Despacitoleo
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RUN BITCH RUUUUUUUUUN
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Sometimes The Light At The End Of The Tunnel Is An Oncoming Train [DxD / Celestial Dojo SI]
- Thread starter BlueHelix
- Start date
Chaosfox13
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Mikey has a lot of problems, but honestly the keeping the "god is dead" secret is mild as heck. Its not even like hes doing it for power. He despises his job by all evidence. The system breaking would just be bad for a lot more than just him.
Its patronising as hell, but he probably sees the lie less as a cunning power play, and more like telling a 5 year old grandpa went to a farm upstate.
God's dead. He's not a usurper he's outright the heir. His real problem is not stepping up to kingship, instead trapping everything in a regentory limbo.
Much like all the biblical faction leaders, his problem is being insufficiently tyranicall.
Excommunication is a slap on the wrist. Even the superexcomunication that gets used. Congrats, you are now no longer in a church to a non existent god. And its a lot less impactful than it was in medieval Europe
Its in fact very much over used as a punishment, as Freed "i love rape" Selzen and Valper "orphan grinder" Galilei, really shouldn't have been gently scooted out the door to be everyone elses problem.
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DodoDude
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I enjoyed the small lesson on the Japanese drainage system in Tokyo. It really does ground the story when you are running around at the lower and more gritty levels of DXD.
Also I can't wait to see what kind of unintended consequences that this mysterious healing gyaru will cause in the future.
Also I can't wait to see what kind of unintended consequences that this mysterious healing gyaru will cause in the future.
Nicohals J Westerberg
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Lol glad to see the MC is trying to be smart
Psionic Simian
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Tftc
BlueHelix
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So this is like, a complicated kind of answer. I think the easiest way to say it is that like, you see how this story is set in the backdrop of the aftershocks of the Japanese Lost Decade, and the 2008 Financial Crisis, right? Haru does not have problems with Japanese people, or American people, or whatever, and on a very broad basis, does not inherently have problems with Devils, Fallen, or Angels
If Haru ever remembers more context though, or well, continues to encounter the supernatural, they will kind of not have many kind things to say about Azazel and Devil Society as it stands
Heaven and the Church I will have to still figure out properly but it's uh, kind of fucked up on some level that Heaven kind of gave Issei and Irina the Interdimensional Room in vol. 18:
Volume 18 Life 1 said:
But this is really nothing (aside from principles, lol) compared to how fucked Devil Society and the chicanery that Azazel gets up to
Here you have Issei go Oppress D. Slaves:
Volume 14 Life 2 said:
Like obviously if people pop off that's an issue, especially after the Underworld got wrecked by the Hero Faction attack, but isn't it kind of indicative that a whole bunch of Devils just went and immediately popped off after the "secret" about Balance Breaker was revealed? Balance Breaker really only pops if you feel extremely strongly and your heart is resolved, which oftentimes typically comes in the heat of life-risking combat
A lot of people felt so strongly that they flipped Balance Breaker and just fucking booked it. Some went "mad," but others wanted to just run away after what Issei explicitly calls painful experiences and still get arrested, haha, and there's no real follow-up on what happens afterward.
Because ultimately, like, why would they? Sona's dream of a school is mocked, but then it's like blown up like five times when it exists, and there's constant talk about political backlash. The New Satans are just like, despite all their strength, are ultimately figureheads except for Serafall who's breaking her back carrying international relations
Volume 17 Life 0 said:
Grayfia is literally forced into house arrest after Euclid does his shit by mysterious """higher ups"""
And then in terms of Sona's extremely basic in concept "Rating Game School anyone can attend"
Sona cannot build her own fucking school in her own fucking house's territory because of """stimulating the politicians"""Volume 17 Life 1 Part 4 said:
The house of Hell is not in order, to say the least, when extremely basic things cannot be enacted for fear of political backlash. And to a degree, this kind of makes sense why Sirzechs doesn't just flip the switch and go "do what I say, or else" because he never wanted to be Lucifer. He was a music teacher whose students got killed by the Old Satans anti-rebel actions and crashed the fuck out over it, but he never wants to fight in a war again -- his own power is to some degree a curse to him.
But this has fundamentally made the concept of "reform" of the Underworld basically a joke, especially with one of the biggest ways of social mobility in the Underworld - Rating Games - basically get rigged by the Old King Faction with the whole King Piece chicanery. And despite the whole thing about might being right, education seems very much gatekept in the Underworld too with the school and everything -- which makes sense, because there was a random-ass Ultimate Class Devil on Team Shooting Star in the Azazel Cup that was stuck as Low Class taking care of rocks in the Devil Wasteland. The promotion tests are linked to knowledge of Devil Culture and other stuff that low class people cannot necessarily learn easily.
So like, despite Sirzechs' good intentions, Hell is basically halfway to a terminally rotten society infested by the Old King and the Old Satan factions. Diodora's actions aren't really considered all that bad if it wasn't for the whole Khaos Brigade / Ophis Snake thing, for example. Kuroka crashed out for a reason. So on and so forth. And like, to a degree you can say it's not really their fault because Devils are basically a race of born weapons created by Lucifer to die in droves for the Great War and they're trying to figure out their society, uh
Society's still kind of hosed, you know? And part of that is that besides from Serafall, and Ajuka creating the Evil Piece system to fix their population problem, the rest of the Satans have just not really stepped up to fix Devil Society in the centuries between their takeover and now.
That being said, I don't think Haru will ever really perceive Devils as like inherently disgusting or whatever. They might work with a few in the future, they might not. But it's not really in Haru's nature to paint people by their species -- there's no real reason to do that when there are very real criticisms to be had, just like how Haru doesn't dislike people but it's inarguable that many governments mishandled the lead-up to 2008 and the after-effects.
This response post has already gotten 800+ words long, but like, Azazel is the most sus person alive, lol. How did you develop the Sacred Gear Extraction technology, Azazel? How did you have a bunch of Vrita Sacred Gears ready to merge with Saji, Azazel? Why is Grigori standard protocol to literally brand the people they operate on, Azazel? Why did one of Issei's clones go insane when you experimented on him, Azazel? Why did--
In all honesty, it's not that surprising that Kokabiel went from this in Slash/Dog:
To this in DxD
I'd go insane if Azazel was my boss, too.
In any case, the answer is "it's complicated but Haru isn't racist," but there will be no "devil glazing"
(I have to wonder what fics are "devil glazing" tbh most of the ones I've encountered are pretty negative on them on a societal basis if positive on an individual basis for the ORC and Sairoarg and so on)
Whoops, sorry. I went and added a "one month later" to be clear there was a timeskip on that front.
Haru has not ignored their academic and financial problems -- they have kind of rather done the opposite. The whole reason why they're fighting underground at the start is that they're getting paid:
To clear things up for the future, I added this sentence:
This is literally how they're keeping afloat at the moment, because they've lost their housing stipend from their scholarship and a number of other resources. Sakamoto-san has been feeding them a lot and also been giving Haru a lot more hours:
But you can bet that Haru's been working their butt off underground to build reputation but also put food on the table, especially considering their increased caloric requirements to maintain their energy.
As for the excommunication, like... Haru kind of really wants to know, but they literally have no way to get answers, as unlike typical excommunications, Haru doesn't exactly have avenues to appeal or bring themselves back to the Church. Haru does have people they trust in the Church, but they're kind of the people who raised them -- talking to them could get them into trouble. Perhaps more trouble, because Haru isn't a normal heretic -- they're one that have accidentally zipbombed God's system with their flood of toxic faith. How would Haru become that? You bet that the nuns would be a candidate -- or at least that's what Haru thinks.
As for school, uh, good luck paying for that without a lot of money / scholarship. School year's started too, so they kind of have to wait for a new term too at the moment, sucks to suck.
Real talk, nothing Haru could say could meaningfully hurt Michael than what Michael sees and hears every day. He is the inadequate heir to a God no one could match, and he sits in a throne that is not his and hears prayers he cannot answer and sees the Grigori rip out His gifts to humanity and the Devils take God's gifts for their own.
Michael in canon feels like dogshit and the case remains the same here.
And also like, kind of yes and no here--
Excommunication is not meant to be some kind of crazy censure unless you go absolutely nuts. It's simply removal from the communion with the Church. Normally, in modern day, it's entirely fixable and resolvable, unless you are kind of bugnuts or zealous in your own way, like the Society of St. Pius X who have openly defied Rome's authority and is not willing to reconcile because they are so desperate for the ability to ordain priests that follow their own doctrine they will falsely ordain bishops without papal approval in order to continue the ability to ordain priests.
It's only so harsh on Haru because they actually did rely on some degree on the Church for survival and for the ability to continue their education.
As for Freed and Valper, I don't really think that the Church would have you know, willingly let them go. They kind of left and got picked up by the Grigori and then it's SOL -- if the Church could have killed them, they would have, you know?
Well, then again, you just kind of have to look at the prevalence of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, or the boarding schools for Native Americans, and then maybe that isn't the case. But those people haven't exactly gotten excommunicated either, and to be honest, you don't really get excommunicated for being merely a criminal or an evil person. Being evil's a matter of sin, and that's an entirely different matter, one concerning for your soul. Excommunication's more of a doctrinal matter, I suppose.
I'll try to take a look at it later, I actually had gone over it before publishing to break it up already, haha... I'll try to keep a better eye on it in the future, appreciate the feedback.
Thanks boss! Haru's kind of outgrown their starting zone like I said, but they're still having to live in it, and thus they don't really want to blow up where they live. All the power to blow up a mountain in the palm of their hand, and they can barely use a fraction of it. Kind of ironic considering what I've said about Sirzechs and the Satans, eh?
As for the healing gyaru, well, I think the church would be more concerned with the fact that she mentioned a sensei. Or perhaps they wouldn't be. Getting extremely yoked is one of the methods to get touki after all, and it wouldn't be too far of a stretch to for that to be a route to learn senjutsu from reverse principles, considering how a lot of martial arts focuses on mindset and discipline and harmony with the world. Who knows what'll happen? Even I'm not fully sure!
Despacitoleo
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oh yeah ironically Sirzech's is literally somehow the only devil thats actually a good person like how ironic your own family wife and friends are shit your society is shit essentially your entire race is shit and somehow the dude named essentially the second lucifer Morningstar, the sirzechs music forced into a leader position, D gregomory is somehow a good dude like actually good
Just fucked over by essentially his own race lol
Uthalem
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Be other options
Touki is the main method people who like punching people go to for strength where they can so coming up with a magical version of that makes some sense but probably wouldn't have occurred to most as if you wanted to punch harder Touki would be a perfectly reliable option so coming up with a magical method probably just seemed like reinventing the wheel not to mention less intuitive for those who are meatheads.
Fucking funny he got this
I think I know how, financial trouble and getting offered money. No joke his main job is being a mercenary at this point and from the sounds of things he is being low balled for someone who is a high class mercenary. Hiring someone like him should very much be like hiring someone like death stroke from DC but the problem is that his clients aren't exactly swimming in money and what he is being paid to fight isn't worth someone like him, additionally he might do too good of a job mixed with his vigilantly work that they just don't need him anymore, not in amounts that are sustainable for him. But they have objective proof of him being well into high class based on his base stats alone so someone could hear about that or if they are feeling nice name drop him as I have to imagine actually high class combatants as opposed to people who just have the title because politics or something are very rare and even more rarely unspoken for, so long as it came with proof (as I don't think most would believe in a unknown high class unclaimed mercenary without some) it would not be hard for someone to be convinced to pay for his time.
Does that mean he is not getting paid a lot? You would think being basically a mercenary would pay more even on the low end to fight the supernatural
WerewolfEros
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An Industrial Gas Mask, if such a thing exists, reinforced with Purification Ofuda.
PinkShadowReader
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Love how he's constantly training. That he isn't' standing still.
It makes sense that he isn't eager to tie himself to another organization after the one that cut him off so abruptly had supported him since he was young. I really love that he's really patient, understanding and forgiving of that. I can easily think of several people in that situation would have gone to their first enemies and signed up with them purely of spite despite how unwise it would be. Even other people that wouldn't do anything that terrible would be incredible angry at the injustice that had happened. There wasn't even a grace period or a transfer to non Catholic site.
I do like that he has excised caution, has focused on laying low and been training what he can.
Rofl. What a trick with his voice over the phone. I didn't think that his own standing would make the one he rescued suspect.
Its really hilarious that he can heal now. Even if its not efficient healing its still better than none. Even better his power can't be stolen. That's one of the biggest things he can get even if it takes specific circumstances for it to be a danger.
Thanks for the chapter. Cheers!
It makes sense that he isn't eager to tie himself to another organization after the one that cut him off so abruptly had supported him since he was young. I really love that he's really patient, understanding and forgiving of that. I can easily think of several people in that situation would have gone to their first enemies and signed up with them purely of spite despite how unwise it would be. Even other people that wouldn't do anything that terrible would be incredible angry at the injustice that had happened. There wasn't even a grace period or a transfer to non Catholic site.
I do like that he has excised caution, has focused on laying low and been training what he can.
Rofl. What a trick with his voice over the phone. I didn't think that his own standing would make the one he rescued suspect.
Its really hilarious that he can heal now. Even if its not efficient healing its still better than none. Even better his power can't be stolen. That's one of the biggest things he can get even if it takes specific circumstances for it to be a danger.
Thanks for the chapter. Cheers!
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Karnax626
Getting sticky.
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You said he's probably going to be doing stuff outside of Tokyo soon, if he's been effective enough at clearing the sewers I can see him being given jobs by shrines in other cities.
It is a shame all the other High classes are busy, though even if they weren't I doubt he'd be able to spar with one or anything. At this rate he's probably going to have to Leeroy Jenkins it and hope for the best when he first has to fight a peer.
The problem isn't the amount it's that he can't be guaranteed consistency, especially since if he does his current work well enough he's kind of putting himself out of a job, at least temporarily. Leaving the city might help him find more work though that's even less stable, especially for whenever he tries to get back to school.
Magery
Your first time is always over so quickly, isn't it?
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Ah, so this was Haru's secret middle-school syndrome... instead of a sealed eye and hidden powers behind forbidden covenant, she had bright nails and dyed hair.
I bet if you asked her the best ways to apply a fake tan she could rattle off three brands and two good magazine guides.
God bless.
(Well, He can't really do that right now, so maybe I should have said Michael bless instead. Shame about the excommunication—ganbare, Haru-chan! You can still save your soul. I believe in you!)
BlueHelix
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I think it's kind of complicated -- I think a lot of the protagonistic devils are well, maybe they're not necessarily heroic, but they are I think "good" on a basic personal level. This is of course an important distinction because by and large Devil society works for them and they are not like, very interested in doing anything momentous or risk anything to change things -- like again, of the protagonistic devils the only people who are really expressing any desire to actually change devil society is like... basically Sona? And I've gone over how relentlessly fucked over she is. Sairoarg to some degree does show rep but after he loses to Issei he basically is shunted over to Sona's school to be a teacher rather than pushing for anything more and then again, Sona's school is put in the torment nexus, especially after Sona's dad gets afflicted with the Sleeping Sickness and thus she's forced to retire from being a teacher to run the Sitri territory
The Sitri territory she can't run her school in, haha
But by and large Sirzechs I think is a good man but a failure of a leader. His ideal Devil society is not one defined by strength, but by character, in part because of his trauma of the Devil Civil War -- he can absolutely throw hands, but he doesn't like doing it, and he despises the idea of enacting the policies he wants by force of violence. Like straight up, if he crashed out, the only person who could stop him in the Underworld is Ajuka, and Ajuka does not give a fuck. So he kind of makes nice mouth words but he's afraid to push his weight around to allow for a pretense of a fair society.
Which is a joke, because uh--
Volume 20 Life 1 Part 4 said:
The supposed "ruler" of Hell has to beg the Great King faction to not have his goddamn little sister's Rating Game match rigged. Obviously there's context and issues but the fundamental issue is that power abhors a vacuum, and Sirzechs being unwilling to step the fuck up has let others step in and entrench themselves. Maybe Ishibumi didn't intend it, but the way it's portrayed, the Four Satans are like... basically figureheads.
But like, they don't have to be? They've just fundamentally abdicated their responsibilities. The person who works the hardest for devil society is outright Serafall Leviathan who is shouldering an insane burden to make the Devils not supernatural international pariahs as the public relations Satan (which considering what Devils do and the Evil Piece system is kind of insane). Ajuka giga clutched up with the Evil Piece system but functionally fucked off. Falbium is actually kind of cool as a somewhat genius of hard work who sleeps all the time due to exhaustion from training from what a friend of mine who's reading DxD 0 is telling me, but isn't really doing anything policy wise because most of his work is in the military. And uh, Sirzechs is Sirzechs. But any one of them could basically tell the Great King Faction to put up or shut up, and the four of them combined could basically spank the Old Satan and Great King faction combined trivially. They just are unwilling to push to that extent, somewhat for reasonable reasons (they never wanted to be rulers) but it sucks for the countless victims of their inaction.
(This is better than Azazel, because I do not think there are any good intentions at all coming from him)
The thing is is that like, Touki is just actually incredibly hard for most people to grasp? It is the old reliable, but you have to train batshit hard to get it or get good with senjutsu, and even then you probably have to get some specific teachings. Otherwise people just thug it out.
Like, Zekka gets taught by her grandma how to use Touki, and while she's an absolute freak of swordsmanship talent, there's no way she's as physically capable as Cao Cao, much less Vasco Strada, and both of them don't have Touki, for example.
But in contrast, you can in fact just thug it out and be physically buff on those levels without Touki, and learning calculation-style magic to be good enough to enhance yourself on that level is probably more trouble than it's worth for someone who's entirely on the body cultivation path.
(Also, Vasco Strada probably would've been using it if it was easily available, because my king Vasco is also just apparently an accomplished anti-magic practitioner?)
Volume 19 Life 3 Part 3 said:
(He legit disassembles Rossweisse's formulae, who by the way, was the one who theorized the spell to seal Trihexa. What the fuck is up with that?)
Haru's getting paid a decent amount, but they're also rebuilding their savings and budget from the ground up because their housing is no longer subsidized and their food expenses have exploded. If push comes to shove they can split up their budget to favor more for immediate spending, but they're building up savings because they're somewhat deluded into thinking that they can still go to normal college (let's be real, at the moment that's functionally impossible for them) and need to save for tuition, or more realistically, need to save up for a number of other expenses involved with a world trip.
wrt mercenary work, shrines have options, and they have money, but they don't actually have a tremendous amount of money. Nishina-san's arrangement is great but it happens because the shrines get a lot of carveouts or tax breaks or subsidization of certain expenses, and while the government could probably adjust their budget, the Japanese government is not exactly a paragon of dynamic budget adjustments, and also a lot of her bonus stuff is well, bonuses -- the shrine has enough money to pay for an apprentice shrine maiden, not for the actual pay rate of whatever a High Class mercenary is.
I guess the way to say it is that Haru has enough to get by, and if all they wanted to do was clock in for a 9/5 they probably could. But they're dealing with a massive increase in expenses while their savings are now suddenly inadequate, and there's other stuff looming.
Good thoughts about merc work though -- Haru's name is pretty respected for those who know and work with them.
That's not a bad start, but the bigger issue is if there's just straight up not enough oxygen to begin with. Air purification is all well and good, but fighting's a very physical activity that requires lots of oxygen -- poisoning's the big ticket issue, but flat out hypoxia is a concern down in the sewers, a place where you can't easily find a place for "fresh" air either. In a way, G-CANS was pretty risky too, but it was a lot more clean. There's a reason why Haru was working alone down there.
That being said, there are obviously magical options to counteract minimal oxygen too, it's just a little more complicated.
Thanks for the response! I think a big important part of training is that it's a matter of control. Haru has a lot of instincts and skill downloaded into them, but that doesn't mean that they're exactly comfortable with it. It's easy to be able to push out biggatons in punches, but there's a whole reason why the legend of Masamune vs Muramasa has Masamune win out despite Muramasa's sword being able to cut everything -- every single time Haru fights, Haru knows that if they lose an ounce of control, the shockwave of even a half-serious punch could kill hundreds to thousands of people. Tokyo is really really densely populated, which is great for being able to run to a 7-11 for some onigiri and karaage, but not so great for back-alley supernatural fights.
Haru is pretty clearly conflicted about what happens, but like, the Catholic Church that excommunicated them is still the one that took them in when they were a little baby and raised them, despite the huge strain on the budget and overcapacity. The people Haru loves are still there, and they're also just not the people who excommunicated them either -- joining an explicitly anti-Church or Heaven organization would mean opposing those people too. It's complicated, and there's a lot things to be frustrated about, but well...
Haru's been working on control for a number of reasons -- impulsive anger is not a luxury one can afford when your crashout can cause a massacre.
Haru probably could actually probably do so -- they grew up in Shinjuku, which while wasn't the throbbing heartbeat of gyaru culture like Shibuya was, still has quite a fair bit of counterculture in there since like the 50s and 60s. Haru could apply a fake tan but they never really wanted nor had the opportunity to do so for themselves or others because they grew up in a Catholic orphanage. The heavy tan and makeup of the ganguro is pretty out of the question, but so would the heavy brand focus of stuff like onee-gyaru or the huge closet.brand investment of hime-gyaru. If pushed, the orphanage probably had some people doing kogal stuff more than anything else, because you know, school uniforms and not being adults, haha.
If consulted for "good" artificial tanning recommendations, aside from a harsh de-recommendation of tanning beds, there's the big magazine of egg which pushed a lot of hard gyaru culture. Ranzuki for more simple darker skin styling, and I think JELLY spun off from them for more onee-gyaru stuff, but they still did a lot of good bronzed makeup?
I am actually not a Harajuku gyaru so I can't speak with full confidence there, just a lot of osmosis
(Tanning product is a little complicated considering the focus on bihaku / pale - clear skin in Japanese culture, but there are options. I can't track down brands for Heisei-era preferred stuff, though, and I am like... 80% sure it will not be relevant, so I'm too lazy to hunt it down for now. Assume Haru does know though because they fucking hate tanning beds. Goddamn cancer machines.)
al103
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Satans pretty much gone Katsura Kogoro. Only reason Japan gone it's way after reformation was because that man didn't wanted another civil war. I would actually bet on him if he would've actually raised banners instead of resigning from his post to get drunk. Japanese love their Meiji references and it's not like it's first one in DxD.
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WerewolfEros
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A Spacesuit then. Just made with Supernatural Materials instead for the Durability and to make it slim and less bulky. The Oxygen Tank's will have to also be made from Supernatural Materials along with Defense Ofuda so they dont get punctured during any fights.
Finnish_man
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Is this part of dxd or your own aditiion cus i have never seen this before in any fic where the character is part of the church and knows for a fact that god is dead and belives it i mean in some fics i have read they have seen the corpse of god and nothing happens and wasent like the blue haird girls friend not kicked out after she laernd of gods death and became an angel in teh end
I will allways feel bad for michael and i will allways think that gods love for humanity was truly great since he created the sacred gear that are honestly one of the few things that make humanity revelant
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blariviere
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Kinda surprised nobody else noticed how absurdly powerful Blessings and Curses is.
Because of it, he can nosell Divine Dividing, since that Gear steals your own power.
Because of it, he can nosell Divine Dividing, since that Gear steals your own power.
BlueHelix
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I actually don't check QQ unless I'm about to update or just a few days after for the most part, so hilariously someone pinged me to tell me someone was asking me about this. Uh, parental surgical procedure + absolutely awful schedule last two weeks at the hospital has gutted my writing speed and I lost my mental framework for the chapter (if I ever really had it), but I'm getting back on the saddle. Update's at roughly 3k words, hopefully comes out this week?
Latae sententiae is an actual type of excommunication from the IRL Catholic Church, it's where you do an action that automatically excommunicates you. The type of excomm that Haru got was not precisely from IRL because there's noted no opportunity for reconciliation at the moment, though.
NakedFury
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I still dont understand the excommunication or why the main character cares about it.
You were excomunicated and cut off from housing and school. Tough and horrible to happen but you had another option that took you in.
Why is he being so...hmm...I dont know another word for, being a pussy about it now? Who sincerely cares if the know you helped thos exorcists? You were cast out, their opinions now should not matter at all to you and helping those wounded exorcists was just something your upbringing told you was a good thing to do.
You were excomunicated and cut off from housing and school. Tough and horrible to happen but you had another option that took you in.
Why is he being so...hmm...I dont know another word for, being a pussy about it now? Who sincerely cares if the know you helped thos exorcists? You were cast out, their opinions now should not matter at all to you and helping those wounded exorcists was just something your upbringing told you was a good thing to do.
NemoMarx
Getting sticky.
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If the church is willing to excommunicate instantly for knowing that God is dead but not telling anyone or doing anything with it, they might excommunicate people who talked to you or got helped by you just in case. And they were raised in a Catholic orphanage and care about the other people there, who are at risk of this now?
I don't see why taking a few moments to worry about that in the middle of training and taking on new jobs is weird. Moving on instantly and not caring about it at all would be pretty cold and emotionless instead.
I don't see why taking a few moments to worry about that in the middle of training and taking on new jobs is weird. Moving on instantly and not caring about it at all would be pretty cold and emotionless instead.
Xenoxn
All cute girls in the world belong to me!
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Go ask in the DxD thread, this is not the place for that.
CHAPTER FIVE: NEED TO BREATHE
New
BlueHelix
I trust you know where the happy button is?
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CHAPTER FIVE: NEED TO BREATHE
It's an infuriating feeling, having the capability to help people, truly help people, and not be able to use it for fear of consequences. It was something that I had already been dealing with, having grown strong as I had, but it was easy enough to push past when your greatest strengths are the ability to apply violence. On a day to day basis, most people don't really need the help from someone with the ability to blow up mountains. I could content myself with the necessity of needing to practice my control first or risk blowing up mountains of people instead, as well as the fact that I was already applying myself in the defense of others.
That equation changed when I gained the ability to heal others. It had been one of my most cherished dreams to be able to heal others in another life, and it had extended over into this one as well. How could it not have? Japan had escaped the SARS pandemic that had swept over Asia in the early 2000s, but that didn't mean that it escaped all respiratory diseases, or just diseases in general. The incidence of tuberculosis in Japan was something like 34 per 100,000 on average, the highest of any industrialized nation, but in where I grew up in Shinjuku-ku? In the late 90s, it had reached to close to triple that, about 90 per 100,000. Such a disparity was a matter of course, because although it had even reached even into the Imperial Household, the place it was most prevalent was the bottom-most rungs of society, for that was where the neglected elderly lay.
It's probably unsurprising to most people, but Japan had some of the largest proportion of elderly people in comparison to the relative population, and they had been through a lot. They had endured Imperial Japan, they had endured the Pacific War, and naturally they had endured the postwar period — the one where tuberculosis had been the leading cause of death in the shattered country, in a time where the pharmacological treatment had been not even a decade old. But those elders had fought, they had endured, and had survived. People had thought that Japan had triumphed over the disease, as Japan passed the Tuberculosis Control Law, and the nascent World Health Organization garnered funding and enacted a plan of mass administration of the Bacillus Calmette-Guérin vaccination. But unfortunately, victory wasn't so simple.
Surviving tuberculosis didn't guarantee that the disease was completely eradicated from the body — no, the disease was a sick bastard that could survive within the body for years without being symptomatic, thanks to the ability to hide within the immune cells of the host that would normally kill it, waiting, lurking, for the opportune time. And what better time could it be than when its host became advanced in age, their immune systems weakening, allowing for the disease to erupt and rage throughout the body?
And so the disease erupted, like some awful culmination of all of the country's sins coming together at once. Perhaps that phrasing was a touch too dramatic, considering that tuberculosis had a worldwide resurgence, in that time as the world cut funding towards public health infrastructure, but considering what I saw and remembered, I knew it was but a premonition of things to come. With the country's elderly population the highest it had ever been in proportion to the population, many got infected from the older generation, but it wouldn't have nearly gotten so bad if screenings were done early and people actually regularly checked on them, or if those older individuals could even afford regular healthcare. Between the stagnant economy, the burst of the asset price bubble, and the proportionally lower amount of youth contributing to the Government Pension Investment Fund, something close to one in five seniors were below the poverty line, as their pensions — if they even had one, like many widowed or divorced former housewives did not — were unable to keep them afloat. They settled into a part of society that few looked at, where so many fell to kodokushi, the lonely death where their corpses could lay for weeks to months without discovery.
That underclass where it was not convenient for society to observe was where the disease incubated and raged. Places where the traditional feudal underclass, or where minorities like the Chinese or Korean immigrants were sequestered away from the public eye, were prime locations for the disease to spread thanks to lack of healthcare access and thus screening. Locations where there were high amount of migrant or unhoused workers, as welfare often needed a permanent address for assistance, and thus those populations were simply not acknowledged. That lack of attention proved critical for the disease's spread, with places like Osaka and our very own Tokyo proving to be the highest incidences in the nation.
Once the fire started burning, the government naturally took action. A public health emergency was declared. Public investment poured into hokenjo, public health centers strategically placed in locations where the disease were most endemic to screen for those infected, their success rate increasing as they could identify the latent disease beyond the background interference of the vaccine. Regular screenings and checkups identified people infected more rapidly and those who had fallen ill were quarantined appropriately in separate hospital wards, breaking the chain of transmission. A coordinated effort with investment from all parts of the public took place, from schoolteachers to drugstore employees to assisted living facility workers, disseminating information and reporting potential incidences. Welfare was expanded as the eyes of the government was forced to acknowledge those it had ignored for so long, guaranteeing provision of medication and treatment. After nearly a decade of effort, Japan had fallen back to a low-incidence rate of tuberculosis, which was something to be applauded and a testament to its healthcare system and public health offices when fully pushed into action.
But things weren't so easily out of sight, out of mind. Not for those of us who lived with it, for those who knew the victims. Tuberculosis was not a disease that was easily treated, and when it became an epidemic, things could become disastrous. Active treatment of tuberculosis took about one to two months of treatment with the correct antibiotics, and continuing treatment afterward to ensure the eradication of the disease within the body to ensure antibiotic resistance was not inculcated could take another two to even seven months. And resistance was absolutely a concern — tuberculosis was terrifyingly adaptable, and treatment for thoat disease could take close to even two years.
There were people I still knew who were still afflicted with that disease, imprisoned in a hospital bed, struggling to breathe. People who I could heal with the wave of my hand and some expenditure of energy, for what lay within me was an energy that healed not just my allies but eradicated my enemies, and what was an infection but a particularly small, persistent enemy?
And those people, I couldn't help freely, for fear of capture, of imprisonment, of conscription. I had asked around, and it had been as I remembered. Healing, true, indiscriminate healing that could be easily applied to anyone was a capability that was beyond rare. Phenex Tears would have been valuable, but not the nigh-mythological commodity that it was outside of Hell if that wasn't the case, and so the Devils and the Grigori searched for methods of healing not limited by divine grace or limited bloodline, and would do anything to obtain it. Extracting an innocent nun's Sacred Gear was a matter of course, and mental alteration magic would be more than on the table for the ability I now controlled.
It was sickening, it was infuriating, but it was reality. A reality I was not strong enough to contest, like so many other things. And yet, even so. Life went on. If I could not change things I did not control, then I would use the gifts I had to change what I could.
And so I descended into the labyrinth within Tokyo once again, a fox-faced masked affixed to my face.
"Securing" the Tokyo wastewater sewer system was an entirely different beast from G-Cans. The Metropolitan Area Outer Underground Discharge Channel, while not quite dry, was open to access to the public in the non-rainy season for a reason. It was a stormwater diversion system that was essentially a massive underground river, diverting floodwaters to the Edogawa river. It was disconnected from the actual sewer system, which although was 80% a combined system of stormwater and wastewater, remained in constant use.
That meant being able to manually tag and secure the entire system was out of the question. The majority of the system were in pipes too small to traverse — although I heard tell of robots being used in the future to maintain pipes too small for humans, as of right now inspections for those pipes were done through remote-controlled CCTV cameras pushed through pipes, and if inspections found something, then they'd have to be dug up and fixed. And so instead of going into each pipe and applying ofuda, the shrines had decided to implement "arrays" of particularly powerful talismans in the correct areas, something they had been working on for the past few years to implement.
Such a task was easier and harder than it sounded like. Easier, in some ways, because the city formerly known as Edo sat on a number of powerful Dragon Lines, and with space at such a premium economy, even supernatural geography had been taken into account for city planning. Shinto clergy were already consulted to bless and approve of sites before construction began — when the first modern sewer was constructed in Tokyo in the late 19th century, they were there too, and so the shrines, when putting together their records and the mundane Sewage Mapping and Information System from the municipal government, had a surprisingly accurate map and jump-off point for their plans.
However, that still meant people had to traverse underneath the ground to clear out if not all, at least most of what lay beneath the city. It wouldn't do for the arrays to be activated, only to enrage hundreds of beasts that lay beneath the city and cause mass disruption of a city already straining at the seams. And so here I was, walking through one of the sewer's "trunk lines," placing ofuda at whichever interval and opening deemed necessary by the planners of the operation.
In order to sustain operations down here, as well as not keel over from the smell despite my enhanced senses, I had a fox mask covering my face, the disguise kit providing an airtight seal over my face. Nishina-san's shrine didn't have the most ideal kami to petition for this, but Susano-no-Mikoto was a kami whose domain governed wind, while Inari Ōkami had quite the broad domain, one of which included success. Both of their ofuda were affixed to the inside of the mask, recycling the air I exhaled while filtering in further oxygen from the air outside. While it wasn't fully necessary, I'd be given a general warning if the air suddenly became "unclean."
If the onmyōdō some of the shrines had contacted could have spared some time, I was sure that they could've conjured up some useful spells or enchantments, but I heard that due to not needing to care so much about misogi, or ritual purification, they and their shikigami were being put to quite the work down in the sewers. Between scouting out pipes that CCTV cameras could not get into or combating any creatures that were too small for us to access and couldn't section off, they had quite the workload. I had always thought that kan no mushi only inhabited the insides of people, but apparently there had been an entire nest inhabiting a blocked off sewage pipe.
Despite being effectively sent off alone with a couple prayers and good luck, I could only count myself lucky I didn't have to deal that. Instead, I just had to walk a kilometer or two a day in the cavernous trunk lines beneath the already labyrinthine underground of Tokyo. Coordination with the city government allowed me a choice manhole to drop down in, and I scouted out any potential unauthorized alterations while I was placing the talismans in the wall. As my sense of smell had been essentially sealed off eyes the easiest to fool, I spent a significant amount of my concentration clicking my tongue while focusing a significant amount of my Battle Aura into my ears. Echolocation in tunnels with acoustics like these had been a… godsend… and I had found a few sealed off tunnels. They could have been old construction as they looked as if they hadn't been used in decades, but they hadn't been marked down, so recorded they were.
Fortunately for my tongue and the roof of my mouth, my career as a human sonar was coming to a close soon today. Walking on the concrete ledge that kept me away from the undoubtedly lovely-smelling sewage rushing underneath, I eyed the branching "pathway" in front of me. If I was right, I'd be right at the border of another ward, marking off this as the border between Shinjuku-ku and another metaphysical "zone." Giving a mental shrug, I started laying down my last few tags, preparing to seal off the underside of the Shinjuku-ku properly. Doing so aboveground would've most likely been seen as an unforgivable attack on certain inhabitants of Kabukicho, but nobody was supposed to be in the sewers, so apparently if they had a problem, the onus would be on them.
That being said, they hadn't been informed. When I had reported the stray devil warrior that had been wreathed in ghostly armor, the figurative alarm bells hadn't so much as rung but rather blasted off the walls. The fact that the Church had Light Weaponry was one of the main counterweights to the steadily rising Devil population in the wake of the postwar period and the sticky marsh of the Lost Decade's collapsed asset market, but if a cut-rate Stray Devil had been able to gather enough restless spirits to forge sufficient protection to be able to singlehandedly take down an entire Church Exorcist hit squad, unprepared or not, then that was a serious potential risk to the already simmering city.
And thus, we couldn't afford leaks — especially given how it was entirely possible that the yakuza possibly had contacts with Stray networks, whether they be Exorcists or Devils. "As above, so below," and just as the Three Factions had locked in their official contacts, the "rivers and lakes" and "chivalrous organizations" of Tokyo had been made offers as well. Strays didn't have access to the endless "mortal" resources anyone from the Three Factions who did business in the Human World had, so in exchange for a little supernatural muscle and help, those Strays who had access to sufficient mental faculties got access to the yakuza's grey market dominance of semi-legal cash-heavy businesses.
It was a risky proposition on both sides — one never knew when the figurative tiger of a Stray's mental health that one was riding would bite you, and on the other hand, while officially there was a crackdown on yakuza entering sacred spaces, there was a reason why one could often see them at the fringes in festivals wearing their tattoos openly while carting around ornate mikoshi, miniature shrines on palanquins. In a world where there were three clear superpowers, one couldn't easily refuse allies. There was a reason why the Five Clans and the Youkai Factions still talked to each other, despite everything.
These thoughts filled my head as I cracked my neck, looking at the last spot I'd have to lay down the ofuda. It was still a little surprising that with open tunnels in front of me, this was still a "border," but if it had been good enough for the designers and priests half a century ago, it was good enough for me. I laid the talisman and to my surprise, a golden light flared out through the tunnel, networks of lines tracing between each and every ofuda I had placed over the past day, and suddenly I was everything, everywhere, all at once—
I s-s-saw—
I h-h-heard—
I s-s-smelled—
I f-f-felt—
I t-t-tasted—
—great rivers of energy that underlaid Creation. No — no, these were no mere rivers, but enormous serpentine dragons that moved underneath the great metropolis and beyond. Their scales were brilliant, eightfold in iridescence: sunlit gold, shining silver, glimmering steel, burning crimson, flowing azure, rippling sable, steadfast alabaster, and vivacious green. Glorious as they were, they were still stained by the world, bloated with pollution in the Depths they were. And yet, despite everything yet still they remained: ever-moving, ever ever-present. Influenced, tapped, and even redirected, their existence could not be denied, not by mere rot, and-and-and—
—a cacophonous noise coming out of the the jaws of each and every dragon, something that I had never heard yet had always been there, my ears finally unsealed to the voice of all things. And yet, what came out of the maws of Creation was no mere cry of a beast. No, it was something something different, but could not be anything else. The roar of the dragons was that of life and so it was: the cries of children being born. The despairing sobs of those who were about to die. The wailing of the unquiet dead, the people left behind by the "times," all those who were too inconvenient to look at. The struggling, the striving, the strong and weak alike — a song of survival and the journey beyond—
—a thousand thousand traces of existence, invading my senses? Within them were odors and scents and aromas, drawn into my "self" in a sucking, gasping breath. Within that first inhalation carried the vitality of millions, within the flow was the stink of rot. Flowers blooming relentlessly, disease spreading aplenty, the finest perfume afloat, viscera spilt by a blade, the breath of a wok, spoilt food vomited out, the unmistakable presence of life, the unmistakable trail of death. H-h-humans weren't meant to sense this with every breath-
—waves and waves of energy pushing into my body, my n-n-nerves? meridians? circuits? straining at the seams. The sight and noise and scent of millions of living beings slammed into me like, no, as a physical force, my mind finally forced to remember it had a body by the screams of my organs bursting with energy they didn't have the capacity to handle. It was too much, too loud, too overwhelming, the furnace of my brain alight attempting to process it all. My arms had somehow stretched out in a futile attempt to shield myself from it all, but inadvertently as my limbs reached out, what lay behind them reached out in turn. My mind — soul — identity were drowning under the flow of Life, tossed into a current that I couldn't make heads of tails of, the flow of Creation battering at my existence. The movement of all things was sweeping me away, constantly demanding that "I" justify my existence. Who was "I"? What truly laid within my "body"? Was this truly my "self"? I couldn't answer, my b-b-being frozen as I felt what must have been only a few centimeters away-
—blood.
My jaws slammed shut around my tongue, and if I had the ability, I would have screamed. Vomit and spittle and bile had ejected themselves from my esophagus mere moments earlier, but the acidity of stomach acid was now but a memory, for all that I knew now was the taste of iron filling my mouth. I almost attempted to wrench my jaw open before I regained the presence of mind that I had limiter seals within my bag. Taking them out deliberately, because there was a very real risk I could tear them just by holding them, I applied them as swift as I could.
Immediately they started glowing and smoking — I had a very limited amount of time before things started to go drastically wrong. The nature of my energy meant that the bleeding in my mouth had already stopped and my organs were being repaired as soon as they were damaged, but that wasn't a sustainable state of affairs. And so I closed my eyes, slipping into a half-meditative state but carefully keeping myself from falling into the abyss that had drowned me earlier.
Just like when I had woken up a month ago, or when the omamori had detonated when I fought the gaki, a deluge of knowledge had deposited itself within my memory, although at the very least this time it had at least half-provided an explanation for itself. The wave of energy had been the ofuda array interacting with some measure of redirection of the Dragon Lines beneath Tokyo, something I could only decipher with my apparent new skills as a… I could only call it as a Feng Shui practitioner.
Within my brain now laid countless arrays to be used to gather and redirect various forms of natural and elemental energy, as well as the ability to harness it. The attack on my senses had been due to my newfound ability to directly perceive such networks, and unfortunately for me, the ability to perceive was rather directly connected to the ability to connect. Natural energy had poured into my body, and it was only thanks to my forcibly altered body and internal energy constantly healing the damage that I had survived — unlocking what I could only ironically refer to as touki, or the Battle Aura native to this world.
Unfortunately though, flaring such a massive amount of energy in the sewers, however recently this section had been cleared, had consequences. Consequences being creatures that were sensitive to the flow of life, either in hunger of it, or so very aware of the dangers of it wielded by someone or something else. And it seemed that down here in the underbelly of Tokyo, by and large the ghosts were like everything and everyone else in this city, in this era.
Hungry.
In my first encounter with the gaki of Tokyo, I was ambushed, the creature setting itself upon me, intending to devour someone unable to defend themselves. In my subsequent encounters with the starving spirits beneath the City, I allowed them to attack me, inverting the advantages of their ambush by forcing them to attack me on prepared ground. Now…
Now I was going on the offensive properly.
"Grrr-ack—!" A flick of my finger crushed a behemoth's throat.
"LOVELOVELO-urk—" Enveloped in a dull glow, a pebble caved in a humanoid mass' chest.
"Skreeee-ke-ke-ke…" Seeing a centipede-shaped creature skittering before me, I leapt forward and used its head as a stepping stone, neatly decapitating it.
I was killing the creatures in droves despite being in their territory, thanks to one very simple fact — just as I could now amplify my lifeforce, I could also suppress its presence. Although my grasp on the finer nuances of what must have been senjutsu and touki were still rudimentary, combined with the lessons of North God Style that I had engraved into my memory, it was essentially impossible for the maddened spirits that lay in the depths of the sewers to detect me before I could attack.
…that being said, it wasn't these spirits I was worried about.
My newfound access to senjutsu had two main consequences. First had been the unshackling of my life force — even now that I had suppressed it far below what it had originally been, it had still flared for an indeterminate amount of time until I regained my senses. Secondly was that my senses had expanded massively, and they had mapped out the surrounding areas in far greater depth than what had originally been given to me. Which was a matter of course, because the maps the shrines had constructed were that of the sewers — and what I had detected, in that moment, was something further beneath.
It wasn't necessarily something physical, although part of it certainly was. If it had merely been a massive physical cavern, I was sure just passive checks through mundane or magical seismic mapping would've determined the location. And it wasn't just a sheer mass of energy — even if senjutsu users were rare, considering the presence of so many major Inari shrines, much less the importance of Tokyo itself, a Sage should have checked on Tokyo itself at least somewhat regularly. I was a mere initiate, and as much knowledge as had been dumped into my head, it wasn't as focused on the subject as what an actual Sage would have been, considering yōkai lifespans. No, what had truly tipped me off was my newfound knowledge of arrays and the construction of facilities that could truly tap into the energy that flowed underneath the skin of the world.
Somehow, some way, the miasma of negativity incubated by the millions-strong inhabitants of Tokyo had not just been sinking underneath the city. It had been channeled, redirected along the lines carefully laid out by decades of civil and magical engineering, into what was essentially metaphysically a pot, steaming and bubbling. And now that pot, fed by over a decade of misery from a population fully recovered from the war, was now boiling over.
Although I had my suspicions on why and how this was happening, whether or not intentional sabotage was at fault was irrelevant. There was a ticking time bomb beneath the city and in the throes of my forcible enlightenment, I had felt it shift, move, twitch, like it was preparing to wake up, in response to an overwhelming amount of life energy in relative close proximity. My life energy. Because no matter how it had been cultivated or shaped, what negativity always craved in some way was to fill the hole in its existence — so if I was the one responsible for knocking down the final domino of this disaster, then I would be the one to end it.
As I advanced deeper into the depths of what quite possibly was the remnants of nineteenth century pipework, the miasma became thicker and thicker. If it wasn't for the fox-faced mask I wore right now, I was sure I wouldn't be able to draw breath at all. Never before was I so thankful for the fact that it was sealed flush to my face — just because I was fairly certain I could survive hypoxia as of the last fifteen minutes didn't mean that I wanted to test it out. With the light of the tunnels thoroughly behind me, conventional senses had become more and more limited as well, as it was getting to the point I had a better sense of reference with my half-baked skill in senjutsu with its sensitivity to negativity more than anything else.
Limited did not mean useless though, although it had grown dark and quiet down here, light and sound were not truly absent. With enough fine-tuned reinforcement of my eyes and ears, I could make my way through, and behold my destination in all its benighted glory. It was a cavern, because of course it was. Countless pipes like the one I had clambered through dotted the room, but my vision was dominated by five great trunk pipes, their cavernous maws spilling out liquids mundane and not, glowing darkly in all levels of my senses. Those fluids flowed down toward the center of the room, finally meeting together at what I could only describe as a cocoon, pulsing, trembling, perhaps even beating like a heart would. It was disgusting, awful, repulsive, but what I could detect from it felt almost undeniably human.
Taking a brief look around, I tried to uncover any other potential evidence or tools that I could use to resolve the situation. A conveniently large red off button would be nice, but I could never possibly be so lucky — the place looked abandoned, whatever that meant for a carved out space beneath the sewers of Tokyo. Considering what I managed to see and hear at closer observation, it was entirely possible it was intentional.
At each of the main trunk pipes, there laid a plinth of bone-white stone, covered in script and arrays that made my eyes hurt. On one laid a mountain of broken granite pillars with various names written on them, meaning they were likely hakaishi, family tombstones. The one next to it held a pile of old, discarded objects, looking like they were pulled from a landfill a century ago, ranging from broken swords and rusted helmets to half-rotten rickshaws and twisted railroad spikes. Lying upon the third was a scattered floor of broken mirrored glass — although the space was dark and unlit, shadows flickered through each shard. The one closest to me was a repository of what could only be misappropriated offerings, complete with half-burnt incense and money and food covered with mold, yet still uneaten by any scavengers or insects. Finally, the one furthest from me, in the direction that I instinctively just knew was directly aligned with the northeast, laid a pile of human remains, the ones with flesh still persisting on them somehow mummified, despite the damp and dank of the environment.
Underlying all of it was this incessant whistling, undoubtedly caused by the various pipes crisscrossing the stone walls of the cavern. On the surface it seemed like the wind, but if one listened closer, it almost sounded like whispers, just barely unintelligible even to my enhanced senses. I almost coughed up a laugh in response. The scene before me was practically artful in its desecration, but to go so far that they were invoking that old fairy tale was almost comical.
What wasn't comical was that what I saw before me was an array of negative geomancy so powerful, so plain in its blurring the boundary between the world of the living and the one of the dead, but near completely empty of anyone making use of it. The demesne that had been created had clearly taken a considerable amount of resources — all of this material, all of this spellwork, all of this spiritual architecture… and all of it had been left to rot. The presumed fruit of their labors, giant pulsating gray cocoon in the center of the cavern, had been left unguarded. The spirits that had been pumped out of here couldn't even be called security, considering the amount of work the knowledge in my head was telling me this had taken.
I wasn't sure what would even be considered a good outcome here. If the project had simply been abandoned, then the organization responsible regarded the resources invested in here irrelevant enough to discard, and had moved onto better horizons, whatever that meant. If the project was complete, then whatever was in that cocoon was probably going to hatch pretty soon, meaning that I needed to start working yesterday. And if the project was incomplete, then whoever was running this project was considered sufficient security for this project alone, and that meant that I really needed to get to work before they returned.
Ah, damn. I hadn't even graduated college yet, much less become a full-time employee of a proper company. There was nothing else to it, I supposed — it was time to engage in the time-honored tradition of the Japanese workplace: overtime.
Time was a rather subjective experience when there was work to be done. Sometimes it stretched and oozed like undercooked saltwater taffy that I had yet to nearly lose my teeth to in this life, and other times it dissolved in an instant, akin to cotton candy dissolving in water. The amount of confectionary comparisons on my mind was probably due to the fact that if I couldn't heal myself, I would have probably exsanguinated myself by the amount of blood I was using to modify the array around me. My mind may have been able to direct my body with supernatural precision and skill, but I could not yet manifest tools from thin air, and so I resorted to the only, and thus most potent magical ink I had access to.
Time was of the essence, and so I could not be as thorough as I wanted to be. There were any number of things I could have done, given enough time and resources. Perhaps I could have inverted the array into a ritual to bring in the light of the Sun, Moon, and Stars to purify the blasphemous ritual. Maybe I could have aligned the flow of the pipes into a Water-based array, isolating the nascent pseudo-underworld from the rest of the world and eased the passing of the restless dead by invoking the nearby Sumida River to cleanse their impurities. Or perhaps I could have neatly sealed off the area, burnt everything to ash with righteous Flame, and collapsed the whole rotten Cavern with a working of Earth. I could have done all of this, if I had just a little more time and any tools worth a damn.
But if wishes were fishes, the nuns wouldn't have had to skip meals to keep the rest of us fed, and so I worked with what I had. My left palm slit, I made use of the boundary the already present geomantic array had helpfully given me, creating a classic spiritual boundary. Circles were traced around the pipes, giving me a pathway to alter their flow when the time was right. And finally, I slapped my palm on each of the plinths, staining their bone-white facade with my ichor.
Once my work was finished, I healed my palm with a minor flex of my energy. Predictably, the ashen, pallid cocoon before me began to beat faster and faster in response, preparing to hatch. Well, if it wanted my energy so bad, it could have it.
I inhaled. The cocoon pulsed.
I took a stance. The cocoon shook.
I chambered my fist. The cocoon began to crack.
I cleared my mind. The cocoon twitched in my direction.
I struck. The world came apart in front of me.
The first sign that Plan A didn't work was the fact that the miasma didn't clear. The second was when a colossal skeletal fist wreathed in ghostly flame crashed into my crossed arms, forcing me back a few meters. Shifting, I gripped it with one arm and launched a strike with my other, only for the limb to disintegrate into a pile of… skulls?
Focusing my eyes through the now thickened-miasma, I looked for the source of the strike. I shouldn't have bothered though, because it rather obvious very quickly. The ash-gray cocoon had turned the same bone-white as the plinths I had stained earlier, and had a massive hole in it, one that I had placed and had a response sent back out of. Slowly, cracks began to stretch from the opening, spiderwebbing across until the top of it shattered as a massive, monstrous figure clambered out of it. Easily over ten meters tall and still growing, a gargantuan skeletal torso glared down at me, eyes aflame with hatred for everything alive, but me in particular. Maybe it was mad that I had punched it before it was even born, but frankly considering any signs of cracks and battle damage it retained was rapidly regenerating, all that told me was that I had held back too much for fear of damaging the city above, and I should have hit it a hell of a lot harder.
And so I did.
Stepping forward, I struck eight times all at once across the body of what could only be some kind of mutated Gashadokuro. Eight became sixteen, sixteen became thirty-two, and thirty-two became sixty-four as my fists, elbows, knees, and feet crashed into the skeleton, my limbs blurring faster and faster until the monstrous spirit had enough of getting constantly having to regenerate itself back into physical substance. Howling a silent scream, it detonated its body to blow me away, leaving only an ectoplasmic skull floating in the air. Its jaw unhinged, it began sucking in the miasma at a prodigious rate. Instead of rebuilding its body as it had before, however, an ominous light began to build within the head of the Gashadokuro.
If that was going to be some kind of beam attack, it could outright break the barrier, and that was unacceptable. I mentally sighed. It was unfortunate that I would have to play this card this early, but if it wasn't even going to bother to regenerate anymore, than now was the time to play it. With a stomp of my foot, the arrays written in my blood began to burn bright, infiltrating the pipelines of energy feeding the horrifically hungry spirit. Slowly, precipitiously, my reserves began to drop at a faster and faster rate, but it would be worth it, for just as the skeletal artillery battery was about to fire, its attack detonated prematurely. The portion of my life force it had consumed so greedily had destabilized the mass of energy, and energy did ever so love to undergo entropy.
And still, despite my released energies now burning away at the miasma, I knew for a fact that I couldn't let my guard down. Even as its physical form had temporarily dissipated, the half-broken cocoon it had erupted from still held a morass of undying, deathless energy. And perhaps sensing that I wasn't fooled by it attempting to play dead — or well, play deader, it did the only thing that had successfully managed to do so far in its unlife.
It exploded again.
Scattering apart its spawn-shell entirely, a cavalcade of skulls erupted, instantly filling the room through sheer volume. They gnashed, they consumed, but most importantly they continued to detonate, relentlessly releasing their hatred for existence at every instant. The miasma had become almost a physical thing as the ghostly skulls continued to set off each other, each chain reaction somehow fueling the fog to the point they could respawn the ossified bombs. At which point they would immediately begin to detonate on contact with something again, restarting the cycle.
For a brief moment, I thought that would be the end of it. Although plentiful, the deluge of explosions were individually weak and couldn't bypass my defenses when brought to bear. But I could never be so fortunate, for what enemy would spend its life for something fruitless? Even the meanest individual desired for their life to mean something, and so if it couldn't damage me, then it would do its level best to damage something. The circle of my blood had done excellently to keep the spirit from escaping through movement in this direction, it could do nothing about escaping into another.
Hadn't that been the whole principle of this place in the first place? To blur the boundary between the world of the living and that of the dead? To thin the barrier… between dimensions? The Gashadokuro didn't have any of the skill in arrays as its creator or I did, nor did it know the results of our actions, but what it did know was that something was weakened, that something could be broken, and that was enough for it. And if it succeeded, a portal to the Underworld, or even worse, the Dimensional Gap could be torn open, and there would be no going back from that.
I grit my teeth. If I struck at the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the wrong amount of force, I could bring that disaster from the immediate future to the here and now. And yet, if I didn't do anything, then that disaster would come anyways. Carefully and deliberately, I began to release the limiters of my power, the twin flames of my soul and life growing brighter and brighter, preparing to end it all with one strike. Finally released from my control, the excess Battle Aura and touki began to fill the room at a quicker and quicker rate, meeting the boundary I had constructed and enveloping the cavern. My mind began to empty itself, clearing itself of the frantic thoughts that had occupied it, and I steadily became one with the world—
—and then a memory, a revelation struck.
North God Style was the natural counter to Water God Style, for Water God Style relied on its ability to read the flow of battle and its nigh-absolute defensive and counterattacking techniques. Although well-suited against Sword God Style's aggressive and strike-first philosophy, North God Style's unpredictability and adaptability was anathema to the Water God's techniques.
But if simple "type advantage" was sufficient to guarantee victory, then who would ever bother attempt to train properly? Simply just learn a few techniques from each style and achieve victory in an endless rock-paper-scissors. Refusing to pollute her martial path nor concede advantage to a bunch of feckless scoundrals, a Water God Style swordswoman dove deeper, deeper, and deeper, learning the most difficult techniques of the Style.
If North God Style had a technique for every situation, then she would create a technique that would be able to counter all of theirs. If their unpredictability and adaptability was the danger, then she would simply become able to read every single one of their attacks and strike back.
After years of refinement, she finally revealed it, and the world would know a new Water God—
I wasn't that Water God. Hell, I couldn't even call myself a North God. But I didn't need to be. Every single skull in here was marked by my life. This entire cavern was bounded by my blood. In this space, there was not a single thing that could escape my reach.
I closed off each and every one of my senses. My eyes. My ears. My nose. My touch. My tongue. All that was left was my newfound senjutsu, and that closed down, down, down until all that I knew was what existed within this cavern.
I was still. The world was not.
I made it so.
It's an infuriating feeling, having the capability to help people, truly help people, and not be able to use it for fear of consequences. It was something that I had already been dealing with, having grown strong as I had, but it was easy enough to push past when your greatest strengths are the ability to apply violence. On a day to day basis, most people don't really need the help from someone with the ability to blow up mountains. I could content myself with the necessity of needing to practice my control first or risk blowing up mountains of people instead, as well as the fact that I was already applying myself in the defense of others.
That equation changed when I gained the ability to heal others. It had been one of my most cherished dreams to be able to heal others in another life, and it had extended over into this one as well. How could it not have? Japan had escaped the SARS pandemic that had swept over Asia in the early 2000s, but that didn't mean that it escaped all respiratory diseases, or just diseases in general. The incidence of tuberculosis in Japan was something like 34 per 100,000 on average, the highest of any industrialized nation, but in where I grew up in Shinjuku-ku? In the late 90s, it had reached to close to triple that, about 90 per 100,000. Such a disparity was a matter of course, because although it had even reached even into the Imperial Household, the place it was most prevalent was the bottom-most rungs of society, for that was where the neglected elderly lay.
It's probably unsurprising to most people, but Japan had some of the largest proportion of elderly people in comparison to the relative population, and they had been through a lot. They had endured Imperial Japan, they had endured the Pacific War, and naturally they had endured the postwar period — the one where tuberculosis had been the leading cause of death in the shattered country, in a time where the pharmacological treatment had been not even a decade old. But those elders had fought, they had endured, and had survived. People had thought that Japan had triumphed over the disease, as Japan passed the Tuberculosis Control Law, and the nascent World Health Organization garnered funding and enacted a plan of mass administration of the Bacillus Calmette-Guérin vaccination. But unfortunately, victory wasn't so simple.
Surviving tuberculosis didn't guarantee that the disease was completely eradicated from the body — no, the disease was a sick bastard that could survive within the body for years without being symptomatic, thanks to the ability to hide within the immune cells of the host that would normally kill it, waiting, lurking, for the opportune time. And what better time could it be than when its host became advanced in age, their immune systems weakening, allowing for the disease to erupt and rage throughout the body?
And so the disease erupted, like some awful culmination of all of the country's sins coming together at once. Perhaps that phrasing was a touch too dramatic, considering that tuberculosis had a worldwide resurgence, in that time as the world cut funding towards public health infrastructure, but considering what I saw and remembered, I knew it was but a premonition of things to come. With the country's elderly population the highest it had ever been in proportion to the population, many got infected from the older generation, but it wouldn't have nearly gotten so bad if screenings were done early and people actually regularly checked on them, or if those older individuals could even afford regular healthcare. Between the stagnant economy, the burst of the asset price bubble, and the proportionally lower amount of youth contributing to the Government Pension Investment Fund, something close to one in five seniors were below the poverty line, as their pensions — if they even had one, like many widowed or divorced former housewives did not — were unable to keep them afloat. They settled into a part of society that few looked at, where so many fell to kodokushi, the lonely death where their corpses could lay for weeks to months without discovery.
That underclass where it was not convenient for society to observe was where the disease incubated and raged. Places where the traditional feudal underclass, or where minorities like the Chinese or Korean immigrants were sequestered away from the public eye, were prime locations for the disease to spread thanks to lack of healthcare access and thus screening. Locations where there were high amount of migrant or unhoused workers, as welfare often needed a permanent address for assistance, and thus those populations were simply not acknowledged. That lack of attention proved critical for the disease's spread, with places like Osaka and our very own Tokyo proving to be the highest incidences in the nation.
Once the fire started burning, the government naturally took action. A public health emergency was declared. Public investment poured into hokenjo, public health centers strategically placed in locations where the disease were most endemic to screen for those infected, their success rate increasing as they could identify the latent disease beyond the background interference of the vaccine. Regular screenings and checkups identified people infected more rapidly and those who had fallen ill were quarantined appropriately in separate hospital wards, breaking the chain of transmission. A coordinated effort with investment from all parts of the public took place, from schoolteachers to drugstore employees to assisted living facility workers, disseminating information and reporting potential incidences. Welfare was expanded as the eyes of the government was forced to acknowledge those it had ignored for so long, guaranteeing provision of medication and treatment. After nearly a decade of effort, Japan had fallen back to a low-incidence rate of tuberculosis, which was something to be applauded and a testament to its healthcare system and public health offices when fully pushed into action.
But things weren't so easily out of sight, out of mind. Not for those of us who lived with it, for those who knew the victims. Tuberculosis was not a disease that was easily treated, and when it became an epidemic, things could become disastrous. Active treatment of tuberculosis took about one to two months of treatment with the correct antibiotics, and continuing treatment afterward to ensure the eradication of the disease within the body to ensure antibiotic resistance was not inculcated could take another two to even seven months. And resistance was absolutely a concern — tuberculosis was terrifyingly adaptable, and treatment for thoat disease could take close to even two years.
There were people I still knew who were still afflicted with that disease, imprisoned in a hospital bed, struggling to breathe. People who I could heal with the wave of my hand and some expenditure of energy, for what lay within me was an energy that healed not just my allies but eradicated my enemies, and what was an infection but a particularly small, persistent enemy?
And those people, I couldn't help freely, for fear of capture, of imprisonment, of conscription. I had asked around, and it had been as I remembered. Healing, true, indiscriminate healing that could be easily applied to anyone was a capability that was beyond rare. Phenex Tears would have been valuable, but not the nigh-mythological commodity that it was outside of Hell if that wasn't the case, and so the Devils and the Grigori searched for methods of healing not limited by divine grace or limited bloodline, and would do anything to obtain it. Extracting an innocent nun's Sacred Gear was a matter of course, and mental alteration magic would be more than on the table for the ability I now controlled.
It was sickening, it was infuriating, but it was reality. A reality I was not strong enough to contest, like so many other things. And yet, even so. Life went on. If I could not change things I did not control, then I would use the gifts I had to change what I could.
And so I descended into the labyrinth within Tokyo once again, a fox-faced masked affixed to my face.
"Securing" the Tokyo wastewater sewer system was an entirely different beast from G-Cans. The Metropolitan Area Outer Underground Discharge Channel, while not quite dry, was open to access to the public in the non-rainy season for a reason. It was a stormwater diversion system that was essentially a massive underground river, diverting floodwaters to the Edogawa river. It was disconnected from the actual sewer system, which although was 80% a combined system of stormwater and wastewater, remained in constant use.
That meant being able to manually tag and secure the entire system was out of the question. The majority of the system were in pipes too small to traverse — although I heard tell of robots being used in the future to maintain pipes too small for humans, as of right now inspections for those pipes were done through remote-controlled CCTV cameras pushed through pipes, and if inspections found something, then they'd have to be dug up and fixed. And so instead of going into each pipe and applying ofuda, the shrines had decided to implement "arrays" of particularly powerful talismans in the correct areas, something they had been working on for the past few years to implement.
Such a task was easier and harder than it sounded like. Easier, in some ways, because the city formerly known as Edo sat on a number of powerful Dragon Lines, and with space at such a premium economy, even supernatural geography had been taken into account for city planning. Shinto clergy were already consulted to bless and approve of sites before construction began — when the first modern sewer was constructed in Tokyo in the late 19th century, they were there too, and so the shrines, when putting together their records and the mundane Sewage Mapping and Information System from the municipal government, had a surprisingly accurate map and jump-off point for their plans.
However, that still meant people had to traverse underneath the ground to clear out if not all, at least most of what lay beneath the city. It wouldn't do for the arrays to be activated, only to enrage hundreds of beasts that lay beneath the city and cause mass disruption of a city already straining at the seams. And so here I was, walking through one of the sewer's "trunk lines," placing ofuda at whichever interval and opening deemed necessary by the planners of the operation.
In order to sustain operations down here, as well as not keel over from the smell despite my enhanced senses, I had a fox mask covering my face, the disguise kit providing an airtight seal over my face. Nishina-san's shrine didn't have the most ideal kami to petition for this, but Susano-no-Mikoto was a kami whose domain governed wind, while Inari Ōkami had quite the broad domain, one of which included success. Both of their ofuda were affixed to the inside of the mask, recycling the air I exhaled while filtering in further oxygen from the air outside. While it wasn't fully necessary, I'd be given a general warning if the air suddenly became "unclean."
If the onmyōdō some of the shrines had contacted could have spared some time, I was sure that they could've conjured up some useful spells or enchantments, but I heard that due to not needing to care so much about misogi, or ritual purification, they and their shikigami were being put to quite the work down in the sewers. Between scouting out pipes that CCTV cameras could not get into or combating any creatures that were too small for us to access and couldn't section off, they had quite the workload. I had always thought that kan no mushi only inhabited the insides of people, but apparently there had been an entire nest inhabiting a blocked off sewage pipe.
Despite being effectively sent off alone with a couple prayers and good luck, I could only count myself lucky I didn't have to deal that. Instead, I just had to walk a kilometer or two a day in the cavernous trunk lines beneath the already labyrinthine underground of Tokyo. Coordination with the city government allowed me a choice manhole to drop down in, and I scouted out any potential unauthorized alterations while I was placing the talismans in the wall. As my sense of smell had been essentially sealed off eyes the easiest to fool, I spent a significant amount of my concentration clicking my tongue while focusing a significant amount of my Battle Aura into my ears. Echolocation in tunnels with acoustics like these had been a… godsend… and I had found a few sealed off tunnels. They could have been old construction as they looked as if they hadn't been used in decades, but they hadn't been marked down, so recorded they were.
Fortunately for my tongue and the roof of my mouth, my career as a human sonar was coming to a close soon today. Walking on the concrete ledge that kept me away from the undoubtedly lovely-smelling sewage rushing underneath, I eyed the branching "pathway" in front of me. If I was right, I'd be right at the border of another ward, marking off this as the border between Shinjuku-ku and another metaphysical "zone." Giving a mental shrug, I started laying down my last few tags, preparing to seal off the underside of the Shinjuku-ku properly. Doing so aboveground would've most likely been seen as an unforgivable attack on certain inhabitants of Kabukicho, but nobody was supposed to be in the sewers, so apparently if they had a problem, the onus would be on them.
That being said, they hadn't been informed. When I had reported the stray devil warrior that had been wreathed in ghostly armor, the figurative alarm bells hadn't so much as rung but rather blasted off the walls. The fact that the Church had Light Weaponry was one of the main counterweights to the steadily rising Devil population in the wake of the postwar period and the sticky marsh of the Lost Decade's collapsed asset market, but if a cut-rate Stray Devil had been able to gather enough restless spirits to forge sufficient protection to be able to singlehandedly take down an entire Church Exorcist hit squad, unprepared or not, then that was a serious potential risk to the already simmering city.
And thus, we couldn't afford leaks — especially given how it was entirely possible that the yakuza possibly had contacts with Stray networks, whether they be Exorcists or Devils. "As above, so below," and just as the Three Factions had locked in their official contacts, the "rivers and lakes" and "chivalrous organizations" of Tokyo had been made offers as well. Strays didn't have access to the endless "mortal" resources anyone from the Three Factions who did business in the Human World had, so in exchange for a little supernatural muscle and help, those Strays who had access to sufficient mental faculties got access to the yakuza's grey market dominance of semi-legal cash-heavy businesses.
It was a risky proposition on both sides — one never knew when the figurative tiger of a Stray's mental health that one was riding would bite you, and on the other hand, while officially there was a crackdown on yakuza entering sacred spaces, there was a reason why one could often see them at the fringes in festivals wearing their tattoos openly while carting around ornate mikoshi, miniature shrines on palanquins. In a world where there were three clear superpowers, one couldn't easily refuse allies. There was a reason why the Five Clans and the Youkai Factions still talked to each other, despite everything.
These thoughts filled my head as I cracked my neck, looking at the last spot I'd have to lay down the ofuda. It was still a little surprising that with open tunnels in front of me, this was still a "border," but if it had been good enough for the designers and priests half a century ago, it was good enough for me. I laid the talisman and to my surprise, a golden light flared out through the tunnel, networks of lines tracing between each and every ofuda I had placed over the past day, and suddenly I was everything, everywhere, all at once—
I s-s-saw—
I h-h-heard—
I s-s-smelled—
I f-f-felt—
I t-t-tasted—
—great rivers of energy that underlaid Creation. No — no, these were no mere rivers, but enormous serpentine dragons that moved underneath the great metropolis and beyond. Their scales were brilliant, eightfold in iridescence: sunlit gold, shining silver, glimmering steel, burning crimson, flowing azure, rippling sable, steadfast alabaster, and vivacious green. Glorious as they were, they were still stained by the world, bloated with pollution in the Depths they were. And yet, despite everything yet still they remained: ever-moving, ever ever-present. Influenced, tapped, and even redirected, their existence could not be denied, not by mere rot, and-and-and—
—a cacophonous noise coming out of the the jaws of each and every dragon, something that I had never heard yet had always been there, my ears finally unsealed to the voice of all things. And yet, what came out of the maws of Creation was no mere cry of a beast. No, it was something something different, but could not be anything else. The roar of the dragons was that of life and so it was: the cries of children being born. The despairing sobs of those who were about to die. The wailing of the unquiet dead, the people left behind by the "times," all those who were too inconvenient to look at. The struggling, the striving, the strong and weak alike — a song of survival and the journey beyond—
—a thousand thousand traces of existence, invading my senses? Within them were odors and scents and aromas, drawn into my "self" in a sucking, gasping breath. Within that first inhalation carried the vitality of millions, within the flow was the stink of rot. Flowers blooming relentlessly, disease spreading aplenty, the finest perfume afloat, viscera spilt by a blade, the breath of a wok, spoilt food vomited out, the unmistakable presence of life, the unmistakable trail of death. H-h-humans weren't meant to sense this with every breath-
—waves and waves of energy pushing into my body, my n-n-nerves? meridians? circuits? straining at the seams. The sight and noise and scent of millions of living beings slammed into me like, no, as a physical force, my mind finally forced to remember it had a body by the screams of my organs bursting with energy they didn't have the capacity to handle. It was too much, too loud, too overwhelming, the furnace of my brain alight attempting to process it all. My arms had somehow stretched out in a futile attempt to shield myself from it all, but inadvertently as my limbs reached out, what lay behind them reached out in turn. My mind — soul — identity were drowning under the flow of Life, tossed into a current that I couldn't make heads of tails of, the flow of Creation battering at my existence. The movement of all things was sweeping me away, constantly demanding that "I" justify my existence. Who was "I"? What truly laid within my "body"? Was this truly my "self"? I couldn't answer, my b-b-being frozen as I felt what must have been only a few centimeters away-
—blood.
My jaws slammed shut around my tongue, and if I had the ability, I would have screamed. Vomit and spittle and bile had ejected themselves from my esophagus mere moments earlier, but the acidity of stomach acid was now but a memory, for all that I knew now was the taste of iron filling my mouth. I almost attempted to wrench my jaw open before I regained the presence of mind that I had limiter seals within my bag. Taking them out deliberately, because there was a very real risk I could tear them just by holding them, I applied them as swift as I could.
Immediately they started glowing and smoking — I had a very limited amount of time before things started to go drastically wrong. The nature of my energy meant that the bleeding in my mouth had already stopped and my organs were being repaired as soon as they were damaged, but that wasn't a sustainable state of affairs. And so I closed my eyes, slipping into a half-meditative state but carefully keeping myself from falling into the abyss that had drowned me earlier.
Just like when I had woken up a month ago, or when the omamori had detonated when I fought the gaki, a deluge of knowledge had deposited itself within my memory, although at the very least this time it had at least half-provided an explanation for itself. The wave of energy had been the ofuda array interacting with some measure of redirection of the Dragon Lines beneath Tokyo, something I could only decipher with my apparent new skills as a… I could only call it as a Feng Shui practitioner.
Within my brain now laid countless arrays to be used to gather and redirect various forms of natural and elemental energy, as well as the ability to harness it. The attack on my senses had been due to my newfound ability to directly perceive such networks, and unfortunately for me, the ability to perceive was rather directly connected to the ability to connect. Natural energy had poured into my body, and it was only thanks to my forcibly altered body and internal energy constantly healing the damage that I had survived — unlocking what I could only ironically refer to as touki, or the Battle Aura native to this world.
Unfortunately though, flaring such a massive amount of energy in the sewers, however recently this section had been cleared, had consequences. Consequences being creatures that were sensitive to the flow of life, either in hunger of it, or so very aware of the dangers of it wielded by someone or something else. And it seemed that down here in the underbelly of Tokyo, by and large the ghosts were like everything and everyone else in this city, in this era.
Hungry.
In my first encounter with the gaki of Tokyo, I was ambushed, the creature setting itself upon me, intending to devour someone unable to defend themselves. In my subsequent encounters with the starving spirits beneath the City, I allowed them to attack me, inverting the advantages of their ambush by forcing them to attack me on prepared ground. Now…
Now I was going on the offensive properly.
"Grrr-ack—!" A flick of my finger crushed a behemoth's throat.
"LOVELOVELO-urk—" Enveloped in a dull glow, a pebble caved in a humanoid mass' chest.
"Skreeee-ke-ke-ke…" Seeing a centipede-shaped creature skittering before me, I leapt forward and used its head as a stepping stone, neatly decapitating it.
I was killing the creatures in droves despite being in their territory, thanks to one very simple fact — just as I could now amplify my lifeforce, I could also suppress its presence. Although my grasp on the finer nuances of what must have been senjutsu and touki were still rudimentary, combined with the lessons of North God Style that I had engraved into my memory, it was essentially impossible for the maddened spirits that lay in the depths of the sewers to detect me before I could attack.
…that being said, it wasn't these spirits I was worried about.
My newfound access to senjutsu had two main consequences. First had been the unshackling of my life force — even now that I had suppressed it far below what it had originally been, it had still flared for an indeterminate amount of time until I regained my senses. Secondly was that my senses had expanded massively, and they had mapped out the surrounding areas in far greater depth than what had originally been given to me. Which was a matter of course, because the maps the shrines had constructed were that of the sewers — and what I had detected, in that moment, was something further beneath.
It wasn't necessarily something physical, although part of it certainly was. If it had merely been a massive physical cavern, I was sure just passive checks through mundane or magical seismic mapping would've determined the location. And it wasn't just a sheer mass of energy — even if senjutsu users were rare, considering the presence of so many major Inari shrines, much less the importance of Tokyo itself, a Sage should have checked on Tokyo itself at least somewhat regularly. I was a mere initiate, and as much knowledge as had been dumped into my head, it wasn't as focused on the subject as what an actual Sage would have been, considering yōkai lifespans. No, what had truly tipped me off was my newfound knowledge of arrays and the construction of facilities that could truly tap into the energy that flowed underneath the skin of the world.
Somehow, some way, the miasma of negativity incubated by the millions-strong inhabitants of Tokyo had not just been sinking underneath the city. It had been channeled, redirected along the lines carefully laid out by decades of civil and magical engineering, into what was essentially metaphysically a pot, steaming and bubbling. And now that pot, fed by over a decade of misery from a population fully recovered from the war, was now boiling over.
Although I had my suspicions on why and how this was happening, whether or not intentional sabotage was at fault was irrelevant. There was a ticking time bomb beneath the city and in the throes of my forcible enlightenment, I had felt it shift, move, twitch, like it was preparing to wake up, in response to an overwhelming amount of life energy in relative close proximity. My life energy. Because no matter how it had been cultivated or shaped, what negativity always craved in some way was to fill the hole in its existence — so if I was the one responsible for knocking down the final domino of this disaster, then I would be the one to end it.
As I advanced deeper into the depths of what quite possibly was the remnants of nineteenth century pipework, the miasma became thicker and thicker. If it wasn't for the fox-faced mask I wore right now, I was sure I wouldn't be able to draw breath at all. Never before was I so thankful for the fact that it was sealed flush to my face — just because I was fairly certain I could survive hypoxia as of the last fifteen minutes didn't mean that I wanted to test it out. With the light of the tunnels thoroughly behind me, conventional senses had become more and more limited as well, as it was getting to the point I had a better sense of reference with my half-baked skill in senjutsu with its sensitivity to negativity more than anything else.
Limited did not mean useless though, although it had grown dark and quiet down here, light and sound were not truly absent. With enough fine-tuned reinforcement of my eyes and ears, I could make my way through, and behold my destination in all its benighted glory. It was a cavern, because of course it was. Countless pipes like the one I had clambered through dotted the room, but my vision was dominated by five great trunk pipes, their cavernous maws spilling out liquids mundane and not, glowing darkly in all levels of my senses. Those fluids flowed down toward the center of the room, finally meeting together at what I could only describe as a cocoon, pulsing, trembling, perhaps even beating like a heart would. It was disgusting, awful, repulsive, but what I could detect from it felt almost undeniably human.
Taking a brief look around, I tried to uncover any other potential evidence or tools that I could use to resolve the situation. A conveniently large red off button would be nice, but I could never possibly be so lucky — the place looked abandoned, whatever that meant for a carved out space beneath the sewers of Tokyo. Considering what I managed to see and hear at closer observation, it was entirely possible it was intentional.
At each of the main trunk pipes, there laid a plinth of bone-white stone, covered in script and arrays that made my eyes hurt. On one laid a mountain of broken granite pillars with various names written on them, meaning they were likely hakaishi, family tombstones. The one next to it held a pile of old, discarded objects, looking like they were pulled from a landfill a century ago, ranging from broken swords and rusted helmets to half-rotten rickshaws and twisted railroad spikes. Lying upon the third was a scattered floor of broken mirrored glass — although the space was dark and unlit, shadows flickered through each shard. The one closest to me was a repository of what could only be misappropriated offerings, complete with half-burnt incense and money and food covered with mold, yet still uneaten by any scavengers or insects. Finally, the one furthest from me, in the direction that I instinctively just knew was directly aligned with the northeast, laid a pile of human remains, the ones with flesh still persisting on them somehow mummified, despite the damp and dank of the environment.
Underlying all of it was this incessant whistling, undoubtedly caused by the various pipes crisscrossing the stone walls of the cavern. On the surface it seemed like the wind, but if one listened closer, it almost sounded like whispers, just barely unintelligible even to my enhanced senses. I almost coughed up a laugh in response. The scene before me was practically artful in its desecration, but to go so far that they were invoking that old fairy tale was almost comical.
What wasn't comical was that what I saw before me was an array of negative geomancy so powerful, so plain in its blurring the boundary between the world of the living and the one of the dead, but near completely empty of anyone making use of it. The demesne that had been created had clearly taken a considerable amount of resources — all of this material, all of this spellwork, all of this spiritual architecture… and all of it had been left to rot. The presumed fruit of their labors, giant pulsating gray cocoon in the center of the cavern, had been left unguarded. The spirits that had been pumped out of here couldn't even be called security, considering the amount of work the knowledge in my head was telling me this had taken.
I wasn't sure what would even be considered a good outcome here. If the project had simply been abandoned, then the organization responsible regarded the resources invested in here irrelevant enough to discard, and had moved onto better horizons, whatever that meant. If the project was complete, then whatever was in that cocoon was probably going to hatch pretty soon, meaning that I needed to start working yesterday. And if the project was incomplete, then whoever was running this project was considered sufficient security for this project alone, and that meant that I really needed to get to work before they returned.
Ah, damn. I hadn't even graduated college yet, much less become a full-time employee of a proper company. There was nothing else to it, I supposed — it was time to engage in the time-honored tradition of the Japanese workplace: overtime.
Time was a rather subjective experience when there was work to be done. Sometimes it stretched and oozed like undercooked saltwater taffy that I had yet to nearly lose my teeth to in this life, and other times it dissolved in an instant, akin to cotton candy dissolving in water. The amount of confectionary comparisons on my mind was probably due to the fact that if I couldn't heal myself, I would have probably exsanguinated myself by the amount of blood I was using to modify the array around me. My mind may have been able to direct my body with supernatural precision and skill, but I could not yet manifest tools from thin air, and so I resorted to the only, and thus most potent magical ink I had access to.
Time was of the essence, and so I could not be as thorough as I wanted to be. There were any number of things I could have done, given enough time and resources. Perhaps I could have inverted the array into a ritual to bring in the light of the Sun, Moon, and Stars to purify the blasphemous ritual. Maybe I could have aligned the flow of the pipes into a Water-based array, isolating the nascent pseudo-underworld from the rest of the world and eased the passing of the restless dead by invoking the nearby Sumida River to cleanse their impurities. Or perhaps I could have neatly sealed off the area, burnt everything to ash with righteous Flame, and collapsed the whole rotten Cavern with a working of Earth. I could have done all of this, if I had just a little more time and any tools worth a damn.
But if wishes were fishes, the nuns wouldn't have had to skip meals to keep the rest of us fed, and so I worked with what I had. My left palm slit, I made use of the boundary the already present geomantic array had helpfully given me, creating a classic spiritual boundary. Circles were traced around the pipes, giving me a pathway to alter their flow when the time was right. And finally, I slapped my palm on each of the plinths, staining their bone-white facade with my ichor.
Once my work was finished, I healed my palm with a minor flex of my energy. Predictably, the ashen, pallid cocoon before me began to beat faster and faster in response, preparing to hatch. Well, if it wanted my energy so bad, it could have it.
I inhaled. The cocoon pulsed.
I took a stance. The cocoon shook.
I chambered my fist. The cocoon began to crack.
I cleared my mind. The cocoon twitched in my direction.
I struck. The world came apart in front of me.
The first sign that Plan A didn't work was the fact that the miasma didn't clear. The second was when a colossal skeletal fist wreathed in ghostly flame crashed into my crossed arms, forcing me back a few meters. Shifting, I gripped it with one arm and launched a strike with my other, only for the limb to disintegrate into a pile of… skulls?
Focusing my eyes through the now thickened-miasma, I looked for the source of the strike. I shouldn't have bothered though, because it rather obvious very quickly. The ash-gray cocoon had turned the same bone-white as the plinths I had stained earlier, and had a massive hole in it, one that I had placed and had a response sent back out of. Slowly, cracks began to stretch from the opening, spiderwebbing across until the top of it shattered as a massive, monstrous figure clambered out of it. Easily over ten meters tall and still growing, a gargantuan skeletal torso glared down at me, eyes aflame with hatred for everything alive, but me in particular. Maybe it was mad that I had punched it before it was even born, but frankly considering any signs of cracks and battle damage it retained was rapidly regenerating, all that told me was that I had held back too much for fear of damaging the city above, and I should have hit it a hell of a lot harder.
And so I did.
Stepping forward, I struck eight times all at once across the body of what could only be some kind of mutated Gashadokuro. Eight became sixteen, sixteen became thirty-two, and thirty-two became sixty-four as my fists, elbows, knees, and feet crashed into the skeleton, my limbs blurring faster and faster until the monstrous spirit had enough of getting constantly having to regenerate itself back into physical substance. Howling a silent scream, it detonated its body to blow me away, leaving only an ectoplasmic skull floating in the air. Its jaw unhinged, it began sucking in the miasma at a prodigious rate. Instead of rebuilding its body as it had before, however, an ominous light began to build within the head of the Gashadokuro.
If that was going to be some kind of beam attack, it could outright break the barrier, and that was unacceptable. I mentally sighed. It was unfortunate that I would have to play this card this early, but if it wasn't even going to bother to regenerate anymore, than now was the time to play it. With a stomp of my foot, the arrays written in my blood began to burn bright, infiltrating the pipelines of energy feeding the horrifically hungry spirit. Slowly, precipitiously, my reserves began to drop at a faster and faster rate, but it would be worth it, for just as the skeletal artillery battery was about to fire, its attack detonated prematurely. The portion of my life force it had consumed so greedily had destabilized the mass of energy, and energy did ever so love to undergo entropy.
And still, despite my released energies now burning away at the miasma, I knew for a fact that I couldn't let my guard down. Even as its physical form had temporarily dissipated, the half-broken cocoon it had erupted from still held a morass of undying, deathless energy. And perhaps sensing that I wasn't fooled by it attempting to play dead — or well, play deader, it did the only thing that had successfully managed to do so far in its unlife.
It exploded again.
Scattering apart its spawn-shell entirely, a cavalcade of skulls erupted, instantly filling the room through sheer volume. They gnashed, they consumed, but most importantly they continued to detonate, relentlessly releasing their hatred for existence at every instant. The miasma had become almost a physical thing as the ghostly skulls continued to set off each other, each chain reaction somehow fueling the fog to the point they could respawn the ossified bombs. At which point they would immediately begin to detonate on contact with something again, restarting the cycle.
For a brief moment, I thought that would be the end of it. Although plentiful, the deluge of explosions were individually weak and couldn't bypass my defenses when brought to bear. But I could never be so fortunate, for what enemy would spend its life for something fruitless? Even the meanest individual desired for their life to mean something, and so if it couldn't damage me, then it would do its level best to damage something. The circle of my blood had done excellently to keep the spirit from escaping through movement in this direction, it could do nothing about escaping into another.
Hadn't that been the whole principle of this place in the first place? To blur the boundary between the world of the living and that of the dead? To thin the barrier… between dimensions? The Gashadokuro didn't have any of the skill in arrays as its creator or I did, nor did it know the results of our actions, but what it did know was that something was weakened, that something could be broken, and that was enough for it. And if it succeeded, a portal to the Underworld, or even worse, the Dimensional Gap could be torn open, and there would be no going back from that.
I grit my teeth. If I struck at the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the wrong amount of force, I could bring that disaster from the immediate future to the here and now. And yet, if I didn't do anything, then that disaster would come anyways. Carefully and deliberately, I began to release the limiters of my power, the twin flames of my soul and life growing brighter and brighter, preparing to end it all with one strike. Finally released from my control, the excess Battle Aura and touki began to fill the room at a quicker and quicker rate, meeting the boundary I had constructed and enveloping the cavern. My mind began to empty itself, clearing itself of the frantic thoughts that had occupied it, and I steadily became one with the world—
—and then a memory, a revelation struck.
North God Style was the natural counter to Water God Style, for Water God Style relied on its ability to read the flow of battle and its nigh-absolute defensive and counterattacking techniques. Although well-suited against Sword God Style's aggressive and strike-first philosophy, North God Style's unpredictability and adaptability was anathema to the Water God's techniques.
But if simple "type advantage" was sufficient to guarantee victory, then who would ever bother attempt to train properly? Simply just learn a few techniques from each style and achieve victory in an endless rock-paper-scissors. Refusing to pollute her martial path nor concede advantage to a bunch of feckless scoundrals, a Water God Style swordswoman dove deeper, deeper, and deeper, learning the most difficult techniques of the Style.
If North God Style had a technique for every situation, then she would create a technique that would be able to counter all of theirs. If their unpredictability and adaptability was the danger, then she would simply become able to read every single one of their attacks and strike back.
After years of refinement, she finally revealed it, and the world would know a new Water God—
I wasn't that Water God. Hell, I couldn't even call myself a North God. But I didn't need to be. Every single skull in here was marked by my life. This entire cavern was bounded by my blood. In this space, there was not a single thing that could escape my reach.
I closed off each and every one of my senses. My eyes. My ears. My nose. My touch. My tongue. All that was left was my newfound senjutsu, and that closed down, down, down until all that I knew was what existed within this cavern.
I was still. The world was not.
I made it so.
Wow, it's almost been a month since I updated. Yikes, that's rough, but IRL takes precedence, haha... not a great experience to be running on four hours of sleep for two weeks straight. I managed to put in a few hundred words here and there, but boy was that not a great experience. Chapter sucks real bad because of that, sorry, but I just had to get it done. With this chapter, Haru's... mostly done with Tokyo, save for a few loose ends. I originally had this plan to show how the Old Satan Faction had bought up a lot of territory to do chicanery with their resources buying up real estate after the bubble popped, leaving various Devil investors in Tokyo sitting with bad debt, but I just didn't have the time and energy to do that, so I decided to just slam through it with raw power and leave the investigation into how this occurred to the Shrines instead. Sorry, guys.
Anyways, rolls--
Eight-Fold Geomantic Mastery
200 CP
You possess the inherent understanding and skill with geomancy and the manipulation of natural energies such that you may now create manses in any area where such a thing could conceivably be created. The stronger the mystic or magical significance of a given place the more powerful the manse that can be built there, but even in the barest and most mystically barren areas you will still be capable of producing, given some time, a manse of the least (1-dot) power. The process of creating a Manse is tremendously faster for you than it would be for others, the necessary geomantic arrays and arrangements seeming to simply leap to your mind with a clarity of insight few if any could match. The Eight-Fold part of it is that you understand the methods for creating manses aspected towards all five of the elemental essences of fire, earth, wind, water, and wood as well as manses aspected towards solar, lunar, and stellar (sidereal) energies. Given time and effort you may discern methods for creating other types of manse, twisted mockeries of what nature intended, but such insights will take considerable effort, time, and resources to bear fruit. Taking this perk explicitly allows you to create manses even outside of Creation and, indeed, is the only way to create manses outside of Creation.
Source: Generic Exalted, Chapter: Talent
24000 Words, 450 CP => 250 CP, Hit
Prosperity of the Sun
600 CP
War and blood does not build a nation, shining wonders do not create happiness in one's people, and Exaltation does not make one inherently fit as a ruler. You are unique in that you have internalized these truths and fully understand what is needed to create true prosperity in both yourself and your subjects. You understand economics and politics with complete mastery of both, but you also know how to build a lasting nation or organization that can sustain itself without you having to constantly reinforce it with Charms or other abilities. In addition, changes you make in the world...whether building monuments, kingdoms, or slaying a great menace will have a permanent and lasting effect - your dynasty will last for thousands of years beyond your own era, your legend is told for many years to come, and your cities will be full of life even if the world around it should be torn apart. This effect can be mitigated or 'turned off' at your leisure if you prefer subtlety or impermanence.
Source: Solars Exalted, Chapter: Talent
26000 Words, 350 CP, Miss
Miracle
600 CP
A power that humanity holds, that even the Gods are wary of, is that of being able to make their dreams a reality through love and honor. A piece of that power now follows you. When you confront an insurmountable or otherwise unstoppable foe or obstacle, with no way to win, the winds of karma will swing the odds in your favor - a character flaw in the enemy's heart causes them to waver, a weakness is revealed, or they make a glaring mistake when fighting you. This will create an opportunity, however small, for you to capitalize on and perhaps seize victory...but such chances, such miracles, will only happen once against said foe. I hope you use it wisely.
Source: Saint Seiya : The Original Series, Chapter: Source
28000 Words, 450 CP, Miss
Is it possible to learn this power? Not from the protagonist.
400 CP
With the upcoming changes in the world, or even just by playing Neolife, you're undoubtedly going to come into the possession of many new skills and abilities. But is it really the strength of his powers that defines a man? No, it is how he uses said powers. Well, using them better is mainly to get even more powerful, but you get the gist. And with this perk you get it even more. Using your abilities to their fullest potential is child's play to you, and you can easily use several abilities you have in tandem to amplify their strength beyond what might be expected of them. What's more, you also have a talent at coming up with entirely new techniques and and ways to use any powers you have for most any situation you can think of. If you have the Fire affinity, you won't even need to think for a second before realizing that you can also use it to pull fire mana out of an object to freeze it, and having to shoot your enemies with twenty variations of elemental beams will be a thing of the past. You also possess the mental faculties to actually question how your powers work, and if you ever used shadow magic, you would surely recognize that it could only work if a seperate shadow realm existed. So rest assured, as with these gifts you'll never need a divine intervention to actually use the vast power you have gained.
Source: World Seed, Chapter: Talent
30000 Words, 550 CP => 150 CP, Hit
Genuinely hysterical set of rolls (what the fuck is Prosperity of the Sun doing here, lmfao. That would've solved so much of Haru's problems it wouldn't even have been funny, crazy it was just barely missed, not that they'll ever know). Geomantic is nonsense and has caused Haru to firmly tip into Ultimate Class as "manipulation of natural energies" allowed them to unlock Senjutsu, which combined with their massively physically enhanced body unlocked their Touki properly, which basically caused me to eject them from Tokyo basically immediately. It is what it is.
The other perk that was unlocked is honestly kind of weird, but it's opened up some opportunities. For the record, Haru is insanely far away from actually being able to rawdog Deprivation Sword Kingdom, but they cheated pretty hard with the circumstances as described plus their massively boosted physical body. I suppose it's the long-dormant Fate fan in me invoking "exceptions," but it is what it is. I had a lot of struggle figuring out how to end the chapter, and at the very least this one wasn't as boring as the default "and then Haru just managed to flip the array and clean out the entire sewers without any real fight," so there's that at least.
Responses... uh, probably in the next day or two, grandmother hospitalization has been complicated and I've been shanghai'd into cleaning up her house. I've cleaned bedpans and all sorts of nasty stuff before, but opening up her fridge and having cockroaches fly at me, or having to dump out literal bowls of shit from her bedroom was a pretty new low. I need a break lol, but wanted to get this chapter done first. See y'all next time.
Anyways, rolls--
Eight-Fold Geomantic Mastery
200 CP
You possess the inherent understanding and skill with geomancy and the manipulation of natural energies such that you may now create manses in any area where such a thing could conceivably be created. The stronger the mystic or magical significance of a given place the more powerful the manse that can be built there, but even in the barest and most mystically barren areas you will still be capable of producing, given some time, a manse of the least (1-dot) power. The process of creating a Manse is tremendously faster for you than it would be for others, the necessary geomantic arrays and arrangements seeming to simply leap to your mind with a clarity of insight few if any could match. The Eight-Fold part of it is that you understand the methods for creating manses aspected towards all five of the elemental essences of fire, earth, wind, water, and wood as well as manses aspected towards solar, lunar, and stellar (sidereal) energies. Given time and effort you may discern methods for creating other types of manse, twisted mockeries of what nature intended, but such insights will take considerable effort, time, and resources to bear fruit. Taking this perk explicitly allows you to create manses even outside of Creation and, indeed, is the only way to create manses outside of Creation.
Source: Generic Exalted, Chapter: Talent
24000 Words, 450 CP => 250 CP, Hit
600 CP
War and blood does not build a nation, shining wonders do not create happiness in one's people, and Exaltation does not make one inherently fit as a ruler. You are unique in that you have internalized these truths and fully understand what is needed to create true prosperity in both yourself and your subjects. You understand economics and politics with complete mastery of both, but you also know how to build a lasting nation or organization that can sustain itself without you having to constantly reinforce it with Charms or other abilities. In addition, changes you make in the world...whether building monuments, kingdoms, or slaying a great menace will have a permanent and lasting effect - your dynasty will last for thousands of years beyond your own era, your legend is told for many years to come, and your cities will be full of life even if the world around it should be torn apart. This effect can be mitigated or 'turned off' at your leisure if you prefer subtlety or impermanence.
Source: Solars Exalted, Chapter: Talent
26000 Words, 350 CP, Miss
600 CP
A power that humanity holds, that even the Gods are wary of, is that of being able to make their dreams a reality through love and honor. A piece of that power now follows you. When you confront an insurmountable or otherwise unstoppable foe or obstacle, with no way to win, the winds of karma will swing the odds in your favor - a character flaw in the enemy's heart causes them to waver, a weakness is revealed, or they make a glaring mistake when fighting you. This will create an opportunity, however small, for you to capitalize on and perhaps seize victory...but such chances, such miracles, will only happen once against said foe. I hope you use it wisely.
Source: Saint Seiya : The Original Series, Chapter: Source
28000 Words, 450 CP, Miss
Is it possible to learn this power? Not from the protagonist.
400 CP
With the upcoming changes in the world, or even just by playing Neolife, you're undoubtedly going to come into the possession of many new skills and abilities. But is it really the strength of his powers that defines a man? No, it is how he uses said powers. Well, using them better is mainly to get even more powerful, but you get the gist. And with this perk you get it even more. Using your abilities to their fullest potential is child's play to you, and you can easily use several abilities you have in tandem to amplify their strength beyond what might be expected of them. What's more, you also have a talent at coming up with entirely new techniques and and ways to use any powers you have for most any situation you can think of. If you have the Fire affinity, you won't even need to think for a second before realizing that you can also use it to pull fire mana out of an object to freeze it, and having to shoot your enemies with twenty variations of elemental beams will be a thing of the past. You also possess the mental faculties to actually question how your powers work, and if you ever used shadow magic, you would surely recognize that it could only work if a seperate shadow realm existed. So rest assured, as with these gifts you'll never need a divine intervention to actually use the vast power you have gained.
Source: World Seed, Chapter: Talent
30000 Words, 550 CP => 150 CP, Hit
Genuinely hysterical set of rolls (what the fuck is Prosperity of the Sun doing here, lmfao. That would've solved so much of Haru's problems it wouldn't even have been funny, crazy it was just barely missed, not that they'll ever know). Geomantic is nonsense and has caused Haru to firmly tip into Ultimate Class as "manipulation of natural energies" allowed them to unlock Senjutsu, which combined with their massively physically enhanced body unlocked their Touki properly, which basically caused me to eject them from Tokyo basically immediately. It is what it is.
The other perk that was unlocked is honestly kind of weird, but it's opened up some opportunities. For the record, Haru is insanely far away from actually being able to rawdog Deprivation Sword Kingdom, but they cheated pretty hard with the circumstances as described plus their massively boosted physical body. I suppose it's the long-dormant Fate fan in me invoking "exceptions," but it is what it is. I had a lot of struggle figuring out how to end the chapter, and at the very least this one wasn't as boring as the default "and then Haru just managed to flip the array and clean out the entire sewers without any real fight," so there's that at least.
Responses... uh, probably in the next day or two, grandmother hospitalization has been complicated and I've been shanghai'd into cleaning up her house. I've cleaned bedpans and all sorts of nasty stuff before, but opening up her fridge and having cockroaches fly at me, or having to dump out literal bowls of shit from her bedroom was a pretty new low. I need a break lol, but wanted to get this chapter done first. See y'all next time.
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ObsidianNoir
Making the rounds.
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Rough to read the dilemna of being able to heal people but being unable to because the powers that be would jump Haru's ass immediately.
Those rolls are insane, giving bro immediate access to Touki and the ability to use new stuff on the fly. North God was already Bullshit Go but now it's even more so.
Those rolls are insane, giving bro immediate access to Touki and the ability to use new stuff on the fly. North God was already Bullshit Go but now it's even more so.
TheFabulousCustodes
Well worn.
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Interesting draw, considering that's basically Yasaka's bread and butter.
This effectively turns him into a savant with his abilities, if I'm reading it right.
Completely busted roll, here.
I would want to heal people as well (and make some serious bank), but I agree the possibility of getting forcibly pieced, kidnapped, or murdered for asset denial is just to high at this point.
Sorry to hear about your family situation, I'm dealing with something in the same approximate ballpark here as well.
Thanks for the chapter.
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Kaine941
Not too sore, are you?
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Magical medium or "ink" perhaps?
Think you didn't fully delete a previous wording.
There's a period instead of a comma
Here
Thanks for the chapter hope things get better in your personal life.
Arkaiopedys
Making the rounds.
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Huh, wonder what that's referring to?
Ahahaha-
Maybe I'm just a basic bitch, but lines like these are truly my favourite.
Fun chapter, cool ending. It's fun knowing depressing historical tidbits with each chapter haha...
K.st0ne
Not too sore, are you?
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Why did this:
Give him Water God Style?