Thub-da-dum.
The sound was a heavy, hollow drum beating within a cavern of silk and cedar. It was a rhythmic, grounding thrum, not the dying, erratic rattle of a man whose ribcage had been breached by the cold, obsidian talons of a demon.
Yorimitsu felt a sharp, cooling sensation against his skin. The air carried the ghost-scent of expensive sandalwood incense and the damp, sweet breath of a meticulously manicured garden. A soft wind pressed through the silk-screened window, rustling the indigo curtains with a domesticity that felt like a violent slap to his soul.
His eyes snapped open. The ceiling above was not the jagged stone of a mountain cave or the rotting, spider-draped rafters of a cursed village. It was polished cedar, lacquered to a high, dark shine that reflected the dim light of dawn.
"Obaasan!"
The name tore from his throat a raw, jagged sound. He lurched forward, his hand slamming against his chest in a desperate, frantic search for the wound. He expected to feel the slick warmth, a jagged, hollow void where his heart had been dragged out to pulse in the open air.
His palm hit soft, unscarred skin.
Yorimitsu froze, his breath hitching in a throat that felt far too narrow. He pulled his hands into his field of vision, holding them up against the pale light filtering through the screens.
They were small. Impossibly small. The thick, iron-hard calluses he had earned from a decade of swinging an ironwood blade against stone were gone. The scars from mountain briars, the jagged lines where the black ink of his bondage had burned into his flesh, all of it had vanished as if it had never been. His fingers were thin, his nails clean and well-kept.
I died, he thought, his mind reeling as if caught in a mountain gale. I felt the light. I saw my own heart being stripped out of my chest. So why is my breath still warm?
He scrambled out of the silken bedding, his legs feeling strangely short and light. His centre of gravity had shifted; he felt unanchored, as if he might float away. He stumbled across the polished floorboards, his gaze darting frantically until it landed on a copper gong standing on a dark wooden frame in the corner of the room.
He knelt before it, his reflection staring back from the polished metal.
The face was ten years younger. The spiral was a faint, dormant smudge on his brow, lacking the pulsing, obsidian power he had mastered in the mountain mists. My body is that of a child...?
He was back in the Minamoto estate, in the very room where he had spent his nights weeping in the dark.
"Did I... get back to the past?" he whispered. The voice that came out was high-pitched and thin, lacking the gravelly resonance of a warrior. "How is that possible… that just isn't what the hell happened. I felt the release. I felt the end."
He forced himself to breathe, piecing together the fragments. He remembered the rituals. He remembered the way Yama-uba had gripped her own demonic wrist with a strength that snapped her own bones.
She inverted the flow, he realised, a hollow, cold ache opening in his gut. She didn't purify the demon. She used the collision of our souls to punch a hole through the Wheel of Karma. She traded her divinity to turn back the pages of the world.
"She gave up her peace," he whispered, tears finally blurring his vision. "In the wheels of life and death, she chose to stay behind so I could come back."
By pulling him back, she had fractured her own cycle. At this time, she was no longer on that mountain; she no longer existed in a sense. The bond they had forged over a decade of blood, sweat, and shared meals was gone.
The years she spent knitting his bones back together, the way she had taught him to see the spirits in the trees, to her, it had never happened. He carried the weight of a lifetime of love, but she was now a stranger burdened with the debt of a ritual she hadn't yet performed.
A deep, suffocating longing for his master threatened to overwhelm him. He wanted to scream, to run toward the Aokigahara until his lungs burst and his feet bled. But he looked at his small, soft hands again and saw the weakness there.
"No... what help will that be?. She is gone from me now, even if she lives."
He stood up slowly, inspecting the weight of his old body. He moved his shoulders, testing the flexibility of the joints. The muscle memory was there, the phantom ghost of a sword-swing lurked behind his skin, but the physical strength was absent. He was a grandmaster's soul trapped in a vessel of porcelain and silk.
"It feels so odd... It's like this isn't even my own body," he muttered. He focused on his internal flow, and his eyes widened. "Looking at it now, I wonder how I was even alive. The amount of Reiryoku my body is leaking right now... I shouldn't even be standing."
To his awakened sight, he could see his spiritual energy bleeding out of the spiral on his forehead like smoke from a chimney. In his previous life, this leak had made him sickly, a curse that brought ill-fortune to those around him. Now he knew better.
He knelt again, this time in a formal seiza, bowing his head until it touched the cold wood. It was a bow of deepest, soul-shattering gratitude, a silent vow to the woman who had sacrificed her karma for him.
You gave up your divinity to give me back my life, he thought, his jaw tightening until the muscles ached. You disturbed the heavens and the earth for a boy who had already given up. I will not let your sacrifice be a waste. I will not let this life be a tragedy.
He steeled his mind, clenching his small fists until the knuckles turned white. He realised now what he had to do.
"I will live the life you wanted, Obaasan," he whispered to the empty room, his voice settling into a dangerous, quiet chill. "I will use this new life well. All the pain I experienced, all the people I lost... I will not lose them in this life. I will be the one who hunts the hunters."
He looked out at the stars, the constellations still hanging in the pre-dawn sky. He knew the calendar.
I think I still have a year before I am sold to the Minakaze, he calculated, his mind spinning a thousand strategies. One year to coil this leaking energy. One year to turn this soft flesh into a weapon. By the time they come for me, I will show them a hell like no other.