Part I: The Foundation of Telepathic Industry
X1: The Soybean Revolution
The narrative begins with the establishment of a new telepathic industry centered around soybeans in Manchuria. The Manchu Edison Film Corporation sponsors the construction of fields, factories, and mines, using modern advertising techniques to introduce the “modern soybean” to the region. Central to this campaign is Koko Emotion, a mascot and advertising icon described as the “big little sister” of Koko-omote. Both characters are depicted as pregnant with little dolls resembling themselves, serving as symbols for the “Strengthen Telepathy!” campaign. The soybean proves remarkably versatile, used to manufacture salad oil, magazine paper, fertility medicine, and movie film.
X2: The Land of Ice
The setting shifts to a surreal landscape where air and sky are black. Weather vanes atop every building indicate the direction of “local knot flow,” while the sky fills with smoke puffs. Knots are revealed to be thoughts themselves—they travel through blood, transform into different shapes, tie and untie themselves under tongues, and exit through fingernails. The sun appears as a shapeless face made of ice bubbles that never lingers long above the horizon. Within each nitrogen bubble exists a miniature land of ice that can be entered with a lantern, though no air exists inside these bubble-worlds.
X3: Human Fuel and Steam Movies
A disturbing industrial process emerges where humans are converted into fuel for “steam movies.” At the Imperial Blood Banks near Harbin, thoughts are wrapped in bark cylinders to resemble wooden logs, while others are dressed in black cloth bags imitating coal lumps. These prepared thoughts enter glass steam chambers where burning begins, transforming people from flame to steam. They become the very air that surrounds the world, completing a cycle of human transformation into atmospheric essence.
Part II: The Technological Infrastructure
X4: Mechanized Thought Collection
The Manchu Edison business model centers on mechanized thought collection at all their theaters. Every theater lobby features a thought donation machine shaped like a projector, which extracts, tests, separates, and stores different types of thoughts from paying customers. Police monitor both movies and the hygienic thought collection processes under tax franchise. The collected thoughts are mixed into film chemicals during development, helping fix images on celluloid and changing photographed images. A metal device called “The Emperor” stores thoughts, with many copies distributed throughout Manchurian thought banks. Enterprising children sell home extraction kits door-to-door, enabling movies to be made from previously unknown pictures imprinted on new film through these extraction processes.
X7: The Thought-Blood Empire
Manchu Edison Thought-blood emerges as a powerful Christian bio-empire promoting Sister Jesu's soy bean throughout Manchuria. Their breakthrough invention—a portable thought-blood purification device—separates thought-blood from groundwater for dual usage in religious, combat, and cinema applications. When Steam Church members drink the thought-blood of the Steam Woman from Iishi steam boilers, they consume purified water that aids medical and telepathy research. This enables the use of diseases to research human properties.
The Center for Disease Recycling, run by Christian administrators, processes missing people as test subjects for prayer experiments, including being strapped to crosses during disease release. Scientific data from these tests is sold worldwide. The Pure Land Motion Railroad incorporates thought-blood machinery into train cars, creating mobile laboratories where tubes allow rabbits and animals carrying soy knots to move between cars, offering passengers new diseases and cures to strengthen the nation while streamlining onboard thought-blood collection.
Part III: The Telepathic Ecosystem
X10: Mosquitoes as Thought Carriers
Mosquitoes serve as living knots that spread telepathy by drinking blood without skin contact, using leg veins to transport knots between people. They can pass through government building walls, and each person receives a personal mosquito guide to the blood world. On private days in special homes, people wear mosquito masks. The mosquitoes' legs extract thoughts from air while collecting blood for Manchu Edison, creating a biological network for thought transmission.
X11: Animation and Thought Layers
Thoughts exist in layered formations where animated drawings come to life as a man sketches on blackboards. Hands create people, and line-drawn cars accelerate into the fourth dimension, distorting surrounding objects. In theaters, movie talkers conduct audience orchestras dancing silently in their seats. The movie talker wears a stage draped around her neck, her hands swinging and singing in her head while dropping world pieces onto the stage. This stage becomes a floating island within the ear, where people travel as invisible singers on telepathic film strips covering the sky. All participants—people and mechanical components—form parts of the telepathic projector in this phantasmagoria later known as the Manchu Edison Film Corporation.
X13: The Dangerous Liquid
Thought-blood is revealed as a dangerous liquid containing dangerous fish that wait in the heart. Every thought constitutes an island—part of a lost world where Japan itself becomes folded thought-blood. The world appears as a small sphere with a pinch from which little strings folded into knots fly into darkness. Thought-blood flows as a big river in a small cave populated by blind white lizards that fly through cave air and over dark oceans, flying over sleeping Japan at night.
Machiko, a character who travels through her own thought-blood, possesses thought-blood that functions as an eye, allowing her to perceive patterns between words and animals. Syllables transform into vegetables that are themselves thoughts with independent viewpoints. The narrative warns that if dolls discover they aren't people, they will become angry. Machiko investigates human properties until becoming oversensitive to the fact that there are too many thoughts for the counted number of brains, leading her to retrain as a movie talker to help herself and audiences forget.
Part IV: The Cinema System
X14: Telepathic Cinema Mechanics
The Telepathic Cinema requires people to function as its complete motion picture system. People serve simultaneously as cameras, subjects in front of cameras, developing the pictures inside themselves, editing and duplicating them, projectors, and theaters with internal audiences. Moviegoers attend to forget, while simultaneously becoming part of the movies themselves. The system records telepathic cinema in people using ordinary machines, with movies consisting of thought-blood dried at 24 frames per second inside thought-blood donation machinery like the “Emperor” boiler projector. Missing people's thought-blood serves as ink for cel animators, mixed with film chemicals to record unknown thoughts.
X15: The Miniature Blood World
Manchuria exists as a miniature world inside blood, populated by creatures made from thought-knots who read while fire burns the dolls. Words within bodies speak themselves, and geography takes many forms as movement occurs between people, with specific forms and emblems for each character. Telepathy functions because of this small scale. Machiko travels through her own thought-blood where stories are written with fat words, creating patterns between words and animals, with vegetable syllables that are thoughts possessing their own viewpoints, including talking snowflakes.
Part V: The Agricultural and Spiritual Landscape
X16: Rice, Administrators, and Trees
Single rice pieces found on intercity train floors and seats take control of living human bodies, making them laugh. Each grain represents antique living bone capable of thought, though lacking spatial awareness. Manchuria itself constitutes a single grain of bone rice, described as very sad. In soy fields, tiny rice grains help grow the Shinkyo Administrators—one thousand stone dolls at a time, half-clothed and worn down in frozen grass ruins of an ancient wizard city. These administrators emerge from dirt, their faces and bodies carved by flying rice pieces along ruined railroad paths.
This location is called the Garden of the Theater, where single grains sometimes pile to create miniature houses for movie dolls. Later, dolls attach to barren rice plants, eventually producing more rice. Meanwhile, thoughts exist as bodiless brains kept in unlit cathode tubes inside cardboard boxes on thrones in Shenyang Palace on the mountain within smokelight.
Thought-blood flows through underground street pipes that leak, feeding ginkgo tree roots. The ginkgos carry thought-blood to leaves where it evaporates and burns spontaneously, creating polarized light that casts sharp shadows along wide avenues. In these shadows, people grow at road edges with fingers sprouting leaves, smelling tree syrup. Their burning fingers hiss as thoughts leave them, creating bubbling steam talk that can heat train cars or power engines. Growing people shake loose from their originating dirt and climb ginkgo trees with burning fingers.
At treetops, observers see the hungry sky filled with holes in every direction. Thoughts fly in flocks, eating thoughts clustered around nitrogen bubbles containing hot ice. The horizon leads to the heart—an empty sphere toward which weather vanes point. Streets lined with ginkgo trees have leaves that are thoughts forgotten by others, burning in the trees as people climb seeking lost thoughts. When unsuccessful, they cut down trees to light night lamps. Some trees walk among people as candles, their blood burning visibly through skin to light the night.
Part VI: Gas, Plague, and Evolution
X17: Gas to Telepathy
Originally, weakened thought spores at lake edges merged with local volcanic soy plants. Nitrogen gas from resulting beans learned to bind into tiny bubbles shaped like floating dolls. These complex bubbles, in diffuse and weakened form, were carried by volcano steam to countryside near Changbaishan. When inhaled, bubbles pass through blood, creating mild telepathy in local farmers before exiting under fingernails. People worked happily in open-air pits mining and crushing shale boulders, creating gravel mixed with soybean seed for railroad beds beneath mobile rails. Later, these beds became giant gravel fields covering large Manchurian sections where knots waited to grow, with gas flowing place to place through gravel.
Before the national rail system's completion, thoughts traveled along country gravel paths, arriving inside many people. Many attributed these thoughts to rice or rice dust in the air, while others believed they came from dust dropped by known or unknown enemies in wooden airplanes seen at horizons or silent above trains and cities.
X18: The Thought Plague
A thought plague breaks out in Manchuria caused by rice falling from the air. This thought distribution connects to certain Manchu Edison movies and the soy coal company owned by Princess Klaatu. The thoughts operate by tying and untying themselves under tongues before leaving through fingernails, taking different shapes in the air and transforming into dolls or mosquitoes.
X19: Thought Fish and Industrial Integration
The narrative concludes with a character assisting in thought-blood extraction, analysis, and delivery, gaining status as new blood technologies take hold in the company and industry. Animators use thought-blood pictures of lost places—rivers in caves where fish wait on water worlds with pinches in the middle, from which thoughts fly jumping. Her thought-heart is an octopus living in blood rocks at her veins' center. After her first husband dies in war, her second husband takes his family name to preserve family identity. Later, she revives a cooked fish by placing her hand over it, keeping it in a fishbowl where it swims through the night.
Conclusion: The Integrated System
The VolumeX narratives present an intricate world where biological, technological, industrial, and spiritual systems interweave to create a comprehensive telepathic infrastructure. From soybean-based advertising campaigns to thought-blood purification, from mosquito-carried telepathy to rice-grain consciousness, these stories describe a society where the boundaries between human, machine, nature, and thought have dissolved into a complex ecosystem of mutual dependence and transformation. The Manchu Edison Film Corporation serves as the central organizing force, orchestrating this vast network of telepathic cinema, thought collection, and consciousness manipulation across the Manchurian landscape.