A young Michizane Sugawara learns about the tragedy at the shrine from Lord Tanashiro when he delivers the scroll, and he just doesn't know how to process all the things he's feeling as he learns that such a terrible tragedy unfolded.

All of it is just really sad.

Because he has been to battlefields, even as a helper and not a fighter, he's seen death. His mind doesn't play any silly little tricks on him, and he is forced to be grounded in reality as he listens to the story.

The idea that Ayame either died from falling or that she froze to death after and her corpse is under the fresh snow makes his heart hurt so bad he fights the urge to cry right there in front of his lord. During his time away, he entertained all kinds of daydreams, and in all of them, he would play out some life other than the one he has, and she would always be there.

Even if they were young, he loved her. He wanted to be free, so that he would be free to live her.

Michizane knows Momo must be living through hell too.

When his coat meows, Lord Tanashiro asks, "What is that?"

Michizane answers, "The girls were keeping a cat up at the shrine. I guess he got left behind with everything that happened."

Hoshi was shivering and incredibly hungry, but he'd eaten some of Michizane's provisions while they were waiting to see Tanashiro and now he was just cold and traumatized by everything.

One mystery that remains is what exactly happened to the dark idol.

Michizane examines the two halves of the broken jade idol and confirms that whatever that frightening power was, it's not trapped in the pieces of the idol.

There are a few possibilities that seem obvious:

The vengeful spirit absorbed the technique, although Tanashiro insisted the curse wasn't powerful enough.

Or it might have autonomously jumped to another vessel, an object or maybe a person, but it had a distinct presence and Tanashiro couldn't sense it when he arrived on the mountain.

It's already been more than a week since the attack, so whatever happened, most of the traces Michizane might have been able to see with Six Eyes are already gone, but Tanashiro still asks if he will go look around with Six Eyes and see if he can find anything.

Michizane tries to check in on Momo first, but she's asleep, so he hands Hoshi the cat off to the nurse to look after for a while, and heads back to the mountain.

Michizane looks around the mountain more thoroughly, mostly trying to see if he can find Ayame's body under the snow. Since it would have cooled off to being the same temperature as the snow, he's not sure if he would be able to see it, but leaving her outside until spring makes him feel sick to his stomach.

Even though he tried to deny himself, his mind does seem to suggest that maybe she's not dead, but Ayame has pink hair and the locals that live around the base of the mountain know her.

Tanashiro said he and other sorcerers were on the mountain for hours after the incident and they never saw anyone else or heard anyone crying for help. A splotch of pink can be seen against the snow from very far away, and if she'd called for help, her voice certainly would have carried.

And ultimately, regardless of what happened, no one has seen her, so she must be somewhere outside somewhere.

He can't see anything with Six Eyes, and while he considers throwing all the snow off the mountain to get a clear look, an avalanche would kill people at the base of the mountain. Killing people and wildlife to find a dead body was realistically probably unfair and immoral, as much as he wanted to do it. He is surprised that he has his wits about him to even have that consideration.

Michizane finds Master Haru's horse, dead on the side of the mountain with a broken neck, along with other serious injuries. Since humans are not sturdier than horses, it only drives home the point that the fall might not have been survivable.

The horse isn't far from some unusually sophisticated animal traps along a rocky outcropping, and Michizane knows there's a trapper who hangs around. With Six Eyes, no one around is really ever unknown to him, and even the girls knew about the trapper because they'd find these the traps on occasion.

Gazing into the distance, he spots a sign of life on another mountain and immediately appears as the trapper is setting fresh traps.

"Hello."

The trapper jumps, greeted suddenly by glowing blue eyes.

The young man has a metal pin indicating he is a high-ranking sorcerer working under Tanashiro's employ, and the trapper is sure that he's been caught and will be punished for illegal trapping.

"I'm just trying to feed my family," he quickly says.

"I doubt that's true, but it doesn't matter to me either way. I want to ask you a question. I know you skulk around here in the winter, so I'm sure you know there was a little bit of a problem at the shrine."

"I didn't see anything," he quickly says.

Michizane asks, "Did you see anyone on the mountain after?"

The trapper thinks he might be looking for the pink-haired girl, and while he has already sold her and she is long-gone from the area, he still doesn't want any suspicion.

"That night after everything happened, the wolves at the base of the mountain had a body. Or part of one. I wouldn't have been able to tell anything about the body, but the head had pink hair, so I think it was that girl who lived on the mountain. It looked like she fell, and the wolves got her. I can show you where, but in winter like this, the wolves will even eat the bones."

The best lies were ones that were partially true; Michizane knew Ayame fell, and he knew he couldn't find a body.

This explanation made him feel sick to his stomach and yet seemed to answer his questions, so because his mind simply couldn't needle the issue further, he accepted this answer.

If the wolves got Ayame, there probably wasn't much to find.

Perhaps someone would find a few bone scraps in spring, but maybe not even that.

The trapper can tell that this boy is devastated, and he feels maybe a moment of guilt. Selling a person isn't the same as selling rabbit furs, after all. The girl was in bad shape, and certainly, this boy is looking for her to take care of her.

…but if he tells one of Tanashiro's sorcerers he did something so egregious, he'll be executed, so he keeps his mouth shut and decides he won't do anything like this again.

Michizane continues searching, and finds nothing, well into the night.

There's also no trace of the dark idol.

If the power was still somewhere in the area, he would be able to see it. It almost seems like maybe the idol ceased to exist on the mountain rather than finding its way down in another vessel.

Michizane didn't think it was possible that the power had been destroyed, but even a week later, if someone had carried it out of the area, it might have left some trace behind. That said, the intense negative aura that made the idol dangerous at all times came from the warding spell placed on the idol and not the power itself, so free from the cursed jade, the strange power probably existed in some neutral capacity.

It was like a sword that had been bound up inside of an evil scabbard, which became damaged two hundred years ago and was kept at the shrine, but now the scabbard is broken, the sword is probably free.

Where it went was a completely different issue.

He imagined it might be less dangerous without its cursed scabbard, but it is still a sword and loose in the world, it would be used to cut someone eventually.

Michizane wonders if one of the other sorcerers working for Tanashiro might have taken it, but Tanashiro was the first person to arrive at the site and he of all people would have noticed something like that. It doesn't help that they didn't know much about the dark idol's creation or history.

It was named Ryomen Sukuna at some point long after it was made according to the lore, and they didn't even know where it originated in the first place.

Michizane ultimately comes up empty handed, despite having Six Eyes. He has no clue about what happened to the technique sealed away in the dark idol, and he did not find Ayame's remains.

He couldn't imagine what Momo's state of mind was, and he absolutely didn't want to tell her that her sister might have died quickly or slowly, from the fall, or from exposure, or maybe from being eaten by the wolves. He also didn't want to tell her that he couldn't find her body, and that there might be nothing, or that wolves might be playing with and gnawing on her bones.

That was her sister.

Michizane decides that reality is too cruel, so before he goes back down, he makes a little grave on the mountain. He decides he'll tell Momo that he found her, that he's certain she died instantly and probably never felt anything, and that he took care of the remains.

He makes a little grave for Master Haru too; there's nothing left of his physical body since he turned, but he puts some of his personal belongings in the grave. A cane, his teacup, a few articles of clothing.

One thing that is incredibly surprising is that Tanashiro is oddly sympathetic about everything that happened. If he had to guess how Tanashiro would react to losing the dark idol, Michizane would have expected heads to roll, and truthfully, when he first arrived at the shrine and found it destroyed, he wondered initially if Tanashiro had gotten into some sort of battle with Master Haru over its fate.

Michizane wonders if Tanashiro's humanity was somehow affected by all of this, as he does love his children, horrible as they are. Maybe he sympathized with the fact the girls hesitated to do their final duty?

It was all quite odd. He'd spent time away finding out that Tanashiro was really the cruelest of the lords, only to come home and find out he saved Momo and found a little grace to cover this situation.

When he returned to the castle, he made a report to Tanashiro, who is unsurprised that he was unable to find any clues as it had been a long shot attempt in the first place.

Michizane carries a bowl of soup to Momo's room after, hungry but wanting to see her.

This time, she's awake, and when she sees him, she panics and tries to tearfully explain. It's maybe her emotional state that sheds light on why Tanashiro isn't being harsh to her; there isn't any horrible thing anyone could tell her about what happened that she doesn't already know.

Momo doesn't look good, either; since she got stabbed through the middle, he assumes she hasn't been eating normally because she's lost a lot of weight. She presses down on the injury reflexively when she cries, so he knows it probably still hurts like hell.

"It's okay. I know about everything."

"Forgive me…it's my fault…it's my fault…"

Michizane answers, "Please don't cry. My guess is that you've already shed enough tears. Sometimes people make mistakes, or they fail at something they wanted to succeed at. What happened is sad, that's all. Not everything has to be someone's fault."

"Ayame got left behind…I…"

After swallowing hard, he tells his lie. "I found Ayame. She probably died right away when she fell and didn't feel anything. Even if you'd been able to go to her, it wouldn't have changed anything. I made a grave for her on the mountain, so she is at rest."

Even if it wasn't the truth, he felt it was his duty to Momo and maybe to Ayame too. Ayame wouldn't want Momo to be in this state. Momo was always quite serious and even though Ayame always felt useless compared to Momo, she helped Momo be happy.

Momo finds this maybe the saddest thing of all. "But you loved her."

He has already decided that he will deal with his feelings later, that is the luxury of someone trained as a soldier. They learn that they can just set things aside and sort them out at a different time. Right now, his responsibility is to take care of his friend.

There isn't anything that he can do for Master Haru or Ayame, or at least that is what he thinks.

In all of his silly little dreams with the pink haired girl, Momo would have been his sister in law. Michizane decides that he'll just be a brother to her from now on, whether she likes that or whether she doesn't. As someone raised a slave, he knows there's nothing worse than feeling alone, so he won't let her feel that way.

Since Momo had planned to dedicate her life to the shrine, everything about her life has been ruined. There's no dark idol to guard, no shrine to work at, her family is gone, and she is left with a serious injury.

All of this puts his personal plans for growth on hold and all the information he absorbed in the city just sort of gets stacked on some back shelf in his mind.

Tanashiro is kind in letting Momo recover in the castle without asking anything in return, so his feelings toward the lord soften somewhat. The lord doesn't want to conscript her into the army both due to her injury, and also due to the fact that no matter how anyone wanted to look at it, Momo's actions caused what happened on the mountain.

He thought this only proved that women were unfit for important roles.

At the same time, female sorcerers were typically just ushered straight into arranged marriages, but Momo was impaled through the pelvis by a huge piece of wood, which emerged from her back on the other side. Her body doesn't seem like it could be used for giving life, and that trying to do so might be dangerous or fatal for her.

Tanashiro doesn't know what to do with her, useless for this and that, but the real reason he looks after her is because this makes Michizane more loyal to him.

XXX

At some point, Ayame started becoming somewhat conscious, although not fully. She would swallow if offered milk or water. She had seizures occasionally at first, and her head oozed for almost two weeks.

As the swelling in her face went down and the merchant taking the furs to Nara began to realize she was an absolutely gorgeous product, he felt like he'd struck gold because he didn't pay much for her and she was clearly getting a little better each day now.

It was the smell of food when they arrived in Nara that caused Ayame to sit up and finally look around, fully conscious for the first time in weeks.

Her head was spinning, and she felt dizzy, and she couldn't remember how she got in the back of a cart?

The merchant saw her sitting up and asked, "You finally awoke?"

Her hand went to her head where the injury was. "I was sleeping?"

"For at least three weeks. I think you got hit in the head a little too hard. What's your name, girl?"

Ayame thinks about this answer so long that it's suddenly frightening, but after a while, says, "I don't remember."

Actually, she doesn't remember anything.

It was like this was the first moment of her life and nothing before that existed.

The merchant buys her a rice bowl with a little meat since she's only sipped milk for all this time, and after sitting in the back of the cart, is confronted with his humanity like the trapper was.

As someone who traded furs and rare goods, he'd thought of the pink-haired girl as a commodity, especially since it seemed like the only profit that he would receive was in selling her hair. There were wigmakers in Nara who would have probably paid as much for the hair as fifty of the top-grade white rabbit furs, and he'd only thought of her in this context.

When she actually woke up, he realized she was very young, and very scared. Additionally, it seemed like she hadn't endured a lifetime of hardship. The merchant assumes there are probably people somewhere out in the world that are looking for this girl. Since she was an odd product that seem to have travelled along with the furs, he thought maybe she came from the area around Tanashiro's castle.

If he took her back there, in the spring, would that be best?

She seems so scared, because she can't remember who she is or what she was supposed to be doing.

Facing his guilt, because he has a daughter around this age, and he hopes that if she met with misfortune that someone might be kind to her, he takes her to a doctor.

The doctor gives her a thorough examination and is surprised to find she spent so much time weaving in and out of a barely aware state where she could swallow and look around, only to emerge and regain full consciousness. He claims he's never seen such a recovery with a severe injury to the head, and that outside of that injury, she seems to be mostly okay.

Even though the doctor is unsure about what the future will be like with her head injury, the fact she had significantly improved likely meant she wouldn't die from the injury. At the same time, since the girl said her head had been aching non-stop since she awoke, and there was a funny twitch to one of her eyes, the doctor said he assumed recovery might continue for a very long time and a fully recovery might not be possible. He'd only read cases of people who lost all their memories before, and never actually met someone, so he is professionally fascinated.

As the doctor tries to test her mental faculties, he learns that this girl, with her lovely pink hair and her gemstone green eyes, can read at a literacy level equal to his own, has the most beautiful penmanship he has ever seen, knows all kinds of folklore and history, and when he brings out a board game, she not only knows how to play the game, but she is very good at it.

Even stranger, she doesn't look like any woman from the island, and judging from her education alone, she hadn't lived like most girls do.

The merchant decides that he'll let her stay with him and do menial work for his business, and then in the spring, he'll take her back to the area where the rabbits are trapped. Surely, someone there is desperately looking for her.

This is obviously someone's child.

At least, that was the plan.

But the doctor, a man of the city, makes another suggestion:

He could probably make an enormous fortune if he sells her to a pleasure house. With her exotic looks, intelligence, and charm, she'd do well at the kind of place only doctors and merchants and other well-to-do people could visit.

The suggestion is ludicrous, until the doctor tells him exactly how much she might be worth, and the merchant's sense of morality is quieted by his unspeakable greed.

When the merchant decides to do this egregiously immoral thing and sell a girl who is clearly loved and missed by someone into a brothel, instead of taking her home, he takes her to an inn where he pays the staff to help clean her up and make her pretty.

He has no idea what her name is, and she doesn't either, so he decides he'll call her Sakura due to the color of her hair. He buys a secondhand silk kimono for her, some hair sticks, and brings her to a street lined in upscale brothels.

Ayame didn't even know places like this existed before, and she feels uncomfortable being called Sakura, but she can't remember what she does want to be called. She knows she has been hurt and thinks the merchant is being kind to her, making sure she eats and has a place to rest.

A girl from a most humble area, where commoners had nearly nothing and she never saw noble women, she'd never really seen fine kimonos before. The women she meets with are stunning, with sparkling hair jewelry. They wear makeup and jewels and the kind of silk kimono that almost looks a little shiny.

She is a naïve bumpkin who has no idea what is going on here and is just enjoying seeing so many beautiful women and sparkly things.

The most scandalous thing she has ever done with a man was unpinning her hair just for Michizane so he could run his fingers through it, and she doesn't even remember that or him.

The brothels all want her, and after a bidding war, the merchant walks away with a purse equal to five hundred fine rabbit furs. Since he initially didn't think that she was even going to survive, he only paid what he thought her hair was worth, so this is a most fortuitous turn of events for him. He can expand his business, provide a better life for his family, and create a legacy for his children to inherit.

A little voice in the back of his head knows what he did was wrong and he should have taken that girl back to where she probably came from, but the world is full of people who profit off the suffering of others.

XXX

Weeks later, as the snow thaws in Tanashiro's lands, Michizane secretly returns to the mountain to see if he can find Ayame's remains despite his lie to Momo that he had already laid them to rest. Unexpectedly, he finds the corpse of the trapper who told him that he had seen her being eaten by wolves.

The trapper stepped in a giant metal trap with teeth, the kind someone might lay out to catch larger game like wolves or deer—probably not his. Unlike the delicate rabbit snare, these traps are intended to incapacitate an animal that will be killed, so his leg was seriously injured when the trap closed.

It looked like he'd had a small fire there, and the tools from his pack were laid all around the trap.

It was actually kind of mysterious, because certainly a professional trapper with a full set of tools and supplies would have experience with devices like this.

It's when he leans down to examine the trap out of curiosity that he senses it:

Lingering, tiny amounts of residue from the power of the dark idol. The cursed energy is on the trap, on the hinge and on the rusted metal.

Experimentally, Michizane with all of his strength tries to open the trap and is unable to do so. The metal, despite being rusted and exposed to the elements for an unknown number of seasons, is unyielding.

The trap was seemingly cursed by the power of the dark idol so that it would never open again.

The trapper probably stepped in it when it was covered in snow, and despite his best efforts, could not escape even though he appeared to be well prepared for an emergency like this. He even had bandages and other supplies that probably would have allowed him to survive if he'd just been able to get out of the trap.

It looked like in the end, his cause of death was probably exsanguination from trying to cut of his own leg in order to free himself. Considering the supplies wasted on the mountain and the fact he built a fire with kindling from his bag, he was probably trapped like this for days before he finally died.

Michizane finds this method of death incredibly disturbing and knows it must have been scary and hellish for the trapper.

No one has reported a missing person, so he's probably not from the valley. The teenager doesn't know his name or where he came from, so he makes a grave for him on the mountain before hauling the metal trap back to the castle.

In Nara, the warming weather brings opportunity for the merchant. He takes all his fortune, a small wooden box of gold coins, and sets out on the road to Heian Kyo with plans to expand his trade into the other city. Heian Kyo and Nara are the largest cities in the land, but Heian Kyo is more difficult to break into since they already have flourishing merchants who are quick to elbow newcomers out of the way.

With his windfall from the sale of the girl, he can overcome this effect, and he is plotting a takeover of the whole fur trade when a bridge collapses, sending his cart into a rushing river. The merchant grabs the box of gold coins before the cart sinks.

The merchant has an opportunity to reach a rock that would have allowed him to climb out of the river, but in order to do that, he would have to let go of his fortune. He sold a girl that people clearly cared for into slavery as a brothel whore for this gold, so if he let it go, what would that even mean? That he ruined her life for nothing, knowing he should have done right and that he chose not to for his own gain?

Thinking a better opportunity will come—it always does—he maintains his grip and is swept into deeper, more dangerous rapids.

Pulled under the water, he tries to resurface, only to find that his clothes are caught on a tree branch that has fallen in the river.

The only way to get free is to undress, which requires two hands, and even though he can't breathe, he tries to wedge the box into the branch so he can grab it again.

But the sharp tree branches only catch his haori even more and suddenly, he can't move his arms at all. Kicking his legs violently in a panic because he can't surface for hair, the box falls in the river and begins floating downstream while the merchant slowly drowns.

All he can think about as he is desperate for air is that he could have survived if he'd let the gold go even a moment before. And if he'd never done any of this and simply taken the girl back home where she belonged, none of this would be happening.

He thinks about his own daughter, who he is leaving in a world where even a man who thinks he is a good man will do unforgivable evil to someone else's child without remorse if he is paid enough.

And then he doesn't think about anything anymore.

The box floats downstream for a while, but eventually sinks to the bottom of a lake, where it is joined by the merchant's body as the branch that drowned him drags him further downstream. When he sinks to the bottom, the earth swallows him and his gold.

The trapper, savagely killed a trap;

The merchant, devoured by the earth with his gold;

Both of them, cursed by an unknown power.

It's a little malevolent.