In the year 5980 of the Celestial Calendar (C.C.), Hakari Shio and Hana Yurei were blessed with their second daughter on a sunny summer afternoon.
They named her Ayako, and straight out of the womb, she had a gift for fixing things and solving problems. By the time she was just nine months old, she was tearing apart her toys and sitting there for long stretches of time, trying to figure out how to fix them.
Her older sister Kanami was always with her. Though she wasn't interested in it at first, the constant amount of time she spent with Ayako made her unconsciously change her tune.
Their mother would always joke that she had the easiest life a mother could have since they weren't rowdy or misbehaved like the other children of the town.
Despite her wonderful stay-at-home life, Hana started to grow weak from a hereditary illness that she had. Her decline was slow rather than abrupt, and Hakari did everything he could to save her. But in the year 5984, she succumbed to her illness, leaving the girls motherless at such a tender age.
Such families were fated to undergo complete change from either a depressed father who falls into addiction or through neglect from the father who is unable to adjust to the new reality and proceeds as before.
Hakari Shio vowed to be neither of them. Every day, he would take the girls to his workshop, where he did his best to cater to their every need while still struggling to put food on the table.
It was difficult for him at first, but the girls, being as disciplined as they were, made it so that it wasn't long before he got used to it.
Almost a year later, Kanami started showing signs of the same disease too. The frequent trips to the physicians were where she met her closest friend, Ririsa Ishibashi, the daughter of the local physician.
The disease wasn't something that could be simply cured, but with constant medication throughout her childhood, the effects of it were greatly decreased. But this did make her more sickly than other children. In winter, when the cold would spread, she would be the first to catch it, and they would be right back at the physicians again.
In the coming years, the effects of the illness on her daily life were almost completely gone, and she would be back at the workshop with Hakari and Ayako once again.
It was by the time that Ayako was eight years old that he properly took them into his tutelage, teaching them everything he knew.
There was this saying he would always tell them: "Is it better to be a master in one trade or proficient in many?"
No answer they gave satisfied him. For the last two generations, their family prided itself on being as proficient as possible in several fields of artistry. They were known across the town as "the all-in-one shop," but the answer that being good at many fields didn't satisfy him.
It lurked in the back of their minds as they underwent years of rigorous training in their artistry, and he even allowed them to pursue other fields as hobbies, like painting for Ayako and sewing for Kanami.
Every day was a tough grind, but they were a self-sustaining family that was well respected, which is why the news of Hakari Shio's death spread more than you would expect from just a simple artisan.
The cause of death was stated as a sudden heart attack, but the physician couldn't tell what triggered it. Whether it was some underlying condition that he was keeping under wraps to prevent any more strain on his daughters or just a sudden collapse from work-related stress.
Yet again, the two sisters had lost a parent, but this time they had no one to turn to. He died relatively debt-free, and so they were able to inherit his workshop and all his tools. At the ages of fourteen and seventeen, the two of them started working to sustain themselves.
They made many mistakes at first, drew long-term customers away, and endangered the business, but with time they ironed out their kinks and got better.
The long-term customers who stayed spread the word of their great work, and more business started pouring in. But with a sudden upset in the town's economy, prices of daily commodities skyrocketed, and they were on the verge of running out of business.
That was when a family related to them through their maternal grandmother reached out with a proposal: if Kanami married their son Ashiro, they would invest in the workshop and save them from bankruptcy.
Ashiro was a known delinquent and habitual gambler, so no other family was willing to even consider him whenever his family proposed for him. But the Shio sisters were in a difficult situation. Without any assistance, it would only be a matter of time before they lost their livelihood. So she hesitantly accepted, and the two of them were married.
Ayako disliked him with a passion from day one, but she kept her mouth shut to avoid any problems for Kanami.
But she could tell that this man was bound to mistreat her sister, and with her illness, she could not survive.
So when the call to join the shrine came, she firmly refused it, saying that she would much rather stay and work in the workshop.
Her in-laws expressed their dissatisfaction, but she couldn't care less about what they thought. Instead, she had her gaze firmly fixed on Ashiro. At any sign of his drunken outbursts, she would secretly shield her sister by taking the brunt of it.
This fragile peace lasted for nearly a year until one fateful afternoon he suddenly called hee to meet up with him deep in the forest.
She spent the entire walk there trying to come up with a reason as to why he wanted to see her. When she finally arrived at the agreed meeting spot, she caught his drunken scent before she even saw him.
"What the hell do you want!" she shot. "I'm too busy to be wasting my time out here with you."
"Calm down, Ayako," he said, his speech slurred as he slowly approached her. "I just want to talk."
"You see, I have a little secret I want to tell you," he said with a smirk. "I just made a huge bet that could cash out in the millions if I win."
"What did you use to make that bet?" she asked. "Last I checked, you don't own anything."
"That's the thing. I bet the house, the workshop, and all our belongings," he said, almost at the brink of laughter.
"You did what!" she yelled as she grabbed him by the collar.
He brushed her off and said, "Don't worry. We're going to cash out big, then we can finally leave this town."
"Why the hell are you telling me this and not Kanami?" she asked. "You trying to convince me to tell her that the bet was my idea?"
"Ding ding ding," he said while pointing at her. "She could never get mad at her own sister."
"Since when do you care what she thinks?"
"How harsh. She is my dear wife, of course I care what she thinks," he said, his pointing hand shaking.
"Go to hell, you bastard. You had no right to gamble away our livelihood!" she yelled. "When you lose you won't be draggingus down the gutter with you."
"You know, I'm getting tired of this," he said, his tone suddenly serious. "I've tolerated you and your sister for a year now, and being the nice guy I am, I went easy on her because you asked, even though her nagging drives me crazy and you run your mouth off to me."
"Remember that I'm well within my rights as the man of the house to demand you leave my matrimonial home," he said. "I could force you into the shrine until your twenties if I wanted to, and no one could stop me!"
Then he started staring at her differently, eyeing her from head to toe as he said, "If you and your sister ever want a cut of the loot, then you gotta do something for me too, or else I'll divorce her ass the second I get my money."
"What the hell are you talking about?" she said, backtracking, but it was already clear to her what he wanted.
He slowly started approaching her as she kept backtracking until she turned to run away. But he caught her by the arm and pulled her back, yelling, "Stop struggling!"
She lashed back, trying to break free any way she could, from scratching to punching, anything she could, but he was too strong.
So, in a desperate attempt, she pushed back on his chest as hard as she could, and he stumbled back, losing his grip on her and his balance at the same time, tumbling over onto the ground.
She fell to her knees, taking deep, panicked breaths. Once she looked back at him, he was just lying there on the ground.
At first, she wanted to leave, but something compelled her to get closer. Once she did, she found him lying face down. When she tried turning him over, she saw blood on her hands from an injury to his head.
His eyes were gaping wide open and his expression was blank. His head had struck a sharp rock where he landed. She passed her fingers over his nose to confirm, and surely enough, he wasn't breathing.
She put her ear on his chest, but there was no heartbeat. She stumbled back, and as she looked down at her blood-stained palms, she found herself muttering, "I killed him."
"No, this isn't possible. This isn't my fault, I swear," she pleaded as if she was already being interrogated.
"No, no, no! What do I do!" she yelled, panicking.
That was when she remembered the stream nearby. Looking back at him again, she knew that there was no other choice but to get rid of him there.
So she put his arms over her shoulder and started walking toward it. Blood from his head stained her robe as she carried him.
The sun was setting, and darkness was setting in. The stream had grown from the rains, and its currents were stronger than ever.
"This is my only chance," she mumbled. "If the Doshin find him, then it's over for me and Kanami. I'll just dump his body here and it will get washed away by the current."
The splash of cold water as she threw him in sent a chill down her spine, but it was too late to look back. The skies were getting cloudy so she had to hurry.
She found herself staring at her palms as the blood washed away from them in the water.
The colour of the water turned slightly red near her, but something didn't feel right. There were streaks of red flowing in from upstream. They started out as small streaks but kept increasing.
She turned her head toward the direction it was coming from and rose to her feet. Just like before, something compelled her to go to its source, but she hesitated, looking over her shoulder at the direction where she threw in the corpse.
Against her better judgment, she walked toward it, moving through thorned bushes until she saw him.
He was lying there on the ground beside the stream, half of his body inside. He was wearing a mix of black and white, stained red by the same blood that was flowing downstream.
She moved toward him slowly, and once she was close enough, she noticed that he wasn't moving. So she pulled him out of the water and lay him flat on his back.
A streak of white in his hair stood out the most to her, and as she stared at him, then he coughed. This startled her, but she was glad to see that he was at least alive.
His coughing continued, and his eyes opened slightly. She held his head up and asked, "Are you okay?"
His eyes shifted to and fro as if he was looking for something, but then they stopped, as if he had forgotten what it was.
The silence that followed was only broken by a single unanswered question from Ayako.
"Who are you?"