A small update, compliments to Niume22;-).
Fujiwara-no Sai pounds the hypothetic walls of his prison with his incorporeal fist. The chest where his goban is hidden rattles in response. With a pitiful groan Sai sinks on the metaphorical floor: he doesn't want to become a vengeful ghost, he truly doesn't, but he can just feel his sanity slipping away from him with nothing to occupy his mind but remembering his past games again and again and again. It has been over a century since he last played Go. It has been a millennium since he touched the stones. It has been almost thirty years since he last saw light. Since his goban was locked away he has cried so much Heihachi's house should have been by now flooded up to the rooftop, except the ghost's tears are, apparently, as insubstantial as the rest of him.
'Kami-sama', he whispers, 'I know now a soul can no more live without a body than a body without a soul. Isn't it the lesson you wished me to learn?'
For a moment Fujiwara-no Sai thinks he heard a soft laughter. But the darkness is still there.
When, on his way home from three days of amateur Go and Okinawa sun, Shindo Heihachi was informed gleefully by his nosy neighbor that some hairy strangely dressed brat had been caught by his house earlier that morning and taken to the nearest police station, he hurried to wave the gossipy hag off. Perhaps, he wouldn't have been so quick to dismiss the situation had he listened long enough to realise that anyone wandering the respectable neighborhood aimlessly wearing a white kariginu, of all things, was extremely likely to end up in the local hospital: the one where Heihachi's sixteen-year-old grandson had been admitted a few days earlier.