Time passes, and the world evolves sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly.
Six years after the discovery that Ayame was alive and living quite well in Nara, Michizane visits Heian Kyo for a meeting, and remembers his first trip to the city, now almost thirteen years ago. He was still a kid in many ways, a slave, and the city enchanted him in a way, making him understand what humans were really capable off with opportunity and cooperation.
It was filled with life, people running everywhere, street food, all kinds of tradesman, merchants…everywhere he looked, there was something to do.
The city is a place of misery now.
Back thirteen years ago, the city was really the only major commerce hub, so whatever the laws were, traders had to put up with them. High taxes? Too bad.
The current misfortune of these people was caused by three factors:
First, the fall of the Katsuragi clan, and the fact it was replaced by the Kamo clan. The Kamo clan lost the territory it controlled decades ago, and now that they had gained control of a place again, it was painfully clear to everyone that all the horrible things people said about them were definitely true.
Second, a road was completed connecting a port in Sugawara's territory, to Magome, the growing town in the valley where Sugawara grew up, and Nara, Fujiwara's shining gem of a city. The route from Nara to the continent through well-guarded and friendly territory caused merchants to simply avoid Heian Kyo.
In the days before Sugawara took over, the Katsuragi clan had the only major port connecting to the continent and the largest center of commerce, so anything being traded across larger areas passed through there. Merchants from other territories paid a high premium to do business there, so essentially, the wealth of Heian Kyo was actually leeched out of other territories as they struggled to evolve from farming villages to towns.
Once traders started avoiding Heian Kyo, the Kamo clan banned merchants from their own territory from trading in 'enemy territories' despite the fact no one was actually at war, and increased taxes on everyone and everything to try and compensate for the loss of public funds caused by the ongoing collapse of Heian Kyo.
As things became sourer, many tradesman simply left, preferring the opportunity afforded elsewhere.
Heian Kyo, once a lively city, is a portrait of despair now. The people who have remained hate their neighbors, thinking their lives have been stolen by greedy lords, when the truth is that it was Heian Kyo that had been stealing from everyone else.
There are no street musicians, the theatre is closed, and windows are nailed shut, signs are posted to ward away the homeless. Beggars are everywhere. People are thin. Everything seems gray, dirty, unkempt.
The archive where Master Haru studied to become a priest was burned to the ground by angry protestors who despised the fact that the priests were still living lavishly while they were struggling with scarcity.
Things are dismal, except in a part of the town that is walled off where the Kamo clan's closest allies live behind a wall, where they live like everything is still wonderful. The only reason the commoners haven't scaled that fence and murdered them at this point is because the Kamo clan will kill them.
It's all so dismal.
What's the third reason for all of this?
Carts of reddish sand being hauled away to brick buildings on the river where smoke billows from huge ventilation shafts reportedly around the clock.
He zips over to take a look around and finds piles of wood, mountains of red sand, and gnarled little blocks of wrought iron, the low quality output of melting iron sands in a bloom furnace. When the sand is melted in a bloom furnace, it will separate by grade, and rough, brittle wrought iron is the lowest grade result.
While it does have many uses, it's not a suitable material for weapons, because it is brittle and very heavy. It could be used to make metal household implements like pots and pans or in construction to make nails or bolts or beams that hold up bridges, but no one is really doing any of that at the moment, so it lays discarded in small mountains around the forges.
He already knows all about this, but it's still irksome to see. There's really only one reason a territory of belligerent bastards would be sourcing tons of weapons-grade metal.
The young lord heads on to the castle where he met Daisuke Katsuragi for the first time back when he was a teenager, and finds it is just as opulent as he remembers.
His meeting is with a woman now regarded by many as the Demon Queen, Midori Katsuragi. Every man probably thinks of his mother in law as being a demon at some point, but Midori has rightfully earned her title.
Decades ago when the Kamo clan fell to near ruin, the former head of the clan, unable to overcome the incredible power of the ruling sorcerers they lost their influence to with the members they had at the time, decided to approach the failure of their clan in a different way.
He married Kamo clan women into many major sorcery houses, each time making a fuss about how the clan was in decline and this would ensure the preservation of their techniques. The real purpose of these women was to subvert and create opportunities for the Kamo clan. Clans where Kamo clan women landed tended to have an unnatural rate of assassinations, poisonings, and other misfortune.
Kikyo Fujiwara was one of these, but she rejected this fate and once she got comfortable in the Fujiwara clan, stopped interacting meaningfully with anyone from her blood family.
Midori Katsuragi was also one of these, and as long as her precious son was alive, she had no problem with the Katsuragi clan. In fact, she helped eliminate young sorcerers in the clan that might have challenged him, because she knew he didn't want to do any fighting himself and with the world as it was, that wasn't really sustainable.
When he was killed by Fujiwara, she no longer felt any loyalty to the Katsuragi clan and staged an absolute massacre of all of its members by the Kamo clan.
It was so quick and violent that the sun set on Katsuragi clan rule and rose on Kamo clan rule. There was never any time to prevent it from happening, and once it happened, they more or less had to accept the outcome.
The Kamo clan is currently being led by the Demon Queen and her brother, Akira Kamo, a short, violent man that is feared by many, hated by just about everyone.
It's really all so surprising, because Michizane just thought Midori was kind of a vain old bitch and that she probably had something wrong with her mentally. No, she was evil. The whole time, she was just evil. She was a master manipulator, a schemer, someone who warped people to suit her interests, and the only thing holding her at bay was the love she felt for her beloved son.
When he died, she took her mask off, murdered the people she'd been living with for almost four decades, and installed her blood family in their place.
With all of that in mind, he actually believes Midori probably didn't terrorize her daughter Fumiko purely out of vanity, but because she wanted her to be easy to control.
Ayame told him being a parent was a daily labor of building a person through love and encouragement so they can develop character and confidence. Fumiko was built by someone who did not have that goal in mind, and if he considers the constant abuse Fumiko suffered growing up and how desperate she was to both escape and prove she wasn't worthless, what she did actually makes a lot more sense.
Now that he's had endless amounts of time to think about things, he wishes he'd gone after her. At the time, he felt relieved that she left because he didn't want to even face her, but he sincerely believes that if there had been a mechanism by which she could have switched places and died and the baby lived, she would have used it without hesitation.
Even if they couldn't continue on as a happily married couple, he felt like he should have provided a home for her and if she still wanted to leave, made sure she had a safe place to go. By the time he calmed down enough to feel this way, it was far too late to try and track her down. The fact that no one anywhere has ever seen or heard a single word about Fumiko in six years leads him to worry that she met misfortune, especially travelling in the condition she was in.
Being left to believe a woman he loved is dead somewhere out in the wild seems to be a situation he shouldn't have let happen again.
But to the matter at hand:
Midori Katsuragi sits on something that looks suspiciously like a throne, with a fancy gold headdress embellished in gems and peacock feathers that looks suspiciously like a crown.
Two hundred years ago, sorcerers decided that Akitsushima was an island that needed no emperor. In all of the constant warring that followed, imagery that was imperial in nature was considered in incredibly poor taste by everyone.
"Well, if it isn't my son in law."
"Greetings, Demon Mother."
"You flatter me. My dear brother Lord Akira will not be joining us. He had urgent business."
Sugawara shrugs. "I didn't want to talk to that loser anyway."
"Loser? Lord Kamo has overcome the ruin left behind by our weak, foolish forebearers. There is no one like him, rising from such a low place."
"I was a slave the first time we met. An actual slave. Someone owned me."
Midori answers, "Whose fault is that? Have you ever thought about what an unpleasant son you must have been that your own mother looked upon you and said to herself, 'I'd rather have a few gold coins than this thing.' I can see her point, really."
The blistering enmity within this relationship all goes back to what happened when Fumiko left.
When he and Fujiwara sat down and they put everything together, they assumed from the start that Daisuke Katsuragi told his family about Fumiko's curse and about the power that cursed her. For whatever reason, it seemed clear that he chose not to. Sugawara's best guess is that he didn't tell his mother he was assuming risk for his sister's sake because his mother would never have supported that.
So when Fujiwara retaliated and killed him, that knowledge never spread into the Katsuragi or Kamo clans or any of their allies, a small miracle.
That also meant that the Demon Queen knew generally that Daisuke's death was in some way caused by Fumiko, but she doesn't know any of the details and despite rising to her current position, she has been unable to gain answers. She hates Michizane because she's sure that he probably played some role, and if nothing else, he absolutely knows what happened.
But more than answers, the thing she wants more than anything is vengeance.
Against Fujiwara and his family, to kill his sons and him and to send violence to rip through their clan like the unholy monster that she truly is.
One of his advisors tells him he has a horrible mother in law because she moved in and complains about everything. His mother in law wants to murder everyone and become the new empress, with her brother?
There is a rule they all observe that when coming to visit an enemy, certain customs must be observed. Sugawara passed into the city without resistance because there was an expectation that he wouldn't cause trouble while there. In the world of sorcery, it's generally not permissible to strike directly at an enemy base.
In a war without sorcerers, armies have to move a certain way, progressively, but there are sorcerers who can go wherever they want, and so they don't attack each other at home so they won't be attacked at home.
Daisuke violated this rule for Fumiko's sake, so Fujiwara violated it in kind and came to this castle to kill him, a reminder to everyone why such customs came into existence in the first place.
He thinks he might save the world a lot of trouble, if he just flicked his fingers and splashed her on her throne, but the Kamo clan is nasty, and if he strikes them at home, they'll do worse to him. The only way to really stop them would be to uproot their entire web of allies all at once.
So, for a while, the two just stare at each other, and Midori looks down at him, bored. He notes her hair, which had gray stripes at the temples the last time he saw her, has been dyed, probably with imported dye. It's so opulent, to be an aging woman with dyed hair and a crown, in a city of hungry commoners.
"Did you come here for some political reason, or did you just want to gaze upon my beauty? You requested this meeting, so here we are. Meeting," she asks.
Michizane points at the other throne and asks, "Can I just ask about the brother-sister thrones? I mean, I'm not a scholar or anything, but when the emperor was around, did he sit on the throne next to his favorite sister?"
"I'm confused about whether the silly little slave boy wants to know what it's like to have a real family or if he has some perverted curiosity in incest? Either way, it is so very clear that you were not loved enough as a child. Are you here for some personal reason? Perhaps to ask for a divorce?"
"I decided I won't divorce Fumiko unless she comes home and asks."
"Why?"
"I made my vows too. Approaching the world with an attitude of grace can do wonders for a person's sense of peace."
"According to your marriage contract, you'd be obligated to take a concubine from the Katsuragi clan, but we only kept two of the girls and I gave them to my brother so we could capture the Katsuragi clan technique. Your contract was non-transferrable. I checked, kind of a disappointment, really. So I suppose we don't have any further business in that regard."
Sugawara asks, "All the personal stuff aside, what do you plan on doing with all that metal?"
"We're going to use it for art. With enough metal and the right attitude, it's possible to paint the whole world red."
"Is that what you want?"
"You know what I want. I want Kenji Fujiwara's head. When I finally get my hands on it, a certain woman will become available, you know. Who will she fuck then? Probably still not you."
With a sigh, he says, "I came to ask you about two matters. Someone broke the seal on Yamata No Orochi. Do you know anything about that?"
"Of course I do. If I didn't, you wouldn't have come here to ask. But, you have your secrets, and I have mine. I'd wager mine is more dangerous."
Michizane lets out a little laugh. "You're wrong. The only thing I would bet on is that if we ever find out for sure, it'll be a dark day for everyone."
Fujiwara killing Daisuke Katsuragi was such a mistake, but it was always easy to understand why he did it. If someone sent an assassin into a bedroom with his wife and child, he would absolutely eliminate them from the earth. It's just that Daisuke's life was the only thing keeping the Demon Queen from plunging their lives into violent chaos.
Then again, if he had died from natural causes, everything would probably be the same except she'd want to kill Fujiwara for purely political reasons instead of personal ones.
The cautious peace the central region of the island had is about to come to an end. They all know it. The signs are everywhere.
The Kamo clan has a vast network of allies that they've been building, most of whom are similarly motivated. When the emperor was first eliminated, the island shattered into dozens of tiny feudal areas, with more powerful clans claiming a piece of the world for themselves.
As time passed, these areas consolidated for a lot of reasons, one of the main ones being that if a clan had a powerful sorcerer two hundred years ago, that was all well and good, but did they still have one when that person died, or the person after that? The clans that had prevailed were the ones who, through luck or strength of bloodline, consistently produced powerful sorcerers. By this same token, a clan losing their powerful sorcerers usually vanished, absorbed into other families like Katsuragi.
One by one by one, most of the clans that had something at first lost it, including the Kamo clan. Some of those clans have powerful sorcerers right now, and they are aligned with Kamo because Kamo has likely promised them territory if they topple the pillars currently holding the world up.
Since many of these families fell from prominence and have been mostly living in secret to rebuild and strengthen themselves, the number of sorcerers and their strength levels is unknown to Sugawara and Fujiwara. What is clear is that despite the incredible power they hold both as individuals and lords, this woman is very confident that she will emerge victorious, and that is scary. It means that somewhere in the equation, there is some factor they don't know about that tips the scales against them.
The Kamo alliance is contrary to the Jujutsu Society as well, which primarily aims to limit how sorcerers endanger civilians. Jujutsu Society sorcerers agree to settle disputes in direct battles with one another if it comes down to that, without mobilizing armies of non-sorcerers that get slaughtered.
It's like there are two worlds that are trying to emerge at one time, and the only way for either to be born is for the two worlds to clash and see which one survives.
The real reason he has come is to ask if there's any way to dissuade Kamo from what they are obviously about to do, but she only laughs in his face and sends him away with nothing, which is exactly what he expected. Still, he didn't want to be sitting on some battlefield in a few months, wondering if he'd really exhausted all his options.
She implied they'd wait if there was an agreement to trade resources, and as much as Sugawara feels enormous empathy for the people living in this increasingly hungry territory, he knows that if he sends rice to them it will be stockpiled for the army instead of reaching the people who truly need it.
In peacetime, people produce more than they consume, so it's possible for most to at least get by. People are more charitable to each other when they have a little extra, and they don't mind pitching together to provide a roof and a bed for those who aren't able to be productive because they're children or old or disabled in some way.
In the instant a war begins, the spirit of scarcity returns because war destroys resources. Soldiers don't produce anything but death and destruction, and it takes so many resources to keep them doing that. People become desperately worried about their own families, and become less kind to others, and if things get bad, many resort to violence to get by.
There's no reason to drag non-sorcerers into anything, but the horror is the point.
Sugawara and Fujiwara agree with a future where sorcerers settle things amongst themselves, so forcing them to mobilize an army because Kamo clan is in some way makes that message seem incredibly silly, like it could never work.
He leaves with a confirmation that everything they're worried about is really going to happen and there is nothing they can do about it.
His next step is Nara, where Fujiwara is not surprised that his effort was a failure.
Fujiwara is making decisions about how to posture his clan for the war. He considered whether to send his family and other noncombatants away from Nara, but having them away from the center of power is dangerous. There are reasons a bad actor would go looking for his children, as Kenshin carries Ten Shadows, and Ayame herself is a liability due to being the dark idol's vessel. Kikyo is a target for the Kamo clan since she is one of them, and she turned on them right away when she was married into the Fujiwara clan.
Moving the center of power of the Fujiwara clan out of Nara will probably condemn the city to some terrible fate, but moving his family away from that power is also unacceptable.
Michizane's household is just Tengen, her student, and her brother, and there's no reason for anyone to target her brother and people are still a bit scared of Tengen.
It's all so stupid to him.
Fujiwara pretends not to be stressed out about it, but it's clear he is worried, even as he walks with Michizane in the courtyard with his three-year-old daughter Hoshiko holding his hand.
Hoshiko inherited her mother's pink hair and her father's dark blue eyes and is just the bubbliest little ray of sunshine to everyone. Fujiwara jokingly tells anyone who will listen that she is favorite, to which his sons will only roll their eyes because they know he's a bit silly sometimes.
Hoshiko holds onto her father's callused hand as he swings her off the ground.
She runs off after big brother Kenjaku when Kenjaku spots her and calls her away, understanding the two lords might have important things to discuss that aren't for young ears to hear.
Kenji isn't surprised that Michizane's attempt at negotiation failed because there was never anything to negotiate. He initially blamed his killing of Daisuke Katsuragi for the current state of affairs, but Kenji actually didn't think anything would be different if he hadn't. He thinks Akira Kamo, Midori's brother and current head of the clan, would have probably killed Daisuke in some secret way to achieve this end.
"Kenjaku is getting so tall. He's starting to look more like a man these days," Michizane says.
"Right? He's taller than his mother now. Ayame too. I feel like every time I turn around he's gotten a little bigger. He's started getting pimples."
"Poor guy."
Michizane says, "I wasn't going to say anything because it's not really my business, but all things considered, it might be something we need to have in mind if things become dangerous."
"Huh?"
"Do you know Ayame is pregnant?"
"Are you sure?"
"I figured out how babies look in the womb while Fumiko was pregnant. Twins this time."
He doesn't exactly seem happy about it, but Michizane assumes it would be different if things weren't politically stressful and dangerous. If Fujiwara didn't have a multitude of responsibilities, he'd every day of his life at home with Ayame and the babies.
"Twins? That's rare."
Twin pregnancies are regarded with a lot of negativity, because they are far more dangerous and likely to result in tragedy, because they take so much strength from the mother, and also because they're just generally regarded as an incredibly bad omen. In many remote villages, if twins are born, it is common for one of them to be sacrificed at a shrine as a plea for leniency from the gods.
While neither of the men are particularly superstitious, something that is typically perceived as a precursor for tragedy and misfortune suddenly happening in Fujiwara's family is…probably nothing, but a creepy coincidence, at best.
Fujiwara says, "Uhhh, do me a favor and don't tell her I was a little sour about it."
"Of course, sure. I understand."
While they talk, Kenjaku takes his little sister to swing for a little while and then inside because he has a bit of a new hobby he really likes. He likes cooking, just mixing all kinds of things and tasting new things and combining things in different ways is actually quite nice.
Plus, it's time he usually spends with Ayame, who has been his true mother in every sense of the word. Since she was with him when he was a newborn, she's been the one who loved and taught him most and embraced him even though he was different than everyone else.
That's not to say that he doesn't have a good relationship with his mother now, but they get along better as he gets older, and they relate to each other more easily. When he was younger, they struggled a little.
He knows people think he should feel slighted or whatever, because his younger brother Kenshin is very obviously going to be the Fujiwara clan heir. He has the technique, and probably the personality for it. Anyone who doesn't think a six-year-old can have or not have heir-type personality traits wasn't around when he was six and having animal funerals in the garden.
An outsider would probably call Kenshin the perfect son, and Kenjaku doesn't really disagree that his little brother is great.
Kenjaku doesn't want to be head of the clan, or honestly, even someone deeply involved with the clan. What he wants for himself is to leave home when he gets older and travel all over the world. There are so many things to do and see, so many things he wants to learn about and try.
His father has never in his life known that kind of freedom despite all the power that he holds.
Kenjaku loves his family very much, especially his younger siblings, and he enjoys being a big brother, but he doesn't really care about the Fujiwara clan beyond that. He wants to be free, and being honest with himself about that allows him to actually feel very relieved that he will be passed over as the firstborn son.
He is so glad every day that he had someone in his life that accepted and loved him to death even though he isn't like everyone else, who told him every single day that it was okay and he could be different and want different things. The older he gets, the more he understands that Ayame almost singlehandedly kept him from being forced to become something he wasn't meant to be.
Besides, they have so much fun. Sometimes they get carried away with cooking and make food too spicy. Kenshin and his dad, hilariously enough, can't stomach spicy food, so they'll end up having to eat something else while he and Ayame and Hoshiko eat the spicy goodness of the land.
Hoshiko is a tiny little girl who can eat food spicier than any man, and there is broad discussion about this in their family, that perhaps she can't taste the spice or her technique has something to do with spice, or maybe she's just odd. She will grab dried peppers and gnaw on them if she sees them in the kitchen.
Hoshiko once tried to share her spicy rice with her father, who didn't know it was spicy rice and was left with eyes watering. Thinking he was crying as she sat on his lap, she reached up to wipe his tears away, but she was two, so of course she'd been eating with her hands and rubbed peppery oil in his eye. He was a lord defeated by a toddler with spicy, sticky fingers.
Ayame asks, "Maybe we should make two pots?"
"One for the current and future heads of the great Fujiwara clan, and one for those of us who can't be defeated by pepper flakes?"
She laughs. "Michizane is another big scary sorcerer who can't take a little spice."
"He kind of looks…unseasoned? Very pale and not very much color as long as his eyes are covered. Like an unseasoned chicken leg with long hair."
They laugh together as they work.
Kenjaku believes that someday when he leaves and is exploring the big, wide world, he'll probably miss times like this.
Michizane has dinner with the family after he finishes discussing everything with Kenji, and basks in the glow of this happy family. Maybe he's a bit envious of Kenji, not because he has Ayame, but because he thinks it would probably be a lot of fun to be surrounded by babies all the time and watch them grow.
Someday, he'd like to have a life like this.
Fujiwara loves Ayame very much, but it is also true that she loves him back just as much. So it's not hard for him to think that he missed his opportunity, because in the end, she has built her life with someone she loves. Someday, he'll be able to do the same.
When he returns home, he and Tengen regroup, and she sends messengers out to the Jujutsu Society sorcerers to update them on everything. The situation with the Kamo clan alliance has threatened the Jujutsu Society's very foundation.
The Jujutsu Society is founded to bring about a better world, not to become another factional alliance that causes bloodshed. Tengen doesn't want to allow the Jujutsu Society to become twisted into the very thing it's meant to oppose, and he agrees with this. Adding more sorcerers to the conflict will just get more people killed and defeat the entire purpose of all of it.
XXX
In the distant northern compound of the Star Society, Fumiko notes the passage of time, and wonders what is going on in the outside world from time to time, but information never reaches her.
When she first arrived, the Star Society was just a bunch of lost people living together, participating in strange religious rituals that didn't make a lot of sense. The big-breasted Tengen statue remains focal, and every time she sees it, she thinks about how annoyed Tengen would be if she ever saw it.
After the first year, a strange man wandered in, a foreigner. He had a powerful aura, the kind of presence a sorcerer might feel around an absolutely monster-class sorcerer and never at any other time. He wanted to know about Tengen, all about her, about their work, about everything they'd managed to learn about her, about that terrifying night that she almost evolved into something inhuman.
Zhang is from the continent and has an odd appearance. His skin is incredibly pale, marked with dark spots from the sun, and has a weird, almost sickly pinkish tint to it despite the fact that he seems quite healthy. His hair is snow white, although not white like Michizane's, as Michizane's hair is quite lustrous and soft. Zhang's hair is kept cut short, quite out of style, and it's sort of fuzzy. It sort of reminds her of the downy fluff a baby has at birth. His eyes are gray but have a reddish hue over them.
He reminds her of the albino rats that she'd occasionally see back in Heian Kyo.
His body is quite small and scrawny, perhaps as tall as an average woman and not much heavier. Yet he has that presence, like he can be a danger to everyone if he wants to be.
And when Zhang arrived, things started to change.
A wall went up, in one corner, separating a huge part of the Star Society into a place called the Enclave. People with sorcery powers were invited to be trained in the Enclave, to serve the goal of seeing Tengen reach her true potential.
Fumiko stayed away from Zhang and the Enclave because it became increasingly clear that the Star Society had been taken over by this strange foreign sorcerer.
Even more concerning, once Zhang seemed to have consolidated power in the Star Society, while things in the general population seemed normal most of the time, people from the outside started coming in, going straight to the Enclave.
People she saw meeting with her brother years ago started to come and go from this place, and she realized over time that the Star Society had been taken over by people who had no interest in what the Star Society members wanted. What they wanted was unquestionably stupid and probably impossible, but they were being used by people associated with the Kamo clan who had some other agenda.
In her fourth year at the Star Society, she tried to escape one night because she realized this organization was probably going to be used to attack the Jujutsu Society. She thought she'd escape and find her way back home to warn Michizane. But after a brief skirmish with a trained sorcerer, one of the leaders broke her left foot with a heavy rock. In her sixth year, it remains gnarled, and it is physically impossible for her to run or climb the wall.
So no, things are not going well even though they were fine before Zhang showed up.
She'd do her little daily chores, talk to people, laugh, play games. They made booze in a bathtub, had silly little competitions, and yes, maybe she felt weird making offerings to the big-breasted Tengen statue, but she had friends. Older ladies who were very nice and motherly to her, lady friends to giggle with, kids to watch and look after, and sometimes, men flirted with her because this was a world where it was wonderfully okay to just have normal looks.
She would never flirt back, as she was a married woman, and she could never love anyone like Michizane, which was probably best for everyone considering how that turned out.
Fumiko has learned that she has a good sense of humor and when she tells jokes, people always laugh. She wonders sometimes if she'd been able to be herself back then, if she could have made Michizane laugh too. Probably, he's such a silly man sometimes. Fun.
If she could leave, she'd like to see him again, probably just for closure. She doesn't think there's any possible way they might be able to move past what happened to them, but she also doesn't like how things ended and thinks an apology with a more mature mind is the least that her husband is owed.
But then, on some lovely spring afternoon, while she is hanging laundry, she reaches to a basket of wet bed linens and hears the wet bedsheet she just hung whip in the wind as someone slaps it out of the way.
"Well, well, well, if it isn't the runaway lady of Sugawara House."
Akira Kamo, the devil himself, although Fumiko has been so isolated that she has no idea about anything that's happened in the outside world so her understanding of the danger she is in is inaccurate. He is far worse than she even fears, and she fears a lot, actually.
"Well, well, well, if it isn't my evil uncle," she nervously answers, "How have you been? Still evil?"
Akira Kamo is a short and stocky man who she would explain looks like a boiled thumb wearing a topknot and is otherwise unremarkable to look at. His skin is unusually dark for someone from their part of the world, which is considered quite unattractive.
Instead of answering, he grabs her by the hair and drags her straight into the Enclave, a place she has never been before.
If someone told her what was inside, she certainly wouldn't have guessed 'hundreds of inexplicably ambivalent cursed spirits just lazing about a garden of absolute nightmares.' She knew there was a concealment barrier, but she just assumed they were concealing something ridiculous. Sometimes sorcerers were very secretive of things they cared about that no one else in the world cared about.
Kamo drags her to a stone building at the center of the Enclave, where white-haired Zhang is sitting at a desk.
Zhang looks up and asks, "What now?"
"How long has she been here?"
"Sister Fumiko? Hmmmm…" Zhang thinks for a moment, tapping his chin, "I have no idea. I think she was here when I got here."
"Do you have any idea who this is?"
"The woman who does the laundry?"
Zhang is confused about what all this is about as Akira has seemingly brought one of the most normal people around to him, demanding answers. Fumiko is actually one of the more emotionally balanced and useful cult members, as she's both literate and seemingly not insane. The Star Society has attracted a collection of rather eccentric personalities, being a fringe religious order and all.
Akira says, "This is Michizane Sugawara's wife. His wife. His damn wife. If you want to know something about Tengen, this woman probably has the answer. They all lived together like a family. She knows information about Sugawara that's probably priceless, and I would bet that based on how close Sugawara and Fujiwara is, that she knows about them too."
Zhang looks her over. "Sugawara…married her?"
"Yes."
"Are you sure?"
"She's my niece."
Fumiko realizes at this point that she's probably in the kind of danger that a person can't escape from, and that if Akira wants to know her secrets, telling him no isn't really going to work. He is known to have tortured people, information she has been blessed with because this man is her uncle.
Since she ran away from her life because she hurt people who loved her, she promised herself she wouldn't ruin all their lives again no matter what. There are secrets here that need to be kept, and yet she knows if she tries to keep them, Akira is going to hurt her. And not hurt her a little bit…this is information they clearly need for some critical purpose. The only way she's going to get away from Akira without disclosing it is if she dies.
There's not a scenario where she can be okay and protect her family back in the valley. She can either be okay, or she can protect them. Worst case scenario, she might decide to hold out and then find the torture unbearable and end up failing everyone and dying too.
Fumiko doesn't know how much information they have, or what's happened in all these years, but she holds two very dangerous pieces of information.
The first piece of critical information is that Tengen is not the only one of her kind and that her student Narumi is like her. If they learned that, it would put Narumi in catastrophic amounts of danger. Everyone is afraid of Tengen, but unless things have changed, Narumi is a version of Tengen that's less dangerous to bad actors.
The second dangerous secret she holds concerns the Ayame Tengen's status as the dark idol's vessel. She doesn't know if her brother told their mother about it before he died, but if not, Akira probably doesn't know. That's the sort of thing a trashy wretch like him would be very happy to find out about.
She almost died in childbirth and lives with a mutilated foot, so she generally thinks that she can take pain fairly well, but is there an amount that would make her give up?
Maybe it's a silly question, because even if she told them everything she knows, they wouldn't want anyone else to find out that they found out, so they would kill her anyway.
Yes, no matter how she looks at it, she's done.
If she tells, they'll kill her.
If she doesn't, they'll torture her until she dies trying to make her.
Somewhere in the back of her mind, she wonders if it would have been better if she'd learned to use her cursed technique, but these sorcerers are very powerful. Unless she became one of the greats, impossible with her cursed energy, there was never any possibility that she might escape from this room. It didn't matter what choices she made before this, this room was a point of no return for her.
Fumiko feels like an animal caught in a trap, frustrated that every outcome of this situation will result in her death.
Killers know when their victims realize their fate, and Zhang looks back down at the letter he was writing.
"I don't really want to participate in abusing a woman. I'll leave her to you."
Fumiko says, "I actually need to use the toilet."
"…what?" Akira asks.
"I'm not someone who can drink milk, and I…I drank milk."
That sounds gross, and someone having that kind of incident is an inconvenience to everyone in the room, so Akira curses under his breath and takes her back outside to the toilet.
"Why are you dragging me?"
"Can you walk?"
"Not very well, if we can be perfectly honest!"
Once they get there, she closes the door, and starts untying her long belt.
This is probably her absolutely last opportunity for her to avoid being tortured to death or betraying everyone again, so she throws the belt over the ceiling, and ties it in a knot.
Fumiko wonders what the point of life ever was in the first. She had an unhappy upbringing, committed a terrible sin that hurt everyone, ruined her marriage, got her precious son and brother killed, became cursed by some sort of ancient power that thought she was a terrible person, ran away from home, and despite having been born in a castle in Heian Kyo, was going to die by suicide in a toilet in some horrible place.
In a story, a villain who achieved redemption was supposed to have some kind of closure, maybe they reunite and apologize for their wrongs and the people they wrong forgive them, or they find some sort of happiness beyond their mistakes.
No, she was going to jump off the side of a toilet and die.
It's a joke, really. All a stupid, awful joke, and she hopes the gods are having a nice laugh.
It doesn't hurt very much.
It's fine this way.
She hopes everyone is okay and that maybe this will make up for some of the hurt she caused. In the end, she protected them, and even if they don't know that, it still happened.
Akira waits outside for ten minutes, shouting at her to hurry up.
He beats on the door, curses at her, and then when he forces it open, finds their source of information hanging dead.
Akira checks to see if he might be able to do something with reversed curse technique, but he can't.
Still he laughs at her as he throws her over his shoulder. "Did you think that would be enough?"
When he brings her back to Zhang's office, he drops her corpse on the desk.
"What? Did she already tell you everything?"
"Stupid girl hung herself. There's no need to worry."
Zhang says, "What do you mean by that? Do you have some way to ask a corpse questions?"
"I do."
"And she'll answer?"
Akira reaches out to pat him on the head. "You came from a foreign land, so how could you even know the horrors of Akitsushima? This island is cursed in ways that you can't even imagine. Let's go for a dark little adventure."
Zhang says, "I do not like adventure."
"Too bad. If you want whatever this idiot woman has trapped in her idiot mind, it has to be done in about three hours, or it won't work."
Akira needs the use of a fast-flying cursed spirit, but Zhang is reluctant to go that far south. The central part of the island is dominated by allied dragons Kenji Fujiwara and Michizane Sugawara, monsters that have locked down an immense tract of land. The problem with this is that Master Tengen, the founder of the Jujutsu Society, sometimes creates massive barriers that allow her to see what's going on inside of them.
No one who is going to talk to the Kamo clan knows how big these barriers actually are, but the Kamo clan has been testing how far out they can cause trouble without a Jujutsu Society sorcerer showing up, and they generally think that when Tengen is watching, she can see across both allied territories and perhaps into half of the Kamo clan's as well.
And Tengen isn't the only problem.
Six Eyes have some absurd range as well, and unlike Tengen, Michizane moves around a lot. Because he can mysteriously just 'appear' in places that are far apart from each other, it is impossible to guess where the range of his senses are.
Fujiwara and Sugawara had already risen to power when he first decided to come to the island, so he crossed the sea to the distant north and only went south very cautiously. Typically, he would fly so far around so that he flew over the sea rather than risk being discovered.
Going south makes him nervous, but he agrees before stopping to check in on the occupant in the adjacent room.
There, a woman he has taken a liking to is quietly nursing a baby, who will carry a strange seed many years into the future before it spouts again, seemingly at random, in a family that seems to have no connection to the sorcery world.
Zhang's technique is Cursed Spirit Manipulation.
He grew up in a small village on the continent, and because he had this technique, he decided that he would travel to the island, rumored to be full of powerful cursed spirits.
When he arrived, he found hell.
Some foreigners on the continent were teaching that evildoers go to hell when they die, but he now knows that hell isn't an imaginary place, it's Akitsushima. In Zhongguo, they talk about this island as being filled with uncivilized barbarians, but it's much worse than that. There are many small islands where less advanced people live. Akitsushima is something else.
The island itself is so difficult to navigate for people without some sort of superpower that he wonders why people ever tried to live there at all. In his few years here, Zhang has seen an avalanche, mountains buried in so much snow that it all slides down and buries entire villages. The mountains are hell to live on, but most of the valleys flood easily and quickly. Landslides are frequent. The island has been hit by a typhoon every other year that he has lived here, and he thinks that perhaps the island tempers the storms before they strike the continent because what happens here during a typhoon is difficult to imagine or explain. It's like the very hands of the gods are trying to break the world apart, drown it, blow away this whole island and all the people on it.
The earth shakes often, sometimes to a point that's scary, but that's nothing compared to what comes after. A tsunami struck the nearby shore only a year ago and all the fishing villages disappeared like they never existed in the first place.
And if all of that wasn't bad enough, the island is overflowing with cursed energy, and has so many sorcerers and so many powerful sorcerers that he can name at least fifty who would be considered legendary on the continent, but on the island no one even knows who they are.
These sorcerers are constantly killing each other and everyone else, and if the island and the warlords don't do the job, the wilds are filled with cursed spirits, bandits, murderers, slave traders, and thieves. It's not uncommon to find a whole village that has been eaten by some random cursed spirit. On the continent, a cursed spirit powerful enough to kill many humans at once would be a big deal, but it's not even something worth note here.
Zhang is convinced that the gods only reincarnate people here if they hate them or they did something terrible in a past life, explaining why there are so many subhumans like Akira Kamo, whose niece immediately committed suicide after running into him by chance because she seemingly knew what he was going to do to her.
When he goes back home, no one is going to believe anything he says about this place or these people.
But, he's not going to leave until he gets what he wants. In that respect, he is also a terrible thing that is going to happen to the people of this island.
Zhang only wants one thing: Curse Tengen.
He already collected Yamata No Orochi, and while there's no one who could overpower him on the continent now, Curse Tengen is the ultimate prize. Tales about her reached him when he first arrived, and he accidentally met some members of this weird little religious organization.
Zhang unfortunately knows that gaining access to Tengen will require breaking apart the allies that protect her.
Akira Kamo came to the Star Society seeking to fashion it into an anti-Jujutsu Society outfit, and their causes are aligned. Kamo wants victory over the other territories and to consolidate everything into his kingdom, and Zhang wants Tengen.
Tengen's existence is a problem, and Zhang being able to control her and take her away without the need to overpower her solves an important problem for the Kamo clan.
Zhang plans to return home with the woman and their child once he has his prize, but he does secretly hope that something absolutely dreadful happens to Akira.
For now, he flies with Kamo and a dead woman on the back of Blackbird, one of his favorite curses. It's so quick and looks like a giant crow. Blackbird carried him across the sea, to this strange wonderland of dread.
They fly around, over the sea, to avoid any risk of crossing into any super senses and then loop around to Heian Kyo.
Zhang still doesn't understand what they're doing, but Akira continues on into the castle, with Fumiko's body on his shoulder.
Akira likes to talk a lot, and unabashedly explains this poor girl was placed into an arranged marriage that went bad and ran away after her baby died over some strange mystery that probably led to the end of the Katsuragi clan.
"This is your sister's child, no? Won't she be sad her daughter died?"
"If I brought her in alive, Midori would kill her with her bare hands. She really preferred Daisuke, so the fact he died and it was probably her fault…she's not going to be upset."
Zhang answers, "Your family is quite terrible. If my sister died, my mother would never recover."
Akira takes Fumiko's body to an empty bedroom and asks a servant to fetch someone named Kazuya, and Zhang waits to see what sort of unholy, disgusting thing this man is going to do with the corpse of his niece, who he probably watched grow up from a child.
It sounded like she had a really hard time in her life, and Zhang wonders if getting entangled with these people will end with him sharing some sort of karmic debt.
Just kidding.
If this island taught him anything, it's that there are no consequences for anything, just endless churning chaos that seeks to destroy everyone.
He knows it's dangerous to try and benefit from that chaos, believing he can grab a piece of meat from the fire without getting pulled into the flames himself.
Kazuya enters, and he doesn't look like the other Kamo clan members. He seems like an unrelated person, which features that seem more southern, but the reason for that becomes clear a few minutes later.
Akira points, and Kazuya recognizes Fumiko's corpse.
The two men argue, because Akira wants Kazuya to do something and he doesn't want to do it. He calls whatever is being asked 'disgusting, disrespectful,' and says, 'maybe for a stranger, but not for family.'
Kazuya argues he's never done whatever it is to a woman before, and Zhang feels increasingly uncomfortable, although despite his discomfort, nothing prepares him for what he sees next.
Kazuya goes over to the bed, takes out a sharp instrument that's quite flat, and starts, using it to hammer into her forehead like someone chiseling wood.
At this point, Fumiko has already been dead for over two hours, so the blood has thickened although it still oozes as he chips her skull in a straight line.
Zhang watches in horror as he removes the top of the skull, and then, takes out her brain. There's coagulated blood, slimy ooze, and a pinkish fleshy mass.
Then Kazuya pushes his bangs back and pulls a stitch before taking the top of his own skull off.
Kazuya takes his own brain out, puts it in the hollowed out skull of Fumiko, and then his existing body collapses to the ground as Fumiko's begins to move.
While Kenjaku's family believes that he has a strange technique that no one has ever seen before, it's actually something he inherited that the Kamo clan, which works very hard to keep it very secret. Only a few people in the family are ever allowed to know that some of those born into the clan have had this ability. Even Kenjaku's mother Kikyo doesn't know that his odd technique was inherited through her.
Kazuya heals the body, which isn't in particularly poor shape since Fumiko didn't die a particularly violent death.
As he stands up, he suddenly sees a vision, of a torii gate surrounded in skulls.
"Master Akira," he says, his voice now soft and female.
"What?"
"There's something already in here, and I don't like it. I'm coming out. This body is cursed!"
"Fumiko? Cursed? Are you out of your mind? Calm down," Akira firmly orders.
Kazuya desperately sorts through Fumiko's memories for any information about what it is that is living inside of her flesh, because it is deeply terrifying to get into a body and find something else there.
What kind of vicious curse is so malevolent that it stays in a person's flesh after they die?
He sees an object in her memories and grapples for the good luck charm that Ayame Tengen made for Fumiko, which Fumiko wore on a chain around her neck. It's the only thing that kept her from being consumed by her curse, he's sure of it—or at least Fumiko was sure of it while she was alive.
It was a mistake to get into this body.
Still, he dumps her memories, and he tells all of her secrets.
Even though Fumiko had been isolated for years, she had all kinds of valuable information.
They are stunned to learn there's another Tengen, but more importantly, they learn that the infamous dark idol has a fairly helpless host.
Kazuya feels bad for poor Fumiko, since he knows she took her own life to protect this information, but it's information that Akira would kill for.
The curse that is lingering in this body fills him with such dread that it is almost unbearable. To a sorcerer who is sensitive to such things and a fellow invader of the body, it's scary in there and he wants to get out. The fact that this curse is just basically residue from angering the power inside of Ayame Tengen hints at strength beyond their understanding because he's never even heard of a curse this potent.
He hopes once they have all the information they want that he will be able to switch; even though he can't ever go back to an old host, it would be better for him to be inside of any random person dragged in off the street than to be in this body. This curse almost tortured Fumiko to death and it killed her baby, so there's no telling what it might due to him.
And even if the body wasn't cursed, it's a terrible body. The foot is busted to all hell and even standing on it hurts. It was very purposefully crippled, and he doesn't want to be in a body with a crippled foot. And even if it wasn't cursed and crippled, his memories tell him this thing bleeds like a fountain every month as a result of the injury to her body during delivery.
Kazuya doesn't want to menstruate, or be crippled, or be cursed.
There aren't a lot of interesting or fun memories, just a lot of his cousin Midori berating this poor girl, followed by incredible misfortune, bad choices, regret, a curse, a dead child, a crippling injury, and then death. The fact she couldn't even achieve anything she wanted in death is probably the saddest thing of all, and Kazuya is glad she doesn't know what he's done.
Akira tells him he has to stay in Fumiko for a while longer and that he needs to come up with a plan, and Kazuya decides a little alcohol will do him well.
His heart won't stop pounding as he remembers that vision of the torii gate with the skulls, like the curse is waiting to welcome him to his death, and his forehead is practically sweating as he wanders to a small little den where the Kamo clan members gather to drink.
Just as he is about to pour a beer he hears the Demon Queen.
"Don't tell me my worthless child has returned. Do you think you can just come here, after all you've done, and expect any kindness at all?" Midori asks.
Kazuya is weirdly terrified by the tone in her voice because it's actually very evil.
Fumiko's life was scary.
"Lady Midori, it's me, Kazuya."
"Kazuya. Really?"
"Yes. Sorry."
Midori looks him down and says, "You're standing like it's your first day being a woman. Legs together. There's nothing down there to obstruct. Chin up, shoulders back. If you're going to play the role of my daughter, I'm going to need you to do a lot better than that. And drinking beer in the afternoon? A young lady?"
Kazuya cringes. "A young lady indeed."
"She's dead then?"
"Yes."
"How?"
"She saw Akira's face and decided to kill herself."
"Suicide? What unpleasant, attention-seeking behavior."
Zhang is meanwhile genuinely upset by the fact that this clan has hiding the fact that they can take over the bodies of the dead. It's so unsettling, and so disgusting. He also feels like if he dies anywhere near these people, they're going to do it to him. Secretly, he starts to wonder if that's actually their plan and they intend to get him killed in whatever risky maneuver they're going to attempt so they can steal his corpse and gain access to his spirits.
His arsenal already includes thousands of curses, including a dozen or so that are absolutely destructive, and his current top threat, Yamata No Orochi.
Once he obtains Tengen, or maybe even two Tengens, if they can gain access to his corpse, all of that power will be theirs.
He wants to say that they would never do that to him because they are allies, but he just watched what they do to their own and knows these demons will absolutely commit terror beyond his imagination if it helps them in any way.
Later that night, Lady Midori learns from her brother that her son was killed after trying to eliminate the dark idol's vessel, an act the sorcery community at large would have agreed is absolutely the right thing to do. The veil of secrecy existed because powerful men love that woman and are willing to kill for her, or let other people die.
That's just a completely different story than 'Daisuke Katsuragi tried to murder Fujiwara clan members for no reason at all.'
She would make a fuss and tell everyone what corrupt liars Fujiwara and Sugawara are, posing as the leaders of the future when really, they destabilized the world to protect someone who should have been eliminated, but her brother asked her to stay silent.
Akira wants to take that power for himself, and she supports this. Their clan had a number of techniques related to the body and blood, and so they've experimented thoroughly with all kinds of living vessels and curses in the past. Extracting a power from a vessel usually destroys the vessel, but in expert hands, the power might remain intact.
And besides, fate is clearly on their side because they've been afforded an opportunity to send a soldier into the enemy's most intimate spaces.
Midori and her brother Akira already know Sugawara won't be able to tell Kazuya is inside of Fumiko's body because he's already met Kazuya before and didn't know it.
They now have a way to manipulate Sugawara and send him far enough away that he won't interfere when they move on Nara, as well as a way to gain access to Narumi, Tengen's student. Tengen herself might be difficult to wrangle, but having a weaker version of her to experiment with would allow Zhang to perfect a plan to return her to her cursed state and then tame her as a cursed spirit.
Akira will receive the power of the dark idol.
Zhang will get Tengen's student.
Midori will get her revenge.
Everything is falling into place for them, and their enemies don't understand the magnitude of the threat nor any of their key assets.
They carefully ink their plans, and begin moving pieces into place:
'Fumiko' is sent back to her husband to make amends and complete a set of instructions.
Akira and Zhang return to the Star Society to handle their final business there.
Zhang hides his woman and their child at a faraway village, a remote place only he will be able to find her, and when he returns, he uses his flying curses to move the Star Society's sorcerers into position for their mission. Or at least as close as they can get, all things considered.
Akira meanwhile doesn't want anyone knowing what went on within the walls of the Star Society and slays all of the other members, men, women, children. The soldiers who looked upon Tengen in wonder and believed she could save them? Dead. The ones who made offerings and prayed to the strange statue? Dead, and left to the crows, victims of the very violence they prayed to be delivered from.
They called upon Tengen's name, but she did not answer, because she didn't know they existed.
If she did, she would have told them to stop what they were doing a long time ago, and certainly to take that cursed statue down.
The only thing that is left for Kamo House is to make their move and see if the gods continue to bless their aggression with good fortune.
XXX
AN: I don't say this enough because I don't want it to sound like I'm begging for praise, but I read all the reviews and they mean so much to me. I really appreciate that so many of you are going along with me on this journey, and I hope you are not disappointed in the end.