March 26, 2007. Outside.
Arata looked at the cloak.
He looked at the knife.
He looked at my face.
His expression was different from the usual, which was to become briefly, genuinely uncertain.
"Well," he said. "That's new."
"You keep saying that," I said.
"Because it keeps being true." He circled me slowly, examining the cloak. "Walk me through it. Exactly. From when she first spoke."
I walked him through it.
By the end, Miu had her notebook open, her pen moved without her eyes moving from me.
"You didn't use a grave," Arata said.
"No."
"No ritual. No blood. No sacrifice of any kind."
"I had a conversation," I said.
"A conversation," he repeated, as if testing the weight of the word.
"That's what it felt like."
Saiko raised her hand. "For what it's worth, from outside he went under, like, his body was still there but he wasn't," and when he came back he was wearing a haunted costume and holding a murder weapon. The conversation detail wasn't visible."
"Thank you," I said. "That context is very helpful."
"You're welcome," she said.
Genkei had been quiet since we came outside. He spoke now. "Your aura is different. Since you came back. It's layered. Like there are two things where there was one. It's not like gravebinding where you have your own aura and another is close to yours."
I felt the cloak against my shoulders. It didn't feel like cloth. It felt like…intention. Borrowed intent, coiled.
"What does this mean?" I asked Arata.
He stopped circling me.
"Honestly?" he said.
"Ideally," I said.
"You did something that shouldn't be possible," he said. "Gravebinding works through graves, through the anchored remains of a specific dead person. The grave is the structure. Without it you shouldn't have anything to 'bind' to." He tapped his staff on the ground. "But ghosts don't have graves. They have stories. And you, somehow, made a binding through the story."
"Through the conversation," Miu said, without looking up from her notes. "The moment he engaged genuinely, not to answer the question but to understand it, he formed a thread."
"A thread," Arata said.
"The ghost recognized him," she said. "Not as prey. As interlocutor." She underlined something. "That recognition created a connection. The connection became a contract. The contract became a binding. That's my personal theory."
Arata was quiet for a moment.
"Miu," he said.
"Yes."
"That's the most coherent explanation of an unprecedented event I've ever heard on the spot."
"Thank you," she said. "I've been thinking about it since he touched the grave in the cemetery."
Everyone looked at her.
She looked up from her notebook. "He had a high spiriton reading even before the first binding with Kenji Eito based on the report Arata gave in. The quality of it was unusual. I formed a hypothesis."
Arata did a report on me?
"And?" I said.
"You're a proof of concept," she said. "Currently."
I absorbed this.
"I don't know how to feel about this," I said.
"It's interesting." She closed her notebook. "Which, in the long run, may be useful."
---
"Congratulations," Arata said, clapping his hands once. "Itsuki is officially a gravebinder. First rank: Graven."
Saiko blinked. "Not Pale?"
"Not Pale," he confirmed. "Pale is for binders who are still working out whether they're going to survive their first contract. Itsuki is past that. Even though Genkei and Saiko are already above this stage, I'll go over this anyway."
"You've each demonstrated control, application, and."
He glanced at me.
"Unprecedented ghost absorption. You're Graven."
"What's the difference?" I asked.
"Pale is borrowed power," he said. "Graven means you've made it your own. Your control has stabilized. You're not fighting against the contract anymore, you're working with it." He paused. "For most binders, the jump from that first unstable binding to genuine control takes weeks. Months, sometimes. You did it tonight… Well, not in the regular way, I'll equate absorbing Aka Manto and not losing your mind to stabilizing a spirit."
I tilted my head. "What comes after Graven? You said there were more."
Arata smiled. "Ask me when you've earned the next one."
I groaned.
"Of course," I said. "Cryptic to the end."
"I'm not cryptic," he said. "There's a sequential nature to this. There are things you need to know in order. The rank system exists for a reason." He raised his hand, his expression shifting from amusement to something more deliberate. "Now. Back to base."
"Open the door that was never closed, let the unseen garden call us home," he said.
The world folded.