Chapter 2: A Sacred Duty

Higurashi Dekuyume sat at her favorite spot in the Higurashi Sanctuary. To be fair, as the keystone for the barrier, she could not leave, at least not physically. Between the fact that she was a kami who used her body as her domain ship, the fact that as an adsorption Dai-yōkai she had a pocket dimension where she could store all her extra mass, the time discrepancy she could invoke, and all the magic she had learned… It was easy enough, to travel the celestial ocean from the comfort of the sanctuary.

Her tea, the warmth of the sun on her daisy decorated kimono, and the gentle caress of the cherry blossom flowers that fell from the perpetually blooming tree above her, did little to soothe her irritation at the moment. She sighs deeply, causing the flower petals to move away from the castaway bottle sitting on the kotatsu before her.

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Kiyoshi stood upon the seal array that would supply the extra power needed to send Botan and the three castaway bottles into the distant past via The Well of Time. Dekuyume no kami stood there watching intently, worried, but full of faith. He smiles tiredly at his first daughter, "Have faith Deku-chan. Protecting ones family is a fathers sacred duty." Dekuyume smiles, "And saving you will be mine." He looks startled for a moment, flickering madly in and out of being with increasing frequency, the longer he pours his power of existence into it.

Thankfully, the array powers down indicating that Botan was on her way through time. Swiftly she opens the last of the bottles that they had liberated from The Spirit World 's cache of enchanted objects. As she presses the opening against his chest she whispers, "I will find a way to give you a soul of your own. We didn't go through all of that trouble just to lose our father. You will not die. I do so vow."

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Dekuyume shakes the memories away, scattering more cherry blossoms from her long black hair. Setting down her tea, she rubs her blood colored eyes in frustration. The journal had only contained her memories up to a certain point and while it had chafed to have her every action meticulously planned out, she wished that she had found a way to include memories of this… She had tried and failed several times to give Kiyoshi-Otousan a soul of his own so he didn't have to worry about dying. So far, she had failed.

She closes her eyes with another sigh, but when they open, her perspective shifts from where she sits at the kotatsu to the center of her being. Dekuyume had rather easily decided that she liked neither the way that Naraku had organized his mass storage dimension, or the visualization that he had used to differentiate between each of the souls that had made up his collective. The end result was a play on her name, her domain, and a scene much easier on the stomach, though not by much.

The Battlefield was endless, spread out infinitely in all directions. Dead bodies, broken hearts and shattered dreams lay strewn about, the nightmare only hidden by the red haze of blood that floated like fog along the ground. But sometimes the fog rose above it all to obscure the sky from vision only to rain, as if weeping for the damage done.

Her mass was in the shape of a titan, walking endlessly into the sunset. When it rained, the blood fell in rivulets down the titan's skin and the footprints left behind stretched backwards in a perfectly straight line into infinity. But it wasn't just a perfect replica of a naked human, no, it was also a castle with rooms in different parts of the body, most notably the heart, mind and stomach.

Her hearts-home, the seat of her magic, was beautiful garden full of poisonous, hallucinogenic, and lethal flowers all a bloom under a harvest moon. The implied threats of deceit, corruption and death soothed away by the presence of a gentle stream of water entwined throughout, and aglow with lightning bugs. Though… the insects used their lights to attract either mates… or prey… so perhaps the threat was merely carefully hidden. Whenever she felt unsettled, the tiny French table and its matching chair held her gently, soothing away her troubles. Sometimes she even brought a book and read by the light of the lightning bugs.

Her stomach was a vast cavern, as if the inside of her chest had been removed but for the heart. It was a ridiculous amount of space, but it was needed due to the sheer amount of matter that she wanted available to her at any given point in time. It was incredibly hard to go from pseudo-human to some of the more interesting forms she had transformed into when starting from scratch, and having to remember each correct DNA sequence. It was just so much easier to keep the completed models and switch from one to another. There were more models than floor space, so when she had reached the point where she needed more room, she had simply built another floor above it. She would run out of room eventually, but for now she still had lots to work with.

The spiral staircase made of bone, was probably a bit much, and the signs on each floor indicating what biology could be located there might have been more legible if they weren't engraved bone. But she only had so many materials to work with, and she wanted to save the more important ones for her minds-home. The minds-home was considerably less gristly, at least until you realized that the floor was in the perfect shape of a human head that had been bisected half way through the nose. The floors were a nice shiny obsidian black and there was a clear dome barrier that kept the blood out when it rained. The room wasn't very big, just large enough for the desk laden with monitors that went along the perimeter of the mostly circular room and the cushy office chair that sat in the middle.

Here she had let her name take precedence. Much like all of the other magic that she had used during her past incarnation as Naraku, the puppetry spell had been revamped and reworked. Instead of golems made of wood and tied to the spell-caster via a piece of hair, these were made of flesh and blood, and made use of the body-soul-mind interface to allow for her to be in multiple places at the same time. For each body, there was at least one computer monitor, connected to the minds-home via her ship, internal dimension, and memory archive. Like a videogame aficionado running multiple instances of the same game, she was both here, there, and there as well.

Desktop Dream indeed.

Sitting back in her chair, Dekuyume tucks her feet up onto the edge and curls her arms around them with a troubled sigh. Thousands of candles can be lit from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. And so a single soul exists in multiple dimensions, in thousands of roles, some different, others so similar that the only difference is the price of daikon.

Somewhere, in that infinite sea of possibilities, there had to be a place where the odds against Otousan gaining a soul of his own was possible, thus avoiding death by flickering. She had been searching for a battlefield/dimension where they had the highest chance of success, but she hadn't been having much luck. It was like trying to find a needle in a haystack without knowing what color the needle was, or if it was made out of hay too. She had learned quite a bit about reincarnation at this point, having performed the reincarnation of several souls herself. Permitting the Higurashi to remain free of the non-existent mercies of the other kami. But it wasn't reincarnation that she was trying to perform on Kiyoshi, she was trying to give him a soul of his own, and while it bore a slight resemblance to reincarnation, she had a sinking suspicion that it would prove to be fundamentally different in terms of magic.

The mechanics of reincarnation were fascinating. The body died and the soul was sent to loiter in an appropriate afterlife while waiting for their turn to reincarnate. The soul was then sent to The Wheel of Reincarnation where it would be processed. Inside a shielded pod, the soul would be stretched, like tilling a field. This would make room for the soul to grow during its next life. The kami also took the time to plant seeds inside a soul, memory-vine seeds to prevent the soul from remembering its past incarnations, inky black seeds of doubt, golden kernels of wisdom, and a kaleidoscope of spiraling multicolored seeds of faith, tiny flowering seeds of ideas and dandelion fluff dreams.

All of them were necessary tools for the largest seed they planted in a soul, the thread thin vines of fate would spread throughout the soul guiding it from one lesson to another, so that no moment they were alive was wasted. Seeds from previous lifetimes would either be removed, or de-germinated and reprogrammed when the new fate matrix was applied. And then the shapeless, ball of spirit and fate was placed in a vessel, and just like gelatin given a container to cool in, the soul set in the shape of its vessel, a vessel shaped by DNA and circumstance.

Then, once the life had ended, the soul that left the body was the same shape as the vessel that had contained it last. But sometimes… sometimes the shape did not take and when the soul left the body once more, it returned to what it was before, or fell apart into some mish-mashed mimicry of their best idealized self. Therein lay her problem, there didn't seem to be a way to keep a soul stable around a derived kami like Kiyoshi, even if she could find a vessel that wouldn't explode when she shoved everything inside.

A monitor beeps and Dekuyume turns to it. With a smile her perspective shifts, and Dekuyume shuffles over at the kotatsu so Sōta can sit next to her while he does his homework. The two of them are joined by Kagome and her husband Aki Hōjō to work on their college homework when they get out of class. It was true that Inuyasha had matured considerably in the aftermath of their quest, but somehow Dekuyume still had troubles wrapping her mind around the fact that Aki was Inuyasha's reincarnation.

The students are only interrupted by Kānēshon and Jinenji as they bring food to the table for dinner. As the children Dekuyume had adopted follow the smell of food to the table, it magically expands to provide room for them all. Dekuyume smiles softly at her family, leaning into Kiyoshi's side.

It didn't matter how long it took her to figure out how to give him a soul of his own, she knew she would eventually. Kagome no kami and The Well of Time had already given her proof of that.