One day he woke up and could smell the rot. The rising sun stroked his face as it rose up, spread out, and perfumed the air with the scent of death.
It was the same rotting-earth smell that had coated his mother, then his father, and finally his half-brother; the same smell that clung off of every human and animal.
He was finally dying.
From then on it leaked out every morning, a bit at a time, contorting his shell a little further each year.
He grew impatient and decided to cut off the mask himself.
One evening, thousands of years after Naraku and hundreds of years after the age of humans, as the dying sun stained the room blood-red, he peeled off his shell. He felt better after one slice; the pressure was starting to seep out. An ending—and then the pain was gone, sliced off, and he could only feel it slip over his bones like hot water (and heard it slosh onto the floor, though that stopped after the removal of his ears).
While he was cutting the nothingness flooded out and began to swallow him
Red became nothing.
"Drip" became nothing.
Hot became nothing.
Salt-blood became nothing.
And finally, the stench—that sickening ground-bone smell—dissolved. The nothingness burst out and stretched its limbs. They were free.
"Hello Father."