Chapter 20
Morning light seeped through the gaps in the curtains and fell across Eriri's face.
She suddenly opened her eyes, her heart still pounding from the dream that had felt too real. It was not the suffocating, oppressive hall, not the kneeling crowd, not the slowly rotating Dharma wheel hovering above Genji—only the familiar ceiling, the pale blue wallpaper, and the messy pile of drawing tools on her desk.
"A dream…?"
Eriri sat up, her long blonde hair a little disheveled from sleep, falling over her shoulders. She rubbed her eyes, her gaze gradually focusing.
And then she saw it.
On her single sofa—or rather, "hovering" over it—Genji was "sitting" in an extremely bizarre posture.
Head down, feet up. His entire body was hanging upside down from the back of the sofa. The hem of his indigo hunting robe fell downward under gravity, revealing his smooth calves. In his hand was a manga—the book Eriri had tossed onto the coffee table yesterday.
At that moment, he was reading with great interest. His slender fingers gently turned a page. His eyes were narrowed into slits, and a faint smile played at the corners of his lips.
The picture was so strange.
A being from the Heian period, once revered by an emperor and called a "god," was hanging upside down on a 21st-century high school girl's sofa, reading modern manga.
Eriri opened her mouth to say something, but couldn't make a sound. Her brain was still trying to process this huge cognitive dissonance—was the Genji in last night's dream, with the Dharma wheel above his head and an expressionless face receiving the worship of all, the same person as the Genji in front of her, reading manga upside down and not sitting properly?
"You're awake?" Genji asked without looking up, his voice lazy, as if he had just woken up himself. "You slept deeply last night. You mumbled a few words in your sleep."
"…What did I say?" Eriri asked warily.
"Something like 'why is the emperor kneeling to you,'" Genji finally looked up from the manga. His upside-down face turned toward Eriri. His usually calm eyes looked a little funny due to the inversion at that moment. "It seems you had some interesting dreams."
Eriri's face turned red. She threw off the covers and got out of bed, stepped barefoot onto the floor, and walked over to the sofa in a few quick strides. She looked down at the upside-down Genji.
"That wasn't a dream, was it?" She asked, her voice low. "I saw it… your memories?"
Genji closed the manga, did a light flip, and "floated" off the sofa—not jumping, but slowly descending like a feather. The hem of his hunting robe traced an elegant arc through the air. He straightened up, put the manga back on the coffee table, and looked at Eriri.
"Probably," he admitted, his tone as relaxed as discussing what to eat for breakfast. "There's a certain level of spiritual resonance between a shikigami and its master. You've been in contact with me for a while now, and you've seen me use cursed energy. It's normal to subconsciously pick up fragments of my memories."
"Normal?" Eriri's eyes widened. "I saw an emperor kneeling before you! I heard you being called 'Great Priest'! And your brother… Zen'in Sei… he said you protected the entire country—"
"Exaggerated," Genji interrupted, walking to the window to open the curtains.
The morning April light instantly flooded the room, dyeing his indigo hunting robes a warm golden color. "I just don't like chaos. Cursed spirits were killing people everywhere. Sorcerers were acting recklessly. The people were panicking all day. Such a world was too noisy. It gave me a headache."
He turned and leaned his back against the windowsill, the sunlight forming a halo behind him. At that moment, Eriri saw the shadow of the "god" from her dream again—but then Genji yawned and scratched his messy black hair, and his lazy demeanor diluted the divinity once more.
"Get ready," he said. "Aren't you going to school today?"
Only then did Eriri remember to check the time—7:20 AM. If she delayed any longer, she would be late.
She hurried to the bathroom, brushed her teeth and washed her face, changed into her school uniform, combed her hair, and tied her signature twin tails. The whole process happened in a daze. The scenes from the dream kept replaying in her mind, along with the image of Genji reading manga upside down.
Fifteen minutes later, she pushed her bicycle out of the house. Genji floated beside her as usual, remaining "invisible," but today Eriri could clearly feel his presence—not just because of those memory fragments, but because of some kind of… intangible connection.
"Hey…" After getting on the bicycle, Eriri finally couldn't hold back. "What you said yesterday… could you tell me more about the barrier and the balance?"
The morning breeze brushed against her cheeks, bringing the coolness of an April morning. The cherry blossoms on both sides of the street had begun to wither, pink and white petals falling onto the sidewalk, gathered into piles by the early morning cleaners.
Genji was silent for a few seconds, as if organizing his words.
"There is a balance between cursed spirits and humans in this world," he spoke slowly, his voice calm and clear, only audible to Eriri. "Like the ends of a scale. The more negative emotions humans generate, the more cursed energy accumulates, and the cursed spirit side will grow stronger. In turn, when cursed spirits spread, humans become afraid and desperate, and new cursed spirits are born. It's a vicious cycle."
Eriri slowed her pedaling and listened intently.
"A thousand years ago, when I was born…" Genji paused, then rephrased. "When I, as Zen'in Genji, awakened the Ten Shadows Technique, that balance was broken."
"Because you were too strong?" Eriri asked.
"Yes," Genji nodded. "My existence was like throwing a boulder onto one end of the scale. Suddenly, there was an 'irregular' individual on the human side. To maintain balance, the cursed spirit side also began to 'evolve' more powerful beings. During that time, the frequency of special-grade cursed spirits appearing was more than ten times higher than it is now. Sorcerers also popped up like mushrooms all over Japan… no, the whole world was in chaos."
Eriri tried to imagine that scene—cursed spirits everywhere, people struggling to survive, and a young Genji walking with his shikigami through a land ravaged by war and curses.
"So you started destroying cursed spirits?" She asked softly.
"At first, it was just self-preservation," Genji said very honestly. "Those cursed spirits kept coming to bother me. If I didn't kill them, they would kill me. Later, I realized… as I kept killing, it seemed like a solution."
He said it lightly, but Eriri could hear the bloodshed behind it. This wasn't a game or a manga. It was real life-and-death battles.
"And after you killed them?"
"After that, I thought, since I've killed so many, I might as well just clean it up completely," Genji smiled, a hint of self-mockery in it. "And my brother, Sei… he has a Heavenly Restriction. Zero cursed energy, but his body is incredibly strong. I wanted him to live a dignified life, not to be discriminated against by the old antiques of the Zen'in clan. So I needed power. I needed status. I needed to shut everyone up."
He looked ahead, his gaze distant, as if piercing through time and space back to a thousand years ago.
"So I accepted the position of 'Great Priest.' The emperor kneels to me. The nobles fear me. The sorcerers listen to me—not because I wanted it, but because it made it easier to do things. I established the rule that sorcerers must not kill indiscriminately or bully ordinary people. All sorcerers must be registered, monitored, and purged if necessary. If anyone violates the rules… kill them."
The last word was said lightly, but Eriri felt a chill.
"That sounds cold," she said.
"It is cold," Genji admitted. "But it worked. In turbulent times, harsh penalties are needed. That era didn't need kindness—it needed order. I gave them that order, with blood and a blade."
The bicycle crossed an intersection, and the red light came on. Eriri stopped, propping one foot on the ground, and turned to look at the empty air beside her—but she knew Genji was there.
"What about the barrier?" She asked. "The one you mentioned last night… covering the whole world?"
"Ah, that," Genji's tone softened. "That was my 'side job.' After I got tired of destroying cursed spirits, I started researching how to reduce the birth of cursed spirits at the source. Then I discovered that the essence of a cursed spirit is the condensation of cursed energy unconsciously emitted by humans."
The light turned green. Eriri pedaled and continued forward.
"So you thought that if you collected that scattered cursed energy, you could prevent cursed spirits from being born?" She guessed.
"Clever," Genji praised. "But it's much more complicated than that. First, you have to be able to sense the flow of cursed energy on a global scale. Second, you have to design a system that automatically absorbs, filters, and stores that cursed energy. Finally, you have to make sure the system doesn't accidentally harm sorcerers—sorcerers also need cursed energy to perform jujutsu. If you take away their power, you'll be putting the cart before the horse."
Eriri was stunned. "You… you did all that alone?"
"It took about thirty years," Genji said, as if he were saying, "I made a bowl of noodles yesterday." "I traveled all over the world, setting up barrier foundations at key nodes on every continent, then using techniques to connect them into a global network. Finally, I wrote a set of 'operating rules' that automatically distinguish between the cursed energy of ordinary people and sorcerers, absorbing only the former."
"Thirty years…" Eriri murmured. She was eighteen this year. Thirty years was almost two lifetimes.
"Actually, it could have been faster," Genji added. "But there were many technical problems to solve. For example, how to deal with the absorbed cursed energy—just dispersing it directly would be wasteful, so I designed an 'energy storage pool' to hold the cursed energy, thinking that future generations might use it as a power source. Another example was maintenance—I couldn't live forever to take care of it, so I created a 'Guardian'… an artificial intelligence that automatically adjusts the barrier's power and repairs damage. In your words, it's called AI. In my words, it's a 'self-regulating barrier core shikigami.'"
Eriri didn't know how to respond. She was just riding her bicycle to school, and the person beside her was quietly explaining that he had "casually" set up a curse filtration system for the world, complete with an AI administrator.
"Then… why are there still cursed spirits?" She remembered the strange murder case her father had mentioned last night. "If the barrier is still working—"
"Because it's saturated," Genji interrupted, for the first time with a hint of helplessness in his voice. "When I designed it, I set an absorption upper limit based on a certain population density and average level of negative emotions. But in this millennium… humanity has developed too fast."
He paused and continued. "The population has exploded. Information has exploded. The pace of life is fast. Pressure is high. Anxiety, depression, anger… the cursed energy generated by these negative emotions was a bit higher than my calculations. The barrier has been running at full capacity for a long time, but there is still a lot of cursed energy left in the air that hasn't been absorbed, and it eventually condenses into cursed spirits."
"So in the last ten years or so, cases of cursed spirits harming people have started increasing again?" Eriri asked.
"Yes, especially in Japan," Genji said. "Japan was originally one of the regions with the highest concentration of cursed energy—we call it a 'cursed energy vortex.' The barrier can barely hold on in other places, but here, it's already a bit powerless."
Eriri was silent. She remembered the cursed spirit she had seen last night in the Ginza hotel, her father's worried expression, and the casual way Genji had exorcised it.
"What if…" She asked cautiously. "What if the barrier completely breaks?"
"Then everything will return to the state of a thousand years ago," Genji's voice was very calm, but Eriri caught a slight heaviness in it. "Cursed spirits everywhere, sorcerers everywhere, ordinary people in danger. However…"
He reconsidered. "That shouldn't happen. The barrier I designed has a self-regulating function. When the cursed energy concentration exceeds a threshold, it automatically expands its absorption range and increases its absorption efficiency—although it consumes more energy, it at least ensures it won't collapse suddenly."
He paused again, then looked at Eriri. Although she couldn't see his expression, she could feel his gaze.
"And?"
"And when I set up the barrier, I never intended to 'completely solve the problem,'" Genji said. "Cursed spirits originate from people's negative emotions. As long as people have emotions, cursed spirits will not disappear. All I can do is keep the problem within a manageable range and buy time for future generations to find real solutions."
"Real solutions?"
"For example, teaching people to control their emotions? Developing technology to transform negative emotions? Or…" Genji smiled. "Just making everyone a sorcerer and teaching them to control their own cursed energy? I don't know. That's a problem for future generations to think about, not me."
Suddenly, Eriri remembered what Genji had said to Zen'in Sei in last night's dream: "I hope future generations will find a way to cure the root of the problem."
So it wasn't just a polite remark.
He really thought that way. And he really did that.
The bicycle entered the gates of Toyonoki Academy. Eriri parked her bike, locked it, and stood there for a while.
The morning light illuminated the campus. Students walked toward the school building in twos and threes. The sounds of laughter, footsteps, and the zippers of school bags mixed together, forming the most ordinary daily scene.
But now she knew that beneath this ordinary daily life, there was an ancient barrier covering the entire world, silently operating, absorbing people's negative emotions. And the creator of that barrier was at that moment floating beside her, yawning and complaining, "I got up too early this morning. I'm so sleepy."
"Genji," she suddenly spoke.
"Hmm?"
"You…" Eriri bit her lip. "Will you stay here? I mean, with me?"
Genji was silent for a few seconds.
"As long as you don't kick me out, I'll stay," he said, a slight smile in his voice. "After all, I'm currently in a state of 'possession.' I can't leave even if I want to." He paused, then added, "And this era is much more interesting than the Heian period. There's milk tea, manga, games, and… interesting masters like you. I'm quite satisfied."
Eriri's cheeks flushed slightly. She turned her head away, pretending to be calm, and said, "W-Who said anything about kicking you out? The storage closet is empty anyway. Stay as long as you want."
"Then thank you for taking me in," Genji said. "By the way, after school today, can you take me to a bookstore? I want to see if any new manga have come out."
"Can't you go by yourself?" Eriri said this, but her steps were already heading toward the school building.
"Ordinary people can't see me, but if a book floats off the shelf and checks itself out, it will scare the clerk."
"…I know, I know. I'll take you after school."
Eriri walked up the stairs, her golden twin tails swaying gently behind her. Morning light streamed through the hallway windows, casting bright patches of light on the floor.