The night ran deep.
Kobe Hikaru raced across the sky on thunder, violet light dragging a long tail through the cloud layers.
Raikiri in his right hand.
The sheen along the blade had gone out entirely. The half-divine artifact's stored faith had been spent in that single cut on the riverbank, and though Raikiri was still keen, it carried no blessing of faith now.
So he would send it home.
Back to the shrine in the Imagawa clan's main castle, to go on receiving offerings, to go on gathering the power of faith, to finish its true metamorphosis.
A half-divine artifact was still a long way from a true divine artifact, but the direction was right.
Time would take care of the rest.
And as a yokai, Kobe Hikaru had no shortage of time.
Below him the land fell away at speed in the dark.
With the Thunder-Sinew Razor-Body running wide open, the distance from the Suruga border to the Imagawa main castle was a matter of moments.
And in those moments his awareness sank once more into the depths of the field.
The bonds of dread linked nearly a hundred yokai — and while he flew, his orders went out along them all at once.
The three clans of Tono, each to its place.
The great kappa, with its dozen-odd water yokai, was assigned to Shimizu Port in Suruga Province and the river systems around it.
The waterways there ran thick and tangled, ideal ground for the kappa clan to root itself, and the tanuki spirit had already laid the groundwork in that region. The handover between the two would not need him watching over it.
The Kamaitachi, with its wind-natured kin, went to the mountains of western Sagami Province.
Those cedar-thick hills were the finest habitat a wind-blade yokai could ask for — and they were the same stretch that lesser yokai had once held, the stretch he had cleared out on his way through.
It stood empty now. It might as well be filled.
The snow woman —
The snow woman he placed in the north of Musashi Province.
Close to the corridor the Uesugi clan would use coming south.
For one thing, northern Musashi sat high and cold, suited to the survival of her kind.
For another, that was precisely the weakest seam in Hojo Ujiyasu's line after he had lost four-tenths of his garrison.
The state of the second-generation Uesugi Kenshin was still unknown. Kobe Hikaru held a portion of her soul in his grip, true, but some guard had to be kept regardless.
At the Eight Mutations, the snow woman was strong enough to handle an Echigo vanguard. Even if the divine-artifact maiden warriors under Uesugi joined forces, with military might behind them, she could hold them.
As for the forty or fifty lesser yokai, they were broken up and parcelled out to plug the gaps everywhere else.
Nearly a hundred yokai, across the lands of three provinces, each settled in its own quarter.
The ghost stories spread wider. The dread grew.
The map of the Night Parade of a Hundred Demons, after this one night, had genuinely and substantially expanded several times over.
Before this, after all, Kobe Hikaru had held the dread of three provinces in name — but twenty-three small yokai were plainly not enough to occupy it in full.
Now it was another matter.
The orders were given.
Kobe Hikaru drew his awareness back, crimson demon eyes refocusing on the way ahead.
The scenery beneath him was changing.
He was crossing the heartland of Suruga Province.
Even at this hour of the night, the human qi over this land burned bright — more than twice as thick as when he had first come here a few months ago.
The sense of it was immediate and plain.
It was not simply more people. The population had not actually changed. It was human qi gathered into shape, organized, driven by a single unified will.
Since ancient times, sovereign authority has never reached down into the villages — and that held just as true across this stretch of the Eastern Isles.
All the more so in a world where the land was vast while the population had barely grown. No daimyo could exercise real control over the whole of their own domain; they had to hand it over to lesser and greater lords, to noble houses in their own districts.
The vassal of my vassal, as the saying went, is not my vassal.
It was also why Yoshimoto had courted Kobe Hikaru yet built his shrine only in Suruga Province.
Not because she was unwilling to offer more, but because she — or rather the Imagawa clan — governed three provinces in name while holding real control over little beyond Suruga.
Even within Suruga there were plenty of shadowed places the Imagawa clan could not touch directly.
That situation, though, was shifting.
The clearest sign was the roads. Every route running toward Imagawa Castle, seat of the main house, was wider than before.
Sweeping past overhead, his Sharp-Eye Mutation picked out construction along both shoulders of the highways — road surfaces widened, drainage ditches dug deeper, and every few ri a newly built post station or watch post.
And… new shrines. New dread.
The ports had grown too.
The wharves at Shimizu Port held at least several more berths than a few months back, piers running out into the sea, lanterns flickering even at night.
Great transport ships lay at anchor in the harbour, masts standing thick as a forest.
All of it the fruit of Imagawa Yoshimoto emptying Suruga's coffers to raise a five-thousand-strong fleet and strike at Echigo — expansion.
Imagawa Yoshimoto had used that expedition as a springboard.
A five-thousand-man crossing had all but hollowed out Suruga's defences, even with the yokai lending their strength. But the strategic result of landing in Echigo's rear had sent the Imagawa clan's standing in Kanto soaring.
Echigo Province's land was neither rich nor fertile, yet its very remoteness, with another sea at its back, had given it better development than most places.
The haul from that trip had been considerable.
Uesugi Kenshin forced to pull her army back in defence — that news had run the length of the Tokaido.
The daimyo of every province began to weigh the Imagawa clan's strength more seriously, and several were feeling out alliances.
And then there was the one standing behind her… that "Demon God."
That the Imagawa clan had at its back a Demon God capable of matching the God of War Uesugi Kenshin move for move on the strategic board — that understanding, too, had spread through Kanto and the Tokaido in little more than a month.
Hojo Ujiyasu ground his teeth over it.
Imagawa Yoshimoto rode the current.
Totomi and Mikawa had always belonged to Yoshimoto on paper, but within them sat any number of powerful houses that in practice drifted outside Imagawa control — as scattered a hold as the Hojo had over Musashi Province.
Now they were declaring their submission one after another. Plenty of free-floating landholders and great lords remained, yet Suruga's own internal governance was consolidating at speed.
Taxes up. Recruitment pools widened. Trade routes opened.
A daimyo house in rapid expansion.
That was where the human qi came from.
The gathered belief of tens of thousands, of hundreds of thousands, forming an invisible momentum — enough, even unconverted into faith, to press down most inhuman power.
Fortunately, to the Kobe Hikaru of today, a human qi field of that magnitude was a breeze across the face. His yokai aura at the Nine Mutations passed through it without effort.
But something else was threaded into that field, and it made him pause.
Faith.
Not only the faith Yoshimoto herself offered up.
As the so-called Demon God who had left behind the legend of thunder-slaying, he was worshipped throughout the Imagawa domain — the common people made offerings to the Twenty-Three Demons and to the Thunder-Slaying Demon God alike.
He was no true god, but he was the guardian deity of a house, raised up by Imagawa Yoshimoto in her own name.
Dread and faith wove together, seeping out of every shrine in Suruga, every crude painted image, every ghost story passed from mouth to mouth.
The concentration might fall short of a certified true god, but belief that rose from the people of its own accord was still belief.
Quantitative change brings transmutation in the end.
Perhaps one day Kobe Hikaru would reach the realm of the divine by this road. It was not impossible.
And so violet lightning split the night sky over Suruga.
The Imagawa clan's main castle came into view at last.
At the very top of the castle keep, a light burned.
Kobe Hikaru gathered in his thunder and dropped out of the air, boots landing on the wooden balcony of the keep's uppermost floor. Arcs of lightning spread bright beneath his soles, then drew in and vanished.
Before him stood a paper door, half open.
Beyond it was the small room they had converted into a shrine.
He stepped through.
Purified sand covered the floor, sacred sutras papered the walls, and the sword rack at the centre stood empty — he knew perfectly well that the Raikiri in his hand had been summoned away from that very rack.
Kobe Hikaru laid Raikiri back across the rack.
The instant blade met wood, a faint hum ran through it — like something that had come home.
And like something reluctant to let go.
The panel flickered.
[Raikiri (Soza Samonji): Favourability +2]
[Current Favourability: 28 (Trust)]
[It is content. It enjoys being taken out to fight, but it also enjoys coming back here to be worshipped. Both feelings make it happy. Still, it would rather stay at your side. It asks you to wait for it to finish its metamorphosis.]
Kobe Hikaru patted the scabbard and rose to his feet.
Then his eyes shifted to one side.
In the corner of the shrine, someone was sitting.
He had known it from the moment he stepped inside. That person had been there the whole time.
Sitting quietly.
Smiling. Watching.
Saying nothing.
White monastic robes. A grey kasaya.
A woman monk — and yet… not quite.
The collar crossed and drew tight, wrapping her form close, leaving nothing bare above the neck.
Her long silver-white hair was bound up high, a few loose strands falling across her collarbones.
The collar of the white robe was cut as though altered, the cloth pulled taut across the front, and the long skirt below fell loose only to be pressed flat by her crossed, folded legs, drawn tight over full thighs, the round line of her hips squeezed by the posture into an exaggerated curve.
Like a god or a buddha — and yet, like a Devil.
What truly could not be ignored, though, were the eyes.
So deep the bottom could not be seen.
Like a dry well with its walls carved full of characters, and every character a stretch of experience another person could not finish reading in a lifetime.
Prayer beads wound between her folded fingers, her thumb resting on one of them without turning it.
She was looking at Kobe Hikaru.
Kobe Hikaru was looking at her.
Crimson demon eyes behind the oni mask met eyes far too weathered to belong to anyone young.
Raikiri had returned to the hands of its head priest, and it looked happy about it.
She spoke first.
Her voice was neither loud nor soft, like a temple bell at dawn, calm and clear: "The Demon God honours us with his presence. This humble monk failed to greet you from afar."
Kobe Hikaru did not deny who he was. He only asked,
"Who are you?"
"Taigen Sessai."
"Dharma name, Sofu."
She gave her name, and her dharma name along with it.
…sacred sutras… the sword rack… purified sand across the floor.
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