Elsewhere, Watanabe sprinted along the rain-slicked road, closing the distance toward another fragment of the split spirit.
The crimson butterfly Gabimaru had created zipped through the downpour with blinding speed, weaving effortlessly between wooden poles before veering upward toward the far edge of the village. As Watanabe gave chase, the cluster of wooden houses grew sparse, replaced by an eerie scatter of small, weathered stone shrines peeking out from the tree line.
"Tsk...!"
Watanabe skidded across a shrine's slick tiled roof. Temporarily losing his footing on the wet ceramic, he tucked his body into a tight roll, spinning off the edge and splashing heavily into a mud puddle below.
Scrambling back onto his feet, his eyes darted through the gloom. Catching a glimpse of the butterfly's faint crimson glow, he leapt forward after it.
"Damn it... I have no time to waste here!" he growled under his breath.
Flashbacks of the terrified children from the village surged through his mind—their tear-streaked, panic-stricken faces blurring seamlessly into the image of his own younger sister.
Gritting his teeth against the cold, he pushed his legs to move even faster.
"I will save them... and then I'm going to save my sister, too!" Watanabe growled through gritted teeth, pushing his legs beyond their limits.
His speed surged. As he broke past the outskirts, the aged wooden buildings of the village vanished entirely. What replaced them was a desolate landscape dominated by ancient temples and weathered shrines. Strung along the roadside were endless lines of thin, taut rope, stretching into the gloom on either side of him. Suspended from the cordage were hundreds of tiny glass bells, chiming in rhythmic harmony with the howling wind.
Then, Watanabe took his next step and the world went completely dead.
Without warning, every sound vanished. The roar of the downpour, the crash of thunder, and the rush of the wind were abruptly snuffed out into a suffocating silence.
Cling... Cling...
The only sound that remained in the dead air was the delicate chiming of the glass bells, soft, low, and eerily identical to the subtle wind chimes hung on countryside porches.
Watanabe's gaze snapped forward.
Standing in the centre of an overgrown, open field was an old woman. She stood hunched in the quiet storm, her left hand tightly white-knuckled around something hidden within her palm.
"Save me... young warrior..." a raspy, cracking voice echoed through the silence, followed immediately by the delicate clink of the glass bells.
'What is this feeling...?'
Watanabe's eyes widened. A sudden wave of cold dread washed over him, making his chest tighten as his heart rate spiked.
'Something is wrong here... What is happening?' he questioned internally, his instincts screaming at him to halt.
"I thought I was going to die out here... How wonderful that a brave warrior has come to rescue me," the old woman said again. Her raspy tone hadn't shifted in the slightest, remaining flat and unnaturally calm.
"Ah... So it's already reached this stage," Watanabe said aloud, his voice dropping into a low, lethal register.
Above them, the crimson butterfly flapped its glowing wings one final time. Darting downward, it settled directly onto the woman's shoulder before bursting into a flash of red sparks and vanishing.
"You're the evil spirit terrorising this village, aren't you?" Watanabe demanded.
The mark etched into the back of his hand pulsed with dark spiritual energy. In a flash of light, a sleek katana materialised directly into his grip.
"Evil spirit...?" the woman rasped.
As the butterfly's lingering magic dissolved the illusion, the fog hiding her true features washed away. Calling her an "old woman" was a gross understatement.
She was a walking corpse.
Her eye sockets were completely hollow, opening into deep, dark abysses. Her greying skin was actively sloughing off her facial bones in decaying ribbons. She wore heavily frayed robes of an ancient, bygone era paired with rotting straw sandals.
And tightly clutched in her withered left hand was a dark, carved wooden flute.
"If I am to be called evil, then every last one of you humans must be evil as well," the corpse rasped, dark, viscous goo drooling from between her rotting teeth. "Just as you eat to survive, so do I. And to be perfectly honest... I was growing terribly hungry, seeing as I cannot step outside this boundary."
"Eat...?" Watanabe's mind raced, a cold pit forming in his stomach. "You... you eat people?"
"Oh, yes," she hissed softly, casually waving a dismembered, half-eaten human arm in her right hand. "Right down to the bare bone."
'Tsk... Why is she babbling so much? What's her game plan here?' Watanabe thought, his eyes narrowing as he tightened his grip on his katana, refusing to take his eyes off her left hand.
"If you're just hunting for food... then why do you have the children of this town trapped inside a ritual circle?" Watanabe demanded.
"Mmm... That?" The corpse's voice drifted through the dead silence, echoing from everywhere and nowhere at once. "Is it not your kind who placed them there in the first place? Why ask me about a cage built by human hands?"
Before he could finish his sentence, Watanabe's instincts screamed. He launched himself high into the air as the ground beneath him caved in, revealing dozens of skeletal hands clawing up through the dirt, frantically reaching for his boots.
"Tsk...! I almost fell for it," Watanabe muttered mid-air, sweeping his gaze across the decaying landscape. "All that babbling was just a distraction to set up an illusion array!"
"Kukukuku..." The old corpse rasped, tilting her hollow head upward as he hovered above her. "I can't believe you saw through my art. I caught the last group of warriors with that exact same trick... but I suppose you're a bit different."
'It's the very thing Yorimitsu warned me about,' Watanabe thought, his chest heaving as he hovered at the apex of his jump. 'This fragment has developed a distinct ego and is already reclaiming its forgotten Onmyōdō arts. I can't afford to lower my guard for even a second!'
"Plum Blossom Secret Art: Falling Petals!"
Watanabe drove his katana downward with blinding force. As he swung, a flurry of luminous, razor-sharp plum blossom petals erupted from his blade, raining down onto the open earth. The delicate floral storm slashed through the skeletal horde, severing the bony arms and pulverising them into fine white dust before Watanabe landed lightly on his feet.