I said that I was looking for something important. Something that did not yet exist. And because it did not exist yet… all I could do was wait.
Shizuka fell silent for a moment, processing my answer with a slightly confused expression. Her gaze shifted from my face to the small compass still resting in my hand. A few seconds later, she frowned.
"If it doesn't exist yet, why don't you just create it yourself?"
Her question made me pause.
I looked down at the compass in my palm. The needle was still spinning slowly, pointing nowhere. My Innate Technique indeed allowed me to create many things.
Weapons, tools, even Cursed Tools like this compass. As long as I had enough Cursed Energy and a clear understanding of its form and function, I could bring it into existence.
But what I was searching for was not an object.
I wasn't trying to create something. What I was waiting for was something that had not yet been born into this world. Two little girls who, in the future, would fall into a tragic fate.
That was the real reason I was waiting—waiting for their birth so I could find them first and save them from the terrible future awaiting them.
I could create many things, but human life was not something I could simply produce.
What I was doing now was not creating.
I was searching.
Searching for two specific individuals whose existence would one day become part of this world's tragedy.
Explaining all of that would obviously reveal far too many secrets. In the end, I simply shook my head lightly and said that things were not as simple as they appeared.
Shizuka stared at me for a few more moments, as if trying to understand my answer.
Strange. The girl who usually looked absent-minded and slightly dazed had just asked a surprisingly sharp question.
But after that, Shizuka didn't ask anything else.
Our conversation ended just like that.
Fifteen days after the new year, something finally changed.
As usual, that morning I opened the compass to check it. A small routine I had repeated every day.
But this time, the moment the compass lid opened, I immediately noticed the difference.
The needle was no longer spinning wildly.
It paused for a moment, trembling slightly, then slowly turned and pointed firmly in one direction.
My heart began to beat faster.
Without wasting any time, I quickly prepared myself and left Akiruno. I put on my winter coat in a hurry before starting to follow the direction indicated by the compass.
My journey led me farther and farther away from Tokyo.
The city buildings gradually disappeared, replaced by increasingly quiet roads. Empty fields stretched along the roadside, some covered with thin layers of frost. The trees stood stiff and unmoving in the cold, silent winter air.
The farther I went, the more remote the surroundings became.
Until eventually, I arrived at a small village.
The village looked quiet. There was almost no activity. Simple wooden houses stood far apart from one another, some lightly covered with snow.
But something felt wrong.
The atmosphere was too quiet.
When I approached one of the houses at the edge of the village, a very familiar smell suddenly assaulted my senses.
The metallic scent of blood.
I quickly hurried toward the source of that smell, which was located quite far from the village. When I arrived there, the scene before me made my steps stop.
A man lay on the ground.
His body was covered in unnatural tearing wounds, as if something had brutally ripped him apart. The blood that had flowed from those wounds had already dried on the ground.
Not far from him, a woman lay motionless.
Her face looked pale, and her eyes were open, staring blankly at the sky.
Near the woman's body, wrapped in thick cloth stained with blood, were two newborn babies.
The cries of the two babies sounded weak, thin and trembling in the quiet air. But they were still alive. I understood immediately.
The man and woman lying nearby were most likely Mimiko and Nanako's parents. It was said that they possessed a fairly large amount of Cursed Energy—enough to allow them to see Cursed Spirits. In a remote village like this, an ability like that often became more of a curse than a blessing.
The traces of Cursed Energy lingering in the air were still faintly noticeable. They felt unstable, as if a short but brutal battle had taken place here not long ago.
My hand clenched unconsciously.
I was too late to save their parents.
But not for these two babies.
The compass needle in my hand continued pointing straight toward the cloth that wrapped around them.
At last… I found them.
Even if I arrived a little late.
Was it possible that their parents had come to this remote village to escape the Cursed Spirits that appeared far more often in the city?
The possibility felt quite reasonable when thought about calmly. Large cities were always places where human emotions gathered and collided with one another—fear, hatred, jealousy, regret, and envy.
All of those feelings accumulated like an invisible fog that slowly grew thicker. And for Cursed Spirits, human emotions like those were the most delicious kind of nourishment.
The more densely packed the population, the thicker the cursed energy that would be created.
Perhaps Mimiko and Nanako's parents believed that by fleeing to a quiet, isolated village like this, they could distance themselves from all of it. A remote village with very few residents, far from the noise and chaos of the city, might have looked like a safe place to raise their children.
A place where those unseen dangers rarely appeared.
A place where their two daughters could grow up without having to face terrifying creatures that ordinary people could not even see.
But reality was never as simple as human hope.
Sometimes, those very hopes were what led people toward a far more tragic end.
Perhaps that was exactly why their parents had died.
I turned my head toward the small village that stood only a few hundred meters from where I was.
From a distance, the wooden houses appeared scattered in no particular order. Some of them leaned slightly to one side, as if they had been standing there for far too many years. Their roofs had begun to decay with time, and a few looked as though they had been patched with wooden boards whose colors had long since faded.
There were no tall fences.
No guards.
No sign that the village possessed any kind of protection.
Only a silence that felt a little too calm.
If Cursed Spirits were attracted to Cursed Energy, then the existence of Mimiko and Nanako—who had possessed cursed energy since birth at roughly the level of a Grade 4 Jujutsu Sorcerer—was more than enough to act like a bright beacon in the darkness.
Something bright enough to call them.
To draw the Cursed Spirits here.
And after that, incident after incident must have begun to strike this small village.
Strange deaths with no clear cause.
Accidents that felt far too coincidental to be considered normal.
Screams in the middle of the night that forced people awake with pounding hearts.
But as always, humans would look for something they could see to blame.
Two baby girls.
Those foolish and frightened villagers would most likely accuse Mimiko and Nanako of being the cause of every disaster. They could not see Cursed Spirits. They could not feel Cursed Energy.
All they knew was one simple thing.
Ever since that small family arrived, their village was no longer peaceful.
Fear would slowly turn into hatred.
They would imprison these twin girls. Lock them away like dangerous animals. Treat them as harbingers of misfortune that had to be separated from the rest of society.
Until, eventually, Suguru would arrive and find them.
That was how the tragic story of these two little girls was supposed to begin.
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