how do you think ranpo survived that original blast?
I can’t do much more than speculate, since we didn’t see him directly after the blast happened and thus don’t know exactly how it initially affected him specifically. Teruko was even closer to the center of it all than he was, and Fukuzawa, Aya, and Fyodor were all at the direct epicenter of the blast; I’m even less sure how they could have survived, but given that we saw them alive, albeit injured or dazed, directly after it occurred (even though Teruko and Fukuzawa got absorbed into Ame-no-Gozen shortly thereafter), they all clearly did.
My best guess as to how everyone survived the singularity’s creation would be that the blast was less like an explosion and more like an intense, but highly localized, earthquake; the ground that the characters were standing on was directly impacted, not the bodies of the characters themselves. The actual shockwave seems to have mostly affected the ground, as it created that massive crater, and the energy release from that is what knocked people out and caused damage to the surrounding area. The sudden damage caused to the surrounding ground by the crater opening up and by any falling structures that were destabilized by its creation would then account for the event’s apparent noise (it’s illustrated with a loud BOOM in the illustrated page at the beginning of chapter 115). We also know from that same illustrated page in 115 and from a comment that Aya makes (“is it because of that light earlier?”) that the singularity’s creation generated a massive beam of light, so I’d guess that the “dissolve” effect that seems to wash over the characters at the end of 114.5 is actually meant to represent very intense lighting, not explosive energy. Again, I’m not entirely positive of anything, but that potential explanation makes the most sense to me given the information we have at present.
