WARNING: The following contains spoilers for To Your Eternity Episode 13, “Aspiring to Go Higher,” now streaming on Crunchyroll.
Losing Gugu has taken a tremendous emotional toll on Fushi in To Your Eternity. It's not just that's he lost a brother, it also shines a light on his harsh reality: this likely won't be the last person he will have to say goodbye to and this will not be the first time that he will be left behind by a loved one.
So, in the anime's latest episode, he does what he thinks is the right choice -- leaving everyone behind so the Nokkers won't attack them in order to strengthen his emotional resilience. But Fushi isn't alone for very long before he's accompanied by an old friend, only leading him into even greater trouble.
The "What am I?" question continues to haunt Fushi in To Your Eternity, and as he grapples with Gugu's recent demise, his immortality feels more and more like a curse than ever in Episode 13. Fushi isn't sure what his purpose is anymore. He isn't even a person in the eyes of his Creator -- instead, he's regarded as a "mechanism" to collect and preserve information about the world. The Creator claims that he's essentially Fushi's 'parent' but is immediately shot down. Fushi has a parent and it isn't the Creator. So far, all we (and he) know about them is that they have the faint outline of a young girl holding a stuffed toy, but nothing more.
With the Nokkers still after him in the episode, Fushi tries turning into inanimate objects to hide from them but the Creator warns that this is putting him at a severe disadvantage. If the Nokkers find him in that state, Fushi will be left with nothing but his initial state, the orb. The Creator adds that he will soon leave Fushi and it'll be up to him to defeat the Nokkers. But Fushi is done. He doesn't care about anyone or anything anymore.
This doesn't last long. Initially, another of Fushi's friends, Pioran, left Booze Man's place in favor of traveling with Fushi. But after accompanying Fushi to Takunaha, she ignores his pleas for her to return home, telling him that she wants to give meaning to her life by helping him. In the end, Fushi relents but maintains his distance from her. Pioran tries to take care of him by offering him food and making sure he's warm at night.
Fushi realizes that in order for him to not see Pioran meet the same end as Gugu, he has to get stronger. He knows that pain is an important factor in his transformations and slowly arms himself for when he has to fight the Nokkers again. But it's still not enough.
Pioran decides that Fushi needs a new environment to train in and they travel by ship to get there. However, they're diverted by a young girl who insists that they board a different one. Immediately, Fushi and Pioran are separated and Fushi is thrown into a jail cell. They're taken to a prison island known as Jananda Island where the worst criminals are kept and nobody ever leaves. While there, Fushi tries and fails to find a way to rescue Pioran until the young girl who had purposefully misled them offers him a way to save the old woman: If Fushi wins in the arena on the island, his wish will be granted.
The Creator has continuously reiterated that Fushi's job in To Your Eternity is to collect information and be a vessel in which to hold that information. During his conversation with Pioran in Episode 13, he realizes that he cannot stop his friends from dying or himself from living forever. But he will not allow them to die a second death by losing them to the Nokkers, thereby losing his memories of them. As Pioran herself says, people will only be truly dead once they're forgotten. Fushi has grown to the point where he doesn't want to live life according to the Creator, he wants to get stronger -- not for the sake of the world but for those he cares about.