Night. Kaede Village.
The chirping of autumn insects rose and fell both inside and beyond the barrier. Moonlight leaked through the lattice-window gaps of the Shrine's main hall, laying down bands of silver-white across the floor.
Kobe Hikaru sat cross-legged at the center of the main hall.
The oni mask rested before his knees. In the moonlight his pale face looked a shade more at peace—after the transmutation, his body had at last taken on something of a living man's metabolism, and that metabolism was slowly reshaping his appearance. His skin was still pale, but no longer the ashen, decaying gray of a corpse.
Closer now to a living man who had long gone without sunlight.
He was slowly coming back to life.
Dead and risen again, turned Demon, become Devil.
And at this moment, on the floor before him, sat a crude bamboo vessel.
It held clear water. The surface mirrored the moonlight—and mirrored twenty-three crooked, twisted faces.
Not reflections.
They were projections of the dread gathered from across Suruga.
The Night Parade of Twenty-Three Demons.
The tanuki spirit's round, rolling head took up the center of the water's surface, its little eyes, no bigger than mung beans, stretched wide and perfectly round. When its voice came through the water it carried a buzzing echo.
"Master, everything's fine over in Suruga. The Imagawa clan built the kappa a teeny-tiny little shrine at Shimizu Port—only half a person tall, but the kappa is thrilled, he's been living inside it for three days now and won't come out."
"The one-eyed little monk scared two children into tears in a village outside Suruga's provincial castle. Those two kids went home and told their parents there was a Demon at the edge of the village, and the next day their mother and father went to the shrine to burn incense—dread received! Only a little, but received!"
"And there's more, there's more—"
You could hear how excited it was.
"That's enough."
Kobe Hikaru raised a hand, cutting off the tanuki spirit's endless report.
"And the Hojo side?"
Another small yokai leaned up to the surface—a palm-sized, ink-black little demon with bat wings, its voice grating.
"The shrine in Musashi Province is still being built. The Hojo clan's craftsmen say it'll take ten days to finish! But over in Sagami there are already three, and people have come to worship! Mainly—"
The little demon paused, dropping its voice a little.
"Mainly the villagers there were already afraid of yokai to begin with. The Hojo clan told them that once the shrine was built and they worshipped, they'd be safe, so they worshipped. Dread—it really is increasing."
Kobe Hikaru nodded.
The power of the Night Parade of Twenty-Three Demons was spreading at exactly the pace he had foreseen.
Suruga was the Imagawa clan's domain, with official offerings.
Musashi and Sagami had only just been brought into the scope of cooperation, and the shrines were still under construction—shrines, they called them, but really they were just the little wayside chapels you could find anywhere.
Still, that was enough.
Three provinces of land, three directions, twenty-three weak but cunning yokai scattered among them, sinking like seeds into the seams of human society.
And the dread these seeds gathered—dread born of human fear, of every kind of ghost story, of the trembling of those who dared not step out at night—was flowing, through the core of the collective field, into his body.
Kobe Hikaru closed his eyes and felt that power.
Dread.
Now that he had truly experienced it firsthand, his understanding of the concept had deepened another layer.
It was not simple fear.
Not merely being afraid.
Dread was rumor, the whispers passing between neighbors.
Dread was the ghost story, the strange taboos handed down mouth to mouth among the old.
Dread was, more than that, the downward-sinking force of the human heart—the opposite of faith's upward-rising force. It was the instinctive psychology humans produced when facing the unknown, the dark, the incomprehensible.
What arose from prayer was faith; what arose from fear was called dread.
The former carried something beautiful; the latter sought only self-preservation.
Faith let gods endure, and even be born.
Dread could let a yokai swell into being, if only for a while.
The two were one thing with two faces, springing from the same source.
And he was about to possess both at once.
Once the document Hojo Ujiyasu had sent to Kyoto was approved, he would no longer be merely a yokai who collected dread—he would also become a true god who received faith.
Dread and faith, wielded together.
Just how great that power would be he could not yet gauge, but he could already foresee it, and look forward to it.
That, though, was a matter for later.
For now, he had more practical things to do.
Kobe Hikaru opened his eyes and drew out the dread gathered within his body—yet he did not absorb it himself. Instead he pushed most of it back along the core of the field, distributing it out to the twenty-three small yokai.
This was a practice he had settled on long ago.
To hoard the dread for himself was the stupidest choice.
Besides, to Kobe Hikaru, who had already reached the body of the Nine Mutations, this dread offered little strengthening.
So rather than swallow it whole, better to hand it out.
The Twenty-Three Demons were his eyes and ears, his tentacles, his sensory nodes spread across the land of three provinces. The stronger they grew, the denser his web.
Dread was fertilizer; yokai were the tree.
Piling all the fertilizer at the tree's roots was worse than sharing it out to every branch.
Only once these branches grew strong enough could they feed the roots in return.
What he needed, even more, was not the fear of humans.
It was the reverence and dread within the hearts of yokai.
That, too, was what a lord of yokai ought to have, ought to do.
The twenty-three faces on the water gave a satisfied sigh in unison—the infusion of dread produced a visible growth in their yokai aura. The gain for each was minuscule, but a creature like a yokai lived very long to begin with, and accumulated day by day, the effect was bound to become astonishing.
And so long as they did not lose this dread, they could keep growing stronger, until they became truly formidable yokai.
They all began chattering their thanks at once.
Buzz, buzz, buzz—twenty-three voices mixed together, like a nest of bees stuffed into a bamboo tube.
Kobe Hikaru said flatly, "All of you shut up."
Silence.
"Back to your own shrines, each of you, and behave. Anyone who causes trouble—"
As he said this, Kobe Hikaru felt rather like some crime-boss, but he went on all the same:
"I'll send Kikyo to deal with you."
The twenty-three faces on the water all went pale at once.
A shrine maiden's Sacred Arrow was a thing that could purify yokai aura outright; to small yokai it was more terrifying than heaven's thunder—let alone a great shrine maiden of Kikyo's caliber.
The projections scattered faster than ever before.
Last to vanish was the tanuki spirit, which did not forget to add one more line before it left: "Master! I painted another new war banner, and this time I drew the skull straight—next time at the Night Parade of a Hundred Demons we'll look even more magnificent!"
Kobe Hikaru was speechless for an instant, holding out no hope for that.
"…Go on, then."
He still had a third matter to attend to.
The water grew calm again, moonlight spreading anew across the surface of the bamboo vessel… but before he could get to that third matter, he raised his eyes to see the shrine maiden across from him watching him with a pair of jet-black, seemingly placid eyes. Wrapped tight in white, her figure rose and fell in winding shadow under the moonlight—full and drooping, then drawn taut, curves sketched out, the line of her hips faintly parting.
Kobe Hikaru fell silent.
Trouble.
Caught using his wife to scare his subordinates.
"Am I—so frightening?"
Kikyo pressed her lips together, then spoke, without the least hint of anger—only finding it amusing.
Kobe Hikaru gave a light cough, about to speak as well.
But the shrine maiden across from him reached out, seized the collar of his gray robe… and pulled him over.
What followed needs no telling.
And after that.
When the small hours of the night had come.
Only then did Kobe Hikaru walk out of the room, well content, and return to the main hall. Hampered by a dead man's body—for even with the Blood Mutation, though it could flow, though it could harden with Armament Haki, in the end it could leave nothing behind—the two of them held back and did not take that final step. Yet the tenderness alone was already enough to satisfy a shrine maiden and a yokai.
Only now did he find the chance. Lowering his head, he drew the blade at his waist and laid it open across his palm.
Muramasa.
The yokai blade.
After the fusion at full favourability, Muramasa's core power had already been absorbed by him entirely.
But the blade remained.
Not a spent husk, nor a hollow vessel.
Muramasa's own edge, nourished by yokai blood, was still whole—and thanks to the seepage of yokai power during the fusion, the blade was even tougher than before.
But it—was not yet a yokai.
It was a yokai weapon, a keen edge steeped in yokai power, yet it had not, like the Sakasagami no Yura before it, become an object turned yokai—one with self-awareness, able to act on its own, become a Tsukumogami.
Still, Kobe Hikaru could sense that Muramasa was only one last breath away from becoming a yokai.
The crucial thing that would turn a blade from "object" into yokai.
And dread, perhaps, could grant it that final completion.
If it worked, then next time, facing Onigumo, Kobe Hikaru might be able to sever his arm with this blade alone, by his own strength—without having to rely entirely on Kikyo to truly wound the enemy.
That was the third matter Kobe Hikaru meant to do next.
Kobe Hikaru drew out the remaining dread he had not distributed—the portion he had kept for himself—from within his body, and poured it along his palm into the blade.
Dread was not the same as yokai power.
Yokai power was a product of turbid air condensed, sprung from heaven and earth.
Dread was a product of the human heart settling, sprung from all living beings. It could not become power directly—but once the two were mixed, a peculiar reaction arose.
It could turn a dead thing into a yokai.
It could bring a blade to life.
The panel popped up.
[Yokai Blade · Muramasa: Favourability 100 (Fused)]
[Current status: yokai weapon → yokai weapon (Awakening)]
[Anomalous yokai power infusion detected—the power of dread is altering the object's essential structure]
[Evaluation: You are doing something few yokai ever do—using your own dread to feed an object. Most yokai would choose to swallow the power of dread whole to strengthen themselves, but you have chosen to pour it into a blade. And so, Muramasa is answering you. Its blade soul is stirring from its slumber. A little more, a little denser—and it will wake.]
Kobe Hikaru did not stop.
The dread kept pouring in.
Under the moonlight, Muramasa's blade began to give off a faint glow.
Not the purple light of yokai aura, nor the white light of spiritual power.
But a dark-red, almost blood-colored gleam, seeping out from the grain of the blade and flowing slowly along the edge-line.
That was the color of dread.
The hue of fear and rumor congealed.
The blade shuddered once.
Faintly, as if something inside it had turned over.
Then—silence.
The glow drew back into the blade.
On the surface, Muramasa had returned to its former appearance, but Kobe Hikaru knew it was no longer the same.
The panel flashed one last line.
[Yokai Blade · Muramasa: Awakening progress—12%]
[It has begun to dream]
Dreaming.
A blade, dreaming.
Kobe Hikaru slid Muramasa back into its sheath and leaned it at his waist.
The touch of the scabbard against his side was a little warmer than before—as though it had gained body heat.
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