While Nara is burning, an unknowing Michizane finds some strange writings at the Star Society in the language of Zhongguo. While similar to what they use on their island, it's not similar enough that Michizane can exactly read it. He can tell it's poetry and some of the words are kind of depressing.
He knows war poetry when he sees it.
If he was able to read it properly, he would realize it was a poem written by Zhang about how people in his homeland don't understand how evil and dangerous the Akitsushima is, perhaps because the island devours those who ever get a glimpse of its true horror.
His writings will not reach his homeland because a mother and her twelve-year-old son are defiling his corpse in an underground chamber.
Zhang didn't actually realize he was even dying because he got stabbed directly through the part of his brain that would have helped him interpret that information, so when his eyes open again, he's relieved.
Yet, he's not the one that opened his eyes, and everything feels wrong and terrible. He can't even explain the sense of doom, fear, and malaise he was experiencing, like his very existence was wrong. He only felt vaguely conscious, and there are voices, but they're garbled together, almost like he's drunker than he's ever been, or maybe concussed.
There is a very special kind of hell that comes to those whose bodies are taken from them in death, but those who feel it are never able to even scream for it to end. There will never be any witnesses to explain the experience of an undead soul, trapped in a body being used by another.
His body suddenly stands without his consent, and it starts to move.
When he sees the body of a little boy on the floor of this dark chamber, the top of his head has been removed and it is empty. Then, there's a brain on the floor, and Zhang remembers that horrid scene in Heian Kyo, when Kazuya took the corpse of Fumiko Sugawara.
Has he been taken by some monster?
Kenjaku meanwhile stretches, moving the arms and legs of this new body. Even though his true body was only twelve, he had the Fujiwara genes and was actually quite big and physically powerful for his age. Zhang's body is smaller, compact, and physically weaker than a Fujiwara that hasn't fully gone through puberty.
It took Kazuya more than fifty years and dozens of bodies before he learned how to use the techniques of powerful sorcerers, and even at that, once he gained access to a body with a complex technique, it took him weeks if not months to learn how to use it at a satisfactory level.
So, while the Kamo clan knew about Kenjaku when they started getting intelligence briefings that mentioned he kept playing with dead animals, they never considered the possibility that ability would play any role in their plan. This technique took decades to master as far as they knew, and Kenjaku had not even undergone the rapid expansion of cursed energy that teenagers have.
Kenjaku had been steered away from his inherent darkness for his entire life by a loving family who cherished him and supported his humanity with kindness and acceptance. He truly loved his family, and the only way to save the little ones, and his mother, and get Ayame back was to sacrifice some part of himself that he knows he can never get back.
His technique was always scary to him, and the idea of living in the bodies of strangers seemed disgusting, but now that he has done the deed, it's not so bad. There is an understanding somewhere deep inside of him that he was not his body, but a soul meant to wander the world and do many different things and experience many different lives.
Unlike Kazuya, Kenjaku is a savant when it comes to sorcery, and no one knew including him because he'd never used his technique before. What took Kazuya decades to learn, Kenjaku simply understands, as if the knowledge is so clear and plain to him…of course that's how it works.
Kenjaku probes his new vessel and is able to digest the wall of information that he finds.
How many curses are there? What can they do? How can he make them do his bidding? Most importantly, how can he command the dragon?
Kikyo sees Kenjaku standing in this strange new body in a trance like state, the body she gave birth to left mutilated on the floor, having served its purpose.
"Son?"
He is not responsive to her, but suddenly, the hatch is ripped open and Jun Kamo, a cousin and one of the Kamo clan's sorcerers, peers down at them.
"Found you," he says with a smirk.
Kenjaku opens his eyes, and maybe for a second, Jun wonders why Zhang is down here with these people, until he sees brainless corpse.
He whispers so quietly that Jun can barely hear him.
"Kill him."
Yamata No Orochi swoops down low, snatches Jun with one of his enormous, sword-sharp talons, and squeezes him until he simply pops.
Kenjaku reaches for the ladder leading up, and says, "Don't worry, Mom. We'll make it."
She grabs his hand. "Son, your father is out there. Let me go first. I'll cover him up."
"That would put you in danger for no reason. Let me be strong too, Mom."
"You're not even an adult yet."
"I am all grown up now. So it's okay."
Kenjaku climbs out of the hiding place, and immediately realizes that instead of telling the curses to hunt down the Kamo clan members, he can probably make them come to him. Lying and tricking other people comes so naturally to him that he doesn't even realize that he is doing it. It is simply less work to convince them to come out than it would be to try and chase them down.
He orders the cursed spirits to return to him, except for Yamata No Orochi, and they rush back into his new vessel, through his hands.
When Kenjaku sees his father's body, it's in worse condition than he expected. Somehow seeing him broken like that seems wrong and unfair, because in his mind, his father was always the strongest. Kenji Fujiwara was a titan, the god of this era until a certain someone came along, but they were allies, so that didn't count.
His father's haori is in a tree and had probably been shed during the battle and blown onto a low-hanging branch, so Kenjaku took it down and covered him up, pushing everything together so that it at least looked like it was in one piece.
He felt sad his mother saw him like this, and he didn't want the little ones to see it either. No matter how young they are, that's certainly an image that would stay with them forever. He doesn't want them to remember their dad like that.
With all the curses put away except for Yamata No Orochi, who lands in the courtyard and waits patiently for a new order, the attackers come out, believing that the attack is over and that they have emerged victorious.
They each have a list of members of the Fujiwara clan that they were to track down and kill, and it seems like the only ones left is their tiny family. This is because the others worked to protect them, because they were close to his father, and because his mother fought and killed some of them too.
The fighters, the wives, the elders, the kids.
All gone.
They did indeed have instructions to take Hoshiko and only Hoshiko back to Heian Kyo if possible, but to kill everyone else.
It was dark, deranged, sick, evil.
Kenjaku has never encountered anything like this in his life, so he doesn't really know how to articulate the thoughts in his mind even to himself or how to accept all the information that's rushing in.
It had been his hope that Ayame was still somewhere around, but Akira Kamo didn't stay, and none of them seem to know where he went.
Kenjaku everyone there besides his family to Yamato No Orochi, and once this is complete, he looks around.
Nara is on fire…the whole city, just burning as far as the eye can see. There's nothing left of his home, and most of the people he has ever known are scattered across the castle grounds. Some crushed, some dead from being bitten or clawed at by cursed spirits, some murdered by the Kamo clan. This included his younger cousins, the nice old ladies in the clan whose patience he tested when he was little, even the servants and people who worked to support them.
The girl he liked…he recognized her shoes on a random leg that was thrown away from the body. There's a bite mark in it, and the leg looks like it was ripped from the hip.
There's no way she's alive, and he thinks this must have been so scary for her. For everyone.
What was the purpose of any of this? They overpowered them, plain and simple, so why burn the city?
Somewhere in the back of his mind, he wonders where Sugawara is, but the answer to that question is in Zhang's memories.
Kikyo comes out at the now-still battleground.
It's not quiet by any means as they are surrounded by the sounds of the city burning, and while they didn't firebomb the castle because the assassins were also there, these cursed flames are soon going to spread into the castle grounds and consume everything there, including the bodies.
They're in such a fragile place, the last frayed ends of a clan that has collapsed in a matter of only an hour. Their enemies would certainly circle back, and just because Kenjaku has seized this incredible power doesn't mean much at all. Summoners are weak in the body; Zhang was easy to kill. Kenjaku also knows from Zhang's memories that the Kamo clan has someone else like him, and they will probably retake this power given the opportunity.
Kenjaku is young. He hasn't been training all his life to protect his body like he would have if he was born with Ten Shadows. Targeting him now before he learns how to protect himself is the most important goal the Kamo clan should have.
The alarming realization that the Kamo clan is going to actively try to kill him is terrifying. Everything is scary. He wants to go up to his room and hide under the covers until his dad tells him everything is okay. He doesn't have a room or a dad now.
"Sugawara is too far from us to know anything that's going on. He's not coming," Kenjaku says.
He tells his mother about how they pulled Sugawara away to keep him from interfering, and if she could feel anything besides crippling grief and mortal fear, she is sure she would have been disgusted.
"Mom, what do we do?"
Kenjaku's life is in incredible danger from a multitude of trained sorcerers, and even if he could use his cursed spirits to defend himself, at some point he is going to have to go to sleep. He also commands all of the strength their family possesses; beyond Kenjaku, there's just the children. If he dies, there won't be any way for them to be okay.
While Kenjaku has an enormous amount of power, keeping it and surviving are still nearly impossible unless there is no one trying to kill them. Kenji is gone, the Fujiwara clan is basically gone, Sugawara is out of reach. They will have to save themselves.
"Let's go pay a visit to the Kamo clan. We'll do as much damage and kill as many of them as we can. That's our path to survival right now. We'll have to take the children with us. There's no one here to protect them, and this place is going to be on fire in a few minutes," she explains.
As she makes her way back to where the children are, she spots a cabinet that has crashed down from the top floor, and knows from the decorative paint that it's from Ayame's room, the locking cabinet where she keeps opium serum for her infrequent but severe headaches.
Kikyo is glad to find the little ceramic bottle somehow unbroken and brings it with her to Kenshin and Hoshiko. Giving them strong medicine will both help them tolerate their untreated injuries and hopefully allow them to sleep.
The smoke is getting progressively thicker, and they have to leave, so they put Kenshin and Hoshiko in a big laundry basket that happens to be within reach and depart from their destroyed home on the back of an eight headed dragon.
Meanwhile, Kazuya, the Kamo clan's body-snatching sorcerer, is having a difficult time completing his task.
Kazuya's plan for extracting Narumi, Tengen's student and Star Plasma Vessel, was to change bodies with her boyfriend, a stableboy, but Sugawara had rewarded them for a month of very good work with a whole day off and enough food and drink to have a feast, so he was passed out drunk before Kazuya even went to go find him.
Which was a real damn pain in the ass because it is a long way from where Fumiko stays to the where the stableboys lodge if one has a crippled foot. Even though Michizane made sure to get crutches for his 'wife,' and had an attendant on hand to help her in any way, he couldn't exactly take a paid staffer with him to go collect a new vessel.
The fact he has to kill someone from Fumiko's body is a massive hurdle, because everything about her body makes that difficult. Anyone could just run away. A toddler could evade him in this state.
So after Kazuya made it all the way to where the stable boy lived, he found out he was having dinner in the main hall of the castle that he'd just come from, and then he hobbled back to find he'd left the main hall drunk and was sleeping in the lounge.
When he nudged the boy awake saying he needed his help with something, the stableboy clearly wanted to help. After all, Fumiko is the lady of this clan, and everyone should have been prepared to do anything for her. Yet after standing up, he abruptly vomited all over Kazuya and passed out.
And then he was still in this crippled body and also covered in vomit.
Kazuya was on a very specific schedule! There is a very limited amount of time before a certain someone becomes reachable by Tengen, who is currently standing on the roof of the castle, probably very stressed out because she can sense what's happening in Nara, but she can't send Michizane to stop it.
Breaking the chain of communication between these too is the most important thing, and once it is restored, they have to have completed all of their objectives and they have to be ready for what comes next.
Unfortunately, even though he is running out of time, he had to go bathe and change, because what was more suspicious than Lady Sugawara walking around covered in foaming sake puke? And on top of that, the stableboy's body is fully of alcohol, even if he could get inside of it, it would be useless to accomplish anything for hours.
His schedule is ruined, so he resorts to approaching Narumi directly.
He can't get caught. Can't. These people will kill him or worse, since he's part of a scheme that involved snatching the pink princess. Whoever gets caught is going to get hurt.
In his first stroke of luck, Narumi saw him on the way to the bath and offered to help since he was barely able to hobble around on the foot at this point.
Kazuya attempts to make up a reason for Narumi to follow him out, away from the castle and into the woods. It is an uphill climb to the planned rendezvous spot near the mine, and he just absolutely didn't want to do that with Fumiko's stupid foot, but he was out of options.
Narumi, now seventeen, offered Fumiko less grace than Tengen and Michizane, and seemed to quietly question her motives for returning. Narumi has a tougher spirit than most people, but Kazumi knows this also makes her very unyielding and difficult.
Kazuya says, "I was wondering if I could ask you for a favor."
"I have to get back. Master Tengen needs me."
How can he get her away from here?
Can he get her away from here?
He says, "I think I lost my medicine when I was with Michizane earlier. Do you think you could help me find it? Surely with everything that's going on, Tengen probably just needs to focus on the situation."
Narumi, a scrappy girl who was orphaned alongside her brother and randomly carried home after meeting Sugawara, quickly agrees, and after he tells her where he thinks he dropped his imaginary medicine, he adds it's for a 'female problem,' which Fumiko certainly has from her physically debilitating baby delivery.
After telling Kazumi she needed to run up to her room for a coat, she opens a cabinet and takes out a short blade with a concealed back sheath and puts it on under her coat red coat. It is a cursed weapon, acquired from the transfer of Tanashiro's cursed treasures to Michizane.
They leave together, making their way along a path into the woods.
The moon is full outside, so it's relatively easy to make their way until they get into the trees, when they rely on lanterns.
Kazuya is sweating from how much the foot hurts, but his assignment is almost done and he is an eighty-year-old man inwardly complaining about a condition a woman lived with just as a normal condition of life.
It's almost time for him to meet the liaison, who will hopefully have horses, but as they near the mine, he suddenly hears the sound of a sword being released from its sheathe and turns to find Narumi standing there, holding a short blade.
"What's the meaning of this?" he asks.
"I have a question I wanted to ask you. You said that with everything that's going on, Tengen probably needs to focus on the situation. What situation are you talking about?"
Did he slip? He slipped. He was usually so careful, and decades of experience made him a flawless performer. But things weren't going flawlessly. His vessel had insane menstrual cramps, the foot—the goddamn foot—never stopped hurting, and he was panicked that he was down to the deadline and desperately needed her to go with him.
Tengen hasn't announced or indicated in any way to anyone except her student that something has gone dreadfully wrong in Nara. Which means the only way he would know about it was if he was involved.
It was such a tiny slip, something most people might not have picked up on until after the fact.
Narumi says, "I don't know who you are, but I'll tell you this: every girl who has ever lived a single night on the streets knows the look of a man who intends to harm her. You came here pretending to be Fumiko a week ago, and you just coincidentally sent Michi away an hour before something terrible happened?"
It was his first time in a female body, he'd had no time to prepare, and this body was not only weak and crippled, but it was cursed. There were moments that he couldn't escape the eerie feeling that something was watching him, and he knew it was the curse, like it was looking for a time to collect Fumiko Sugawara's unpaid debt.
Narumi adds, "Fumiko was a rabbit. A dumb one, but always a rabbit, never anything else. You are a wolf. I can see it clearly, because I don't want you to be here. Maybe you tricked good people who wished Fumiko well, but I'm not them."
Still, getting exposed by a second-rate character was annoying, humiliating, and angering. It's not like he got caught by Tengen. Narumi is not a particularly glamorous character on this stage, a slightly overweight but very short tomboy who wears divided robes for riding even when she has no intention of getting on a horse, who always has messy dark hair worn in a ponytail like a man, who sneaks off with the stableboy, but also another boy.
Getting caught by someone like this is one of the most insulting things that has ever happened to him in his life, and he refuses to believe he might be killed by this crazy girl.
Kazuya considers if he can get away from her; he can't run. She has a weapon, and while he's skilled in the use of nearly every kind of implement, he's seen this wild little sorcerer scrap with Michizane every day and she's actually very good. She has an unbeatable monster to sharpen her skills with, so she knows the mistakes she can't make as a less experienced sorcerer.
She won't let him take the sword, he's sure of it.
Fumiko's body is weaker in every sense, and plagued not only by her foot, but something is wrong with her abdomen. His best guess is that she's full of scar tissue and her body can't bend certain ways.
"Who are you?" she asks.
"What are you going to do?" he teases.
She plunges the sword directly into his belly and into the tree behind him. It has the cursed property of burning, but it doesn't burn very much. This is worse as a hot enough burn only hurts for a moment because it destroys the tissue that can feel, but a less severe burn just keeps hurting.
"Kazuya."
"Kazuya?"
"That's my name. Kazuya Kamo. The only person you save with that is yourself."
"Kamo…Kamo, Kamo?"
"Yes, those people. Those are my people. I'm one of them."
She pulls the sword out and says, "What's happening right now?"
Kazuya presses his hand over the wound and says, "My clan is eliminating the Fujiwara clan and destroying Nara. It's probably already done, actually. So, telling you or not telling you doesn't make any difference."
"That's not possible."
"You seem very bright, but something isn't impossible just because you don't understand how it could happen. You don't understand how I appear as Fumiko Sugawara, and yet you are certain that I am not her. How do you think that is?"
Narumi points the sword at him. "You're some sort of sorcerer that can change forms."
He pulls the stitch on his forehead and opens his head. "This is Fumiko. There are horrors beyond your imagination in this world."
As she stares in surprise, he snatches the sword from her and plunges it into her neck.
As talented as she might be, young people are prone to some very specific kinds of mistakes.
It's no longer possible for him to safely kidnap his target, and he needs to get away from this place as fast as he can, and for that, he needs a new body. Fumiko has a body, after all. It's a pain in the ass and he knows Akira is going to beat his ass for botching this mission, but he would never kill him.
Sugawara certainly will though.
He wonders if he'll be able to use the strange powers of the Star Plasma Vessel, but it doesn't matter if he can or can't.
He doesn't want Tengen to sense when he uses his technique, so he drags her as she chokes on her blood, lungs gurgling, feet weakly kicking.
As he gets closer to the mine, he counts down the seconds until he can escape from this cursed, crippled body.
The door is heavy, reinforced, definitely put there after the sorcerers started using the mine.
The mine has a small pulley elevator at the top, not nearly deep enough to insulate his cursed energy from Tengen. He has to go deeper in order to fully conceal the use of his technique.
As he steps on the elevator, Narumi uses what little strength she has to lunge upward and whip her body over, throwing him off the elevator along with her. As they fall, she pulls the top of his head off again, forcibly ripping him out of Fumiko's body as they plummet to the bottom of the mine shaft.
Both bodies hit the ground with a loud crunch as bones are shattered, and Kazuya lands outside of a body, squished somewhat on the floor. His true form actually fared surprisingly well, and while he thought he could just make Fumiko's body pick up the brain again, that didn't seem to be working.
Fumiko's corpse was broken so badly, bent in a way that left no room to doubt that her back had been destroyed, snapped in half until it was protruding from the body. A body with a broken spine can't move, so even when he commands it to come pick him up, all it does is twitch.
Her body is unusable.
Narumi is still somehow alive, probably due to the marvelous wonder of being a Star Plasma Vessel, but he has no way to go to her body.
She turns and chokes, spitting blood at him. "What now? What are you going to do now?"
He can't really do anything.
Neither of them can.
So they'll just die?
How pointless.
If his liaison follows the blood, he might find the mine and rescue him, but this situation is certainly not good for him.
Really unfair to die this way, or so he tells himself. He doesn't have any delusions about who is a villain and who is a hero here, but this is just a really silly and stupid way for things to end for him.
The fact Narumi is also dying is maybe some small comfort, but he didn't really view her as his enemy until a few minutes ago. It's not like he's being slain by his nemesis. He's dying at the hands of a mean little girl who decided if she was going to die, he was going to die too.
This comfort is taken from him as he sees the unmistakable red glow of reverse curse technique. Narumi floats up from the ground as her broken bones, slashed neck, and bleeding head heal themselves before her toes gently touch the floor.
"Is this a joke?" he asks.
Narumi steps on his true form and laughs. "Is this a joke? Why do you look like this?"
He tries biting her foot, and so she stomps on him.
She looks at Fumiko's broken body, and then at Kazuya's true form, and says, "So what happened to her? She obviously died, right?"
"I have no reason to say anything to you."
Narumi whistles, and he hears a multitude of little sounds rushing toward her feet, and s pack of rats crowds around her, squeaking. "These are my pet rats. If you're nervous about meeting them, don't be. They love disgusting garbage. I'm going to leave you with them, and they're going to eat you. Then since you're a sorcerer who isn't going to die by sorcery or have your body handled correctly, you'll probably turn into a vengeful spirit. In other words, your body will be taken by a monster after you die."
A sorcerer intentionally turning someone into a vengeful spirit as a form of execution was a major violation of the honor code most sorcerers lived by, but he could hardly complain since it was his clan that threw out the rulebook. There isn't any functional reason to do it; she was just being evil.
It certainly would have been better to be caught by Lord Sugawara.
Narumi gently collects what is left of Fumiko, and puts her over her shoulder, and then carries her toward the elevator.
He thinks about begging, but Narumi clearly isn't a fool. He slipped up once, and she got her sword and dragged him out into the woods to feed him to her rats.
Kazuya hears the ropes and pulleys as she lowers it and then goes up and then the sound of the heavy door as its sealed shut.
It might normally be a huge risk to make a cursed spirit anywhere, but this mine was outfitted to be able to contain Tengen in an emergency, so it was foolish to think he'd get out once he turned.
Once the door is shut, he sees that strange vision of the torii gate surrounded by skulls, and all the cursed stones that glow shatter, leaving him in pitch darkness as the rats start taking little bites of him.
There's not even a body for him to go into, and virtually the only way that he can be saved at this point is if the liaison comes and follows the blood to where he is, although if the outer door is sealed, it probably can't be opened by just anybody.
He can't see anything, and it's quiet except for the excited squeaks of the rats as they slowly tear at his true body. It hurts more than he expected, and he knows it's going to take a very long time before they've eaten enough so that he will finally die.
What an unexpected, painful, terrifying end.
Why did any of this have to happen?
As Narumi slides down to the ground on the other side of the door she bursts into tears because she really thought she was going to die and the best thing she could do was stop this horrible man before he made everything worse.
She wasn't as excited as everyone else about Fumiko's return, but she didn't deserve whatever Kazuya did to her, and Michizane certainly didn't deserve to have his feelings trampled on.
Tengen remains on the roof, tuned into the hot spot in Nara which is beginning to cool. There's still a massive amount of cursed energy from Yamato No Orochi's flames which are still burning, but the white-hot center of the maelstrom has seemingly burned out. Whatever tragedy happened there has already concluded.
Michizane remains out of her reach as Heian Kyo suddenly lights up under her senses.
All the way in the distant north, Michizane is sitting on a porch with a box of letters. He found the room where Fumiko lived, and there was a little wooden box of unsent letters. First and foremost, she wasn't allowed contact with the outside world, and even if she had been, he's not sure she would have had the courage to send them.
She wrote apologies, explanations, wishes, hopes…
Michizane, still believing that she had come back to him, felt more certain that the right thing to do was to move on with their lives together.
He peers up and sees the atmospheric cursed energy is disturbed.
Disturbing latent cursed energy usually only happens when a massive amount of it is ejected from a sorcerer at once, but Tengen and Narumi can churn it however they please. This doesn't look like something that Tengen did. This is more like the ripple one would see from a distant shore if a heavy stone was thrown in a lake.
He estimates how large the stone would have to be to make a ripple that big and decides that something has definitely happened.
Taking the letters with him, he does a calculation in his head to determine the exact distance from him the source of the disturbance must be, and warps.
Michizane nearly lands directly on top of Kenji Fujiwara's body as it's burning.
This singular sight is enough to make his blood run cold, and for a moment, he can't look away. The haori has already burned, so he can tell this death was violent.
The scene is beyond his understanding or any explanation he can come up with, because there are traces that thousands of cursed spirits were here, especially one very big, foul presence. The entire castle complex is destroyed and in the process of burning to ash, and it's dizzying for him to try and read the scene with Six Eyes.
His mind immediately goes to Ayame and her little children, who Kenji always keeps close to him for protection and also because he has always loved them so much that he would die for them at any time.
Michizane can tell that most if not all of the Fujiwara clan's fighters are dead in this mess somewhere, along with many noncombatants. Children. Servants. People who didn't have a damn thing to do with anything, but the whole city is burning so it's clear the cruelty and finality of all of this was the point.
He can't sense Ayame, although it's just really hard for his over-sensitive senses to sort through the overload of information. It would be different if he had a little experience, but this is his first time seeing something like this and he frankly hopes he never sees anything like it again.
In the inner area at the Star Society, there were signs that curses had been lingering there, leading him to believe that there was someone who somehow had the ability to control cursed spirits.
Michizane doesn't know what he should do now; whatever happened here is done. There's no one to save. There are people out in the city, suffocating from the smoke, being burned, trapped in buildings, suffering from the kind of madness caused by being surrounded in cursed flames.
His mind drifts back to his worries over these past few months, about why the Kamo clan was confident they would be successful against the Fujiwara clan and the odd unsealing and disappearance of Yamata No Orochi.
Clearly their secret is that they had someone who could control cursed spirits, so they gave that person the strongest spirit.
There are just hundreds, maybe thousands of people screaming over the sound of cursed flames.
Where are Ayame and her precious children? What happened here?
What should he do?
No, really, what is he even supposed to do?
He ponders whether to save as many people as he can from Nara, but he knows there's only one right answer to the question.
When he warps to Heian Kyo, he is surprised to find the scene looks just like Nara.
What used to be a city of promises, the crown jewel of their island, burns. The castle where he met Daisuke Katsuragi is in the process of being destroyed and will soon be engulfed in cursed flames. It is an act in kind, a mirror to the devastation in Nara.
If you burn our city, we'll burn yours.
If you kill our kids, we'll kill yours.
If you try to destroy us, we will take you right along with us.
Dark, inhuman, evil, another act in an endless cycle.
He finally finds the source of this destruction, Kikyo Fujiwara, who is running the hallways with a stranger he has never seen before in his life, but according to Six Eyes, is certainly the one who can control cursed spirits.
The curse manipulator clearly isn't even someone from their land, a stranger who came from some distant land to spill blood for his own personal gain.
It's a fascinating and terrible technique, which has led to incredible bloodshed.
"Lady Kikyo."
She turns, holding Kenji's heavy broadsword in her hand; it's absurdly large for her, but it is steadily leaving a trail of blood so she clearly isn't struggling with it too much.
None of this makes any sense; if the curse manipulator attacked Nara, why is he with her attacking Heian Kyo?
Kikyo turns to him and says, "Lord Sugawara. You remember my precious son, Kenjaku."
She indicates to the white-haired sorcerer, and for a moment, he doesn't understand.
When it hits him, his frown somehow manages to deepen. "Oh no…"
Michizane is struck by the fact that he can't tell it's Kenjaku in that body. In Kenjaku's natural body, Michizane was able to read his technique, but in this body, even knowing Kenjaku very well, he just can't detect his presence at all. To Six Eyes, this is a different person.
The curse manipulator destroyed Nara, but got destroyed in the process, and without Kenji, or—probably—any of the other fighters, this is what happened. His mind almost can accept the dark idea that doing this might have been their only way to escape from Nara.
"Is Ayame…"
Kikyo says, "We saw Akira Kamo take her. He knows about her power."
"How?!"
She quickly answers, "Your wife Fumiko. She's been dead for some time, and her body is being controlled by someone in the Kamo clan like Kenjaku. An old man named Kazuya Kamo. He plans on kidnapping Tengen's student. That was the payment this stupid curse manipulator wanted. If you go right now, you might be able to stop it."
"You're telling me…No, that's not…"
Kenjaku and Kikyo see him turn oddly, as if the world was physically spinning for him.
Right ahead of them, is the proverbial throne room where Michizane last saw Lady Midori.
He throws the door open, and finds Lady Midori, sitting on her throne, with her crown, drinking tea from a finely painted teacup as she looks out over the city, only possible because the wall directly ahead of her is missing now.
"Is she dead?!" he roars.
Lady Midori looks up and says, "It's rude to go into a place shouting. Or to visit someone's home and attack it with a dragon. Inconvenient, really, for you people to have the beast. Zhang, for what reason did you betray us, after everything we've done for you?"
"I'm Kenjaku Fujiwara."
She looks him up and down. "I can tell you have no idea how extraordinary or surprising that is."
"Is Fumiko dead?!" Michizane asks again, panic clear in his voice, "Is your daughter dead?!"
Midori sips her tea. "Did you not realize? A curious mind wonders how much you ever loved her, if you did not realize an old man was crawling around inside her dead body like a maggot. Then again, you don't seem to be very good at holding onto the women you care about."
He clenches his fists so hard his arms shake, and she adds, "The only reason Akira was emboldened enough to take Ayame Tengen is because we were certain you were never going to come here and murder everyone. This stupid woman and her gross son certainly will. Look at this little boy, bathing in the blood of his enemies to protect the people who matter to him.
"You will have your principles, and that is all. Everything that happens in this world that you don't like happens because we all understand that you're too busy being 'good' to actually make the world a place that is good, which would, of course, require you to be a demon from the deepest pits of hell."
Michizane has long resisted the constant pressure to become like everyone else; he thought he could be different—that he would live a better life. Lead by example. Create a kinder world.
His principles are like fences around his true potential, and everyone knows that even if they cross lines, he won't.
He took so much pride in this, but is this the reason everything is happening?
Leaving the vengeful terror to a child and a widow on the worst night of their lives, after he was misled and manipulated directly through his weakness, feels like a new lowest point in his life.
Michizane says, "You don't even know where she is, do you?"
"Akira is the only one who knows where the Pink Princess is. Unless you find him, you can't save her."
It was impossible to know if this was a lie or not, although it certainly seemed like it could be true.
Midori clearly knew that there was no way that she of all people would be able to escape from Kikyo's wrath, so she remained where she was, accepting her defeat and enjoying her final cup of tea.
Michizane reaches out for the heavy sword in Kikyo's hand. "Who is left?" he asks her.
"Us. We have Hoshiko and Kenshin. We had to bring them here. That is all."
The fact that those tiny little children are still alive amidst all this violence seems like some sort of miracle from the gods, but he knows it's not. They're alive because of what Kikyo did to her son, because Kenjaku has become a monster.
"That's a relief. You have a dragon?"
"Yes."
"Please take the little ones and go to my home. Tell Tengen about Fumiko. She will take care of everything. Leave the rest of this to me."
Kenjaku feels a kind of relief that he can't even articulate at the idea that he can go somewhere safe and lay down for a moment, and that they can get his younger siblings to safety too—that they even have a place they can go.
Kikyo gives him Kenji's sword, and she takes her son by the hand.
As they leave, Kenjaku closes the door, leaving Michizane and Midori alone.
He stares down at her face, trying to figure out what he's supposed to do with her. The only information he actually cares about is Ayame's location, and he thinks that she's telling the truth about not knowing where she is. If nothing else, his mother in law will look out for herself above everyone else, and if she had information that would have allowed her to escape from this situation, she would offer it.
Midori's wickedness really knows no bounds, as even in this position, her incredible urge to ruin other people remains her dominant motivator. He's spent a long time thinking about her over the years, and the only thing he can compare her to is how many if not most men enjoy the idea of being the one who defiles a woman for the first time. She wants to personally be responsible for causing him to abandon his principles and all his dreams of building a better world.
Midori says, "I have last words."
Michizane stabs her in the mouth with Kenji's sword and pushes it all the way through until it comes out through the back of the chair.
"You've said enough."
When the crown falls on the floor, he picks it up, and places it neatly on her head again.
Heart pounding, he turns to the dirty work at hand, and one by one, hunts down the sorcerers, spouses, teachers, anyone who knows anything in this clan, or anyone working with them as an ally.
There are secret passages and compartments everywhere for emergencies, but there's no place they can hide from Six Eyes. He finds them one by one, tells them that he'll let them live if they can tell him where Ayame or any of their other allies are, and then regardless of how they answer, he kills them anyway. If there's no binding vow, maybe it's immoral, but that's it.
If he has to be a demon, then he'll be a demon.
Yet he ultimately doesn't have the stomach to do anymore damage to the city; while he understands that it is a resource that enemies use, it is also filled with people who would have deposed the Kamo clan themselves if they had the power to do so.
The fires are still spreading and they probably will eventually engulf the whole city, but people can still run.
And there are people in the castle he spares, if he thinks they had no active role in the Kamo clan's business or they're very young. There's a girl from the Katsuragi clan that was forced into the Kamo clan, and she scrambles in the shadows trying to keep a few of the little ones alive. He ignores her; she has a path to get outside, and out of the city.
Vultures are certainly out, looking to pillage whatever can be sniped from the sidelines, but he doesn't have the ability to save everyone who needs it, and if he did, he'd certainly help the people in the cities before the people tied to the instigators.
Everyone's suffering matters.
It's easy for him to hunt and find people as long as he knows their general location, so first the Kamo clan, and then their close allies in the city, and then beyond that.
He'd thought to himself that the only way to neutralize the threat would be to pull all of them out of the ground at once, but Sugawara realizes that if he'd been willing, he could have done this at any time.
Sugawara doesn't even understand what the plan was at first, but as he does this dark deed, he decides that the intended outcome was probably that he would arrive in Nara and assume Ayame was dead under the rubble because the fire would burn residue and corpses.
The only reason to take her after learning about her power is if they think they can utilize it somehow.
Sugawara is sure he's missing more, but between the curse manipulator with Yamata No Orochi, and potentially Akira or one of his sons with whatever power the dark idol has, perhaps they could have challenged him.
Kenjaku stealing the curse manipulator's body is clearly a very serious error.
They all wanted war—is he really the bad guy for giving it to them? They sat around and helped support the massacre of nearly an entire clan, so surely, what they wanted was blood? Or was it just blood for other people?
One of the most angering facets of this catastrophe, which he considers as he does his deadly work, is that it seems like the aggressors thought there would never be any consequences.
As it turns out, none of them wanted a taste of the what they'd wanted to serve someone else.
He considers his ally, perhaps the greatest among the warlords. Kenji Fujiwara was a terror in his own right, but he didn't believe in needless war. He was happy to stay at home with the Princess of the Sun and his children.
Everyone could have just stayed at home with their families.
None of this had to happen.
The only way to have a day of peace is to burn all of these people so badly that no one ever wants to start a fire, so he does.
One after another, he carves a path of destruction across the entire central region of the island, one clan base after another. Each one giving up the next in hopes of being spared.
None of them knows where Ayame is.
When he returns home at noon the next day, Tengen greets him with an urn containing Fumiko's ashes, and they sit on the steps of the porch leading into their home.
There are so many things he needs to tell her about everything, but they just sit in silence.
Ayame is gone again, this time in the gravest danger.
Fumiko never made it home, and all his short-lived hope had been for nothing.
His closest ally has been killed.
The Kamo and Fujiwara clans, the two strongest clans in power, have both been decimated, down to a few members each that managed to escape.
Heian Kyo and Nara are still burning.
Michizane takes a bath, drinks some water, puts a little food into his stomach, and goes to sleep.
When he wakes up again, it's evening, and he has to think about everything that's happening, which just makes him want to go back to sleep.
Hoshiko is in pain from her injury, screaming for her mama and papa. She's not old enough to understand what death is, so they don't even bother trying to explain that she won't ever see her papa again. When she yells for her big brother, she thinks they are lying to her because she can't understand that Kenjaku has a different body, which is understandably a difficult thing for anyone to accept.
It's actually also difficult for Kenjaku that they don't understand who he is.
Kenshin is quieter; he's not necessarily shy, he's just always had a very mild disposition and falls back on silence. Neither one of them can really get out of bed, and Kikyo is the only person they see every day they actually recognize, so she tends to them despite the fact she's not much of a nurturer, she has her own injuries, and she's not even actually their mother. They're family, and she's what they have so she doesn't fail in her duty to them.
Both of Kenji's sons strongly favored him, but Kenjaku has left that form behind, and so it's actually quite sad to see Kenshin, a quiet little mini-Kenji, laying sick in bed with his demon dogs, whispering quietly to them about whatever he doesn't want to discuss with anyone else.
After talking to Kenjaku, Tengen and Michizane come to understand the plan:
The Kamo clan worked quite diligently to unseal Yamata No Orochi for Zhang so that alongside his other curses, Zhang would have the strength necessary to successfully raid the Fujiwara base at Nara.
The ultimate curse for Zhang was Tengen, who is known to have almost evolved into something far beyond even Yamata No Orochi, but obviously gaining control of Tengen requires one to separate her from Sugawara and also be prepared to contain the risks that she herself poses.
They had been in somewhat of a holding pattern, trying to feel out the best way to proceed when Akira Kamo happened to run into Fumiko, who immediately took her own life in order to attempt to protect information from Akira. As a result, Akira put Kazuya in her body and had him extract the information, where they learned not only that Narumi was a Tengen-like creature too, but that there was another great power lurking among their enemies: the dark idol.
A plan was hatched to attack Fujiwara, kill everyone, but sneak Ayame out so they could extract that power from her body, and meanwhile, take Narumi so Zhang could experiment on her and figure out how to handle Tengen.
Ultimately, the final plan was for Zhang to also lose his body to Kazuya, and for the Kamo clan to command Yamata No Orochi, Curse Tengen, and the power of the dark idol, a collection they believed would allow them to kill Sugawara and become overwhelmingly powerful. From there, they start consolidating territory under their clan and move forward as the dominant power of the next era.
It's a plan that might have actually worked.
Michizane and Tengen can't think of a reason it wouldn't have. The plan was careful and surprisingly safe but failed to calculate the existence of Kenjaku. It is Kenjaku's first time to ruin everything by merely showing up to a place and doing a little this or a little that. Even Kenjaku himself didn't know he had this ability.
On one day, he was merely a very weird little boy, and the next day, he had an army of curses, but his father has just been killed, he did a lot of murder with his mom, and his own siblings don't recognize him.
It's a hard day, and reality is difficult to swallow for everyone.
The island is in such a bad place that they can't really afford to take a day to grieve or process anything.
Michizane takes a break so he can sit under a tree with his wife's ashes for an hour before they join their son's, and he thinks somewhere in the back of his mind that the only family he's managed to build for himself is a family grave. That's just a very big and very sad fact to face, and while he sits there, he remembers he still has the unsent letters tucked in his haori.
Tengen dispatches Jujutsu Society sorcerers in an apolitical role to help whoever they can in the two cities that have been left in ruins, but the casualties are not even countable and, in most cases, not identifiable, and much of their work is just helping to make mass graves.
Michizane has nowhere to look for Ayame, but he generally knows that Akira and his two sons are the only fighters left in the Kamo clan. They are missing, as is someone in an allied clan with a movement ability similar to his warp skill. It works differently, but they can appear in different places without traveling between them, so instead of a trail, they transverse across routes as tiny dots instead.
Akira knew that they have to hide Ayame both from Tengen and from Six Eyes, and Sugawara knows he isn't stupid.
The Kamo clan's gamble has unexpectedly gone very poorly for them, with their enemies finding out all of their plans and that they had Ayame, on top of the near annihilation of the clan. Akira Kamo's last hope for turning his situation around is gaining control of the dark idol and for that power to be great enough to make up for everything that has been lost.
Michizane still pops around, in a grid formation, hoping to see any trace of anything.
There's nothing.
The massive disturbance in the land's cursed energy overnight has largely erased and churned residue patterns into a mess that is impossible to read or obtain meaningful information from.
Tengen searches within her barriers, and then he drags her all over the place so she can set her huge barriers in other places and search them, but they don't have any luck.
For days, they search.
Nothing.
Not even a hint of anything.
There are no clues, no people to talk to, no trail to follow.
Ayame has simply vanished.