After news of Ayame's death, Tengen stops coming out of the cavern except once or twice a week, and decides she will sequester herself from humanity because, really, humans are terrible and if she thinks about them enough, she wonders what exactly they're doing, trying to save them.
Another five years pass, as they do, and she continually thinks about Ayame.
Tengen still believes that everything that happened to her sister was essentially her fault because she was the one that made the mistakes on the night she was thrown off the mountain. If she'd been a little stronger, things would have been different.
If the dark idol hadn't been broken, she'd probably still be living in isolation, except on the mountain shrine instead of underground in Kyoto. It would have been fine; it was seemingly always her fate to stew about the world in solitude for all of eternity and she wasn't really bitter about that.
It just was what it was.
If she wanted to live some other way, she could do it any time.
But if Ayame hadn't been dragged away to Nara, she and Michizane certainly would have married, probably when they were young. It's not something that anyone talked about once they reconnected with her because she'd just had a baby with another man, but Momo remembered that they were as in love as teenagers can be.
There was never any benefit in complaining, but it irked her that her sister didn't have that future. There was a difference between being a wife and being a concubine; despite being Kenji Fujiwara's most prized possession, she was never his wife. They were never young and in love.
Michizane's third wife Rei reminds Tengen of how Ayame was when she was young. Not in terms of looks, although she's certainly pretty. When the cat was dying from old age, Rei carried him around like a baby and comforted him, and he very much liked that because Ayame was the same way with him when he was only a kitten.
She's so…youthful. Sunny. Sweet to everyone, and a naturally nurturing person, having grown up running around after her father who cared for sick and injured animals.
Rei has a whole collection of wild animals she helped that couldn't go back to their wild lives for one reason or another, and they live at the Sugawara estate.
Going to visit them involves interacting with all these strange creatures who have been given the grace and kindness to keep living even though all of them are in some way broken.
Tengen considers how even animals are sometimes faced with their lives being permanently ruined. Rei told her once that animals often simply refuse to live once something bad has happened to them, and that the ones she looks after permanently are the ones who were brave enough to keep going.
It's fascinating to think about the world being filled with all kinds of creatures, all of them living according to their own instincts. Armies of ants, slowly devouring all they can, eagles flying high in the skies, the constant wars between predators for territory, and the terror they force on prey.
What a terrible fate it must have been to be born a rabbit? Rabbits lived short, terrifying lives, running for their lives because every predator would kill them, from domesticated cats to large birds of prey to foxes to wolves…and yet each of these little creatures has the capacity for fear and love, and they feel pain too.
When a rabbit screams for its life, other rabbits don't come to save it. It actually attracts more predators to come kill it, while the rabbits friends that it is highly social with are left with no choice but to run away so they don't die too.
Thinking humans are cruel and deserve to die is possibly a bit silly if she really takes a step back and acknowledges that the world is just a terrible place, and it would be filled with bloodshed and suffering even if no humans existed in it.
Tengen struggles to hold this truth inside of her, that suffering is just a part of being alive. It's not just that her sister died that stings, but the fact that she suffered so much, for so long. She was probably so lonely and so scared and so hurt, but the only thing she could do was try and protect her little son.
She asked Kenichi about the night she died once, and he very clearly remembered she was coughing and throwing up blood, because that man had physically stomped her.
Ayame laid down next to him and told him that he should try to survive if he could, but if he couldn't, it was okay and she would be waiting for him.
Ayame knew she was dying and understood that meant her son was probably going to die too. The idea that she died knowing that all she did was probably for nothing and he was going to starve anyway, and the fact she comforted him in advance about that possibility makes Tengen feel physically sick when she thinks about it and she doesn't think there is a number of years when that will ever not physically hurt her.
It is a truth that feels so enormously horrible inside of her, and she knows she can't be the only one who feels that way. Kenshin and Hoshiko don't really know a lot of the details about Ayame's life on the island, but Kenjaku has been profoundly affected by all of that, and Kenichi understands more about how much she suffered as he grows.
But anyway, none of that is the point. There's nothing she can accomplish by filling her mind with all of this.
Seeing Michizane being happily married and a father to three young children just makes Tengen reflect on how Michizane and Ayame should have been together. It was the right thing that should have happened, and they would have been happy.
Tengen feels like she's allowed to have this opinion, but she never discussed it with her sister because she was raising a family with another man by the time they reunited. She also never talked about it with Michizane, because how unhealthy would it have been for him to remain emotionally invested in a woman who was never going to be his?
She's a third party and she can have whatever opinion she wants.
She doesn't think it was fair for Fujiwara to bring Ayame at age fifteen into his house to care for Kenjaku. She didn't even know her own name, and had no sense of identity, so she just became enmeshed with this incredibly dysfunctional family which only became happy in the end because she was there to smooth out everything. She was beautiful enough to keep Kenji from wandering around to brothels like a cat that needed to be neutered, she cared for Kenjaku when his mother refused to, she provided Kikyo with a close friend who accepted her failures as wife and mother. Without her, those three would have just continued to be terrible forever until they died.
The Kamo clan knew if they wanted to take Ayame, they had to keep Michizane from interfering in what they were doing, but planned to attack with Kenji there, which was all the proof anyone needed that Ayame would have been safer with Michizane.
Ayame is supposed to be living happily ever after with Michizane, and while she is never going to discuss that with anyone, she will also never stop believing it either.
Tengen is very happy that he is happy now, and she likes Rei Sugawara very much. She's kind and she was very patient with him being emotionally dysfunctional at the beginning of their relationship. The only time they ever spoke between themselves privately about it, Rei said even when animals get hurt, it takes patience for them to trust and believe they won't get hurt again, so she never expected him to immediately be free and open with his feelings.
It was perhaps incorrect to think of Michizane, an older man who knew better and should have been better, as a wounded animal that needed patience and love and tender care, but somehow all of that worked out.
Michizane and Rei had a healthy baby boy the summer after Ayame died, and then didn't have any more for a couple of years, but last year they had a baby, and this year they had a baby, and currently, Rei is pregnant again.
He jokes this fourth child will be named 'whoopsie,' but that would break their naming convention as their first three are named: Ryujin, dragon god; Ryuga, dragon fang; and Ryuken, dragon fist.
The Sugawara babies are chubby little white-haired darlings with jewel-toned eyes and giving them intimidating names to Tengen seems almost like a joke although she knows it's not going to be funny when they get big.
Their household is a place filled mostly with joy, strange critters, the dragon babies, and of course, Kenshin and Hoshiko, who grow more and more each day.
There is a division growing among the Fujiwara children, not out of disagreement or violence, but a difference in ideas.
The middle children, Ayame's oldest, are as they get older, planning to leave Kyoto and return to Nara to begin rebuilding their clan. They are growing up, now sixteen and fourteen, and wish to return to the home where they were happy with their parents, so they live with their own families someday.
Their home burned to absolute nothingness but stone, leaving the family graves, cobblestone paths and stone foundations behind, but little else. The estate on the hill still property of the Fujiwara clan, had laid mostly abandoned except for visits to the family grave where Kenji, Ayame, and their stillborn child rested.
Despite burning, seeds from Ayame's flower patch somehow managed to spread, and the entire property was completely overgrown with lovely flowers that stuck up everywhere, through broken pieces of foundation and from around every rock.
They find this incredibly meaningful.
Kenjaku was never interested in the clan, and while he supports their ambitions, has no intentions on joining them in Nara. And being Fujiwara couldn't mean less to youngest boy Kenichi, as he never met his real father, and sees a different person in his mind when someone says that word—a person he exploded all over the walls of the pathetic little shack where he lived in poverty with his mother.
He has become more aware of what his mother was doing to keep him fed, and cannot draw a line between the terrible men in the village who would bring little satchels of rice to her and his apparent father, some other man who went into her room and flopped around on top of her, grunting and taking what he wanted.
The truth that Tengen holds in her heart about how her sister suffered weighs heavily on her as a person who has seen many awful things in her life.
Kenichi's foundational years were spent witnessing the horror with his own eyes, and there were times that the person he thought of as his father got after him too. Sometimes men would be rough with his mother and he would try to protect her, only to be left bloody and sobbing in the end the same as her.
His emotional state is at times incredibly flat, almost numb, and at other times, swings wildly one way or another.
Even though he is now ten years old, sometimes he sees Rei Sugawara snuggling her younger children and also wants to be mothered. He will ask if he can sit with her, and snuggle up to her like he is a baby, but when he is tired of it, he'll scratch and bite her and yell at her for not being his mother.
Sometimes he is found sobbing uncontrollably, punching trees until his knuckles are bleeding.
Kenichi thinks of relationships as being purely transactional; no one actually does anything for anyone else just out of kindness, unless they are stupid. In his mind, that's how one ends up in a shallow grave, after all.
He loved his mother, but also hates her for leaving him but also blames the people on the island. His feelings are very observably convoluted and he clearly suffers because he has difficulty accepting the things that have happened to him.
Kenichi is riddled with emotional conflict, wanting to be loved by his family and also not wanting to need love at all. Wanting someone to be kind to him without him having to earn it, but then not believing people are actually ever nice to each other without asking in return.
Sometimes he plays very nicely with the little Sugawara kids because he remembers how he never played with another child until he came to Kyoto and how lonely that was, but sometimes he's also very mean to them, because they didn't have to do anything to earn a garden filled with friends and toys.
In addition, Kenichi's body isn't normal in any sort of way; it's extremely huge for his age, and heavy, which allows him to physically contain an enormous amount of cursed energy at a young age. On the inside, he's a intricate stew of negative emotions that swirl this energy through his body constantly.
With his technique, he is prodigious, and intuitively understands the nature of destruction that he is allowed to engage when he uses it. He can cut through anything. Turn huge stones into perfect little cubes; it's not hard to imagine what happened to the man who killed his mother. Tearing a human body with no cursed energy to shreds would be a simple matter for him, because people are actually quite soft.
Kenichi's blades, made from cursed energy, are even sharp enough to cut through cursed energy and certain weak techniques.
Simple, incredibly destructive, and anchored to a little boy who has cracks that run all the way to the very core of his soul.
Tengen and Michizane have had a few quite conversations about what he's going to be like as an adult, since he is like this during the phase of his life where most little boys are still sweet. Puberty makes every man naturally more aggressive, and it also makes sorcerers much more powerful. Maybe he will calm down, maybe he will get significantly worse?
The idea that he might wield that power from his brokenness is a little frightening, actually, but Ayame loved him very much, and so they want to labor with him and be patient and not assume anything bad.
Kenichi recently broke the arm of Michizane's oldest boy, and even though Michizane and his wife were willing to overlook the matter because it was unclear if Kenichi intended to hurt him that much, understanding that nurturing Kenichi was very important, Kenjaku took Kenichi from the home anyway.
It seemed like a bad decision, but as Kenjaku pointed out, he was Kenichi's oldest living blood relative. Kenshin and Hoshiko were on the verge of going home to Nara, and they certainly weren't able to look after him, and the Sugawara family, despite being so kind, weren't actually his family.
And, for what it was worth, Kenjaku was the only person who had ever really gotten through to him in a way that mattered and the only voice of reason Kenichi would ever listen to because Kenjaku convinced him that they were partners instead of them being child and caretaker.
Tengen and Michizane just have no idea where the two of them are or what it is that they're doing. They generally think Kenjaku is a suspicious character, but they're not aware of any bad dealings he's involved with. His care for his siblings is genuine, but everything else about him could be a lie.
Even his own mother has soured on him again, preferring to stick with Kenshin and Hoshiko, the lovable and normal siblings of the Fujiwara clan who have reasonable life goals and loyalty to their family legacy.
There are no hard feelings between the children; it's just turning out that the middle children are going on to their destiny to work on rebuilding the clan and Kenji and Kenichi are certainly on some sort of path together.
So, what were Kenjaku and Kenichi actually doing?
Mostly nothing, actually!
Despite everyone being incredibly suspicious of him, which Kenjaku genuinely enjoyed for whatever reason, he isn't currently planning or plotting anything in particular. There are ideas in his head, and he has no idea how to even begin going about making them happen.
Besides that, he's taking care of Kenichi now.
In the end, he is Kenichi's oldest blood family member, and as much as Tengen and Sugawara House and even his mother have made efforts, he thinks he has to do what he thinks is best for his youngest brother. Of course it seems like being welcomed into a loving family would be the best thing for Kenichi, but it's really only been causing him pain and problems.
Right now, Kenjaku and Kenichi are just going wherever they want, doing whatever they want to do. Learning, exploring, living. The world is changing, and Kenjaku thinks maybe he prefers spending this transitional phase just wandering around with his littlest brother anyway.
Sugawara wants to restore order to Akitsushima after centuries of post-Imperial feudalism at the hands of sorcery warlords. Since Kenjaku is close to the person trying to do this, he knows that the plan is to settle out the rest of the island, and establish a pact between the Jujutsu Society, sorcery clans, and imperial family to constrain all of them as entities that both strengthen and limit one another.
He is the not the warlord who came out on top due to chance; he kills people who get in his way and while it would pain him to kill one of Ayame's children, Kenjaku does not doubt that he would do it.
Kenjaku feels like the world is going to change drastically as Sugawara either achieves his goal or fails spectacularly. Generally, Kenjaku dislikes the strictures brought by the law and the sense of duty that Jujutsu Society places on sorcerers. Despite his negative opinions about all of it, he can't argue against the idea that something has to change in the world.
The burning of Nara was perhaps the deadliest night in the history of the island, and he can hardly forget the sight of the city when he rose atop the back of Yamata No Orochi. The streets were filled with corpses that had been stripped of flesh on impact of a firebomb, those actively on fire; burned, twitching victims awaiting death, parents holding their dead children.
At the time, he was really anxious and terrified about everything that was going on, but over time, his mind revisits that moment often, that strange, depraved moment.
Since Yamata No Orochi's flames are cursed, a lot of them went mad and ran into the fires.
Nara is still the absolutely glowing hot center of cursed spirit births as a result of that night, with many curses taking forms like small children screaming into the night that they've been burned, only to lure kind people who might help them into darkness and eat them.
As a fully-fledged adult, Kenjaku struggles to reconcile his spirit with the cruelty of the world. How is Kenichi supposed to do it?
Kenichi suffered from all kinds of frustration and resentment back at the Sugawara house, but he really thrived when he was away from there. He was happiest when he was bare from the waist up, tanned from the sun, and probably barefoot as he flew around atop a dragon asking about where they would go next and what they would eat next.
Due to the fact he almost starved, food is a constant preoccupation in Kenichi's mind, and Kenjaku has learned that one of the most meaningful ways to engage his curiosity is to offer him something new to eat.
Kenichi enjoys being a little wild, and loves foraging and fishing. He practices with his bow quite faithfully without needing to be reminded because he's interested in bow hunting. Hiking around, swimming in rivers, jumping off little waterfalls…Kenjaku's idea of freedom involves spending every night at a nice inn, but he understands Kenichi's joy in nature.
His youngest brother isn't a bad student, and actually wants to learn about everything, especially sorcery, but sometimes getting him to sit still can be a challenge, so Kenjaku sometimes takes him to places where important things happened. Kenichi will listen to a history lesson about a place while he climbs around on the ruins and asks questions.
Kenichi is just a ten-year-old boy who likes flying around on a dragon, playing in crumbling old castles, exploring the wilds, and eating everything there is to eat. He is happy having their little adventures, and Kenjaku thinks he deserves to be happy.
Today, they're in the north, and looking around at whatever they see; when they see a settlement, Kenjaku points. "Maybe they have an inn."
"We should sleep outside!" Kenichi answers.
"It's obviously going to rain."
"We can do a tent."
"I need a bath, and a soft bed, and a meal someone else cooked that I don't need to eviscerate for cooking," Kenjaku says.
Kenichi stretches all of his arms and lays back on the back of the dragon. "If you didn't tell me you grew up in a castle, I would know you grew up in a castle."
"What's that supposed to mean?" his older brother asks.
"Nothing, Princess. Let's find you a feather bed and food placed beautifully on a dish so you can get out of the sun."
Kenjaku, sitting on the back of the dragon with an umbrella to shade his albino skin from the sun, says, "This body has a severe intolerance for sun."
"Lame!"
"I could switch at any time, but then I wouldn't have a dragon anymore, and then what?"
Kenichi answers, "I dunno. Why are you asking me to solve all your problems? I'm ten and kind of a problem myself, you know."
"Whatever is wrong with this body, it's something that also occurs in animals. Being exposed to the sun causes problems I can fix with reverse curse technique, but it can lead to deadly skin tumors, which cannot. So I will stay under my umbrella, because I am going to be forced to leave this body if it gets sick like that and I really quite like having a dragon."
When they land near the settlement in the woods, Kenichi runs ahead of him and says, "Hurry up, Princess. I wonder what they'll have to eat."
"I think this might be where the Star Society used to be? My host used to stay around here."
"What's that?"
Kenjaku says, "The Star Society was this little religious organization that believed that Tengen should turn into a monster and kill everyone."
"Except them?"
"No, including them."
"I don't think I understand."
Kenjaku gives him a pat on the head and says, "That's why you're not in a cult."
At the gates to the settlement, they are invited in as it's a more open operation now, with little shops and an inn as it is actually useful to travelers.
Kenjaku heard the people hanging around in the settlement now were originally from Kyoto, so things were quite modern compared to how it was when Zhang was around. When Zhang stayed here, this little settlement was like a pimple, full of rot and sealed away from everything, but now the gates were open, and the people were ready to welcome them as soon as they entered.
At the inn, they share a community bath near the well, and after they are clean, they sit in the dining room of the inn and eat a meal of venison, fish, rice, and local vegetables and fruit. It's quite satisfying, especially for Kenjaku who does like to be spoiled a little bit. He doesn't feel like eating a meal they didn't have to catch, dress, and cook is a huge luxury.
"You like your dinner, Princess?" Kenichi taunts.
"I do. Do you?"
"Mhmm. I like the taste of venison. It's deep, really full."
"Most people prefer more mild meats. It's a bit gamey."
Kenichi, holding chopsticks in his hands, asks, "Are you whining that your meat tastes too much like meat?"
Kenjaku places his venison on his little brother's dish, and Kenichi says, "You're really not very manly if you don't like meaty meat."
"Is that so?"
"Yes, it's probably why the sun is trying to murder you."
Kenjaku almost chokes on his food, but this is his youngest brother at his finest: happy, full, funny, and incredibly charismatic. He obviously has some deep issues, but if they avoid situations that expose the bleeding wounds deep in his soul, he's actually great. Kenjaku loves hanging around with him, and they're having such a wonderful adventure together, just flying free in the world together.
In his element, he's not difficult at all, and he's usually in a good mood. He thinks if a person heard about his troubles, they would think he's impatient, intolerant, with a bad temper, overly-emotional or angry, but the scariest thing about Kenichi was perhaps his ability to be casually content despite boiling with negative sentiment on the inside.
After dinner, they head up to their room, and since their beds are ready, settle in for the night.
When the lights are out, Kenjaku sees four beady little glowing red eyes peering at him, and he asks, "What is it?"
"If that Zhang person was here before, how come no one recognizes you?"
Kenjaku answers, "These are completely different people. Akira Kamo killed all the people that were here before. The people who live here now who have been here the longest showed up after all that."
"So they prayed to be killed by a monster and a monster killed them?"
"I suppose."
Kenjaku starts to drift off but hears Kenichi's voice again.
"If you got into a real fight with Sugawara, who would win?"
He answers, "It would be like when we see falcons hunt. The little sparrows never even see it coming, they're hit with so much speed and force they're instantly killed. No matter how much I prepared, or what plans I had, he could just end me. Crossing Michizane Sugawara is the one thing no sorcerer can ever do, because if he decides to hunt you, when Six Eyes fall upon you, you die."
"Is he that strong?"
"Yes. Our father actually could have given him some problems, as he was also very powerful. They probably could have killed each other if they were really serious about it, but who knows?"
"If he was powerful, why did he die?"
Kenjaku says, "It was a lot of things, really. Zhang was a bad match for him, and it was a surprise attack at his home where his family was. If he'd abandoned his position and attacked Zhang's curses from further away, he probably would have lived and eventually emerged victorious, but the whole point of attacking us at home was because they knew he'd try to protect everyone.
"Because of his choice, my mother was able to kill Zhang, and I got into this body and the tide of the attack changed very quickly. But to your point, Ten Shadows is the only technique I've ever seen that might be able to go toe-to-toe with Sugawara. The problem with my technique is that he would just obliterate Yamata No Orochi, and then what?"
Kenichi answers, "You're nothing without your dragon."
"Thanks, I appreciate that."
"Okay, what about Tengen versus Sugawara?"
"Still Sugawara."
Kenjaku feels teeth chomp down on his finger, and says, "Did you just bite me?"
"Why are you always accusing me?"
"Well, did you do it?"
"Did you see me do it? No you didn't, cause you can't see in the dark. So you don't know it was me. Maybe somebody else bit you. Maybe you bit yourself and you're just lying."
"Why would I bite myself and then blame you?"
"I don't know. Why are you asking me?"
Kenjaku bursts out laughing, and Kenichi joins him before jumping on top of him for a little wrestle. Zhang's body is very short and compact and Kenichi is monster-sized for his age and has four arms, so purely on physical prowess its getting hard to keep up with him.
"Get off, you're getting too heavy!"
"If you ate your meat, you wouldn't get beaten up by a child. Take that!"
"Get off me, you little demon! Go to sleep."
It storms all night, and then the following day, and twenty-two and ten-year-old brothers spend a day inside the inn, playing board and tile games, listening to an old man playing the flute, and talking with the cult members.
The idea of Tengen as an omniscient being meant to destroy them is actually incredibly amusing for anyone who has ever met Tengen both because she would never want to do anything like that and because she'd find all of this to be very bothersome.
On the start of their third day at the Star Society, after they finish hanging their laundry and replenishing their travel supplies at a little store, Kenjaku tries to find bigger shoes for Kenichi because he is forever outgrowing shoes and hates wearing them in the first place. He has outgrown shoes he never even put on his feet, but winter is coming.
As they make their way around, they finally see the huge statue, which is a bit wobbly with the autumn air, thanks to some dirt around the base that washed away with the rain.
Kenichi looks up at the statue and says, "What the hell is this thing?"
"Supposedly, when Tengen almost turned into a curse, she looked like this. Her head got all boxy and her hands turned into claws. She was apparently also a giant."
"And she grew big titties?"
Kenjaku scowls. "We don't talk about women like that."
"Okay, but did she grow big titties when she turned into a monster or what? Cause I've seen her lots of times now and she doesn't have big titties."
"If you say titties one more time, that's it. And it looks like it might topple over, get over here before you get crushed," Kenjaku says, tugging him by the kimono.
Kenichi pouts and says, "If I do die, make sure everyone knows I got squished by a big titty."
Kenjaku grabs him by a slightly deformed ear and drags him further away.
"Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow!"
"What did I say?"
"I dunno, I wasn't listening. But you haven't explained why the statue has big titties."
Kenjaku pulls his ear again. "I said stop saying that word, it's disrespectful. And I don't know. Probably because it was made by a man? Haven't you ever drawn a picture of a lady and then given her large breasts?"
"Why would I do that?"
"Never mind. We'll revisit this conversation in a few years."
Kenichi rubs his ear. "You're so mean to me. You should never have kids. I think you'd be a terrible father."
"I'd be a good dad."
"I don't think so. You could go in a girl body and have a baby, so you could be a bad father and a bad mother at the same time."
They hear a voice call from behind them and turn to see Narumi, Star Plasma Vessel, Tengen's former student and current top-ranked among the Jujutsu Society's full-time sorcerers. Playful Cloud hangs on a special hook at her side, and she is wearing navy blue hakama set.
Over the years, she has lost most of her left ear and has a scar across her lips, but she remains an absolutely fierce woman who still wears her brown hair in a ponytail like a man. Unlike Tengen, she does not possess the technique Immortality, so while Tengen still has the appearance of a nineteen or perhaps twenty-year-old, Narumi looks like someone in her late twenties as she is.
"Well, well, well, look who it is! I haven't seen you two in a while."
Their greeting is pleasant, and she's someone Kenichi actually likes a lot because her personality is aggressive and at times unpleasant. He has liked her ever since he found out she read a body-switcher like Kenjaku, fed him to rats, and then trapped his mutated, vengeful soul inside a weapon that only she seems to be able to use.
He finds her very respectable, a powerful woman who will kill a man or worse.
Narumi has already been traveling for a while, so she needs to replenish supplies, do laundry, bathe, and rest, and they're having a good enough time, so they hang out. Since the storm left everything muddy, there wasn't much to do for a few days anyway.
Over dinner, Narumi tells them a strange tale of a young man who became possessed. He was from the Kaminari clan, one of the Kamo clan's allied clans that got absolutely squashed by Sugawara after the incident in Nara. He didn't kill anyone's kids, and since it's been a few years, some of the older ones who were spared have begun reaching fighting age.
A teenager named Hiro Kaminari wanted to get his vengeance, become strong, reestablish his clan, all that, but he was born without a cursed technique. According to the others in his clan, all his age or younger, he sought out black market sources to obtain a cursed object or weapon he might be able to use since he did have significant cursed energy.
A man sold him a human ear that supposedly contained the technique of a sorcerer. Kaminari ate the ear, became violently ill, started speaking another language, and while he did manifest a cursed technique, he seemed like a completely different person. The others in the clan were frightened and ended up consulting a Jujutsu Society sorcerer in the next town over, but Kaminari killed that sorcerer despite the fact they were friends and the older sorcerer had helped protect the Kaminari clan all the years they'd been vulnerable.
Kaminari became sicker and sicker, started puking up what might have been chunks of his own organs, and died.
It's a matter of importance to Tengen and the Jujutsu Society because human possession is always a scary matter. Historically, almost every instance of a cursed object or entity attempting to possess a human have resulted in the death of the vessel. When it has worked, it was typically because the vessel was more powerful than the occupying power.
Ayame serving as the vessel for the dark idol for all those years was actually an anomalous situation that didn't match with their expectations of what should have happened when it tried to possess her.
The idea of transferring a cursed technique from one body to another was actually quite unbelievable, and even though the vessel did eventually perish, he was clearly fully possessed at least for a time by another sorcerer strong enough to kill one of the Jujutsu Society's people.
Narumi was assigned to investigate the issue, and the only real clue they found is that according to an old retired fisherman who had moved to the village where all of this transpired, the language the Kaminari was speaking was the same language they speak on Ezo, the island north of theirs.
Ezo is a huge place, and Narumi has no idea where she needs to go once she gets there. Therefore, she thinks it is fortuitous that she ran into Kenjaku while working on a matter he clearly finds personally interesting, because Kenjaku has a flying dragon.
Kenjaku is fascinated by this story, and since he doesn't really have anywhere specific that he needs to be or anything he needs to do and his brother doesn't care as long as adventure is involved, they decide they will go to Ezo together and investigate this strange incident.
Narumi believes that Kenjaku might actually be incredibly useful to these efforts, because his technique allows him to possess other human beings and with his intelligence, he is probably an expert in this field. Possession isn't something she often thinks about, but people are always obsessively curious about any information that pertains to their technique, so Kenjaku has probably read all kinds of information about related subjects even though the Jujutsu Society is steadily locking that knowledge away.
In the glorious new world that comes after this one finally gives out one way or another, some knowledge will disappear—that is Tengen's promise to her homeland.
They stay a couple of more days at the settlement because it rains again, and perhaps out of sheer boredom, while Kenichi is running around outside in the rain creating more laundry for them to wash, Kenjaku and Narumi fool around in her room and then after various acts of fornication, lay around and talk.
Narumi wishes to use Yamato No Orochi to carry the cursed, anatomically incorrect statue to the Jujutsu Society and place it in the courtyard of the Jujutsu Society while Tengen is asleep. She evidently still has to do that from time to time and it's usually a secret when she does.
This way, she will awaken to find the Big-Titted Tengen statue right in the middle of the Jujutsu Society where she and everyone else can gaze upon it.
When the rain stops, maybe out of morbid curiosity, they go to the inner section of the Star Society, to the toilet where Fumiko Sugawara committed suicide.
Narumi stares up at the beams on the ceiling and says, "Well, I guess if you gotta go, you gotta go. So she went. Kind of bleak, really."
"No kidding."
"Did you ever meet her?"
"When I was little. She called me a lice-ridden child, and I gave her a dead mouse because she was being kind of a bitch to Ayame. I think I saw when she got cursed and just didn't know it. I have memories about her from Zhang too."
Narumi says, "I think Fumiko probably would have been pretty interesting and fun if things had been different for her. I was harsh on her within myself, you know? I tend to be a perfectionist. With myself, and in what I expect from other people."
Kenjaku answers, "Even though I was the firstborn son of the person who was in his time the strongest lord, people treated me like shit because I was weird, so it has never been difficult for me to accept that people just have their little things. If they're weak or strange or have something wrong with them, that's just how it is. There's no reason for me to be bothered with it."
Kenichi stomps in, soaking wet, through the open door, and says, "Oh, here you two are."
"We were just having a meeting."
"In the toilet, as people do," the little boy answers.
He pushes past them and starts to peel wet clothes off his body.
Narumi says, "Excuse me, are you just going to drop one right in front of me?"
"Are you gonna watch? You can go talk on the porch. I can't go take a shit on the porch, everyone will get mad, and Kenjaku will punch me on top of my head," he answers.
"I can't even argue with that logic. Good luck on your endeavor, little man."
"Thanks!"
Narumi and Kenjaku leave and shut the door behind him, and she says, "He's funny, isn't he?"
"He is. Sometimes when he's being a little shit, it's really hard not to laugh."
"I heard he was a little too rough at Sugawara House."
"He doesn't hate anyone there, and they were all really nice to them, but he seems to get frustrated in the family setting. He was biting, scratching, hitting, being difficult. He broke one of the boys' arms, so I decided he needed a change."
Narumi gives him a rather stiff pat on the back. "You're all right. Everyone else thinks you're a lazy jackass, but I think you're a good person."
"Thanks."
And so, the next morning, they set out for Ezo, which, while relatively close to Akitsushima, lives very separatly, both because there aren't many settlements or villages that far north, and also because the people that live on Ezo are not fond of their neighbors to the south due to the fact that most of their knowledge about Akitsushima involves the fact it's been in a feudal state of unending violence for a while.
They speak a different language, have a different culture, and have resisted foreign influence while Akitsushima was quick to adopt advancements from the continent.
Most of the people in Ezo reportedly lived on the southern coast, in little groups of villages where they mainly relied on the sea for their survival.
Finding someone who could speak both their language and talk to the Ezo natives in the northernmost village was quite a task, but they eventually enlisted an old lady as their translator and crossed the sea.
Narumi believes that whoever made the ear probably fled to Ezo from Akitsushima in order to avoid the Jujutsu Society's meddling and wrath, but the ear made its way to central Akitsushima anyway.
For a few days, they go from one coastal village to another, asking the locals about sorcerers. They're generally greeted with sour answers and unfriendliness because the bloodlines of these families doesn't yield sorcerers like Akitsushima, which makes being their neighbor dangerous. They meet village leaders who are aware that sorcerers who wish to avoid the order of Sugawara rule and the wrath of Master Tengen have begun to flee onto their island.
They don't really have many sorcerers to defend themselves, so they have to go along to get along, and as such, no one wants to talk to the Jujutsu Society, because their appearance brings the sword that has pierced Akitsushima a million times to Ezo.
Still, there are certainly at least some sorcerers, because the person who possessed the ear was speaking the same language as these people.
They're wary of the travelling party: a woman who dresses and behaves crassly, a privilege afforded only to men; a man who clearly came from the continent with white hair and pale skin and reddish eyes; a little boy with four arms, four eyes, and strange markings all over his body; an old lady who wasn't bothered by any of this.
Kenichi loves the food though, since the islanders have a diet that is heavy on meat and fish, although Kenjaku feels like the food is so heavy it will fall through his stomach. Kenichi is always very gracious and charming when it comes to food, and it is his endless praise of a new dish that convinces a village leader that was hosting them to give them a clue.
It's hard for the village leader to view Kenichi as a bad omen when he is grinning ear to ear, praising his wife for her cooking, and declaring he will eat until it looks like he will have a baby which he communicates mostly with his hands. The leader's wife laughs hysterically while she fills his plate again.
Most travelers from the island thumb their nose at the kinds of things they eat, preferring rice and soy and miso.
Kenichi has already won their respect by showing off his archery with the boys in the village, and he eats like he has always lived among them.
The village leader tells them that the villages have spread the word that if they do have a sorcerer here or there, to keep their identities a secret from foreigners because their sorcerers, as few in number as they are, have begun to go missing.
They also suspect someone from Akitsushima probably headed north to escape the spread of order, but they lack the manpower to resources and manpower to address the issue, and know if they had asked for help that they might turn their shoreline into another warzone.
If the Jujutsu Society could quietly, precisely, and quickly address the problem and leave, it would be best for everyone.
Their investigation leads them further inland, to places that are quite untarnished and wild. Most of the people who live on Ezo live on the coastline, leaving the center of the island an expansive wilderness. Beautiful in autumn, like someone painted the whole world in brilliant shades of red and orange.
While they proceed, they have an expectation that a powerful and evil sorcerer lays ahead. But when they finally find the source of this madness, it turns out to be an idiot from Higurashi House who is trying to 'collect' the cursed techniques of the people on the island into himself, so the Jujutsu Society doesn't notice sorcerers going missing.
Higurashi was a small family that could hardly be called a clan, and most famously, contributed the corpse of the 'invisible' assassin to the unfolding epic of the Fujiwara clan. It was this sorcerer's grandfather that got sliced to bits by the dark idol's power in Ayame's room when Kenshin was a newborn.
Kenjaku remembered it well because it was the first time he saw a real human body, and also because this event led to his father brutally stabbing Lord Katsuragi to death in front of his mother, Midori, which really didn't go well for anyone in the end.
Junichi Higurashi is not really anything special; he is armed with research that was clearly written by someone else, he has achieved no success whatsoever, and one of his paid assistants got tired of working for him in such a remote place and stole the human ear to sell it on Akitsushima, which in turn summoned the Jujutsu Society to him.
The secret ingredient is the corpse of a boy in suspended animation.
He keeps it hanging so he can extract blood from it and heal it with a cursed object that performs reverse curse technique since he is not able to do it himself.
It's just…
As they stand in the cave where these experiments have been taking place, and Narumi wonders if they really should have brought a ten-year-old boy to this place, Kenjaku stares at the body hanging from the ceiling.
Kenjaku tilts his head one way, and then back the other way.
"That's uhhh..me? The body I was born into."
It's just very weird for him, seeing his natural body for the first time after more than ten years.
Narumi finds the revelation that the 'secret' behind this possession sorcery, which does not seem to work and according to Junichi himself has only resulted in everyone involved dying, is just the natural born body of a person who can possess others. It's actually all very anti-climactic and stupid.
She is annoyed that she travelled all this way for something so incredibly dumb. Junichi doesn't know what he's doing, and as far as they can tell, the Kamo clan probably authored the research since they'd had other people like Kenjaku born into their family and managed to keep it a secret. Narumi has become privy to the fact tat the Kamo clan originally planned on removing the power using Ayame Tengen as a vessel and doing something else with it, which seemed to align with research like this.
Still, Higurashi was kidnapping the sorcerers that live on this island and murdering them in his experiments. Keeping gross and taboo matters like this under wraps is in everyone's best interest, so Narumi cracks his skull open with Playful Cloud while Kenichi waits outside, and she and Kenjaku looks through the scrolls spread all over the place for a few minutes.
Kenjaku can see a lot of problems with what Junichi Higurashi was trying to do, but the main thing wrong with his process is that he is not the one that owns a possession technique. When Kenjaku changed bodies, perhaps residue of the technique was left behind in his natural body, but the technique itself went with him. That said, his natural flesh probably supported the process more than his current body would as well.
"What a bunch of bullshit. How did this idiot get your body?" she mumbles.
Kenjaku, who is taking his twelve-year-old corpse down from where it hung, answers, "Why are you asking me?"
"I mean, you had it. This dummy dragged it all the way to central Ezo. Something obviously happened in the middle."
He throws his body over his shoulder and says, "I assumed it burned. After the fire in Nara, there were bodies we were able to identify based on where the skeletons were outside, but I left my body under a building that collapsed and burned. I always just assumed it burned up. Someone must have grabbed it and put it in suspended animation almost immediately. I'm in very good condition."
Narumi asks, "What are you going to do with that thing?"
"I don't know. It's clearly useful for something."
"Could you go back into it?"
"I don't think so. Maybe. I don't think I would want to be this age again."
"Maybe we should burn it."
"Must every home that I knew as a child burn in the end? Besides, it's valuable. I might want to do something with it at some point," he answers.
Narumi answers, "Valuable because you can do crazy taboo stuff that will make Tengen murder you, but okay."
Kenjaku says, "I look forward to Tengen trying to convince me it is illegal or immoral for me to own my own body. I can hear the frustration and exasperation in her voice even in my imagination. To her sighing and saying, 'this is why no one trusts you.' But look."
He flashes her with his natural body and says, "Told you it was bigger before."
"Ewww…I did not want to see what your penis looked like when you were twelve. But you'd probably do better if you went back in there, right?"
"I have a big dragon."
"It's below average at best. I'm not complaining or anything. I don't care what size a man's dragon is if he lets me sit on his face."
Kenichi's voice suddenly comes forth, a source of awkwardness for the adults as he stands over Higurashi's body, poking his brain with a stick he found outside, "Why would you want to sit on his face?"
Kenjaku exclaims, "You're supposed to be outside!"
"I got bored. Why would you sit on Kenjaku's face? To cover it up because it's not nice to look at?"
Narumi says, "For…science. Kenjaku likes science."
"I hope you farted in his mouth."
Kenjaku, holding his limp natural body in both hands, says, "Why would you wish for that?"
"It would be funny. Look I found this cool stick, it looks like it would be good for hitting people with," Kenichi says, smacking Kenjaku on the back of his legs, causing the stick to break, "You broke it, Jerk!"
Narumi thinks these two have the most entertaining relationship because they genuinely care about each other, but Kenichi spends his whole day finding ways to menace his older brother.
The middle brother, Kenshin, is so proper and polite, always composed, always interacts with respect. And then the family has the little misbehaving baby boy who revels in mischief, happy to spend his days terrorizing his oldest brother who has endless patience and care to offer him.
Kenjaku holds up his limp natural body. "This is me. Told you we looked alike."
Kenichi leans in to examine this raven-haired empty corpse and says, "You have a really big head."
"You have a gigantic head too. That's our birthright as Kenji Fujiwara's sons."
They make him go outside again to keep him from playing with Higurashi's corpse, and then they collect all the materials, destroy everything, burn Higurashi's body outside, and begin their long journey back to Kyoto.
On the way, he talks quietly with Narumi while Kenichi sleeps, and Kenjaku reflects on how peaceful he looks while he rests.
He was somebody's baby.
He had a mother who loved him very much.
There will be a time in Kenjaku's life when he can predict how people will behave, who has the potential for greatness, and generally, how the future might play out based on the information he possesses. That acumen takes hundreds of years to perfect, for now he is only a man in his early twenties.
Kenjaku maybe suspects his youngest brother might have some assorted behavioral issues as an adult, and he thinks other people believe that as well. Yet there isn't anyone who has even the slightest suspicion about the unimaginable power this little boy will soon wield or what he will do with it.
The final chapter of this era will soon begin, a story of inescapable violence that will be written in blood.
It is almost time for the king, but for now, the prince sleeps.