Six o'clock.
The rain had thinned. Through the thick walls, Nanami Kira could hear each drop striking each wutong leaf, hear the soft rebound off each patch of earth, hear the clear tremor off each brick and stone. The rain grew sparser, like a sick man's moaning—fitful, intermittent.
Yes. Moaning was the word. The earth moaned. The sky moaned. The slender tower standing in the autumn rain moaned too—every brick, every stone. The wutong trees moaned, and the forest stretching for miles beyond them rustled its leaves together in a low, rustling moan.
Because night was about to fall.
Sorako pressed her hand weakly against the thick barrier, then slid slowly down along the Curtain until her hand fell limp at her side, fingers clenching the hem of her dress.
A white dress, a lady's dress. Very beautiful. She had changed into it deliberately—white as a pure carnation.
The warehouse was enormous. Where Nanami Kira had gone she could not say. The lamplight was truly dim, casting the calligraphy scrolls and Cursed Tools and suits of armor from some forgotten era into mottled silhouettes that swayed, crooked and dark, against the warehouse walls.
She had tried every method. Exhausted every option. The Cursed Energy in her body was spent, yet the barrier had not weakened by a fraction. It stood there, immovable, blocking her path forever.
Her bedroom was only one floor away. Yet she could do nothing about those few meters. The distance might as well have been the ends of the earth.
She was no fool. She understood Amber Mansion's principle of Equivalent Exchange by now—nothing inside the mansion could be destroyed. She could not break through the floor to return to her room.
Time trickled past. Trickled past.
This was a hopeless situation.
She leaned against the Curtain, fists clenched, counting silently in her mind.
Don't think so highly of yourself.
Only now did Sorako truly understand how fragile her old pride had been. When everyone abandoned her, she was this small. This insignificant.
Just another straw dog beneath Heaven, no different from any other.
But she could not give up. Refusing to surrender was her last shred of dignity as a sorcerer. If she lost even that, then everything she was would be negated by her own hand.
Six-twenty.
Some owl was the first to glide across the branches. Some cricket was the first to sing. One way or another, the nightingales fanned their wings and the crows returned to roost.
Night fell. Ten minutes earlier than yesterday.
Hah... hah... hah...
Sorako drew ragged breaths, steadied herself, and stared into the dark warehouse.
The flames on the lamps wavered harder. Shadows danced on the walls—grotesque, twisted, alien. They seized Sorako's attention. Those beautiful eyes did not blink.
Odd sounds came from the ceiling. Like marbles dropping one by one onto a floor—but the third story was the top floor. There was no floor above her. Footsteps echoed in the corridor outside, then vanished. Somewhere, iron-shod hooves struck stone. A horn sounded from deep in the warehouse, then fell silent.
She drew back half a step, pressing her spine against the Curtain. That way nothing could reach her from behind.
But the texture against her back felt wrong. Like armor.
She looked up reflexively—and a drop of drool landed on her face.
It was a mass of flesh wrapped in rusted plate mail. Its face was a landscape of fine wrinkles, and from the crease of every wrinkle, a narrow slit of eye peered open. Tiny black pupils, row upon row of them, dense as beans.
"Do you... like eating?"
Sorako gathered every shred of Cursed Energy in her body and slammed it into the thing's face. Crimson energy burst into flame. This was her Innate Technique—through touch, she could ignite any source of Cursed Energy.
The smell of searing meat. Delicious. Fresh. Like steak.
Like the steak they had eaten that day.
This was what Jasmine truly bred inside Amber Mansion. Within the flames, the red flesh died and regrew, died and regrew, swelling in an instant into a viscous mass—like melting ice cream. Gobbets of flesh dripped onto Sorako, and the tiny eyes dotting the surface grinned at her happily:
"Do you... like eating?"
"Ahh—!"
Sorako scrambled backward, stumbled, threw every ounce of Cursed Energy she had left at the thing, and while it drowned in fire she turned and fled deeper into the warehouse. She didn't look where she was going. She simply ran.
Behind her, the creature had already regenerated within the flames. She could hear its wet, clinging sounds:
"Do you like eating? Do you like eating..."
She ignored everything she passed, everything she stumbled over, just kept running faster—and finally left the creature behind.
Where am I?
She caught her breath and took in her surroundings.
Pairs of green eyes lit up in the darkness. Staring at her.
She read the aura around her. At least three Grade 1 spirits. One pressing at the threshold of Grade 1. Another ten or so Grade 2 monsters.
A crawling mass, like a hive gone mad. Putrid fat flowing across the floor.
It's over. This is hopeless.
They shrieked. They roared. They lunged at her from every direction.
Sorako marshaled every last drop of Cursed Energy, wrung every grain of latent potential from her body—even one more second, even surviving one more second, meant she hadn't disgraced the honor of a sorcerer.
But half a second passed, and the expected impact never came. The tide of ghosts swept past her body, stampeding toward something ahead.
As a human-faced Grade 1 Cursed Spirit brushed past her, Sorako read the expression on its face: brow knotted downward, lips pressed thin, pupils shaking.
Fear.
They were running for their lives.
Boom— the thought had barely formed when the human-faced wraith in front of her detonated, spattering her in flesh and gore.
In the rain of broken flesh, dark Cursed Energy erupted through the horde. Each detonation struck a specific node, and as each node was destroyed—severed—the creatures toppled one after another onto the floor. Sorako could no longer track the trajectory of that dark fire.
She heard only the sound of blades sinking into meat. The sound of flesh flying. The sound of monsters dying.
At last, every sound ceased.
Atop the heap of densely packed corpses stood a blood-soaked figure. The nails on his hands dripped crimson. Black eyes devoid of the slightest emotional ripple—dark as the night itself, calm as the night itself.
A black coat draped across his shoulders, stirring faintly.
The man looked like a single crow's feather.
"Gojo... Grade 3?"
Nanami Kira tilted his head down and glanced at her.
Sorako cried out. "How—what is your real grade?"
Even having felt his terrifying pressure up close before, she had pegged him at Grade 1 at most. But this was—
"What is your real grade? Semi-Special Grade? Or Special Grade?"
Nanami Kira looked away from her. His voice was calm.
"Someone once recommended me for Special Grade. I turned it down. His name was Gojo Satoru."
Turned... turned it down?
Sorako could find no words.
Special Grade was something her entire clan had to court and flatter. How many families considered it an honor simply to have Gojo Satoru as a guest? But Nanami Kira had—
"Gojo Grade 3—you're only a Grade 3 sorcerer. What you can't accomplish, we may well be able to."
Yesterday's words echoed in her ears. And when she recalled how she and the others had been calling him "Gojo Grade 3" for days, Sorako felt, for the first time, genuine embarrassment—and a deep, searing shame.
She wanted to slap her former self across the face.
But Nanami Kira had no attention to spare for what was going on inside Sorako's head. The spirits upstairs were Amber Mansion's property too. Perhaps because they belonged to the Past, their lives were not as precious as a Present-era successor candidate like Sorako.
Still, after that many kills, he looked untouched on the surface—but his body was in ruins underneath.
And the night was still young.
He looked out across the dim warehouse.
Gaze calm. The black coat draped over him like night itself.