The moment Sesshomaru finished speaking, Jaken had already dragged something out from behind him.
A corpse.
Wrapped in white silk, whole in shape, about the size of a boy of fifteen or sixteen.
The cloth was fine Shu Brocade, sourced from the Celestial Ming Nation, spotlessly white, giving off a soft sheen in the moonlight—a fabric so lavish and costly that it circulated only among the nobility of Kyoto, yet here it had been put to use as a shroud.
Grunting and heaving, Jaken hauled the shrouded body up before Kobe Hikaru, his pinched, monkey-like little face full of reluctance, though he dared not defy Sesshomaru's will.
"Here. This is that half-baked thing."
Jaken prodded the edge of the shroud with the Staff of Two Heads, his tone thick with distaste.
Kobe Hikaru crouched down and reached out, drawing back the white cloth.
A young face was revealed.
Long, silver-white hair spilled across the ground, though far duller than Sesshomaru's, tinged with a hint of grey.
On either side of the crown of his head sat a single triangular dog's ear, drooping now, utterly without life.
The features could be called sharply cut, carrying the keen edge and defiance of youth—even in death, the brow was furrowed, wearing the look of one who refused to concede.
He was dressed in white. Not red.
Kobe Hikaru's gaze swept over him.
He remembered clearly that the garment on Inuyasha's body should have been a red outer robe—the keepsake Toga had given to Inuyasha's mother, the fire-rat robe that neither fire nor water could harm. Its name matched one of the five treasures Kaguya brought in the older legends, and it too was a formidable treasure—only now it seemed to be missing.
Lost in the chaos, perhaps?
Destruction was impossible.
The fire-rat robe was a treasure even a great yokai would keep in their collection, far tougher than any mortal weave, and so could hardly have been torn.
It was a pity, but Kobe Hikaru swiftly reined in his thoughts, showing nothing on his face.
He knew well that Sesshomaru could not have found the wrong one—the figure before him was Inuyasha.
Toga's second son, half human, half yokai.
Kobe Hikaru looked at the corpse. For the moment, it seemed reasonably intact.
…Better than he had imagined.
He had assumed that a half-yokai dead in the throng of battle more than two months ago would long since have rotted to nothing.
But Inuyasha was, after all, of the bloodline of the great yokai Toga. Though the yokai power of his half-yokai body dissipated gradually after death, the strength lingering deep in his blood had preserved the flesh.
That, together with the silk Sesshomaru had wrapped the corpse in after finding it, using his own yokai power to halt the decay—
the state of the body was, all things considered, passable.
At least the features were complete, the limbs whole.
Kobe Hikaru rose to his feet.
He did not act at once.
He turned his head, the Demon pupils beneath the scarlet oni mask fixing on Sesshomaru, who stood three paces off.
"One last question."
Sesshomaru's golden vertical pupils slid toward him, his gaze still indifferent, only listening as Kobe Hikaru spoke:
"In what state do you want Inuyasha revived?"
It was Jaken who reacted first.
"What do you mean! The way he was before, of course—"
Before Jaken could finish, Sesshomaru's sidelong glance brushed over him, and he shrank his neck at once.
Kobe Hikaru ignored Jaken and went on:
"The souls of humans and yokai are different—I don't think that needs much explaining. And Inuyasha is a half-yokai. Within his body there are two souls: a yokai soul and a human soul."
He looked at Sesshomaru and spoke plainly, hiding nothing.
"What's more, by your own account, these two souls clearly do not merge. Otherwise Inuyasha wouldn't suffer the sudden drop in yokai power at the new moon, to the point where his human side takes over."
"In that case, I can't guarantee I'll call back a complete Inuyasha. More likely… I'll call back two."
That was his limit.
His Soul Summoning could indeed recall departed souls, true—but one was one and two were two. Fusion was beyond it.
In other words, if both were called back and forced into the same shell,
then the Inuyasha he got would, in all likelihood, be split-minded—a genuine, certified madman.
On that count, Kobe Hikaru was in fact inclined to summon only one.
Which was precisely why he couldn't help but make Inuyasha's soul something pure… still, he had come at another's request, and even with his own purpose in mind, some things had to be spelled out.
"Human soul, yokai soul, or an Inuyasha who's still half human, half yokai but split in mind—which do you choose?"
The words fell.
For a few breaths the hillside was silent.
Jaken's mouth opened first, as if to answer for Sesshomaru, but he didn't dare.
After holding it in for a long while, he finally couldn't stand it and muttered under his breath:
"A half-baked thing after all—even his soul is a tangled mess!"
Sesshomaru cut a glance at Jaken, his face blank, and Jaken shut his mouth in an instant.
The young dog-tribe great yokai let his pair of golden vertical pupils fall on the silver-haired corpse, and there, too, they paused for a moment.
On that face, which had never once shown any excess of feeling, no hesitation could be read.
Because there was no need to hesitate at all.
"It makes no difference."
Sesshomaru said, "You decide."
Two clean, decisive phrases.
But saying them seemed no different from saying nothing… Kobe Hikaru clicked his tongue, though it hardly mattered. This was simply Sesshomaru's attitude toward Inuyasha—no surprise there.
Still, his point had been made, and since the other had spoken thus.
"Fine."
Then he would be the one to decide.
As Kobe Hikaru's words fell, his right hand lifted, and then, slowly, he spread all five fingers.
The Spirit-Chasing Bowman's Mutation.
Spirit Affinity. Soul Summoning.
Dark green phosphorescence seeped from his fingertips, not spreading but falling like threads of silk, draping over Inuyasha's brow.
Yokai power poured into the corpse, running inward along the lingering channels of yokai aura, searching.
Searching for those fragments of Inuyasha's soul, already almost entirely dispersed.
More than two months.
Under normal circumstances, two months after an ordinary person's death, the fragments of the soul would long since have scattered clean away, not a trace left, the little remnant of spirit having already entered the underworld to be reborn in the cycle.
Only the rarest few could be preserved to the utmost limit of three months.
But just as Kobe Hikaru had told Sesshomaru frankly, Inuyasha was no ordinary person.
He was a half-yokai, half human, half yokai.
Within his body he held two forces, two souls, like the three ethereal and seven corporeal souls of a human. In life, these two souls circled endlessly within him; in ordinary times the yokai soul, sprung from Toga's bloodline, held the upper hand, and only at the new moon, the day when the murky vapours were at their faintest, did the yokai soul sink and the human soul rise.
And after his death, those two souls still wove and coiled together yet remained divided, unable to be brought under one rule, and so dispersed at different rates.
Of the two, the yokai half, though stronger, dispersed the faster, for yokai aura naturally sinks more readily, being part of the cycle of murky vapours.
The human half dispersed more slowly, for human feeling is richer, the soul's attachments deeper and more stubborn, more clinging, harder to let go.
This too was why, in this world, the Demons made from humans after death were always more numerous, while those from ordinary beasts were few.
Out in the wild wastes, a yokai's departed soul truly was hard to find.
Weighing the two, Kobe Hikaru also leaned toward… reviving Inuyasha in human form.
For no other reason.
Because too little of the yokai soul remained. To haul it up by force would only yield a creature either witless or raving, a thing ruled by instinct like a beast—and what was more, if Kobe Hikaru remembered right, in the original tale, the yokai transformation Inuyasha fell into when driven to crisis was precisely the latter.
He himself was still standing right here. He'd rather not court trouble.
By comparison, the human soul, though weaker, was still a complete Inuyasha with a clear sense of self.
One he could speak and reason with.
So.
Kobe Hikaru's dark green phosphorescence flickered twice at his fingertips, threading precisely around the yokai-soul fragments, so blurred they were nearly beyond recognition.
It seized the human half.
Gathering it with all his strength.
Those soul fragments scattered throughout the corpse, belonging to Inuyasha's human side, he picked up one by one, piecing them together, pressing them tight, stuffing them back into that shell already emptied of life.
"…It's done."
Kobe Hikaru drew back his yokai power and glanced over his shoulder at Sesshomaru.
Sesshomaru asked nothing further.
He truly did not care whether Inuyasha was whole.
His golden vertical pupils rested a moment on the faint outline of dark green light gathered at the corpse's brow.
Then he drew his blade.
The plain scabbard bore no ornament at all, the blade narrow, its edge gentle, the whole giving off a faint blue-white sheen.
Tenseiga.
The other of Toga's two bequeathed blades—it wounded no living thing and cut only death.
It could see the underworld's envoys coiled about the dead, and with a single stroke sever the chains of death, drawing the soul back to the world of the living.
But before this, Sesshomaru had never once used the blade, for no one had ever been worth reviving to him.
And this blade could only be swung with a heart of compassion.
Now, for the first time.
In other words, though Sesshomaru without doubt looked down on the half-yokai Inuyasha, held him unworthy of being his brother, and cared nothing for his state, it was not necessarily true that he felt no flicker of regard at all.
Kobe Hikaru even suspected that the fellow had come all this way to find him and revive Inuyasha not only to claim Tessaiga, but with the aim of reviving Inuyasha too.
He was simply too proud to ever admit it.
The young dog-tribe great yokai stood with blade in hand.
His golden beast-eyes fixed on Inuyasha's corpse.
In his sight—in a vision others could not perceive—several grey chains stretched out from all over Inuyasha's body, linking to some unseen depth.
That was the pull of the underworld, the proof of death.
Envoys from the underworld.
As far as his eye reached, the blade fell, and a pale arc of light flashed.
Without a sound, the chains that only Sesshomaru, with Tenseiga drawn, could see, were cut.
All the grey chains shattered in the same instant, breaking into tiny points of light that dissolved into the air.
Inuyasha's cold corpse, which should have stayed dead and still, jolted violently.
It moved.
His chest, too, at a speed the eye could follow, rose and fell where before there had been nothing.
Breath.
Heavy, gasping breath burst from that body which had lain still for more than two months.
Only the silver-white hair seemed to lose its former sheen and turned jet black.
The pair of dog's ears squirmed and shrank back, vanishing into the hair, replaced by human ears.
The nails went from sharp to blunt, the fangs receded.
The eyes opened.
But not the gold of Sesshomaru's, the mark of the dog tribe's most noble great-yokai bloodline.
Rather, a deep brown.
Those were… human eyes.
With only the human soul returned, Inuyasha had risen from the dead, naturally, in purely human form.
Just as he appeared at every new moon.
The first thing he did on sitting up was cough, so hard his whole body convulsed, as if to expel every trace of death's breath his lungs had stored for more than two months.
Then his gaze met Kobe Hikaru, crouched before him.
Scarlet oni mask, pale long hair, blood-red Demon pupils.
"—A monstrous Demon?!"
Inuyasha's reaction was extreme.
He flung himself backward, braced a hand on the ground to spring up—but his body, weak from having only just revived, gave way, and he sprawled straight back down.
"Who the hell are you! Where is this! How did I—"
He roared, his voice hoarse but full of force, a lung capacity no man two months dead had any right to—but Inuyasha was Inuyasha.
Only his bellowing had not yet died away.
A blade dropped from above.
Tenseiga's blade drove into the ground half an inch from the front of his robe, pinning the pale hem fast to the earth.
Inuyasha could not move.
He looked up.
Sesshomaru stood before him.
Silver-white hair spilling down, golden vertical pupils gazing down from above—that indifference and contempt inborn of the bloodline let Inuyasha recognize the man before him in an instant.
"Se—Sesshomaru!?"
"Where is Tessaiga."
Sesshomaru spoke.
A simple, plain demand, blunt as could be:
"In the place seen yet unseen, the place the true grave-keeper can never behold…"
"Where, exactly, is it?"
These words pointed straight at the place on Inuyasha's body where Tessaiga was hidden, where the key to the passage leading to Toga's tomb lay sealed.
"What the hell are you talking about, you bastard! How the hell would I know! I just woke up! You son of a—"
Inuyasha struggled with all his might, trying to pull out the Tenseiga pinning him, his fingers closing on the hilt—only to be driven back by a searing heat.
Tenseiga wounded no living thing, but neither would it let one it did not acknowledge touch it freely.
Seeing this, Kobe Hikaru felt a pang of regret, all the more certain now that this Tenseiga would be hard for him to obtain—even if Sesshomaru agreed, the blade's own spirit would not permit another to touch it.
"Your eyes."
Sesshomaru's voice sank abruptly.
He had seen it.
Deep within Inuyasha's deep-brown human eyes, something glowed.
Faint, hidden, a jet-black sheen.
In ordinary times, Sesshomaru would not have marked anything amiss with it, for that was strength Toga had left behind, hidden in Inuyasha's eyes and further fused into his body—part of the very bloodline that belonged to Toga.
But now, with the human soul returned and the yokai soul lost more utterly than in the brief stillness of a new moon's night, it could hide no longer.
Sesshomaru reached out.
His pale, slender fingers, without the slightest hesitation, pressed to the rim of Inuyasha's eye socket.
Yokai power poured in.
"Wait—what are you doing! Ow ow ow ow—!"
Inuyasha screamed.
Sesshomaru, in one smooth motion, drew something out from the inner corner of his right eye socket.
The thing rolled into Sesshomaru's palm.
A round, jet-black object, a little larger than a fingernail.
Its surface gave off a deep sheen, as though it could swallow light.
It was a black pearl.
A bead of black agate.
Inuyasha glared, covering his right eye, his other eye locked on the bead in Sesshomaru's palm.
"What… is that thing!"
His voice had changed; he too seemed not to have known this thing lay hidden in his eye.
Sesshomaru paid him no mind.
He held the black pearl up before his eyes, his golden vertical pupils gazing at it for two seconds.
Then, on that face which from first to last had betrayed no flicker of feeling, the corner of his mouth curved slightly. A cold smile.
A very faint one, all but imperceptible.
"So that's it… This is the answer to the riddle? The grave-keeper's own eye…"
"Hosenki."
He spat out the name, having discerned the black pearl's origin.
Hosenki, a great yokai who had served under Toga in life, was the nominal keeper of Toga's grave after his death, and the one who had made this black pearl.
This bead of black agate was the key to the seam between the living world and the underworld.
And within that seam of the underworld—lay Toga's tomb.
In that moment, Sesshomaru understood.
So Tessaiga was there.
There, in the tomb of his father, Toga.
And the entrance to his father's tomb… had, all along, been upon Inuyasha's body.
Inuyasha was Toga's true grave-keeper.
Sesshomaru's grip tightened around the black pearl.
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