The river was not a mother; it was a cold, indifferent machine. For miles, it tumbled Yorimitsu's broken body against slick river stones and submerged roots. When the current finally spat him out onto a narrow strip of grey silt and jagged shale, he was more corpse than boy.
Yorimitsu survived for three days.
He lay in the shadow of a weeping willow; his right arm twisted at an angle that defied nature. His fingers were swollen and purple, unresponsive, useless meat hanging from a shattered shoulder. He drank by pressing his face into damp moss clinging to the stones, licking dew and bitter lichen like a wounded animal.
On the second day, the fever took him.
The forest around him blurred into a kaleidoscope of predatory eyes and shifting shadows. Is this it? He wondered, his mind drifting back to the dung-heaps of the Minakaze estate. Born under a blood-red sky just to die in the mud? He dragged himself inches at a time toward a patch of sun-dried kelp that had washed up from downstream. It tasted of salt and rot, but it was fuel. Every movement felt like glass grinding in his joints.
On the third day, the sun washed over brilliant and uncaring.
Yorimitsu stopped moving. He stared up at the canopy, watching a hawk circle high above. He felt a strange, hollow peace. "Hikaru, I tried," he thought, his breathing slowing to shallow hitches. He felt no anger now, only a crushing exhaustion. He had played his hand, he had scared Mai, and now the debt of his life was called in. He closed his eyes, welcoming the cold.
Through the haze, he heard a rhythmic clack-clack of wood on stone. A figure loomed over him, a nightmare in indigo robes wearing a leering Hannya mask. Yorimitsu tried to crawl away, but his muscles were water. As cold, bone-thin fingers touched his neck, his vision finally surrendered to the black.
Consciousness returned a piercing, localised heat.
Yorimitsu found himself stripped and lying upon a slab of cold obsidian inside a cave that smelled of sulfur and ancient parchment. The masked figure moved with a frantic, bird-like precision, preparing a ritual of Shinkyu, the art of acupuncture and moxibustion.
The healer took a long, blackened needle forged from cold iron. With a practised strike, she drove it into his Hegu point, the Great Abyss between the thumb and forefinger.
Yorimitsu's eyes snapped open, a silent scream dying in his parched throat. He couldn't move; his body was pinned by his own weight and the silver pins now bristling from his skin.
"Be still, brat," a muffled voice rasped from behind the mask. "Your Qi is a tangled knot of thorns. If I don't unbind it, your heart will burst before the moon rises."
She began the Twelve Meridian Purge. She placed needles into the Tianzhu (Heavenly Pillar) at the base of his skull to reconnect his severed senses, and then into the Kuyuzhu points along his shattered spine.
This wasn't the gentle healing of a court physician. This was the work of a Kanko-onmyōji. As the needles sank in, the healer ignited small cones of Moxa, dried mugwort mixed with ground yōkai bone on top of the needle heads.
The heat was agonising. It travelled down the silver shafts, deep into his marrow. Yorimitsu felt his shattered humerus grate and shift; he felt the pulverised nerves in his shoulder spark like dying embers being fanned into flame.
It felt as if a thousand white-hot ants were marching through his veins, stitching his flesh back together with thread made of fire.
"Why"? he thought through the fog of pain. "Why save a cursed thing like me?" He watched, mesmerised and horrified, as dark, turgid blood began to leak from the needle sites, the filth of his trauma and the stagnation of his broken bones being forced out by the sheer pressure of the ritual.
When the heat finally subsided, the cave was silent save for the dripping of stalactites. Yorimitsu lay panting, his skin covered in a thin, glistening film of medicinal oils and sweat. He tentatively twitched his fingers.
They moved.
He scrambled back against the cave wall, his breath hitching in terror as the masked figure approached. "Stay... stay back!" he rasped, his voice a dry ruin.
The figure stopped. A wrinkled, liver-spotted hand reached up and unlatched the leather straps of the Hannya mask.
The face underneath was not a demon's, but that of a very old woman. Her skin was a roadmap of a thousand years of mountain sun, and her eyes were milky with cataracts yet sharp as a hawk's.
"Stay back? Stay back?!" she suddenly shrieked, her voice a high-pitched, frantic cackle that echoed off the stone walls. She lunged forward, grabbing Yorimitsu's chin with a grip like a pincer and forcing his mouth open to inspect his tongue.
"I spent three days pumping your miserable, half-dead soul back into your body! I used my best needles, my cold-iron needles! And you tell me to stay back? The ingratitude! The sheer, unwashed gall of the youth!"
She began to pace around the cave, kicking over bundles of dried herbs and muttering to herself in a chaotic blur.
"A Minamoto! A brat with the mark of the spiral and a face like a half-rotted peach! Do you know how hard it is to heal a body that's trying to rot from the inside out? It's like trying to patch a paper umbrella in a hurricane! Madness! Absolute mountain madness!"
She turned back to him, pointing at a gnarled, shaking finger at the fractured mark on his brow. Her expression shifted from frantic anger to a terrifying, toothless grin that made his blood run cold.
"You're healed, boy. Mostly. Your bones are knit, but your soul is still a mess of jagged glass." She leaned in, her scent of mountain herbs and old earth filling his senses. "But don't think you're going back to that den of vipers. You owe me a debt of blood and time. And I am a very, very greedy woman."
Yorimitsu stared at her, caught between the fear of her power and the absurdity of her mania.