Asuna and Morisaki enter Agartha

Asuna and Ryuuji Morisaki enter Agartha by passing through a lake of Vita-aqua and descending through the ruins beneath it. The crossing joins two quests born of loss: Morisaki seeks a way to bring back his dead wife, while Asuna, unable to make sense of Shun’s death and the strange world opening before her, chooses to accompany him. Their arrival reveals Agartha as a vast underground landscape, but the journey’s later revelations make clear that reaching it cannot undo death without consequence.

Causes and Stakes

At the threshold, a boy confronts Ryuuji Morisaki, then returns his short sword to its sheath and says that his assignment is to retrieve the Clavis. He removes the crystal from Asuna’s neck and puts it around his own before asking her name. The exchange identifies him as Shin, Shun’s younger brother, and Asuna learns that Shun is dead. Shin explains that Shun knew people could not survive long on the surface, yet had broken the law and gone there anyway. The revelation makes the passage into Agartha inseparable from the loss that preceded it: the brother who accompanied Asuna on the surface is gone, and the younger brother who remains is guarded and brusque.

Morisaki’s purpose is different but equally shaped by death. He tells Asuna that he intends to continue into Agartha and seek a way to bring his wife back, apologizing for having put her in danger. He then enters the lake. Asuna is bewildered by the events around her—Shun, Shin, Morisaki, Agartha, and the possibility of resurrection—but calls after Morisaki and says she will come too. When he asks whether she wants to bring back the boy who died, she cannot give a definite answer. Her decision is not presented as a settled plan; she follows despite not fully understanding her own reason.

Crossing the Threshold

Morisaki holds out his hand, and Asuna takes it, stepping into the underground lake. He explains that its ancient liquid, Vita-aqua, has almost no buoyancy and that a person can breathe if it fills the lungs; Agartha lies below. The detail changes the lake from an ordinary obstacle into the means of passage. Morisaki wades farther in, with the water rising to Asuna’s chest, and continues ahead as she struggles to keep up.

They descend a staircase among ruins until it ends abruptly at a hole that seems bottomless. Asuna hesitates, feeling a primitive fear, but Morisaki takes her hand and leaps. The plunge carries them down into darkness. Their entry is thus a physical surrender to a route whose destination cannot be seen: Asuna does not cross by mastering her fear or by understanding the place, but by accepting Morisaki’s hand and following him into the unknown.

First View of Agartha

After moving through a ruined corridor, they emerge to a vast landscape. A grassy plain extends to the horizon, interrupted by forests and rivers beneath a blue sky. The view is so unlike the expected confines of an underground world that Asuna responds in admiration. This first sight gives Agartha a double character: it is reached through a submerged, dark passage, yet opens onto a landscape that appears expansive and sky-lit.

The contrast also marks the change in scale of the journey. The crossing has taken Asuna and Morisaki away from the immediate encounter with Shin and into a world with its own terrain and history. But the landscape’s beauty does not settle the questions that brought them there. Morisaki’s aim remains to find a way to restore his wife, and Asuna’s uncertainty about following him remains unresolved at the moment of arrival.

The Cost of the Quest

The later search gives their entry its tragic consequence. Morisaki learns from Nami, a woman who says she has been dead for five years, that resurrection has a price which varies according to the time, situation, and person. When he asks whether this explains Eve’s absence, Nami confirms that the price of bringing her back was Eve herself: one life for another. Her account makes resurrection not a simple recovery of the lost, but an exchange that can take another life and leave the returned person bereft.

The cost becomes immediate when Morisaki’s own attempt ends in despair. He tearfully asks Shin to kill him. Shin refuses, saying that his brother spoke to him inside the Gate of Life and Death and told him to embrace loss and keep living. As the Shakuna Vimana flies away beneath a clear blue sky, Asuna slowly opens her eyes while Morisaki’s tears fall on her cheeks; she gently embraces him. The movement from the lake’s threshold to this aftermath gives the entry its decisive meaning: Agartha offers a path toward the dead, but the journey culminates not in an uncomplicated reversal of loss, but in the living being urged to continue and to care for one another.