I blinked my eyes sluggishly after I awoke and nearly dislocated my jaw with the yawn that ensued. I’d no idea why, but I still felt incredibly drained from the fight yesterday. It was the first time I’d experienced something like that in this realm. I had completely forgotten about the Red Swordsman and the mental note I’d made to stay far away from any glowing blades like that.
“You’re a very deep sleeper,” a raspy, unfamiliar voice observed. The language and tone were familial, teetering on denigrating.
I sprang to attention, deft fingers pulling my obsidian blade from my inventory to my hand. The black scabbard produced a hollow clunk as it landed on the tatami floor.
“Who are you?” I demanded of the stranger who sat against the opposite wall. His scarred face was visible though the rest of his head and body was covered in a blue-grey full-body cloth suit, like some kind of murder onesie. His brown eyes were circled by darkness and watched me with a calm-yet-calculating shrewdness. A blue-hilted shortsword hung on his back, likely the same weapon worn by the Shinobi I’d seen hiding in the reeds yesterday.
“The name’s Hayato. I serve Seiryū-sama.” The name literally meant, “Lord Azure Dragon”, though I assumed he was referring to the “Lady”. It made me wonder if the “Suzaku”, whom Lady Seiryū had mentioned, while Hanada and I were eavesdropping on her council, was the leader of the Vermilion Bird clan.
“Don’t you know it’s rude to eavesdrop on a lady?”
Hayato snorted derisively. Asshole…
“What do you want?”
“I’ve been ordered to guide you to Namida-jinja.”
“I’m sure I can find it by myself.”
“I doubt that.”
“Don’t you have better things to do anyway?”
“Yes. But an order is an order.”
I sighed loudly, making sure he could hear.
“Fine, give me a moment then.”
“Make it quick, we’re wasting daylight.”
Okay, at this point I wanted to seriously bash his face in. I mean, I’d been looking forward to another dip in the warm pool and some filling breakfast. But whatever, it’d just have to wait until I finished the next Stage.
I swapped out of my regular clothes and into my black armour and impressive cloak, while Hayato sat against the wall, watching me with a somewhat bored expression on his battle-scarred face.
The scabbard on the floor vanished and appeared on my hip after I equipped it in the character screen. It struck me as a good idea to find some kind of baldric or belt-pouch where I could keep my potions on me, so they’d be easier to access during fights. I decided that after I received my payment for this next Stage, I’d go splurge a bit in the market I’d passed through in Kakon-shi, assuming I’d still be able to enter the city and that the dead vendors had been replaced.
“Alright, let’s go.”
Hayato got up and together we left the mansion and the village.
“We’ll pass through Nijigahara[1],” he explained. “Don’t fall behind.” The name reminded me of an old forest near where I lived, or had once lived. The name alone made my stomach tighten into knots for some reason.
As we neared the forest wall, I wondered if I’d ever see Hanada again.
With Hayato in the lead, we passed through the forest in no time, though mostly due to his punishing pace and seemingly-infinite pool of stamina. Even though I did my best to keep up, I had to take a breather now and then.
The forest understory was alive with more plants than I could possibly ever count, and the variety in shades of nearly every colour made it look like some abstract entity. Like my first time through the forest, I started to feel intensely-disoriented as we moved onwards through the brush of tallgrass and vigorous plants, crawling up-and-down the hilly terrain beneath the humongous trees and their sheltering canopies. When next we halted, I spilled my guts on the side of tree, although, thanks to my empty stomach, only bile and water came out.
Hayato watched as I sobbed and groaned pathetically with every pained convulsion and subsequent bodily ejection. Part of me figured that he might not have been created to deal with such a scenario and was simply at a loss for words. Or maybe he just liked to watch…
It took about ten minutes before I felt well enough to proceed. For the remainder of our journey through the expansive woodland, I did my best to simply focus on the back of my Guide and his murder onesie’s calming shade of blue.
When at last we emerged from the trees, a vast clearing greeted us. We were technically still within the massive forest, though altitude-wise higher up than Kakon-shi and Lady Seiryū’s village. A mountain range loomed in the not-too-far distance, and at the centre of the clearing, some forty metres from us, stood a temple with three-metre-tall whitewashed stone walls adorned with onyx faces along its length. From outside, a towering four-storey pagoda and the rooftops of a few temple buildings were visible. Before the temple, also enclosed by the walls, was a small village with modest wooden buildings, the rooftops of which were only partially visible above the walls. The temple village had one massive gate at the fore and two statues of the Buddhistic Niō[2] standing only slightly taller than a human, their muscular forms posed as if ready to defeat any who would breach the gate and cause evil within the sacred place. It seemed like a well-fortified place, though, at the same time, I doubted it would be difficult to scale the walls unnoticed.
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“I was told someone would meet me here,” I explained to Hayato.
“He should already be within the village. You’ll know him when you see him.”
“What does that mean?”
Hayato suddenly turned away, gazing towards the opposite end of the clearing, where a dirt road snaked from the temple and through the trees. A second later I heard the shouting too.
“Already!?” He seemed to have expected this, but not so soon. “Find the Exorcist!”
“What about you?” I asked, but he’d already started running towards the sounds in the distance.
Great…
I started running too, though in the direction of the village. I crossed the grass plain unseen, as not a single watchtower had been erected from within the walled-off temple. As I reached the wall, I leapt and landed a foot on one of the protruding faces, which, frozen in a scorned expression, looked none too happy about it. I caught hold of the tiled edge atop the wall and, using every muscle in my fingers, pulled myself halfway over, then swung my legs up-and-over and fell down hard on the other side, my feet protesting against the impact of the long drop.
A toothless beggar poked his head out of a tiny dog house, or that’s what it looked like anyway, and sputtered some kind of incoherent gibberish.
“And a good day to you,” I said, smiling briefly, before running off deeper into the village, in search of the unknown Exorcist. To my surprise, no Stage banner popped into view, which meant that I was still in-between Stages, though clearly this place wasn’t safe either, as it hadn’t flagged itself as a Safe Zone. I wondered what would happen if I waited around long enough for what I presumed was a minor army of the Vermilion clan marching on this place, but ultimately decided I didn’t want to know.
My first plan was to look in the various ryokan[3] and other such gathering places, but I quickly realised that this wasn’t at all like the village I’d imagined it to be. Rather, it was more like the Kakon-shi Slum, though with marginally-better housing, however, all the inhabitants were living in various states of impoverishments, as though only barely clinging on to life.
I really didn’t like the vibe this place gave off. I mean, what would the monks need all these poor people for? They didn’t seem to feed them at all, considering the emaciation that both young and old suffered. The fact that the massive gate was sealed and that wherever I looked I saw only terrified people, made it feel more like some kind of concentration camp, though its purpose was unknown to me.
I’d been running around the village looking for the Exorcist for roughly fifteen minutes, when I spotted the man: The one who didn’t fit in amongst this malnourished crowd. He wore a brown trench coat over a white shirt, dark-blue jeans, and brown leather shoes. On his back he carried a wooden box, with the straps over his shoulders like some kind of backpack. His skin was pale and one eye was covered by his hair, which was entirely silver-white, but the eye I could see was mysteriously green. He did look Japanese, but the hair and eye colours were completely alien. He definitely wasn’t from around here.[4]
He seemed to notice me at the same time, and as he stood there, some kind of brown cigarette in his mouth, a bored expression on his face, likely born from waiting around for a while, he said, after exhaling smoke that didn’t flow like smoke ought to, “You wouldn’t happen to be looking for me, would you?”
“Possibly,” I replied carefully. There was something extremely mysterious about this person I thought, but then again, who wouldn’t find an exorcist to be a strange person? So, in that sense, it was perhaps a good quality for someone in that field? Anyway…
“Are you an exorcist?” I asked.
“No. I’m a Mushishi.[5] Name’s Ginko.” Had he just introduced himself as an insect specialist? What the hell was he doing here?
“Oh,” I said, disappointed. “I suppose you aren’t who I’m looking for after all…”
“No, I think I might be. Nobody seems to really understand what I do, so the confusion is understandable.”
“If you aren’t an exorcist, then what do you do?”
“I handle cases involving Mushi,” Ginko replied, as though it was self-explanatory. Given that normally ‘Mushi’ meant “insect”, I doubted we were talking about the same kind of insects…
“And will that make you able to exorcise a cursed sword?”
Ginko scratched his head. “I’ve never tried before, so I couldn’t say.” He sighed, exhaling more smoke that flowed around him and outwards, as though the tiny particles were hunting down something unseen in the air. “I don’t think a cursed blade is what you should be worried about though. That isn’t why you’re all suffering like this.”
“What do you mean? I’m an outsider like you.”
“Really? You have the same darkness around your eyes, and if you could see the things clinging to you… I don’t even know how to describe it. I’ve never come across a Mushi quite like this one before. Say, you wouldn’t know if there’s some kind of war going on, would you?”
“You don’t know?” I replied, somewhat baffled. How on earth had he even gotten here without noticing? “These lands are plagued by a bloody civil war. Just yesterday a bunch of people were slaughtered in the city nearby. Also, what the hell do you mean that something is clinging to me?”
“It’s a Mushi that looks like a four-legged spider, though it has a blood-red pearl for a body. It’s likely caused by a large presence of blood in these lands. Have you noticed anything strange with the rain lately?”
“Yes, it looks like blood.”
“So that’s what it is… I’ve only ever heard of this Mushi, but I believe its name is Shigurui-no-Kumo[6]. It’s attracted to wars, and lays its eggs in blood-soaked soil, its offspring attaching themselves to the plants in that soil and forcing them to undergo rapid growth, which is ignorant to the seasons. Humans and animals will eventually consume the corrupted plants and become the Mushi’s new host. It should leave the body as soon as the corrupted food has been excreted, but until then…”
“What? What’s gonna happen to me?”
“You’ll experience an extreme desire to kill, many times indiscriminately. The Mushi has this effect on people because it wants them to spill more blood, so that it can continue to multiply and thrive. Judging from the fact that I haven’t seen a single person not under its influence, I assume this war has lasted for quite a long time and claimed countless lives already. Tell me, when did you first eat food harvested in this region?”
“Just last night… Should I stop eating food from here?” I definitely did not want to end up accidentally killing people supposed to be my allies, but I also had to wonder how someone from the Azure clan hadn’t already killed me, if they were under the Mushi’s influence. I guessed that this Shigurui-no-Kumo didn’t break familial bonds or those forged by loyalty, otherwise the clans would’ve torn themselves apart long ago.
“I see,” Ginko responded, letting out a sigh of smoke. “No, you shouldn’t starve yourself. Maybe if you try hard enough, you’ll be able to suppress it, I don’t know, but it would be best to just get out of here.”
“I can’t. I’m supposed to end this war.”
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[1] 虹ヶ原, “The Rainbow Field/Wilderness”.
[2] Guardians of the Buddha, who, despite the pacifistic teachings of their religion, are permitted to do violence, as long as it is against ‘evil’. Quite contradictory, if you ask me. Also, let us not forget that the monks of this temple are so-called “warrior monks” ... Pacifists only in name, it would seem.
[3] “Inn/tavern”.
[4] …or from this time period for that matter.
[5] 蟲師, literally “Insect Specialist”.
[6] 死狂いの蜘蛛, “Death Frenzy Spider”. Very ominous sounding for sure…