March 25, 2007. Later.
We walked.
Arata walked the way he did everything, without apparent hurry. His staff clicked on the pavement with every other step, a metronome for a tempo only he could hear.
My legs felt stiff, like I'd borrowed them from someone else.
"You're pale," Arata said, walking ahead, coat swaying. "Good. That means you get it."
"I… don't." My voice came out dry. "I don't get any of this."
"Then listen." He didn't slow down. Didn't look back.
We moved along a cracked road, streetlights blinking overhead. The neighborhood was quiet.
"First thing you need to know," Arata said, spinning his staff once.
"Every grave is a door."
"A door," I repeated.
"A threshold. A bridge between the living and whatever comes after. The person inside… or what remains of them, can feel the world on this side. They reach toward it. Offer something of yourself and you're not just knocking." He paused to let a car pass. "You're entering into a conversation."
"That wasn't a conversation," I said. "Felt more like an ambush."
"Because you didn't understand the language." He glanced at me sideways. "Every conversation is an ambush if you don't speak the language. Some graves want blood. Some want pain, the physical kind, real suffering, not symbolic. Some want memories. Some want time, literal years of your life, borrowed against the power they give you in exchange."
I absorbed this.
"And Kenji Eito wanted blood," I said.
"Common graves usually do but he was trying to regain his lost blood. Kenji was a simple man with a simple appetite. The problem wasn't the currency. It was that you paid too much, too fast, without establishing terms first. He took it as invitation to collect the rest of his fee in one transaction."
"He would have drained me."
"Yes."
"And that would have.."
"Killed you. Or worse." He said it without inflection. "There are states between living and dead that are not improvements on either."
We turned down a narrower street. The houses here were older, packed close, their windows dark.
"You're not cursed," Arata continued. "I want to be clear about that before the anxiety sets in. Since you binded to grave, therefore increasing your spiritual energy, what you are is visible. Bright, in a way that spirits notice. Imagine walking into a cave with a flashlight. You see more. But everything in the cave sees you too."
"So I'm kinda like a worm on a hook," I said.
"Bait that can bite back," he said.
I thought about the skeletal hand. About the way it had moved, not my intention, not my instruction, just the grave responding to my blood and my presence and something between them that I couldn't yet name.
"That hand," I said. "Was that me?"
"Was it you?" He seemed to consider the question genuinely. "The power was kenji's, you were the conduit. The intention was your's. Think of it as using someone else's arm. You moved it. It was still his arm."
"That's a disturbing analogy."
"All accurate analogies are disturbing," he said pleasantly.
---
We stopped at a shrine.
Small, tucked between a closed hardware store and a dry cleaner's that was definitely also closed at this hour. The wood of the shrine gate was old and weathered and someone had hung paper lanterns along the eaves, blue flames inside them, burning steady.
Arata kicked the gate open.
Inside: more lanterns. Paper charms everywhere, layered over every available surface. A chest against one wall. An altar of sorts at the back, though the objects on it were nothing I recognized from any shrine I'd ever visited, which were admittedly not many.
The air was thick. Not unpleasantly, just full.
"You work here?" I asked.
"Sleep here sometimes," he said. "It's convenient." He went to the chest, rummaged and found a flask. Tossed it toward me without warning.
I caught it.
"Drink," he said.
I sniffed the mouth of the flask. Metal, bitter, something underneath that I couldn't identify.
"Spirit tonic," Arata said, reading my expression. "Your body just survived its first binding and the subsequent partial collapse of a grave. You're running on adrenaline and spiritual residue. The tonic stabilizes the spiriton flow and keeps your body from collapsing, you won't need it forever."
"The what flow?"
He paused. "Right. You don't know that word yet." He settled onto the floor. "Spiritons. The building blocks of everything, essentially. Life energy, spiritual energy, the force that makes graves function, Onmyōdo work and the world connect to itself. Everything that exists runs on them. Your body produces them. The dead and ghosts require them to exist."
I took a careful sip of the tonic.
My throat burned like I had swallowed steel wool.
I do not recommend it.
I wiped my mouth. "Okay," I said, trying not to make a face. "Spiritons. Building blocks of everything."
"Think of them as fuel," he said. "The grave is the engine. You're the fuel line. The tonic helps regulate the flow so the engine doesn't take more than you can spare."
"And Kenji was taking too much?"
"Kenji was attempting to empty the tank." He folded his hands in his lap. "You have a great deal of it, which is why the grave responded so strongly to your blood. High-spiriton individuals attract attention from the dead the way sweetness attracts insects."
I sat down on the floor across from him.
"About smashing that grave," I said, needing to hear something other than my own breathing.
"Why not just smash all of them?"
Arata sharpened his eyes.
"That one was common. Weak. The man tied to it wasn't important. Some graves have been steeped in blood and rage for centuries. Some are guarded. Some fight back. Smashing those is like trying to punch through a mountain nonstop. You'd just die."
"...So there's a ranking system."
"Of course there is." He smiled faintly. "There's always a ranking system. People. Power. Graves. You're at the bottom. That's fine. Everyone starts at the bottom."
I didn't respond. My stomach twisted anyway.
"Congratulations," Arata added. "You've already stepped over the line. You'll never be normal again."
"Wow. Motivational."
He shrugged. "Truth isn't motivational."
The wind carried a faint smell of incense. Arata kept tapping his staff against the ground while he was sitting.
"Basic Gravebinding comes with three perks," he said, voice flat.
"First: a tether. The grave you bind to is connected. It can call to you. Whisper. Fight for you. You can call to it. Second: amplification. You'll get stronger. Faster. More aware. Standing near your grave will feel like plugging into a power source. Third: a signature ability. Each grave has one. Could be a weapon. A curse. A trick. Yours? Gone now because i destroyed the grave. The power will linger for a day or so, then disappear."
"Sounds like a gamble."
"Everything's a gamble."
"Welcome to the world of Gravebinders, Itsuki Ririku," Arata said. His voice had shifted, still light, still carrying that baseline amusement, but with a much more serious tone. "Until you learn how to defend yourself every spirit and ghost in this city will want a piece of you."
"What's that? And how do you know my name?"
He smiled. The lantern light caught his red eyes.
I looked at the flask in my hand and sigh.
"Then teach me," I said. "Teach me how to survive."
"That," he said, leaning back, "depends entirely on how fast you can learn."
He got up and raised his hands to form a hand sign.
"This is called the hand sign of dimension."
The blue flames in the lanterns shifted.
"Open the door that was never closed," he said.
The space in the shrine folded.