Slowly the girls are making their way towards the bright light hidden somewhere in the middle of this new city layer, and in the daytime they’ve noticed that there are these weird stone statues with creepy expressions on them. If you pay close enough attention, you’ll notice that all the eyes look to the (viewers’) left. Hmm…

Yuuri borrows the camera they received from Kanazawa and starts taking pictures of their surroundings, including many shots of the statues, but she’s unfamiliar with how to use the camera and has to learn on the fly. She tries to get Chito to turn around and pose for a picture while she’s driving the Kettenkrad, but this results in Chito driving them into a small stone statue. It falls over onto the girls and if they weren’t wearing their helmets, the accident might have killed them.

Chito is understandably a little pissed off; Yuuri just can’t be serious sometimes. However the silver lining is that the incident helps Chito discover a new camera feature, although she doesn’t initially tell Yuuri what it is out of spite.

At night the girls continue to follow the streetlights until they decide to stop for a meal before bed. Chito and Yuuri take stock of their remaining rations, and learn that the flavor of their dinner that evening is cheese! Chito also takes the opportunity to show off her newly learned camera feature – a timer. Chito uses it to take a picture of her and Yuuri together.

The next day the girls resume their journey, and they finally reach the source of the very bright light just as the sun is setting. However what’s surprising is that given how blinding the building is on the outside, it’s pitch black on the inside. Chito lights their lamp and the girls proceed.

Once inside Yuuri and Chito discover that there are large versions of the strange stone statues lining the pathway and even alongside some very long flights of stairs. Eventually the girls reach a very large stone slab with lots of pictures and words on it, and Chito is able to decipher some fragments of text. She figures out that the building they’re in is a temple, and it’s meant to be a reproduction of the afterlife. There’s also some stuff written about a god.

Suddenly the girls’ lamp goes out and everything is swallowed up in darkness. Yuuri repeatedly calls out for Chito as she fumbles around in the dark, but the latter doesn’t reply. Finally the girls bump into each other, and Chito reveals that she stayed silent mostly to pull a prank on Yuuri and see her friend’s reaction. Yeesh, what are best friends for eh?

Then from out of nowhere the chamber the girls are in is filled with a blinding light. There is a huge stone statue meant to represent some kind of god, and above it is a giant mobile made up of metal shapes.  It is beautiful, yet still a strange thing to look upon. What is its meaning?

Underneath the statue and mobile are fake lilypads and fish encased in some kind of glass or plastic pond; Yuuri is disappointed that the fish cannot be eaten. The girls stop for a break underneath the stone statue and ponder the meaning behind the creation of the fake pond. No one really knows what the afterlife is like anyways, no? Chito theorizes that perhaps because the earlier humans didn’t want to think about the afterlife being a place of darkness, they created a temple where they could build a tribute using light. A kind of idealistic paradise, if you will.

My thoughts: Did anyone else notice that all the stone statues look to the left, except the one portraying the “god”, which looked to the right? I wonder what the significance of that is.

Also, I think it’s a nice touch that Chito is enough of a bookworm that she’s read all these tidbits and acquired a lot of random information about the humans of the past (our modern world essentially), but doesn’t know what most of it means. So for example she knows what a camera is, and more or less how to use it, but she doesn’t know what cheese is.  Although to be fair, Yuuri doesn’t know either.

I had a really morbid thought – what if the camera ends up being the girls’ way of chronicling their journey because at the end of the season (or the manga, which I haven’t read) they finally run out of supplies and die? x_X

I wonder how the light in the temple was created. More electricity? Some other mysterious means that wasn’t shown? And now that the girls have found the source of the bright light, where will they go from here?