The cold autumn rain drummed a steady beat on the rooftops of Kyoto, washing the color from the wooden facades and turning the streets into muddy streams. In such a city, it was easy to become invisible. Kiriyama Akira was an invisible man by nature.
He stood under the awning of an abandoned tea house, staring at the luxurious villa across the street—the "Scarlet House," known to everyone in the Gion district as the abode of the finest courtesan and a seventh-level Kokuro master, Lady Yukihime. Now, it was a tomb.
Two men in dark blue haori with the Morohashi clan crest were fruitlessly trying to "read" the front door. Their fingers traced the air, searching for the slightest Scar—a trace of intrusion. Their faces were twisted in frustration.
"Nothing," the older one hissed through his teeth. "No forced entry, no residual energy. Like a ghost walked in and out."
"Could it be a forbidden technique?" the younger one suggested timidly.
"Forbidden techniques leave the ugliest Scars. Here... it's clean. Too clean."
It was then that a shadow emerged from behind the curtain of rain. A tall, gaunt figure in a simple black kimono, soaked to the bone. It was Akira. He paid no heed to the guards, stepped up to the door, and nudged it open without touching the deadbolt, which they knew had been locked from the inside.
"Hey! Who are you?!" roared the senior guard, his hand darting to the hilt of his tsurugi.
Akira turned only half his face toward him. His eyes held neither defiance nor fear. Only emptiness, deep as a well on a moonless night.
"The one hired to find the ghost," his voice was quiet but cut through the noise of the rain like a blade. "You are getting in the way of one shadow catching another."
The guard froze. There was something in that gaze that made his instincts tighten his throat. It wasn't the look of a warrior. It was the look of a void.
The interior was a frozen tableau. The air was heavy with the scent of expensive perfume and... something metallic that could no longer be called life. Yukihime lay in the center of the room on a crimson carpet, dressed in a dazzling kimono as if asleep. No wounds, no signs of struggle. Only a slight bluish tint on her perfectly pale skin.
Akira circled the body. The guards hovered uncertainly at the entrance, watching him with superstitious dread.
"Useless," the younger one muttered. "Even the masters from the Himeji clan found no traces of Kokuro."
Akira didn't answer. He didn't wave his hands through the air. He wasn't searching for Scars. Instead, his gaze slid over details that were invisible to them. He saw the absence.
His eyes stopped on the low calligraphy table. On it stood an exquisite porcelain inkstone cup, a brush beside it. And a tiny puddle of black ink on the perfectly polished wood.
"Look," the senior guard nudged his partner. "What's he doing?"
Akira didn't move from the spot. He simply looked. He saw how the microscopic splatters of ink had landed asymmetrically. He saw the "scar of absence" — the trace of a droplet that shouldn't have been there if the cup had been standing still. Someone had nudged it. An invisible someone.
Then his gaze fell on a scroll, partially unrolled on the floor. It depicted the kanji for "eternity" (永遠). But the final stroke was smeared, as if the brush had been torn from the hand at the moment of highest concentration.
"She was writing something when she was struck," said the younger guard, following Akira's gaze.
"No," Akira quietly objected. For the first time that evening. "She wasn't writing. She was retrieving it."
He approached the scroll and, without touching it, studied it. This wasn't just a scroll. It was a "vessel"—an artifact used to store complex Kokuro. There were no visible Scars on it, but Akira sensed its purpose. It was a key. Or bait.
"She knew they would come for her. She tried to activate a defense. But didn't have time. Because her opponent was invisible to her Kokuro. Just like me."
At that moment, the door swung open with force. A new man entered the room. Young, in a luxurious steel-gray haori, with cold, appraising eyes and a sword with an exquisite guard at his waist. Ryūnosuke Morohashi.
"And what has our 'ghost specialist' found?" his voice dripped with the poison of polite contempt. "Hopefully, something more than these failures."
Akira slowly rose to his full height. His empty gaze met the arrogant gaze of the aristocrat.
"He was here," said Akira. "He is in this room right now."
Ryūnosuke smirked.
"I don't see anyone but you."
"Precisely why he was able to kill," Akira countered. "Your Kokuro is blind to him. As it is to me. He doesn't leave Scars. He... erases them."
He turned and pointed to the smeared kanji on the scroll.
"She wasn't writing it. She was trying to erase it. That's her last message. She was trying to erase a Scar on the scroll itself, to hide it from the one who feeds on them."
A tense silence hung in the air, broken only by the patter of rain. Ryūnosuke was no longer smiling. His fingers clenched the hilt of his sword. For the first time, he looked at Akira not as a dirty mercenary, but as a threat. An anomaly.
"And what was on it? On that 'Scar'?" he asked, and his voice held a genuine, steel-sharp interest.
Akira looked out the window at the gloomy sky over Kyoto's rooftops.
"A path," he said quietly. "A path to the 'Tenran' Academy."
His words hung in the air, cold and relentless as a harbinger of a storm. The hunt had only just begun. And the ghost hired to catch a ghost had just found the first trail.