Chapter 1: GOKUMEI
Smoke lay across the plain like a wound. Ash spiraled through the air. Charred beams jutted from the earth like broken teeth. The air tasted of salt, lacquer, and endings.
Three bodies scarred the ground.
One shattered, as if broken by a god's careless hand.
One split clean, crown to groin.
One lay headless at the falls, water sliding over the wound as if pleading for innocence.
Only one shape moved.
He lifted himself from the dirt like a fragment of something once whole. His left cheek was melted, mapped by old flame. One arm hung dead. The other clutched a sword that still remembered mercy. His hair, white and long, was burned on one side and hung in ragged, ash-streaked strands on the other.
He did not look at the dead. His eyes turned toward the sea where light skimmed the water and failed to warm it.
"Akeno," he whispered. The name fractured in the air. For an instant a figure shimmered at the cliff's edge—white sleeves drifting like sails, feet lost in mist. Her hand reached out. He smiled and the smile cracked around his pain.
The vision folded away with the wind. Smoke lingered.
Ten years earlier the sea had been less terrible.
Present time-
Year 1421. Ine Village, Tango Province, Japan.
The village kept its nets like prayers. Lanterns tugged at the dark as boats drifted between the cliffs. Two men fished in silence. Jinzō joked about small hauls. Gorō only stared at the water. The sea smelled wrong—metallic and warm, like blood left too long under the moon.
Something vast rose beneath them, a cathedral of teeth and eyes. Lanternlight skated over black plates stitched to living flesh. Jinzō leaned closer—then the world fractured.
Wood splintered. Teeth closed on the keel. The boat vanished in one furious breath. Only the net remained, torn and trembling in the foam.
Whispers followed. Lanterns burned lower. Boats came back ragged. Mothers stopped leaving fish for crows. During the harvest festival a shape the size of a ruined temple surfaced and swallowed an old woman whole. Her lantern guttered inside its throat. The sea spat her out like a curse.
The hundred-eyed horror earned its name: Gokumei. Fear became law.
But Hikuru Seiryu did not obey laws written by fear.
He had learned the sea's moods before he could walk. Where others saw threat he saw language. The ocean was his teacher—unforgiving but honest. His father had long since put away the nets, but Hikuru fished still, for both of them. Beneath that defiance was something he never said aloud: he wanted to silence the ocean's teeth and make the world right again.
That afternoon lightning ran wild across the horizon. Rain hissed against the cliffs. Hikuru stood at the edge, barefoot, a spear of elm and shark bone in his hand.
"Not today, sea devil," he muttered, and stepped into the water.
The ocean took him like an old friend with a cruel sense of humor. Light dissolved into colorless haze. His silver hair streamed. Tattoos of suns and spirals glimmered across his shoulders. He moved with the quiet grace of one who understood the current's grammar—each stroke a word, each breath a secret.
The sea darkened.
Gokumei rose—a ruin made flesh. Its scales were lacquered armor fused to muscle. Its mouth was a black vault of lightless teeth. A hundred eyes blinked in slow, awful rhythm. The water trembled with its hunger.
Gokumei lunged. Its jaws clamped around hikuru, dragging him into the deep with a force that bent ribs and tore lungs. Saltwater filled hikuru mouth, pain seared his side, and his vision blurred as he sank into the abyss.
For a heartbeat, Hikuru tasted only salt and terror. Then, with a flash of instinct, he drove the spear into one of the creature's hundred eyes. Gokumei recoiled, jaws snapping wide, and released him. He drifted limp, pretending unconscious, letting the beast believe its strike had ended him.
As it lunged again, confident, Hikuru struck. The spear slipped between skull and plate, black ichor spattering. He rode its convulsions upward, clinging, waiting for the perfect moment. Then, with a surge of strength, he drove the weapon home again—fresh, precise. The wound flared and sealed. Flesh roared to ash.
Then memory steadied him—his father's hands showing him how to mend a torn net: slow, patient, deliberate.
He relaxed. Let the current pull him limp. The spear drifted in his grip, an invitation. Gokumei drew close, triumphant. Hikuru struck. The blade slipped between skull and plate. The creature screamed without sound. He rode its convulsions upward, clinging as lightning tore the sky apart.
Man and monster broke the surface together in a burst of white spray. For an instant they hung there, framed in stormlight.
Then everything fell.
Gokumei hit the shore with a sound like thunder swallowed. Sand and seawater flew. Hikuru rolled free, gasping, battered. He rose, dragging the spear.
He could have let it suffer. But pity—the cruel kind that only youth knows—moved his arms. He drove the weapon home. The wound flared and sealed as fast as he made it. Confusion. Then sunlight, sudden and merciless. Gokumei's body ignited, burning from within. Flesh roared to ash.
"Rest now," Hikuru said. The words scraped his throat raw.
The villagers gathered, pale and silent. Some cried. Some knelt. Some only stared as if seeing a god die.
Hikuru did not meet their eyes. He watched the sun's last light refuse the night. The ashes swirled on the tide.
The land sang again. The sea stayed silent.