Night.
Kaede's Village.
The chirping of autumn insects rose and fell in waves both inside and outside the barrier. Moonlight slipped through the lattice windows of the shrine's main hall, painting silver bars across the wooden floor.
Shinji sat cross-legged at the center of the hall. His demon mask rested before his knees, and in the moonlight, his pale features had taken on a certain measure of calm.
After the essence transformation, his body had finally begun to show traces of a living metabolism, slowly altering his outward appearance. His skin was still pale, but it was no longer the corpse-gray pallor of before.
He looked more like someone who simply hadn't seen sunlight in a very long time.
He was, step by step, coming alive. Dying, then reborn. From demon, toward ma.
Before him on the floor sat a crudely fashioned bamboo vessel filled with clear water. On the water's surface, the moonlight shimmered and reflected upon it were twenty-three crooked, misshapen faces.
Not reflections. Projections. Projections of osore, sent from across Suruga Province.
The Twenty-Three Demons.
The round, chubby head of the tanuki spirit dominated the center of the water, its tiny bean-sized eyes stretched wide and round. When its voice came through the water's surface, it buzzed with a faint echo.
"Master! Everything's going smoothly in Suruga! The Imagawa clan built a little, tiny shrine for the kappa at Shimizu Port, it's only about half a person tall, but the kappa's so happy he's been holed up in there for three days and won't come out!"
"The one-eyed novice monk scared two kids in a village outside Sunpu Castle! They ran home and told their parents there's a demon at the village edge, and the very next day, their mom and dad went to the shrine and burned incense! We got osore from it! Just a little, but we got some!"
"And also, also—!"
It was clear the tanuki was beside itself with excitement.
"Enough."
Shinji raised a hand, cutting off the tanuki's breathless report. "What of the Hōjō side?"
Another little yōkai squeezed its way to the water's surface, a tiny inky-black creature with bat-like wings, no bigger than a palm. Its voice was noisy and shrill.
"The shrines in Musashi are still under construction! The Hōjō clan's craftsmen say it'll take another ten days to finish! But in Sagami, there are already three up, and people have come to pray! It's mostly—"
The little demon paused, lowering its voice.
"It's mostly because the villagers over there were already scared of yōkai to begin with. The Hōjō told 'em if they built a shrine and prayed, they'd be kept safe, so they prayed. The osore is definitely increasing."
Shinji nodded.
The Hyakki Yagyō, his Night Parade of Twenty-Three Demons, was expanding at the pace he had envisioned. Suruga was Imagawa territory, with official offerings and sanctioned shrines. Musashi and Sagami had just been brought into the fold, and their shrines were still being built, though calling them "shrines" was generous. In truth, they were little more than roadside hokora, the humblest of wayside sanctuaries.
But that was enough.
Three provinces. Three directions. Twenty-three weak but intelligent yōkai scattered throughout them, planting themselves like seeds in the cracks of human society.
And the osore those seeds collected, the fear drawn from human hearts, from whispered ghost stories, from the trembling of those who dared not step outside at night, was flowing through the core of their collective force-field… straight into him.
Shinji closed his eyes and felt that power.
Osore.
After experiencing it firsthand, his understanding of the concept had deepened another layer.
It wasn't simply terror. It wasn't just fear.
Osore was rumor, the murmurs that spread from street to street. Osore was ghost stories, the strange taboos passed down from elder to elder. More than anything, osore was the downward force of the human heart, the polar opposite of faith, which surged upward.
It was the instinctive, reflexive response born in the human psyche when faced with the unknown, the darkness, the incomprehensible.
What arose from prayer was faith. What arose from fear, that was osore. The former carried hope. The latter sought only self-preservation.
Faith allowed gods to endure, even to be born anew. Osore allowed yōkai to briefly swell and manifest their existence.
Two sides of a single coin. Two streams from a single source.
And he—he was about to hold both in his grasp.
Once the documents Hōjō Ujiyasu had sent to Kyōto were approved, he would no longer be merely a yōkai gathering osore. He would become a shōshin, a true deity receiving faith.
Osore and faith. Wielded together.
How great that power would be, he couldn't yet estimate. But he could already foresee it. Anticipate it.
Though that, too, was a matter for another day.
For now, there were more practical matters to attend to.
Shinji opened his eyes. He drew in the osore that had gathered within him, but rather than absorb it himself, he channeled most of it back through the core of the collective force-field, redistributing it to the twenty-three lesser yōkai.
This was a decision he had made long ago. Hoarding the osore for himself would have been the stupidest choice of all.
Besides, at his current level, a body that had reached the Ninth Transformation, this osore offered only marginal reinforcement. Better to share it than to keep it all.
The Twenty-Three Demons were his eyes and ears. His feelers. His sensory nodes scattered across three provinces. The stronger they became, the denser his web would grow. Osore was the fertilizer.
The yōkai were the trees. Piling all the fertilizer at the roots was far less effective than distributing it to every branch. Only when those branches grew strong enough could they, in turn, nourish the roots.
What he needed, after all, was not the fear of humans. What he needed was the awe and dread that dwelled in the hearts of yōkai themselves. And that was precisely what a true Lord of Yōkai ought to do, ought to be.
The twenty-three faces on the water's surface let out simultaneous sighs of satisfaction. The infusion of osore caused their yōki to swell, visible to the naked eye. Though the increase for each was barely a sliver, a yōkai's life was long.
Given enough days and months and years, the cumulative effect would be nothing short of astonishing. So long as they held onto this osore and didn't lose it, they could continue to grow… until they became truly formidable demons.
And so they began their chattering chorus of thanks. Buzz, buzz, buzz, twenty-three voices all mingling together, like a bamboo tube stuffed full of bees.
Shinji couldn't help himself. "All of you, shut up."
Silence.
"Go back to your respective dens. Keep your heads down and behave. If any of you causes trouble...."
He paused. For a moment, he felt like some kind of underworld boss. Then he continued.
"....I'll have Kikyō deal with you."
Every single one of those twenty-three faces on the water's surface turned white.
The miko's spirit-cleansing arrows, the kind that could purify yōki at its very source, were, to lesser yōkai, more terrifying than divine thunder. And this was no ordinary miko. This was a great miko of Kikyō's caliber.
The projections dispersed at an unprecedented speed. The last to vanish was the tanuki. Even as it faded, it couldn't resist adding one last thing.
"Master! I've painted a new war banner! The skull's centered this time! Next time we march in the Hyakki Yagyō, it'll be even more magnificent!"
Shinji was speechless for a beat. He had no faith whatsoever in that promise.
"…Just go."
There was a third matter to handle.
The water's surface returned to stillness, and moonlight once more spread across the bamboo vessel. But before he could attend to that third task, he lifted his gaze, and found the miko across from him watching him with those dark, deceptively calm eyes.
Her figure, wrapped in white, traced winding shadows in the moonlight: curves that rose and swelled, then drew inward; the soft, subtle flare of her hips.
Shinji went still.
Oh, hell.
He'd just used his wife to scare his subordinates… and she'd caught him.
"Am I… so terrifying?"
Kikyō pressed her lips together. The question slipped out, but there was no trace of anger in it, only the faint curve of withheld laughter.
Shinji coughed lightly and opened his mouth to respond. But before he could get a word out, the miko across from him reached over, took hold of his gray robes by the collar, and pulled him toward her.
What followed after that need not be said.
And after that.
Late, deep into the night.
Shinji finally stepped out of the inner chamber and returned to the main hall, thoroughly content. His body was still that of the dead, the blood transformation allowed it to flow, allowed it to harden with the color of armament, but in the end, it could leave nothing behind.
So they had held back, neither crossing that final line. But even just that warmth, that closeness, was more than enough for a miko and a yōkai.
At last, he found his moment. He lowered his head and drew the blade at his waist, letting it rest across his open palm.
Muramasa.
The demon blade.
After reaching max Affection and fusing with it, Muramasa's core power had already been fully absorbed into him, but the blade itself remained.
Not an empty husk. Not a hollow vessel.
The sword's edge, tempered by demon blood over ages, was still perfectly intact. In fact, due to the permeation of yōki during the fusion process, the blade had grown even more resilient than before.
But it was not yet a "yōkai" in its own right. It was a demonic weapon, a blade steeped in yōki, but it had yet to develop a consciousness of its own, the ability to act independently, like the sentient hair-demon he had once encountered. It had yet to become a tsukumogami, an artifact that had awakened as a living yōkai.
Still, Shinji could feel it. Muramasa was missing only one final spark. The crucial element that could tip a sword from "object" into "demon."
And osore, perhaps, could provide that last piece. Could complete it.
If it succeeded, if the blade truly awakened, then the next time he faced the Tsuchigumo, he might be able to sever its arm with this very sword, by his own power alone, without needing to rely entirely on Kikyō to truly wound the beast.
That, then, was the third matter Shinji intended to see done.
He drew forth the osore he had reserved for himself, the portion he had not distributed to the others, and channeled it from within his body, guiding it through his palm and into the blade.
Osore was not the same as yōki. Yōki was congealed from the turbid energies of the world, born of heaven and earth. Osore was the precipitate of the human heart, born of mortal minds.
It could not directly become power. But when the two were mingled, they produced a unique reaction. One that could bring lifeless things to demonhood.
That could make a sword… come alive.
The System panel flickered into view.
[Demon Blade · Muramasa: Affection 100 (Fused)]
[Current State: Demonic Weapon → Demonic Weapon (Awakening)]
[Anomalous yōki infusion detected, the power of Osore is altering the fundamental structure of the artifact.]
[Evaluation: You are doing something few yōkai would ever consider, feeding your own Osore to an inanimate vessel. Most yōkai would hoard all Osore to strengthen only themselves. But you have chosen to pour it into a blade… And so, Muramasa is responding. Its sword-soul is stirring from slumber. A little more. A little denser. And it will awaken.]
Shinji did not stop.
Osore continued to pour in.
Under the moonlight, Muramasa's blade began to emit a faint glow. Not the violet light of yōki. Not the pure white of reiryoku. This was a deep crimson radiance, nearly the color of blood, seeping out from between the blade's grain lines, flowing slowly along the cutting edge. It was the color of osore. The shade born when fear and rumor congealed into form.
The blade trembled. A faint shudder. As though something inside had turned over in its sleep.
Then,
Stillness.
The light withdrew, folding back into the body of the sword. On the surface, Muramasa appeared unchanged. But Shinji knew, it was different now.
The panel flickered one final line.
[Demon Blade · Muramasa: Awakening Progress — 12%]
[It has begun to dream.]
To dream.
A sword was dreaming.
Shinji slid Muramasa back into its sheath and settled it against his hip. The sheath pressed against his side, and its touch was warmer than before, as though it now held the faint heat of a living body.