"Do you... know how spirits are made?" the pink-haired girl asked abruptly, halting her narrative mid-sentence.
As the unexpected question hung in the air, the steady unravelling of her pale hair suddenly came to a complete standstill.
"Hmm...?" Shion's brow furrowed, her expression completely puzzled as her mind raced to retrieve an answer.
From her limited training, she knew most spirits manifested either when a person died with unresolved lingering grudges, or when the collective faith of the populace breathed life into a deity or legend through shared belief. But put on the spot, she couldn't formulate a proper scholarly definition.
"I don't know..." Shion admitted, a slight flush of embarrassment creeping up her cheeks. "Because of... spirit energy, or something like that?"
"Pfft—!"
The pink-haired girl burst into a fit of delicate, mocking laughter, quickly raising her remaining intact sleeve to cover her mouth. Her crimson eyes crinkled with genuine amusement at Shion's blunt ignorance.
"You hunt us, fight us, and seal us away... yet you do not understand a single thing about what we truly are," the spectre chided softly, her laughter fading into a cold, pitiless smile. "My oh my... how painfully crude. You humans sprout grand speeches about justice and righteousness, yet in the end, you act no differently than ignorant beasts."
"Cut the shit," Shion scowled, her eyes narrowing into dangerous slits. "If all you want to do is sit there and mock me, we might as well finish our fight right now."
"Hmph... Okay, okay, don't get your ribbons in a twist," the pink-haired girl hummed softly, casually crossing her legs beneath her ceremonial robes. "But to properly understand this next part of my story, you have to understand how Yokai are born."
"Ha?! And why on earth would I listen to you?" Shion spat back, shooting sharp, distrustful glances at the sitting spectre. "I should just finish my story, break this damn barrier, and get this over with."
Yet even as the harsh words left her mouth, a strange, unbidden thought stirred in the back of Shion's mind.
'Tsk... What is this feeling right now?' she wondered, her breath tight. 'She's clearly my enemy... so why can't I shake the feeling that there's something more to this? Why does it feel like I need to hear what she has to say...?'
Paying absolutely no mind to Shion's fierce objections, the pink-haired girl casually adjusted her posture, rested her chin on her palm, and began to speak once more.
"There are three ways a spirit is born into this world," the pink-haired girl explained, her voice remarkably calm despite the horror of her words. "First, natural spirits born by the will of Heaven and Earth to maintain balance. Second, false spirits created by the collective faith and imagination of mankind. And finally... artificial spirits engineered by humans through forbidden rituals that twist the laws of the world to spawn hideous, unsightly things... like myself."
"..."
Shion remained completely silent. The harsh retort she had prepared died on her tongue as she found herself captivated and horrified by the girl's confession.
"Inside that sealed vessel, the young girl ate nothing for months save for the worms and beetles that crawled through the cracks," the girl continued, her eyes staring blankly into the distance. "She was denied water, forced to quench her thirst solely on the vile blood-liquor brewed by the monk. And as time crawled on in the suffocating dark... her mind broke."
A soft, chilling breeze swept through the tea room, carrying the faint metallic scent of old blood.
"First, she came to despise the monk. Then, she grew to hate the lord she was sold to marry. Eventually, she even came to hate her own parents, the very people who abandoned her to this agonising fate. And at age seventeen... she came to hate the entire world that allowed such a nightmare to exist."
The moment those bitter words left the pink-haired girl's lips, the pristine tea room disintegrated entirely.
The white walls shifted into rough, damp stone, engulfing the space in near-pitch darkness save for a single, flickering oil lamp hanging from a rusty ceiling chain. High-pitched skittering sounds echoed through the shadows as hundreds of poisonous centipedes and bloated beetles crawled across the floor, swarming over their ankles.
As the story reached its horrific climax, the girl's remaining sleeve unravelled into dark ash, the decay spreading downward to consume the lower hem of her robes.
"Ach—!"
Shion screeched, wincing in agony as sharp, stinging gasps ripped through her forearms and palms. Skin split open along her knuckles, fresh blood welling up and dripping onto the cold stone floor as if phantom mandibles were biting and slicing into her flesh.
'Is this... what she felt?' Shion thought, a single, glistening tear spilling past her lashes and trailing down her bloody cheek. 'Is this the agony she endured when they twisted her into a monster...?'
The sheer weight of the tragedy threatened to break her mind. But deep within her chest, a stubborn ember of Iga steel refused to be extinguished.
'No... I cannot die here. There is still so much I have left to do...'
Steeling her spirit, Shion forced her hazy eyes open and looked across the shadowed pit. Through the dim light of the oil lamp, she gasped; deep, bleeding lacerations were opening along the pink-haired girl's hands and arms in the exact same places as her own.
The ritual was no longer just a story. Their very flesh and souls were bleeding as one.
"I know I can't truly comprehend the horror of what you went through," Shion spoke aloud, her voice trembling slightly from the stinging pain in her bleeding hands, but brimming with raw resolve. "But I have a life of my own, too. I can't just throw it away out of guilt!"
"Hmph..." The pink-haired girl's lips curved into a faint, unreadable smile. She raised her blood-stained hand, her red eyes gleaming in the dim lamplight. "You may not know me now, girl, but you soon will—"
"At age six," Shion interrupted, her voice cutting through the girl's words like a drawn blade. "She came to know her world for what it truly was."
The pink-haired girl paused, her smile freezing as the flickering oil lamp cast long, violent shadows across the stone walls.
"Isolated from anyone who could show her even a drop of warmth or compassion, she was raised to stand strong, forced to endure constant attempts on her life by those meant to protect her," Shion continued, her gaze locked onto the girls. "And at age ten... she came to know nothing. To prove she was a worthy inheritor of her bloodline, she was sent out on her very first mission."
The centipedes skittering across the damp stone suddenly froze.