For a span of ten days, Kaede Village fell into a rare quiet.
No great yokai descended from the sky, no God of War came treading the moonlight, and even the Hojo clan's messengers no longer came and went so often. For the people of Kaede Village, who had lived through one great battle after another, such days felt so luxurious as to be unreal.
Kikyo arranged this stretch of time in perfect order.
Cultivating her spiritual power at dawn, teaching Momiji and Botan their lessons in the arts at midday, maintaining the barrier at dusk, and after nightfall—
What happened after nightfall was not something Momiji and Botan were allowed to know.
Though every morning, when Kikyo appeared with the faint flush at the roots of her ears and her lips so unusually rosy—as if painted with rouge and then wiped clean—already told them plenty.
And Momiji and Botan, reading the situation, never pressed the matter.
At least, not to her face.
"You think Sister Kikyo last night—"
"Don't ask."
"But there was something on Lord Hikaru's collar—"
"Don't. Ask."
Under cover of night, Momiji pressed a hand down on Botan's head and shoved her back under the covers.
On the other side of the paper door, Kikyo—who happened to be passing along the corridor of the side hall—paused mid-step for an instant.
Then she walked on, as though she'd heard nothing at all.
But at the next day's lesson in the arts, the amount of training Kikyo assigned doubled, and so Momiji and Botan, faces drained of all will to live, clutched their shikigami paper dolls and practiced until sundown.
"I didn't say anything at all…"
Botan crouched beneath the torii, sniffling in a small, aggrieved voice.
Momiji's face stayed blank. "But you wanted to say it, and Sister Kikyo can sense that."
"A shrine maiden's intuition is that sharp?!"
"No—it's because you've got a guilty conscience, that's why she saw right through you!"
"…You're the guilty one!"
"…?"
And beyond all this.
Kokaede, for her part, remained entirely unaffected—still the earliest to rise each day, and the soundest sleeper, while the fruit trees in the back garden bore no small harvest of autumn fruit under her care.
That afternoon, she came running out of the back garden hugging a basket of persimmons.
Her twin tails bounced up and down.
She ran to the entrance of the main hall and stopped.
Inside, Naoe Kanetsugu, still bound to the pillar, was dozing with her eyes shut. Her deep-blue light armor had wrinkled into something like a dishrag, and her white jinbaori had picked up who knew how many layers of dust.
Her once-neat high ponytail had come completely undone, stray strands plastered to her cheeks, so that she looked like a radish just dug out of the mud.
Kokaede tilted her head.
Then she walked over and held a persimmon up to Naoe Kanetsugu's lips.
"Big sister, eat some fruit."
Naoe Kanetsugu opened one eye and saw the persimmon.
And then she saw the little girl's eyes curved up in a smile.
She was silent for a moment, then dipped her head slightly and took a bite.
It tasted sweet—so sweet she nearly wept there against the pillar.
"…Thank you."
"Mm-hm! When the big brother forgives you, I'll take you to the back garden to pick fruit! There's lots and lots more back there!"
Kokaede ran off happily.
Naoe Kanetsugu watched that pair of twin tails bobbing into the distance for a long while, and only with great effort managed to steady the wild trembling of her brows and eyes.
…
Ten days later.
Kyoto.
On the official road from the Kanto to Kyoto, a swift horse galloped through the autumn wind.
The messenger on its back carried a lacquer-sealed bamboo tube, its surface branded with the Hojo clan's three-scale crest.
Inside the tube lay a formal petition, its destination the Jingikan of Kyoto—
the central authority governing the faith of the Eastern Isles' Shinto, responsible for assessing the shrine rank of every Shrine under heaven, for certifying enshrined gods, and for conferring divine names.
In this age where gods, buddhas, and demonic fiends coexisted, the authority of the Jingikan had been weakened by the turmoil of war, yet its certification remained the only formal channel by which the Shrines of each province could obtain official standing.
The contents of the document were simple.
In the name of the Hojo clan, lords of the two provinces of Musashi and Sagami, a petition was submitted—
a petition to invest Kaede Village Shrine as the Shinto center of the two provinces.
A petition to invest the Shrine's principal enshrined deity, "Kishin-mitama-no-Mikoto," as the true god of the two provinces.
Kishin-mitama-no-Mikoto.
This was the divine name drafted by the Hojo clan's advisors.
Translated, it meant: to take what had once been the spirit of a monstrous Demon and, through the formal rites of Shinto, transform it into a true god who received the worship of men.
A very typical, very standard Shinto format.
The messenger drove his horse hard; in under ten days he would reach Kyoto.
But in truth, on the very first day the messenger set out, someone in Kyoto already knew of this matter.
Not because the news had leaked—only because something had been watching all along.
Beneath Kyoto.
Another world existed below the bustling imperial city.
Deep, gloomy passages stretched down into the earth, and the moss on the stone walls, grown in an environment that never saw the light of day, had thickened into a dark-green velvet carpet.
Now and then eerie green yokai-fire flickered at the far end, illuminating stretches of pillared corridor carved with scenes of hell.
The palace lay at the deepest point.
To call it a palace was less accurate than to call it a lair.
The vast space was saturated with yokai aura, so thick that the very air had turned a half-transparent grayish purple. At the palace's center the drapes hung low, and cushions of silk and animal hide were piled layer upon layer.
A woman—or rather, a yokai fox—reclined against the cushions.
Her jet-black hair spilled out behind her, several golden hairpins set among the strands, each a priceless antique.
Her features were bewitching, the corners of her eyes lifted, her lips a vivid crimson—every part of her face curved with an enchantment that ensnared the mind.
She wore a junihitoe kimono, its many layered fabrics giving off a cold sheen in the glow of the yokai-fire.
Her abdomen swelled faintly.
She was none other than Hagoromo-Gitsune, the great yokai who lurked in Kyoto's hidden underside.
Compared to a few months ago, Hagoromo-Gitsune's belly was clearly a little larger.
"Tsuchigumo has returned."
Beyond the drapes, a low, crouching shadow prostrated itself on the ground.
It was a servant of Hagoromo-Gitsune, a small tengu tasked with carrying messages.
"He, too, has lost an arm."
That word—too—stopped Hagoromo-Gitsune's fingers against her belly.
The nails painted a brilliant vermilion traced lightly across the swell of her lower abdomen, the motion slow and even—yet the look in her eyes went cold.
The silence held for a few seconds.
Hagoromo-Gitsune leaned back into the cushions, and at last a trace of irritation surfaced on that bewitching face.
Kibomaru had had an arm broken; Tsuchigumo had had an arm broken too.
Everyone she sent out came back short a piece.
"That shrine maiden and that little Demon…"
She murmured to herself, her voice soft and alluring yet edged with cold.
She was rather tempted to go herself.
The Shikon Jewel and all that hardly mattered—it was only that the grudge-rancor over in the Kanto had thinned considerably of late, which had slowed the growth of the child in her belly by no small measure, and that displeased her greatly.
Her own strength was more than equal to it, too—at least in her own eyes, at the height of her power, that shrine maiden and that oni warrior combined, even several times over, wouldn't be worth a glance.
She was a nine-tailed yokai fox.
One of the very highest great yokai in all the Eastern Isles.
Even set against the Heian era, when demonic fiends ran rampant, that remained true.
Even if they could repel Kibomaru and thwart the newly awakened Tsuchigumo, they would never be a match for her.
But she could not move.
The child in her womb was at the most critical stage of gestation, and any violent disturbance might affect its growth.
On top of that, there was that thing pressing down upon the land of the Kanto.
The more powerful a yokai, the more it was suppressed instead. A revenant-yokai of Kibomaru's rank had to weave grudge-rancor first before it could cross over; even Tsuchigumo had only dared to run wild over there because he was in poor condition.
"Then set it aside for now."
"We'll deal with it later."
Hagoromo-Gitsune closed her eyes, her long lashes casting shadows in the yokai-fire.
The Karasu-Tengu prostrate beyond the drapes shuddered all over and bowed lower still.
The land of the Kanto, at its western edge.
Among the mountain ridges at the border of Musashi Province and Kai Province.
A woman stood at a fork in the road.
A black long-skirted kimono, features too exquisite to belong to a mortal, skin so pale it seemed to glow—yet lips so faint they were nearly without color.
A pair of blood-red slit pupils contracted faintly in the dark.
This, too, was none other than Kibutsuji Muzan.
As the progenitor of the human-demon, Muzan possessed the ability to alter form and even sex; at this moment she held a female shape, and beyond any doubt, she had come from Kyoto.
Nor had she come at anyone's bidding—
She had come here only to see for herself.
To see, in the east, the results of the great yokai she herself had lured there.
To see the direction that had cost her one subordinate after another.
And the result had greatly surprised her.
Tsuchigumo—had actually lost.
Muzan's slit pupils swept toward the east.
Across a distance of more than a hundred li, she could still touch the presence over there—spiritual power, clear and cold as a deep-winter spring, so pure that it instinctively made her recoil.
That was the shrine maiden.
That shrine maiden called Kikyo.
From the last surviving memories the destroyed evil demons had sent back before their annihilation, that shrine maiden possessed a talent utterly revolting to her—the ability, before the sun had risen, to refract the dawn light lying beneath the horizon with her spiritual power, and draw the sunlight down to the ground.
A spiritual power lens.
Using the sun itself as a weapon.
To a Demon, this was a bane tailored precisely against them.
Muzan had lived several hundred years, and there was little she feared.
Sunlight, however, was one of those few things.
And a shrine maiden who could summon sunlight at a whim—even if Muzan could dodge in advance, she still had to be wary.
Beyond that, that oni warrior was growing stronger, too.
Her perception, measured against the final scenes in those evil demons' memories, told her that the density of that yokai aura had surged at least several times over within the past half month.
Too fast.
This pace was not normal.
A yokai's growth was reckoned in centuries.
Could it be that the legendary Shikon Jewel truly held such miraculous power?
Or was it something else?
Muzan was not certain.
But she knew that the pieces currently in her hand were no longer enough.
The ordinary evil demons she'd made by carelessly parceling out her demon blood were mere ants before that shrine maiden; even the somewhat stronger ones, hand-picked and endowed with rich demon blood, had been wiped out to the last over there.
Of late, as Kobe Hikaru and Kikyo traveled together, sweeping the region clean, the number of evil demons Muzan had scattered across Musashi Province had plummeted at a frantic rate.
"I need a stronger Demon."
This thought had surfaced in her mind more than once recently.
Not an ordinary evil demon, but a powerful Demon that could hold its own—one to rival a high-ranking yokai.
But such a Demon was something even she could only chance upon, never seek out.
It required that, before becoming a Demon, the being already possessed a certain strength and was special enough to withstand highly concentrated demon blood without collapsing.
It also required obsession.
An obsession strong enough could resonate with the demon blood, producing a transformation beyond the ordinary.
Strength and obsession—neither could be lacking.
And such a raw vessel—in five hundred years, she had found only a scant handful.
It seemed that, until she possessed a sufficiently powerful evil demon, she could draw no closer to the range of that village in Musashi Province.
Having made this inner decision, Muzan withdrew her gaze, turned, and prepared to return the way she had come.
There was all the more reason she could not approach in person.
But just then, from the shadows at the bend of the mountain path behind Muzan, came the sound of footsteps.
Dragging footsteps, one heavy and one light.
When the left foot came down the sound was heavy; when the right foot dragged, it scraped against the gravel.
And there was the smell of blood.
A thick smell of blood, laced with a rotten sweetness.
A figure stepped out of the darkness.
A woman.
Somewhere in her early twenties.
She wore a man's hunting garb—coarse-cloth short jacket, leg-wraps—with a chipped mountain blade tucked at her waist.
The clothes were riddled with tears and bloodstains; a sword wound ran diagonally from her left shoulder to her right flank, roughly stitched, the thread ends straggling out from the edges of the gash, caked with congealed blood.
Below the knee, her left leg was wrapped in cloth strips, soaked through several layers with blood that had already turned a dark brown.
She looked gravely wounded.
Yet she kept limping onward.
Gasping with difficulty, staggering in her steps, and yet as though she still refused to give up.
The only strange thing, perhaps, was that face—so fair it could not possibly belong to someone dressed like this, more like the face of a noble young lady.
And then the woman saw Muzan.
She went slightly still, and, bracing herself against a tree, halted some ten paces before Muzan.
The two of them looked at each other in the night darkness of the desolate mountains.
Then the woman smiled… baring her bloodstained front teeth.
"To think there'd be anyone out here—looks like I won't be so alone in my last moments after all."
Muzan did not move, only watched this woman who had appeared out of nowhere, and asked a single question. "Who are you?"
"A mountain bandit whose stronghold was burned down by those self-righteous bastards of the Uesugi clan. I have no name."
"The Uesugi clan's soldiers torched our stronghold, my comrades are all dead, and I dragged this rotten leg into the mountains and ran. Three days I ran—but it looks like I won't get away."
The Uesugi clan's army had marched south under the banner of "righteousness," and along the way it had indeed wiped out no small number of wicked bandits and robbers.
This woman was plainly one of them.
Yet she distinctly remembered that she had already been near death, and then had suddenly come back to life—and in her daze she seemed to have glimpsed a bead, and a very handsome man.
After that, led by she knew not what, she had walked toward this place.
But those dreamlike things she could neither recall clearly nor put into words.
The woman gasped for breath, and merely spoke this much.
At the end, as if something had occurred to her, she added a line:
"If I absolutely must give one, my name is Onigumo."
And then.
She drew the blade at her waist.
"Don't hold it against me, young lady—if you must blame anyone, blame yourself for appearing all alone out here in this wilderness—letting me savor the joy of slaughter one more time before I die!"
Such a posture, such an act.
It drew a soft "oh" from Kibutsuji Muzan, who found it all rather… intriguing.
The material she had wanted… it seemed, had come?
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