Chapter III
It was dark by the time Shinji awoke, still laying on Rei's head. He must have dozed off while he was thinking, and eventually fallen fully asleep. Shinji stood up and looked around, trying to see if Asuka had gotten back from her foraging trip yet. With a sigh of disappointment, he saw that the landbridge was the same as when he had last looked at it...hours ago? He couldn't keep up with the time here, and he didn't even think that Asuka would be able to tell time by the sun's position. The moon was out, now, though, so it didn't matter to him any more.
We have nothing, but we are expected to survive here on this desolate Earth? Shinji thought. It's as if God's laughing at us. He looked up to stare at the energy-dead EVA-Unit 01, floating there in the sky.
"As long as there is one person left in EVA...it will be eternal proof that mankind had ever existed." He had heard that during Third Impact, as well as his mother saying, "Sure, it'll be lonely, but as long as the Earth, the Sun, and the moon exist, everything will be alright." He pondered that saying for a moment. Had that really been Ikari Yui saying that to him? Or had it been one of Rei's hallucinations? He felt that it had been his mother saying it, but Rei had ways of toying with people's minds that it could have been her all along.
However...if either one of them had said it, then that might just mean that Asuka and he were supposed to rebuild the Earth. That's what happened all those years ago, when humans first came into being; they survived with barely anything, just as Asuka and he had to survive now. The Earth existed, the Sun existed, and the moon existed; all was as said...however, "it'll be lonely" troubled him most. Did that mean that there was nothing to do but sit around and die?
At that moment, Shinji decided to swim back to the landbridge. He walked across the fallen head, but tripped on one of the remaining strands of purely white hair on Rei's head. Into the orange waters he fell, falling deeper and deeper in them. He was going back...back to where he had been during Third Impact.
He remembered vividly all of the orange atmosphere around him at that moment, as well as the darkness far below him, into which the vision of his mother had fallen as the final Impact had come to a conclusion. However, he noticed something that had not been there the first time he had been in the sea of LCL.
Bodies. Silhouettes of humanoid forms, floating about in the waters below. Without looking further, Shinji thought one word, the word which summarized what he saw perfectly. Life.
When Rei had explained the concept of LCL down here during Third Impact, she had said that it was the reverted form of human beings, as well as all other life. Now that he saw the bodies in the LCL, Shinji now saw the concept of LCL as a pre-embryonic state for all beings. This was truly primordial, truly before the beginning. As human beings grew, they evolved past this form, into more humanoid forms. Another phrase that his mother had spoken during Third Impact was, "All life can grow if they can imagine themselves within their hearts." It hit Shinji like a sledgehammer: no one had died during Third Impact. They had all just been reverted to become more easily fused into Rei to complete the Instrumentality Project, the project that fused all living beings into one creature. Ultimately, Shinji had rejected Instrumentality, forcing Rei and the spirit of Kaworu to physically die. No one else had died, just the vessels for the project itself; everyone else had just remained LCL, as if Instrumentality had never begun. Now these people, the bodies, had imagined what they previously were in their hearts, causing regrowth to occur.
The Earth was regrowing...
