Later, Jin realized just how much his mind had faltered in the service of corruption.
But many years earlier, just weeks after he walked away from his only friends at the crossroads, Jin reached a profound conclusion in his meditations: that because of his friendship with the samurai's daughter and the capricious criminal, he was no longer capable of serving only his own needs. Not that he needed a master – far from it; he'd never felt so capable of independent thought in his life – but without a quest, he was without purpose, and painfully lost.
In the first years that followed, Jin methodically scoured the countryside, doing whatever he could for anyone who needed a strong young man – the sclerotic old man picking up sticks to stoke winter fires, the harried innkeeper with rodents to slay – for as long as he could, at least until he realized that such tasks didn't provide a full belly. Always the pragmatist, Jin started to alternate these services with ones that did fill his belly, and provide him shelter, and best of all, made sharpening his daisho worthwhile – dispatching a lady's letter to her criminal lover, executing that unfaithful lady's lover and returning a lock of his hair to her husband – so that he never felt hungry for long, whether it was for sustenance of the stomach or of the soul. At some point he couldn't quite recall, the difference between the two became insignificant.
And so, over the years, Jin stopped picking up sticks.
Eight years ago, he became a full-time hired assassin for "Hidetoshi Karu, Fifth Magistrate of…". He never needed to go further in the announcement of his employer's title. At that point, the brave would interrupt so as to achieve a quicker death, the cowardly, for a recitation of lies or pleas or regrets, and the truly worthy would preemptively move themselves on to the next life.
Memories of the crossroads, or the time before, came only late at night, under the moon. In the warmth of the sun, Jin slayed the vermin of the world at the behest of his master Hidetoshi. And his days were never without purpose in this service, and his belly was always full. He found he no longer needed to meditate in the evenings, for his path was always clear and straight before him.
Yet at night he dreams of blood seeping forth from a crescent moon.
ooooooooooooooooooooooo
"Do you understand? You must arrive before the decoy goods reach the village, but make yourself invisible on your way there. We don't want this criminal woman's accomplices to know we're on to their game, neh?" Hidetoshi's secretary always wanted to sound as though he was a brilliant strategist in a game of dominoes, Jin noted. "We are working to catch her friends upstream, but first we must build our dam at the river's mouth, neh?"
As Jin could not roll his eyes for propriety's sake, he merely squinted a hair's breadth's more.
"Identify this "Momo" woman, find out where she sends these miserable Christians, then execute her, but keep it quiet!" This last part was delivered in a whispery hiss, predictably.
ooooooooooooooooooooooo
Jin easily fell into his old habits of traveling on the road. Though the magistrate's purse could easily keep him fed and bedded at the best inns on his entire journey, he found, as so long ago, that a rich traveler is more obviously spotted as a servant of the shogunate to distrust; he therefore kept his purse well hidden and kept to the meaner huts and campsites. He didn't deny himself the luxury of well-prepared meals, for he found that not only did he pick up useful bits of information in tea houses or at food sellers' stalls, but that his blades struck truer, albeit fractionally so, when his belly was satisfied.
It took Jin a week to reach the area where the Christians were supposedly disappearing. The southern coast was covered in forest, with roads and rivers meandering through, connecting village to village. It was an area where concealment and conspiracy would be easy. For a couple of years, the local officials hadn't realized this region was the major highway for the trafficking of Christians; they'd only ploddingly been investigating an increase in the flow of goods and food that didn't quite seem to correlate with an increase in the wealth and prosperity of the fishing villages along the coast. It was only when an overly diligent scribe in the town to the north started to chronicle the rice and vegetable trade by taxes levied against caravan wagons on their way south that two and two were put together.
Once the magistrate was alerted, he wasted no time in sending spies south to gather rumors of this Christian underground. Soon enough, they returned with vague rumors of the mastermind of this operation, a shockingly female individual called "Momo". Once Momo's name was discovered, the spies found that using it unlocked an increasingly outrageous number of tales and tattles. This only further alarmed Hidetoshi as evidence of an extensive network of accomplices. His first move was to send a decoy cart overflowing with delicacies to the area, manned by two samurai. They passed undisturbed from village to village, peddling their fare with ease. This convinced the magistrate that the waylaid "goods" were people, not rice cakes. Being a man of little logic but much finesse, Hidetoshi sent Jin quietly south to discover Momo, find out from her where she was helping the Christians to go, and execute her. Hidetoshi didn't want Momo's accomplices elsewhere along the path of disappearing Christians warned; he rather liked his strategy of poisoning the root of the tree before hacking off its branches.
Jin arrived at the large village where most of the food carts and trading caravans seemed to be last seen before disappearing into the forest or the ocean. According to the spies' accounts, the disappearances often seemed to coincide with the infrequent visits of a particularly obese woman who lived in a forest hut.
"The villagers meet her with gladness at market, and the children fight to help her carry her bundles home – she never has adult visitors, it seems, except for a young woman thought to be her niece. Apparently the locals figure the woman's too fat to be a mother, or she eats her children…" the spy trailed off mirthlessly, looking for a reaction from Jin. There was none. "But the carts disappear around the time she comes to town, and they never arrive at the next village for trading. Perhaps she eats the carts and drivers, too…" at this the spy attempted a grin, but halted it before it passed two teeth.
Jin, on his part, was glad to hear that his target would be such a discernible individual.
