You glance around, taking in the serious lack of people nearby, even bringing up your ki sight briefly to make sure - as best you can, anyway - that there are no eavesdroppers lurking nearby. You spot nothing out of the ordinary, but even so, you make a point of keeping your voice down. Isshin seems mildly amused by your sudden caution, but doesn't comment on it out loud.
Gained Watchful F+++
"That's a fairly long and personal story," you say, "and normally, I wouldn't talk about it with someone I'd known for less than twenty-four hours." Never mind that you've already done just that when you talked to Kahlua, funky aura-triggered visions notwithstanding. "However, given that I do feel kind of bad for airing one of your family's private matters in public... the short version is that I'm a reincarnation, and I remembered enough of my past life to get a fairly big head-start on life - including the magic. Meeting Briar gave me a reliable tutor who could help me make sense of what I remembered, and being born on a mystical convergence gave me a lot of motivation to excel, if only to make sure that none of the monsters living there ate me or the people I care about."
Isshin now looks like you just slapped him upside the head with a frozen trout.
"That's not how reincarnation works," he protests. "You're supposed to forget everything, so that you can have a fresh start. It takes-"
"-decades of focused effort to recall your previous incarnations?" you guess. "Yeah, already got that part from my sensei when I told him about this. Which is one of a number of reasons why I don't like telling people about it."
"...figured out that there are people who'd really like to know how the trick is done, huh?"
"Yeah." You're one of them, come to that. You can't recall Ganondorf ever actually doing anything to keep himself alive - except for the times when other people revived him, his various defiances of death all seemed to go back to the Triforce of Power, and you know that the relic was taken from your past self before his most recent defeat. You shake your head. The mystery behind your odd origins has been with you for your entire life, and you know it's not going to get solved any time soon. With the skill born of long practice, you set the old questions aside for another time, and focus on the present.
"Well, at least you've got some good sense," Isshin sighs, rubbing tiredly at his face. "And the whole magic angle probably explains how you were able to see the bindings in the first place."
"Huh?"
Isshin smirks at you. "What, did you think that the master of spiritual arts who set these things up for us would be so sloppy as to leave them waving around where just anybody could see them? Or that I'd be so reckless with my family's safety as to accept that kind of shoddy work? The bindings are shielded, kiddo. I have it on the very best authority that most of the people and things running around in the afterlife can't see the seals unless they already know they're there, never mind humans and other mortals whose bodies get in the way of their spiritual senses."
"...oh."
"Yeah. Oh. Kisuke's got a better understanding of magic than I do, and he assured me he'd covered that angle to the best of his ability. I figured that would be enough." Isshin snorts. "Looks like I figured wrong."
That might be the case, you admit. As you'd said just a minute earlier, people able to use both magical and spiritual power at a high level are fairly rare, and as your Maximum Power technique demonstrates, the combination of the two energies can have impressive effects. On the other hand, it might be the fact that the magical style you practice is pretty radically different from the local traditions coming into play; something that would conceal these soul-binding wards from a conventional witch, for instance, might not work against your methods. It could also be that this Kisuke person simply had no way to know that somebody touched by the Triforce of Power would one day encounter his work, let alone how to go about blocking the traces of divine energy that contact had left behind.
Your musings are interrupted by a low, bestial growl.
Isshin raises an eyebrow as he glances at your stomach. "You keeping a tiger in there, kid?"
"More like a giant boar," you mutter absently.