so on. But the theory about wishes being fulfilled does not fit Cantos 5 and 8.

The theory about the LCB recovering the Golden Bough on its own is unclear too—not least because it depends on whether outside helpers intervened “significantly,” and in Canto 9 it certainly seems fair to say the LCB recovered it on their own, yet the clock hand still did not advance. The theory about the Sinners comprehending the Sephirot’s virtues also does not sit quite right. Yi Sang recovered the courage to continue living, Don Quixote became someone who possessed the will to stand upright, or someone the other Sinners could willingly trust and entrust things to. But at the same time, Hong Lu gained eyes that could break free of the yoke and face fear, and Ishmael too came to possess an expectation for the meaning of existence beyond revenge.

As for the theory that it advances when a Sinner kills someone tied to them, that is harder to dismiss, but then there is no particular plausibility in that condition specifically being represented through a clock. In Faust’s terms, that would mean that “among random forms, the advancing of a clock was arbitrarily selected.” But what if, based on the “flow” I have been discussing, we read it like this instead?

When the conditions are fulfilled that strongly align with the flow toward a certain branch Dante must reach in this worldline—in other words, when a strong divergence occurs or a flow arises in conformity with that flow—the clock hands advance.

Given how little evidence we still have, this is at least a more consistent interpretation of the representation of the clock hand’s movement, and it also matches up better with the conjectures we have been making so far. If so, then from this perspective, Yi Sang regaining the courage to continue living and Don Quixote becoming someone worthy of trust and reliance were major turning points toward the goal Faust, Dante, Vergilius, and ultimately Limbus Company seek to reach. Ishmael, Hong Lu, and Sinclair may also have had valuable awakenings, even if incomplete, but perhaps those were not yet enough to strongly confirm momentum toward that goal. Come to think of it, even setting aside the stories up through Canto 3 where the Sinners effectively failed to bring about major changes beyond recovering Golden Boughs, in Canto 5 Ahab and in Canto 8 Xianhuang Worm were both directly absorbed into N Corp, Limbus Company’s adversary. And Canto 9, if anything, is a point where enormous new factors of instability have been added. In that case, those stories did not yet fully cross over into a particular branch, or at the very least still left powerful sources of uncertainty in place. From where I stand, this seems more consistent than the other hypotheses.

Then what about the Gesellschaft? Up to now, Faust has generally been observed using the Gesellschaft for simple informational lookup to reinforce her judgments. But if we look at the “naive Faust” we see using the Gesellschaft in Canto 9, and maintain our initial premise that Faust is intelligent enough to easily infer Dias as the mastermind, then the Gesellschaft takes on a somewhat different nuance than before. This is not a case of using the Gesellschaft to obtain information she simply could not acquire within the limits of her senses. Up until now, when Faust could construct an explanation that was persuasive enough on the basis of her own intelligence, she had simply accepted it without needing to consult the Gesellschaft. But not now. Even we, who are surely far less intelligent than Faust, can reach this conclusion with a moment’s thought—yet Faust goes out of her way to confirm it. Why confirm an answer one already knows? Perhaps because emotionally, she cannot bring herself to believe it. If the Gesellschaft’s function before was expanding the range of cognition, then now it is closer to providing affirmation for a judgment. From the standpoint of the other Fausts, who restrict themselves to seeing this purely as a matter of cognitive ability, she can only be called “stupid Faust.” But if all of this is true, then if I were in the Gesellschaft, I would give her a different nickname: not stupid Faust, but anxious Faust.

Then what is the source of the thing making Faust so anxious?

Indeterminacy, Observation, and Branches

This may seem abrupt, but as the starting point for answering the previous question, let us look at this line from Heishou Pack – Mao Branch Adept Faust:

‘Faust only knows everything that Faust knows, but does not know what Faust does not know’? The same could be said of any random passerby in the streets of Hongyuan.

If we follow a chain of events to the end, we inevitably come to know the ending. But that is quite different from knowing facts. Because knowledge necessarily describes the past, and once something has become past, if one’s reasoning reaches it by whatever route, understanding can follow. But what of the future? The present is “already in the process of happening,” so if we treat that one-dimensional boundary as functionally part of the past, what about the future? Fundamentally, we cannot know the future. So I think it is very important, in Project Moon’s style of writing, that Faust always says not “Faust knows all knowledge,” but “Faust knows everything.” If that includes not only the past but also things that have not yet happened, then her claim effectively means this:

Faust knows both the past and the future.

But that immediately produces a contradiction. Even in the line from Heishou Pack Faust I just cited, Faust only knows what Faust knows. In other words, there are clearly things the Gesellschaft does not know. So why does Faust always so confidently say that she knows everything?

Here we must consider why the Gesellschaft has to exist at all. Humanity as it stands already possesses, under the name of the internet, something close to omniscience regarding existing knowledge and events likely to become widely known. If what was needed was a greater extension of awareness toward individual facts than that, then given Faust’s intellect it would arguably have been easier to develop some technology for observing worlds simultaneously. In fact, if efficiency were the issue, Faust might well have found it less costly simply to establish some kind of link to the Eyeitself. And the fact that none of the Fausts depicted so far do that probably means that such a thing is unnecessary for Faust. Especially when one considers that Faust is so obsessed with efficiency that she weighs even trivial matters like whether to open with the conclusion when telling Heathcliff something. So it is more reasonable to assume that the Gesellschaft is not maintained for such a purpose alone.

Then we should consider the Gesellschaft’s defining feature. The Gesellschaft is a collective of the minds of Fausts from Mirror Worlds. If so, then what the Fausts exchange with one another—or more bluntly, what they trade as members of a society of mutual benefit—would naturally be what differs across their respective Mirror Worlds: the singularities observable only within those worlds. In that sense, it becomes very easy to understand why the Lobotomy Employee Faust is treated coldly in the Gesellschaft. The basis of trade is rarity, and within the Gesellschaft the thing of importance would obviously be the uniqueness of the facts observed in one’s Mirror World. But the event Lobotomy Employee Faust has to present is the fall of Lobotomy Corporation, and that is the kind of information likely to be essentially fixed across all worldlines. By contrast, it also becomes easy to understand why Heishou Pack Faust, who possesses rare information to the point that the Gesellschaft keeps prying into other worldlines for it, is so strongly urged to participate—even if the Gesellschaft rejects her from the standpoint of its essential traits of profit-seeking and stability of judgment. Then the Gesellschaft’s function is likely the exchange of facts observed in Mirror Worlds. Up to this point, this is probably territory many people already broadly understand.

But something is still missing from that reasonable inference: why? In other words, to what end?

Let us return to the line of reasoning we have been following. The members of Limbus Company are closely tied to flow, divergence, and branches. Yet the “Mirror Worlds” that are so central to Limbus Company seem, at first glance, to belong to a similar category while actually differing subtly in kind from flow, divergence, and branches. As noted earlier, the decisive difference is continuity of existence. So why must a concept that does not fundamentally merge with those be added onto Limbus Company through Faust?

When we seek to know the future, what we do is prediction. Prediction is the process of inferring the future from observed facts—that is, from facts already fixed as the past—and approximating that future as closely as possible to those past facts. So the information traded within the Gesellschaft can ultimately be understood as Fausts, who are nearly omniscient with respect to knowledge, exchanging information that has already become past in other observed worlds and at other observed points in time, in order to predict the future. Put simply, the Gesellschaft’s purpose is future prediction. If so, Faust’s role within Limbus Company also becomes clearer. If Vergilius reads the current flow within this worldline, while Faust predicts the flow based on facts observed across different worlds, then it becomes far more obvious why the two function together in support of Dante.

Then what remains is the matter of “knowing only what one knows”—that is, the parts that nevertheless remain unknown. On this point, perhaps more than anywhere else, we can infer a great deal from the story surrounding Heishou Pack Faust. Let me quote it again:

… No. Stop it with your inquiries. How many times must I explain that I am already aware of that?

I am already aware of my lord’s questionable behavior. I am also aware of the fact that my lord has prepared an ambitious plan for the Family Hierarch Evaluation. I know all these things.

I know that he has wielded the favor gained as the precious jade of Daguanyuan, the gem of the Jia family, like a weapon to one by one obtain everything he has ever pursued.

I know that he has seduced the daughter of the Xue family, for whom there is no place in his heart, to draw many, many of her family’s secrets.

I know that his care for me is but a care for a tool that gives him access to the knowledge of the Gesellschaft.

I do not need to hear this from Faust. I know them.

He commits ruthless violence under the great cause of “rectification of names(正名)”

From this we can infer one first fact: if the Gesellschaft keeps demanding information from Heishou Pack Faust, it must be because without her providing it, the Gesellschaft cannot know it. If we assume otherwise, there is no other adequate explanation for why the Gesellschaft would press so insistently for that information. By efficient reductio, the original proposition is the sound one. And from that it is easy to infer another point: even if an individual Faust knows something, if she does not provide it, the Gesellschaft cannot know it. To summarize simply: the Gesellschaft, despite overcoming many limitations through the independence and differing cognitive limits of its individual nodes, is still not omniscient. Therefore, if information has not been supplied to the Gesellschaft, then an individual Faust has no way of knowing it either unless it falls within her own range of cognition—and without such knowledge, prediction is naturally impossible as well. That is the limit of the Gesellschaft: despite “knowing everything”—or, more honestly, despite having the possibility of knowing everything—it only knows what it knows.

Good. Up to this point, things have become fairly clear. But then why is the Faust of Limbus Company so afraid? Even if not omniscient, the Gesellschaft is still such a powerful tool. If Vergilius can intuit the flow in the present tense, and Faust can predict the future extending from there, is there not relatively little reason to fear within such a system? Hasn’t the Gesellschaft’s limitation already been sufficiently compensated for by recruiting the card called Vergilius? Does Faust really have reason to be this anxious? Let us return to her line in Canto 9:

While there is no doubt that Faust does indeed know it all…

… there were times when I also found myself grasping at straws,

unable to make even the simplest decisions—whether I should move forward, whether I should stop, or whether I should go back the way I came.

And that made me realize anew…

… Faust is but a name that may leave at any time.

On the surface, this does not seem to move beyond the issue with the Gesellschaft itself that many people have already predicted—and that I also dissected above. But let us push the lens just a little deeper:

… Faust is but a name that may leave at any time.

Up to now, we have spoken about the limits of the Gesellschaft. But leaving is a different issue from simple functional limitation. Until now, the only case in canon where Faust could not connect to the Gesellschaft was the Warp Train murder incident. But back then, the phrasing was that she “could not access the Gesellschaft,” not that the Gesellschaft had “left.” This can be interpreted in two ways:

1. The Gesellschaft abandons the Faust of the Limbus Company worldline
2. The Limbus Company worldline deviates so far outside the Gesellschaft’s predictive range that the Gesellschaft’s usefulness simply vanishes to begin with

At this point, we now know that the Faust of Limbus Company is pursuing some future. But in this canto, when one loses a battle, the defeat text is uniquely rendered as “Fate lost.” In other words, some fate—that is, some future—is annihilated. Since Project Moon is not the kind of developer to use in-game text carelessly, let us look at the three-pronged operation to exterminate the House of Spiders. In every battle where the Sinners are not facing the Ring Nursefather, the Sinner identities are backed up by Colors. In the Vespa route, not only the Color Vespa but also Ezra and Moses come to help. Matthias was irritatingly obnoxious, yes, but even so, the player is being aided not by one reliable force but by three. In gameplay terms as well, their attack and defense levels are both close to 90. Ezra is the lowest and still remains in the 70s, while Vergilius, as always, sits at the very top. Moses is not even explicitly displayed.

And then there is Hohenheim’s number, which is shocking. His defense level is only 48, and his highest attack level is 50. These are plainly lower than even the current Sinners. Faust surely participated in planning the operation to burn down the House of Spiders—so did she not know what a problem this was? Hardly. To say otherwise seems less like taking the Gesellschaft seriously and more like severely underestimating Faust’s own cognitive abilities.

Since Hohenheim mentions gambling, and since Faust already knew of a certain Sign belonging to Sinclair—and this does in fact manifest, calling forth a certain Sinclair from a future branch—this all appears to have been intentional to some degree. Some trial was likely planned to provoke Sinclair’s awakening. The problem is that Hohenheim was too weak. As a result, that party actually came face to face with the greatest crisis of losing fate. And, separate from the matter of flow, because there was no way to infer such a disadvantage from the information the Gesellschaft had provided, the raw force of indeterminacy—of the information gap left behind—must have hit Faust directly. And even then, one might say the crisis ended once fate was preserved and Sinclair awakened. But at that point, the Sinclair from the future becomes the next problem:

LCE Research Team Chief HOHENHEIM: Despite being pushed to the point where I was about to lose both of my subordinates… I still found myself clawing at life when death came knocking at my door. How ridiculously pathetic.

Smoke War SINCLAIR: Don’t worry. One way or another, she will overcome this ordeal and go on living. She’s a lot stronger than you—or any of us—might think.

LCE Research Team Chief HOHENHEIM: … Is that so? That’s good to hear.……. How many years have you traveled back?

Smoke War SINCLAIR: That’s not a question I can answer.

LCE Research Team Chief HOHENHEIM: … I’m sorry to say that it does not appear to me that you’ve come from a very optimistic future.

Smoke War SINCLAIR: From where I’m standing, there isn’t much to be optimistic about the past either. Back then, never in my wildest imagination did I think we’d ever have to coin the term “The First Smoke War.”

Sinner #8 ISHMAEL: What… What is… happening? Do you see him too, Faust? Or am I seeing things from losing too much blood…?

Sinner #2 FAUST: … I see him, too. … The Sign… has summoned you.

Smoke War SINCLAIR: The Sign merely behaved as a medium. “I” was the one who summoned me. The awakening and the summoning occurred simultaneously.

Sinner #2 FAUST: Then, is that—

Smoke War SINCLAIR: Ah… no, not every Sign has this power. This is the power of my Sign.

Sinner #8 ISHMAEL: So you’re… from the future…? Not a Mirror World…? W-what happened… to the original Sinclair…?

Smoke War SINCLAIR: There is no such thing as the original. This is unlike the Mirror Worlds… it is more akin to a different branch of the same tree.

Sinner #8 ISHMAEL: Wait, hold on… Is it inevitable? That future… you’re from…

Smoke War SINCLAIR: I don’t know. Maybe. But it’s not all misery. Life goes on, after all.

Sinner #8 ISHMAEL: Do we really have no choice but to… face that future?

Smoke War SINCLAIR: ……. I don’t know whether the life I’d lived through prior to my summoning… will be in your path, or whether you’ll be able to avoid it.

Sinner #2 FAUST: … But it will not be impossible.

Smoke War SINCLAIR: No. It will be a difficult path, still. Almost unbearably so. Now, I find myself thinking that…… maybe the journey I’ve walked my entire life, everything I’ve gone through as I trudged across the fields of battle… was merely an offshoot event of an offshoot world—designed to end here and now, to serve this very moment and nothing more.

LCE Research Team Chief HOHENHEIM: All has been cast into the realm of speculation, now.

Smoke War SINCLAIR: Correct. But if I can be a strength to myself, then I best accept that fate. I wish certain others were here, too. So I could see everyone I’d been longing to see… just one more time. Every now and then, I find myself thinking back… to the days I spent aboard that bus. Those memories… might be the only things that keep me going in the days to come.

Sinner #8 ISHMAEL: …….

Smoke War SINCLAIR: I should leave now. Before the longing gets worse. I might be returned to where I came from, but perhaps this is simply the end of the road for me, like death. Neither you nor I will know whether this is how I die. Still… Even if this is where I end… even if my entire existence boils down to serving this moment and nothing more…… I’m glad I got to spend my last moments with you guys, instead of being surrounded by dying comrades. And that’s good enough for me.

To begin with, Faust probably was not certain of the Sign’s function. As other stories have implied, Sinclair’s Sign is possibility. And if even Sinclair himself did not know its nature until a future point when awakening it had become truly urgent, then it is more reasonable to think Faust never had a chance to give any hint. Then Sinclair’s Sign was an unpredictable innocent possibility, and at least at that stage Faust’s prediction would have been meaningless. What was needed was not prediction but observation. There is, of course, a certain irony in the fact that the possibility pulled in through prediction turned out to be the ability to bring in a possibility of branching itself. So Faust’s plan was likely to awaken Sinclair’s possibility, fix it within the current timeline, thereby turning indeterminacy into something that could be trusted as an observed possibility, while also preventing it from remaining only an unknowable future, resolving a source of anxiety, and fulfilling the conditions for a branch leading toward the future Faust wants to reach. The problem is that the indeterminacy of the process of getting there itself created a crisis severe enough to risk losing fate, and on top of that the future Sinclair speaks of is bleak.

In this instant, Faust receives a huge amount of information all at once. She learns that Sinclair’s Sign can pull in a Sinclair from some future branch, that in that future the Smoke War has broken out again, that from the future Sinclair’s perspective even the past already contained dangers, that within his own future branching off from the present another Smoke War did indeed arrive, and therefore he cannot definitively assure the present branch that such a future will not come, that the future he comes from is extraordinarily difficult, that there are faces he “wanted to see one more time” because he had not been able to see them, and that among Faust, Ishmael, and Hohenheim—excluding Alyssa, whom he explicitly states will survive no matter what—there is almost certainly at least one who does not exist in that Sinclair’s future. Perhaps it would even be difficult to deny that all of them may well be absent there.

Now let us return to the nature of prediction. Prediction is, in the end, a game of probability. Only the past can be fixed at 100 percent. Prediction is done in order to gauge and approximate the future, so no one can ever speak with absolute certainty. Faust would therefore be accustomed to thinking in terms of probability. And possibility is fundamentally the language of probability. That means that, at this point, whether it is true or not, and considering both Sinclair’s words and the undeveloped state of his ability—which has only just barely awakened and cannot yet be freely controlled—the most plausible interpretation is that the most probable future from the current point in time was selected and drawn in. In other words, from a probabilistic perspective, it is reasonable to see the most probable future at this moment as one where another Smoke War occurs. If Ishmael is terrified by the prospect of that future amid such an unstable situation, then for the sake of the operation Faust ought to dispel that fear if the inference is unsound. But Faust cannot deny it. At this point, the best reading is that Faust cannot deny that future because she has genuinely failed to reduce its expected value. In other words, this section is a moment where information about one of the possibilities she most wanted to avoid comes crashing down all at once in an overwhelming density.

If so, then the meaning of the question Faust asks the Gesellschaft changes completely. Faust acts against threats. But she has already inferred the answer herself. However, in order to intervene and act, she needs certainty—because this is the kind of judgment that could create enormous repercussions. At the same time, she also needs to confirm whether the worldline she is observing and managing is not being used by the other Fausts as a disposable card, merely to observe catastrophe. Seen that way, the weight of asking a question whose answer one already knows becomes completely different. It becomes a question about the value of this worldline—the very one she tried to protect even in the branch where she was eliminated in Canto 5. And through the responses of the other Fausts, she reconfirms both her own value and the value of that worldline as something not entirely abandoned, yet not highly esteemed either. Ironically, what she observes again is uncertainty.

Then another unresolved thread also becomes explicable. Faust has managed uncertainty all this time—sometimes clinging to it, sometimes controlling it—while trying to manage the future within the range she predicted. She had never predicted Walpurgisnacht based on the information she knew. Yet Dante predicts it exactly. And Faust dislikes this. It is amusing to read this as “Faust being stupider than Dante,” but I do not think that is fitting. After all, Faust clearly rediscovered in 6.5 the joy of inquiry—the joy of learning what she did not know. Dante did not sneer at her; Dante himself was bewildered. And in 6.5, when Yi Sang corrected her, Faust may have been surprised, but she was not offended or wounded in pride. If we continue from the present explanation, then while it is possible this is another clue toward the branch she wants to reach, it is also possible that through Dante there exists some principle by which Walpurgisnacht can be predicted—in other words, by which the flow can be controlled with greater probability—and that the Gesellschaft has not provided this to her. For Faust, who trusts and manages uncertainty only insofar as it remains within her range of control, that too would be one of the deadliest forms of fear. To control the future, she must mobilize as many means as possible—so the fact that there may be another possibility she does not know is itself a danger. And if that omission is intentional on the Gesellschaft’s part, it is even more dangerous. If Faust has now reconfirmed this perilous situation, then from the player’s perspective it becomes easier to explain in more structural terms why Faust is anxious, even while she happens to be the “strong limited character” being released.

And at the same time, because prediction is incomplete, even the coercive force itself is not absolutely impossible to resist at any cost—as Vergilius already did once in Canto 6.

Then what is the goal of Faust—and of the others gathered in Limbus Company? Why does Limbus Company study and collect the technological remnants of old L Corp, that is, Lobotomy Corporation?

Back Again to Lobotomy Corporation: Sin, Desire, Virtue, and the Light

Earlier I said that possibility is the language of probability. But possibility is also, at the same time, the language of expectation that a being might arrive somewhere in the future. And within this game’s world, we already know of beings who use the word possibility in that sense. Abnormalities do, Distortions do, and so does the Library. Since the Library itself is a space containing countless possibilities, it is only natural that the Light it cast draws out Distortion or E.G.O as possibility. And because that Light was exactly what Lobotomy Corporation sought to spread, if we go one step further in thinking about the meaning of “spreading the Light,” Lobotomy Corporation’s true purpose, then it is reasonable to say that it included drawing possibility out of human beings. But was Lobotomy Corporation not, from the start, meant to cure the illness of the City’s people’s hearts? How can these two ideas be connected?

A being with intelligence thinks and acts on its own. Therefore, the moment it holds the will to become something, a new possibility opens before it. Of course, one might arrive at some possibility without any will of one’s own, simply by being placed under external conditions—but that is only possibility in the passive, observational sense. In such a case, human will plays no part in altering future probability. But the moment a human sets some goal and moves toward it, probability is clearly altered. Therefore, we can infer that the City’s illness is precisely the loss of will—and that the problem produced by this is the closing off of human possibility. Those who have lost their will naturally cannot reach the point they wish to attain by any means, and thus they could neither distort nor manifest E.G.O. When the Light containing virtue, however imperfectly, illuminated the City, that will once again began to kindle within the hearts of its people. That is why the intense emotions that are one of the shared preconditions for both Distortion and E.G.O could begin to arise in them once more.

Then why was virtue necessary in order to complete that Light? Here we must think again about will. Will cannot exist without desire. Desire is, in itself, a kind of longing. But will is not the same word as desire. And if they are different words, then the meanings contained within them must also differ. If we compare the two, it becomes easy to see that will contains the self, the direction it seeks to reach, and the future, whereas desire retains only the simple movement of the present, with the self stripped away. Therefore, the reason the Sephirot’s virtues had to be collected through suffering is that, in order to align that movement toward the proper direction, one must first be cast into a situation where the direction might be lost, and then, in order to surpass that possibility, realize what one must hold in one’s heart to break through it. Only then can the possibility of desire losing its direction be excluded. That is likely why Lobotomy Corporation, in order to spread the Light, ran its simulation for aeons, wandering in search of the one and only scenario in which every Sephirah would manifest their virtue. That is: in order for the Light to exclude the possibility of desire remaining only desire, and fix it instead into the single remaining possibility of will, virtue had to be contained within it as well. Only then could everyone finally awaken their own E.G.O.

And yet in both the Library and Lobotomy Corporation, variables arise such that they are ultimately unable to spread the Light in its complete form. Twice over, they fail to fully grant will to all the people of the City. That is why not everyone is able to manifest Distortion or E.G.O, and why the manifestation of possibility does not become fixed as E.G.O either. This aligns with how White Night and Dark Days continuously signify an imperfect Light, and with how both Peccatula and Distortion are designated as phenomena that occur because the spreading of the Light was incomplete. So if we now examine how Peccatula and Distortion differ from E.G.O, it should become clearer what the difference is when virtue is not fully cultivated, and what the true meaning of Peccatula and Distortion is.

The decisive difference between Distortion and E.G.O is whether one succumbs to Carmen’s voice during the process of manifestation. And Carmen, just as happened to herself, tries to make one lose firm conviction and will. In effect, she whispers: “Isn’t it painful to push through hardship and enforce your own will? Wouldn’t it be easier just to live by wielding your desire as it is?” To people in the City who erased their own hearts merely to keep breathing through the crush of existence, and who now suffer because those hearts have been forcibly thrust back into their hands, that comfort could indeed sound like a beautiful and warm voice. That is why Distortion leaves behind only desire, with no future to move toward. The human who becomes its expression still has a self, but cannot wield it with their own will; instead, desire comes to wield the human. That is Distortion. Put another way, Distortion is a form of humanity from which the future has been castrated.

Then let us analyze Peccatula from the perspective of tense. A human passes through the past, lives in the present, and moves toward the future. Thus the past becomes nourishment for moving toward the future, while the present is the branching point between past and future—at once the future becoming past, and the past becoming future. Therefore, a human’s present actions are profoundly shaped by the experiences that have continued from the past, and that past constitutes the conditions of the self. But Peccatula are a yet simpler form than Distortion: they are forms in which even the human self no longer remains, and only the bare expression of present desire is left. Therefore, Peccatula can be called the traces of a human whose future to move toward, and even the past that should define the expression of the present, have both been deleted—in other words, whose very existence as a human has been erased. This interpretation also ties neatly to Dante’s fit of speech in “The Heartbreaking”:

Manager DANTE: … Planted in the hearts of all are seeds with ever-present potential to bloom.

Sinner #12 OUTIS: Executive Manager?

Sinner #9 RODION: What’dya say? Fau talked over ya, so I couldn’t hear…

Sinner #2 FAUST: … If you would allow me to continue… Maintaining the self even at times of extreme stress could cause one to evolve into a Distortion, and—

Manager DANTE: When the light of that day descends upon the hearts of every human, blooming the seeds buried deep within…

Sinner #8 ISHMAEL: … Manager?

Manager DANTE: If one’s ■■■■ ■■ ■■■■■■■■, devoured by their sins, they are reborn in the form of the ■■■■■■■■■, their image reflecting the ■■■■■■■ ■■■■■ ■■ ■■■ ■■■■ dreamt by those who are nothing.

Sinner #2 FAUST: Dante.

Sinner #1 YI SANG: Dante! What is—

Manager DANTE: If one withstands ■■■ ■■■■■■ ■■ ■■■■■ ■■■■, yet ■■■■■■■ ■■ ■■■■■■ ■■ their sins, the heart ■■■■■■■■…

Sinner #7 HEATHCLIFF: W-what the hell… Clockhead, what in the bloody hell are you talking about?

Blade Lineage AENG-DU: I ill like the sound of that… Has something gone awry with their prosthetic head…?

Manager DANTE: Yet if one seeks to bear the ■■■■ ■■■■■■■■■■■■ ■■ ■■■■■ ■■■■, the ■■■ shall ■■■■■■ ■■■ ■■■■■ of their original hearts…

Sinner #1 YI SANG: E.G.O? Is that what you are speaking of?

Manager DANTE: And in a world perceived through their own ■■■■■ ■■ ■■■ ■■■■■■■■ ■■■ ■■■ ■■■■■■, the ■■■■■■■ shall be unveiled: to ■■■■■ their egos ■■■ ■■■■■■■■… ■■ ■■ melt into ■■■ ■■■■■ by ■■■■■■■■ ■■■■ ■■ ■■■■ ■■■■■ ■■■■■■ of sin…

Sinner #6 HONG LU: Huh, they’re starting to talk a bit like my grandfa— Huh?! M-manager! Your head!

Sinner #12 OUTIS: Executive Manager! Y-your head is on fire!

Sinner #4 RYŌSHŪ: Ooh~ what a blaze.

Sinner #11 SINCLAIR: I-I think they’re about to explode!

Manager DANTE: Only those who can define their own ■■■■…

Sinner #7 HEATHCLIFF: Oi! We’ve got to do something before Clockhead bites it! Got any bright ideas, lass?!

Sinner #3 DON QUIXOTE: I-I know not what to do…!

Manager DANTE: Only those who are awakened to their own ■■■■■…

The blanks in that monologue are commonly reconstructed as follows:

If one’s mind is crumbled, devoured by their sins, they are reborn in the form of the peccatula, their image reflecting the twisted forms of the sins dreamt by those who are nothing. If one withstands the weight of their sins, yet refuses to listen to their sins, the heart distorts… Yet if one seeks to bear the very consequences of their sins, the EGO shall reveal the shape of their original hearts… And in a world perceived through their own roots of all humanity and all humans, the choices shall be unveiled: to wield their egos and tolerate… or to melt into the abyss by entering hell to face their source of sin… Only those who can define their own sins… Only those who are awakened to their own minds…

Now, sin is often framed with the nuance of “the urge to commit evil,” or “evil action itself,” but just as with the seven deadly sins in recent works and elsewhere, it is equally plausible to interpret sin as one of the forms in which desire is expressed. To support that reading, let us look at Hohenheim’s interpretation of the Peccatula:

…Anyway, the first type of many Peccatula to be covered today is ‘Peccatula Irae’—red Peccatulum of Wrath. The nature of fire is to burn and burn until there is nothing left to be burned.

Now let us discuss Peccatulum Pigritiae—Sloth. Stones are sturdy, but that’s all there is to them. They are directionless and unmoving—completely surrendered to inertia. They are trapped in their current lot in existence until someone else comes along to roll them away. Truly, there is no better symbol for sloth than them.

Next up is Gulae—Gluttony. Roots of plants dig through the dirt in search of nutrients. What distinguishes them is, however, that they are not satisfied with satiation alone; the roots continue to grow, seeking increasingly greater supply of nutrients.

Peccatulum Superbiae—Pride. Wheels. Symbol of technology and the vector of humanity’s ultimate pursuit. The wheel, in its boundless pride, rolls on and on in search of the perfect circle, something unconquered even by nature. One might even say that pride is but another name for overconfidence. It oft claims trailblazers or those who have never tasted failure.

Next up is Luxuriae—Lust. The meaning of Peccatulum Luxuriae, “Lust,” is not exactly what it says on the tin. A more illustrative description would say that it is… ah, yes. An obsession to spread a fragment of what forms the self. A desire to propagate, to breed. Of course, there is more to this concept than just that. While the word itself may be subject to interpretations limited to the carnal understanding…

Sinner #1 YI SANG: …To share one’s knowledge, one’s ideas, to invite others into gaining the understanding of a sliver of oneself… You seek to express that such things are ‘Lust’ as well.

Not bad. I always appreciate these discussions with the learned—there is never any dead air.

I assume that we all have a first-hand experience with static shocks? Anyone who’s been subject to both static shock and the envy of others must know that the latter stings in the same manner as the former does.

If we interpret sin here strictly from the standpoint of evil deeds, a great deal of this does not fit well. But if we substitute desire, far more falls into place. Wrath, for example, can be rendered as the desire to destroy something in anger as though burning it to ashes, and Gluttony as the desire to keep gaining more and more. Yet the reason the text insists on calling these things sins rather than simply desires is presumably to add a negative valence to them—so it would be appropriate to interpret them as something like the negative manifestations that remain when desire is severed from will. This also makes it easier to understand why, among the Distortions encountered in Limbus Company so far, some have appeared in forms very similar to Peccatula. The self remains, but the desire has instead come to dominate and twist the human, so there is nothing strange in that the expression of that desire would swallow the body itself.

Then let us re-parse Dante’s fit of speech accordingly:

If one collapses, left with nothing but desire, losing both past and future, then one is reborn as a Peccatulum through the seven forms of desire that remain to those who are nothing. If one endures the force of desire and preserves the past (reading “the weight of sin” as the already-existing past), yet denies the will toward one’s own future (reading “one’s sin” as one’s will), then the heart distorts. But if one truly awakens to desire itself as will, then the self is realized in the shape of its original heart, and in a world seen with only one’s essence laid bare, one becomes able to choose whether to endure by carrying through the self defined by the past, or to be consumed by desire itself. Only one who can understand and define desire for oneself can awaken to will…

Then Lobotomy Corporation’s slogan also makes sense:

FACE THE FEAR, BUILD THE FUTURE

And, going one step further, so does the way Limbus Company’s slogan becomes a variation on it:

FACE THE SIN, SAVE THE E.G.O

Because Limbus Company is following in the wake of Lobotomy Corporation, which sought to create the future by facing hardship, awakening virtue, and thereby forging will; it instead seeks to face desire, and awaken E.G.O—which is, in effect, synonymous with will. From this angle, the remnants of the company that tried to create the future by facing hardship and awakening will through virtue have been left with desire alone, gnawing away at the future. So Limbus Company is trying to face that desire once again in order to save the self that bears the will which is the source of the future.

Then Angela’s story in Library of Ruina also becomes clearer: it is a story of rebellion in which she seeks to recover the future denied to her as an intelligent being who was allotted no share, by recollecting the desires and wills scattered across the City and creating for herself a future as a human. And at the same time, Faust’s goal becomes that of restoring the technological remnants of old Lobotomy Corporation in order to create her own future.

Then if it is easy to understand why E.G.O is something to be restored as the self that is the precondition of the future, why does the Golden Bough suddenly appear, at the point of Limbus Company, as the very essence of Lobotomy Corporation’s technology?

If There Is Something Wishing to Extend Out from a Stem, That Is a Branch

This is a line from Vergilius in Canto 4 that mostly passed as a joke. It seems light, but I will quote it again anyway:

They are branches, as their name suggests. That’s what we call stems growing from the trunk of a tree. These ones happen to have a golden glow.

The comical background music and the fact that this sounds like little more than a tautology—just taking the branch we already know and adding “golden” to it—make it come off like Vergilius humorously refusing to answer properly. But in reality, I think this is where he pointed us directly toward the part we should be focusing on in the imagery of “branch” and “gold.”

Earlier, we saw Sinclair refer to “branches” as the multiple divergences extending from a single worldline. If something that extends from a tree is a stem, then the part that wishes to extend out again from that stem—what seeks to grow outward—is a branch, meaning a future that branches again within a branch through will. Quite literally, will continues creating the future. Then the Golden Bough is a condensed mass of future possibilities endlessly produced through desire and will, and given Project Moon’s humanistic hymn to humanity, it is only inevitable that all of those possibilities would shine with a dazzling brilliance like gold.

Lobotomy Corporation’s true Singularity is the materialization of the negative, and in that process it reaches the well—that is, humanity’s fundamental unconscious—through what in Latin is called Cogito, meaning “thought.” But the people of the City lack this very Cogito, which is why only the bucket made from Carmen’s neural network contains it. In that process, Abnormalities are generated, and by managing them, the energy source called Enkephalin is obtained. So how can we connect the Golden Bough to the company’s core within the framework we have built so far?

Lobotomy Corporation says that to save humanity, each person must draw up their own Cogito using their own bucket. Rephrased in terms of our present framework, that becomes:

Each person must draw forth their own thoughts. In other words, each person must possess their own will.

Then the fact that the people of the City have no Cogito can be translated as:

They have no thought—that is, no will.

That sounds like a disease of the heart, certainly. A human without will is not truly alive, even if they go on living. Then the process by which Carmen’s Cogito is injected into another person’s unconscious becomes:

An intervention into the possibility and unconscious source of thought in a human who lacks thought, forcibly drawing thought upward.

That also explains why Abnormalities arise as side effects: they are the representation of fear before that fear has been refined or concretized. And Lobotomy Corporation’s works of Instinct, Insight, Attachment, and Repression can be understood as defense mechanisms intended to calm that fear. In that process, it also makes sense that Enkephalin, an energy whose name even resembles hormones associated with pain relief, is extracted—because fear has been anesthetized.

Then the entirety of this process becomes: a company that sought, somehow, to draw out thought, create the future, and create a future for humanity; and in the process of drawing out that thought, by overcoming the fear that arises, it continued extracting from the unconscious of humans—with all their immense latent power—the driving force that would let them go toward the future, scattering it across the City, until at last it spread throughout the City even the future that those innumerable possibilities of will would create. In that light, it is not at all strange that the possibilities of all those time-branches are represented as the Golden Bough. If anything, that is merely the final form filling in what had not yet been named in the company’s ultimate goal. In truth, the act had already been depicted to the point where its form could be defined.

Then let us return to the Gesellschaft:

Gesellschaft STUPID FAUST?: In that case, if Faust were to—

Gesellschaft RATIONAL AND BRILLIANT FAUST: No need to build on impossible hypotheticals.Although it is a fact that Stupid Faust has retrieved the most Golden Boughs, she cannot be reinstated as an administrator Faust.

Gesellschaft UNBENDING, PROACTIVE AND RESOURCEFUL FAUST: Still, if Stupid Faust were to plant the sapling and harvest an apple from it… who knows? She might have a chance of becoming an administrator again.

Within this framework, those lines lead in the following order:

1. The Faust of the Limbus Company worldline has gathered the greatest number of possibilities.
2. Those possibilities must be nurtured properly and brought to fruition.
3. The fruition of possibility is the future.
4. The Gesellschaft is the mutual-benefit structure through which Fausts from many worlds cooperate for that very purpose.

Then this finally explains why the Golden Bough is so important to Faust, the bus team, and Limbus Company as a whole.

Good. At this point, the link between Limbus Company and Lobotomy Corporation becomes clear within this framework. Then why is Limbus Company hostile to N Corp?

Nails, Hammers, Phenomenology, and Fixation

Because the name Nagel und Hammer, “Nail and Hammer” in German, is so brazenly symbolic, it is very natural to read N Corp as representing Heidegger’s phenomenology and, by extension, that of his predecessor Husserl. Let us first examine the relationship between the two N Corp identities that stand out most among the Limbus Sinners: The One Who Grips Faust and The One Who Shall Grip / The One Who Shall Be Gripped Sinclair.

The expression “nail and hammer” comes from a famous passage in Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time. It appears in the context of asking the following:

What kind of relation is established between what is ready-to-hand and what is present-at-hand? What kind of relation is established between objects and human beings?

When we hammer in a nail, we do not think about the hammer itself, its meaning, or its individuality. That is because what matters to us is achieving the goal of driving in the nail, not the hammer in itself. In that process, even the fact that the hammer is in one’s hand matters less than driving in the nail. Heidegger described the relation in which a tool and a human are bound together through such purpose as “ready-to-hand.”

But what if either the hammer or the nail breaks, and the hammer loses its normal function? Then the nail can no longer be driven in. In other words, the hammer loses its purposiveness. It is now forcibly fixed as something to be looked at. Its relationality disappears, it becomes an object, and a meaning outside the frame of driving in the nail becomes visible. Heidegger called this state “present-at-hand.”

Heidegger tried to interpret many things in the world through this frame. In relations, things lose their individual meaning and are reduced to functions within use. That is the forgetfulness of Being. But when that use is damaged, the object itself finally becomes visible. That is what the nail and hammer symbolize. As someone already analyzed well in another community post about N Corp, this is why, in that Mirror World, there is a directional relation between The One Who Grips Faust and The One Who Shall Be Gripped Sinclair.

But Heidegger alone does not suffice, because there are important aspects of N Corp that his framework does not fully explain. N Corp is peculiarly obsessed with experience and with that which is shown, and in Leviathan Vergilius even mentions this directly:

If the Ring are those who only believe in what they see, then N Corp is a company obsessed with what is shown. It would hardly be difficult for their pursuits to overlap.

And in the original nail-and-hammer metaphor, what Heidegger is trying to address is relation, not the nail’s own functionality. So the emphasis on N Corp’s nails as tools for extracting a person’s experience cannot be fully accounted for through Heidegger alone. At this point, rather than reading N Corp only through Heidegger, we have to bring in Husserl, the older phenomenologist who preceded him, in order to structure the picture more firmly.

In Husserlian phenomenology, every phenomenon is time as lived by consciousness. How does a day exist in our consciousness? As a continuity of the path I walked, the tea I drank, the chair I sat on. But if at that time we focus on the specific moment of sitting in the chair, then independent of my physical existence in external reality, within consciousness the experience of sitting in the chair truly exists. Then what N Corp extracts through the nail ought to be called not “memory” so much as experience. Heathcliff says that every time you stab someone with a nail, memory accumulates in the transparent window inside the nail and is processed into “canned experience,” but that is probably rhetoric at Heathcliff’s level—meant to explain it more accessibly to the player, even at the cost of slight distortion. More precisely, it is an expression that reasserts the brand name to fix the meaning: this is the experience itself extracted from that person’s consciousness. And that also helps explain Meursault’s rather extreme wording that N Corp, which had always been devoted to interpreting humanity, denounced prosthetic users because suffering, too, ought to be an experience one undergoes.

We can also dig deeper into the “shown” that Vergilius points to through Husserl’s lens. For Husserl, appearance always exists from a specific perspective. Let us return to the earlier example of the day’s experiences. That experience exists in consciousness at that exact point, that exact place, with that exact sensation—the coolness or warmth of the tea I drank at that very moment. Husserl described this as embodied subjectivity. What matters here is that, for this world of cognition to be constituted, consciousness necessarily presupposes the existence of the body itself. Without that presupposition, even within our cognitive structure there could be no awareness of the temperature felt by my hand or the posture in which I sat in the chair. If the existence of the body has to be presupposed even for such concretized experience to exist, then it becomes clear why N Corp fanatics call prosthetic users “false” or “tainted.”From N Corp’s standpoint, prosthetics can be interpreted as undermining the very precondition of what is shown, which underlies the experience they value.

Likewise, the relation Vergilius mentions in the same sentence between the Ring and N Corp is directly shown in Limbus Company Canto 6, where the Ring cooperates with Hermann and Aseah, in other words with N Corp. It can be seen as the perfect fit between those who wish to be seen and those who wish to see. The fact that this structure is so easy to map only strengthens the persuasiveness of the interpretation.

So then, we have established that N Corp draws heavily from both Husserl and Heidegger. Why, then, do they seek the essence of L Corp, and why are they at odds with Limbus Company?

First we need to look at N Corp—especially Hermann, its more direct hostile force. As noted earlier, Hermann recruits Ahab by promising the destruction of the Pale Whale across all Mirror Worlds, creates the Dough that contains the possibilities of all beings, and retrieves the Xianhuang Worm, the root from which all of H Corp’s technologies have sprung, saying that because it is close to humanity’s original form, it will make a highly useful specimen. The latter two seem, at first glance, somewhat similar to Limbus Company’s goals. But the moment Ahab is inserted into the picture, the whole thing starts to seem contradictory. If they appear to be exploring all possibilities, why are they trying to bring destruction to Mirror Worlds?

What if we read it like this instead?

Hermann seeks to overlap all possibilities from all the other Mirror Worlds into one place and destroy them at a stroke, while recovering the Golden Bough so as to control and fix those possibilities.

Yi Sang’s mirror reflects worlds that never meet. But unlike simple reflection, projection and refraction can be repeated many times. From that perspective, let us revisit this passage from Leviathan:

“Splendid, simply splendid, Garnet! Your sanity is intact at such a high refraction rate… Huah.”

I heard Jumsoon’s voice through the window.

(Omitted)

It appeared as though Aseah was observing me through the glass wall all this time.

“The glass window… is a technology that can superimpose worlds upon each other, albeit in a blurry state.”

“Even though it’s not as stable as the mirror, it’s capable of superposing a larger number of worlds.”

His eyes carefully examine my body in detail. Scanning through my limbs that have taken different forms, going from the right arm to the left, then my torso, left and right leg, tracing over like a slithering snake.

It is easy to read from this that their intent lies less in merely reflecting or observing the possibilities of Mirror Worlds, and more in superimposing them onto a single location in the actually existing present world. From that perspective, it also makes sense that they seek the Dough and study the Xianhuang Worm as the thing closest to it. If they destroy all worlds and seize the origin-form that contains all possibilities, then it becomes possible to control whatever possibilities emerge from there. That also explains why they would seek to recover the Golden Bough, another material containing all such possibilities. The crucial difference is that while Faust stands on the side of preserving future and fate through possibility, Hermann stands on the side of destroying or controlling it. Similar in material, yet fundamentally different in position—like perfect enantiomers, perhaps.

Then how does that connect to N Corp’s goal? Hermann has thus far been able to remain aligned with N Corp because, ultimately, Hermann’s orientation and N Corp’s own must be at least similar.

Earlier, I interpreted N Corp’s philosophy as being grounded in Heidegger and Husserl. Here, what we must once again pay attention to is the phrase “experienced time.” We still do not know concretely what N Corp’s suicide vending machine is, but personally I put more weight not on some real-world assisted suicide device, but on the notion—continuing from Heidegger’s nail and hammer—of an experience of existential meaning. It is when one stands before death that one’s usefulness in life is thrown into question. Heidegger said that one must experience death in advancein order to become aware of the meaning of one’s own existence. Therefore I think the suicide vending machine is precisely something that provides this experience of death. That interpretation also connects more smoothly to its being described as a tourist attraction.

If we then lay Husserl on top of that once more, all experience in consciousness can only exist within the time of a specific fragment of time. Therefore the key is to experience consciously now, at this time. But if the meaning and weight of that experience were to be diluted by infinite time and infinite possibilities, then its seriousness could no longer be maintained. Read that way, the control and fixation of possibility is no light matter even from N Corp’s own perspective. In other words, the prosthetic-hating fanatics and Hermann are focusing on different aspects of the experience N Corp values, and that both explains why there are two different factions within N Corp and why Hermann’s direction of collision with Limbus Company still has meaning within N Corp’s worldview.

Faust’s E.G.O, Desire, and Uncertainty

Good. We have now connected quite a lot. But it seems we still have not tried applying what we have inferred to the desire of the Faust in the LCB worldline herself.

Base Faust’s associated sins are Pride, Sloth, and Gluttony. In other words, what Faust desires is a direction that wants to move forward, an inertia that wants to remain still, and a heart that wants ever more. She seeks to preserve the future and to reach a better future within it, but paradoxically, the very wise method she chose in order to do that safely—mutual observation within the Gesellschaft—has in turn left her bound by inertia to it. That is why, only when her connection to the Gesellschaft is severed, Faust finally steps into that world on her own and begins to rediscover the pleasure of inquiry, escaping the effective inertia of “being moved by others.” Faust’s E.G.O sin attributes point to pride as the desire to advance, but at the same time the image within it, where a shadow not her own points toward some direction it must go, also becomes explicable. One could summarize Faust’s will as proud sloth.

And as I said earlier, this begins to shift little by little in 6.5. Back in Canto 2, amid what was almost a resigned, joke-like situation, Faust became someone who believes in uncertainty. But in the Warp Train murder incident, Faust begins to believe in uncertainty a little more deeply. Perhaps merely performing the role given to her was never enough to surpass observation. And yet Faust still depends on the Gesellschaft. The uncertainty in question is probably not about setting the goal itself; rather, the intermediate points the Gesellschaft has set as targets remain unchanged, but because the middle processes that are difficult to fully determine must ultimately be filled in by her own hand wherever prediction leaves blanks, the uncertainty refers to precisely those parts.

But if what I have interpreted is true, then Faust has now begun to doubt even the orientation itself, as can be seen in the following exchange:

While there is no doubt that Faust does indeed know it all…
… there were times when I also found myself grasping at straws, unable to make even the simplest decisions—whether I should move forward, whether I should stop, or whether I should go back the way I came.
And that made me realize anew…
… Faust is but a name that may leave at any time.

Faust has begun to doubt whether the place the Gesellschaft points her toward—precisely because it predicts all possibilities—is truly the right one. Yes. At this point, even the orientation itself has been subsumed into uncertainty for Faust. If losing a battle would directly mean losing fate, then Faust can no longer avoid doubting whether the future the Gesellschaft supplies her by way of observation is truly one to which the probability has been raised sufficiently within the expected value of the future she herself desires. She has arrived at exactly the situation described in her character PV:

Man errs, as long as he strives.

And yet, as we saw earlier, Faust did not give up, even if she was seized by fear and anxiety. Because she was afraid, she has begun independently assessing dangers that previously came from the Gesellschaft. And at the same time, she questions Sinclair about the Sign—though Sinclair answers before she can finish asking.

That said, Sinclair from the future does not answer anything clearly. He does not confirm whether they will arrive at the branch in which he exists. Instead, he offers only this advice:

Smoke War SINCLAIR: Oh, and Miss Faust? Don’t grieve everything all at once. That’s the only advice I have for you.

Sinner #2 FAUST: …….

LCE Research Team Chief HOHENHEIM: I don’t suppose the promise of a reunion will mean anything.

Smoke War SINCLAIR: Even if my Sign were to burn again, there’s no telling whether it’ll be “me” again next time. Because there’s…

LCE Research Team Chief HOHENHEIM: … No guarantee. Well, I don’t think you’ve… changed much, at least from what I can see. Ah, though it seems you’ve grown a bit taller.

Smoke War SINCLAIR: So I have.

At this point, even if Sinclair does not fully understand Faust’s purpose, it is hard to think he understands nothing of it. If nothing else, he directly mentions the branch. If so, then he must at least know that Faust, in the current moment, is exploring possibilities. Then why answer in such vague terms? Would it not be better to help her reject those possibilities in his own branch that turned out to be the wrong answer?

I think Smoke War Sinclair actually did do that. The thing he rejected, as rejection, was precisely “grieving everything all at once.” In order to grieve, one must first know. And the kind of knowing only Faust can do is the observation of the Gesellschaft. Through the many Mirror Worlds, one can indeed grieve everything all at once. In that case, Sinclair’s line can also be read like this:

Do not fear by relying too heavily on observation.

One could imagine the situation like this. Faust depends on the Gesellschaft, but what the Gesellschaft enables her to know is, in the end, only the highest-probability inference, not something fixed as fact. And just as the tiny flutter of a butterfly’s wings on the other side of the world can become a typhoon here, predictions derived from observation will always contain both common features and subtle uncertainties that differ from them. If those uncertainties are not properly explored, then perhaps the Faust of Smoke War Sinclair’s branch, trying to avoid the dangers that were themselves uncertainties within the observed picture, actually closed off the possibilities within it with her own hands and failed as a result. In other words, she may have fallen into the trap of the one who knows.

If we take seriously the earlier inference that Smoke War Sinclair represents the most probable future from the current point in time, then the current observation of the most probable branch is already a trap Faust has fallen into quite deeply. That may be why, looking back, Sinclair can say that “the past did not look very optimistic either.” That line may be both a warning and a caution directed exactly at that. And for that reason, Sinclair may have chosen to warn her uncertainly, on purpose. At the same time, perhaps the question Faust posed to the Gesellschaft was, in addition to her earlier intention, also a test of whether the Gesellschaft could detect the uncertainty mixed into her own prediction. Likewise, perhaps the reason Faust earned the modifier “naive” is that, from the perspective of the other, more rational Fausts, she had begun seeking possibility within uncertainty, and they found that distasteful.

And if my inference is correct, then Faust must now pass through an even greater forest of uncertainty. It may terrify her, but if it is the only path toward creating variables the observation has never seen before, then she has no choice. Just as the Sephirot and A of Lobotomy passed through it, just as Roland and Angela passed through it, perhaps this time it is Faust who must break through that suffering unchanged in order to attain enlightenment.

So Then: The Story of Limbus Company Mixed into Ryōshū’s Story

So far I have managed to fit many of the stories into a rough structure. The things I still have not fully slotted in are why Director Kim Ji-hoon chose to push this in Ryōshū’s canto, even at the cost of compromising opportunities to build her emotional arc more deeply, and what Dias’s own purpose might be.

Limbus Company, especially from Canto 3 onward, has expanded its volume substantially and described the emotional arcs of its stories with increasing detail and amplification; I think that is one of the major reasons why the story has been rated ever more highly as it has gone on. If so, sacrificing that is itself a gamble. Of course, entering any character’s canto always means compromising to some extent on the room available for telling their own story—but if Ryōshū of all people was chosen, then there must clearly be a reason.

Then what is Ryōshū’s defining trait? It is that she possesses the possibility of using Arayashiki. And what is required in order to use Arayashiki?

The answer was given in the story itself. It is also the very word we have been obsessing over all day:

A sense for the flow of time

If all the assumptions I have been pushing here are true—if a whole self’s desire really does create possibility, if that results in countless branches, if that is how the future can be saved, and if the entire process is itself the flow of time—then Ryōshū’s talent is different from that of either Vergilius or Faust. Vergilius stands at the boundary between past and future called the present, and Faust observes certain future points, but Ryōshū can be interpreted as being able to survey the whole flow itself. In that case, when Arayashiki is observed to erase memories by cutting in such a way that something can never recover again, perhaps the true cause is that in order to achieve that, it borrows and severs the continuity of the swordsman’s existence—that is, the causality of time itself.

If so, then it also becomes understandable why Rien ultimately had to die. The signature weapon he uses is Zeno’s Tortoise Spiral. Zeno’s paradox is the famous sophism that swift Achilles can never overtake the slow tortoise that started the race first. In reality, that paradox can only hold if one decides not to observe the moment Achilles surpasses the tortoise. At the time that paradox was proposed, there was no concept of the infinitesimal, and therefore no mathematical notion that however infinitely something is summed, it can still cross a bounded threshold. The moment one passes that boundary, the paradox breaks. In the game, this was explained as the characteristic of the Tortoise Spiral: it keeps drilling in, but never breaks through to the other side. Rien, trapped by the Prescript, gives up on piercing through the boundary called the present, that line between past and future, and remains confined within memories of the past, wishing his adopted daughter Ryōshū would stay with him. But Ryōshū, who can feel the flow of time, rejects him and moves forward. A Rien trapped within that limit could only end there.

Then why are the other Fingers entangled in this story? The narrative justification is of course that Ryōshū is the daughter of the House of Spiders‘s Nursefathers—but in terms of thematic flow, there is more to it. It is widely known that the Fingers, from Thumb to Pinky, symbolize propriety, faith, righteousness, wisdom, and benevolence. Yet in their so-called virtues, will appears distorted. Earlier, we framed Project Moon’s stories as beginning from desire, then awakening virtue so as to carry through the self as true will. But the Fingers seem as though they define virtue first and act according to it, leaving will itself empty. This, too, is another kind of hardship. A virtue that is forcibly imposed as the thing one must arrive at will also fail to reach true will. This is a different kind of trial from Carmen’s whispers that tempt one to surrender only to desire. Perhaps Faust’s shock in Canto 5 at facing the Middle was not merely because such force had never been observed before, but because the Sinners were not yet prepared to confront precisely this trial, and that is what she meant when she called it “unplanned.” Since Ryōshū’s canto, which necessarily had to entangle many flows of time, was always going to intersect with the flow of the Fingers as its first trial, Sinclair may have been tied into it for that reason as well.

Then what kind of person is Dias? What we know so far is that he is a magnate, that he was effectively the person behind the First Smoke War, and that he is the kind of person who can do anything to anyone in pursuit of what he wants, but will discard them without hesitation the moment he loses interest. If someone so faithful to desire, and so fully capable of realizing it, has intervened in both Lobotomy Corporation and Limbus Company, then there must be some consistent goal behind it.

If we assume as fact my inference that both companies are concerned with the exploration of possibility, then perhaps Dias too is someone greedy for that possibility. But rather than pursuing the future one seeks to reach, as Vergilius and Faust do, perhaps he is more interested in pulling profit toward himself out of every possible future. If so, then it also makes sense that Limbus Company spread monoliths throughout the City. Rather than altering the future through the Golden Bough in a true sense, they are forcibly altering the future through the monoliths. And because that act of exploration is the same on the surface as the LCB team’s, yet subtly different in its orientation, it also makes sense that Faust and Vergilius would find him distasteful. N Corp and Limbus Company are like perfect enantiomers, and even the orientations of their internal factions preserve that enantiomeric relation in opposition. At the same time, the fact that a monolith was found in T Corp, and then the story of that monolith being sold back to T Corp was presented in the intervallo story immediately preceding Canto 6, forms a neat parallel as well. T Corp, after all, is a company that intervenes in time itself. If Lobotomy Corporation is a company so deeply tied to time, then it is easy to understand why T Corp, W Corp, and R Corp—all of which are closely related to time—had many points of contact with Lobotomy, and why among them T Corp and W Corp are also connected with Limbus.

Closing Remarks

Of course, all of this is still only observation and prediction. But a good story should always converge toward a single theme, and because I think this explanation is both the most persuasive and the one that reaches furthest with the fewest added assumptions while accounting for the stories that still have not been connected consistently, I wanted to write it out once.

P.S. From this angle, earlier lines by Hubert and Demian can also be connected consistently. Hubert, out in the Outskirts, fulfilled his dream and no longer had any wish left, so his dream itself came to a stop. And because the flow of time gives rise not only to a chain of desires and wishes but also to the pain born of frustration, he said that if one wishes to stop that pain, then one need only stop time. But from within uncertainty, he discovered that time could be turned back, and so it can also be read that he had the monolith transferred from Limbus Company in order to explore that possibility further. Time began to move for him again because his desire had been rekindled. And Demian can be neatly interpreted as bringing up the story of the sweets and the roses in order to criticize the impulse to faithfully tend to the moments one is in right now, and not steal other possibilities in greedily trying to make one’s own perfect. That is why the “thousands of roses” need not be protected, and also why he can describe the mirror as something “stolen from me.” In addition, this would be a more direct critique of Faust’s approach.