The soil of the Orizu valley was not like the earth of the southern kingdoms. It was dark, heavy, and smelled faintly of iron and rotted timber. In the mid-afternoon sun, the stalks of black wheat swayed in the breeze, a sea of obsidian waves that whispered secrets I had spent five years trying to forget.
I wiped the sweat from my brow with the back of a hand scarred by more than just harvest tools. My muscles ached with a dull, honest pain. It was a good pain—the kind that meant I had built something rather than torn it down.
"Father! The water is getting warm!"
I looked toward the edge of the field. Shiori stood there, holding a ceramic pitcher with both hands. She was eight now, her hair tied back with a simple hemp ribbon, her eyes bright with a curiosity that had not yet been extinguished by the world. She was the only thing in this valley that didn't feel heavy.
"I'm coming," I said, my voice raspy from the dust.
I dropped the scythe. It bit into the mud with a wet thud. Walking toward her, I felt the familiar hitch in my left knee—a gift from a mercenary in the Northern Marches who had been faster than he looked. Shiori waited until I reached the shade of the old cedar tree before handing me the pitcher. I drank deeply. The water was lukewarm and tasted of the clay jug, but it was life.
"You missed a patch near the irrigation ditch," she said, pointing a small finger. "Old Man Sato says if the wheat stays in the mud, it turns into vinegar."
"Old Man Sato talks too much," I replied, handing the pitcher back. I sat on a flat stone, leaning my back against the rough bark of the cedar. "But he's right. I'll finish it before the sun dips."
She sat beside me, her small shoulder brushing against my arm. I felt a sudden, sharp pang in my chest—not of pain, but of a terrifying fragility. Everything I had was built on a foundation of silence. If the silence broke, she would be the first thing to shatter.
"Father," she whispered, her voice losing its playfulness. "Who are the men on the ridge?"
My heart didn't skip a beat; it slowed down, turning into a heavy, rhythmic drum. I didn't look up immediately. I let my senses expand, feeling the air move, listening to the shift in the wind.
Three men. No, four.
They weren't farmers. Farmers walked with a heavy, rolling gait, their weight distributed for endurance. These men moved with their weight on the balls of their feet. They moved like predators stalking a wounded ox.
"Go to the house, Shiori," I said. My voice was flat. Emotionless.
"But the water—"
"Now. Close the shutters. Don't come out until I call your name. Three times."
She looked at me, and for a second, I saw the reflection of the man I used to be in her pupils. She saw the hardness return to my jaw, the way my fingers instinctively curled as if gripping a hilt that wasn't there. She didn't argue. She picked up the pitcher and ran, her small feet kicking up dust as she disappeared into our modest hut.
I stood up. The honest pain in my muscles vanished, replaced by a cold, familiar adrenaline. I didn't head for the house. I walked toward the edge of the field, toward the men descending the slope.
They wore straw cloaks over stained tunics. Their faces were hidden by wide-brimmed hats, but I could see the glint of steel at their waists. These weren't soldiers. They were 'Sword Snatchers'—low-life scavengers who hunted for remnants of the old wars, or worse, for men like me who had tried to retire.
The leader stepped forward. He was lean, with a jagged scar running from his ear to the corner of a mouth that lacked several teeth. He looked at my hands, then at my face.
"Raigen Kurosawa," he said, the name sounding like a curse in the quiet air. "They told us you were dead. They told us you died in the fire at the Iron Gate."
"A lot of people died there," I said. I kept my distance—ten paces. The length of a sudden lunging strike. "I'm just a farmer now. I have nothing for you."
The man chuckled, a dry, rattling sound. "A farmer. You hide it well. The mud, the beard. But a wolf doesn't become a dog just because he starts eating grass. We aren't here for your wheat, Raigen."
"Then leave. While the sun is still up."
The other three moved, fanning out in a semi-circle. They were testing my perimeter. One of them, a younger man with a nervous twitch in his eye, kept his hand on the hilt of a *Reikon* blade. I could see the faint, blue glow of the spirit-seal through the gaps in his scabbard. It was a low-tier weapon, probably stolen from a dead scout, but it was enough to cut through a man and his house in a single breath.
"The Union wants the Fang," the leader said, his voice dropping an octave. "They know you took it. They know it's here, buried in this pathetic dirt."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
The leader sighed, almost regretfully. "We checked the village first. Old Man Sato was very helpful once we started peeling his fingernails. He said you never let anyone into the cellar. He said you spend your nights staring at a wrapped bundle under the floorboards."
A coldness settled in my gut. Sato. The old man had seen too much.
"He's an old man. He sees ghosts," I said.
"Then let us see the ghost," the leader replied. He drew his sword. It was a standard *Kurogane*—black iron, well-maintained. "Give us the *Shinketsu no Kiba*, and maybe we'll leave the girl alone. She's a pretty thing. Would be a shame to sell her to the pleasure houses in the capital."
The world tilted. The sounds of the valley—the insects, the wind, the distant river—faded into a dull hum. There was a specific point in my mind, a dark, locked door behind which I kept the beast. The leader had just kicked that door open.
"You should have stayed in the village," I said.
The young man with the blue-sealed blade lost his nerve. He screamed, a high-pitched sound of pure terror masked as bravado, and lunged. He was fast, the spirit-seal granting him a burst of unnatural speed. He covered the distance in a heartbeat, his blade whistling toward my neck.
I didn't have a sword. I had my hands.
I stepped inside his guard, the movement so ingrained in my marrow that I didn't even have to think. I grabbed his sword-arm at the wrist and elbow, using his own momentum against him. A sickening *crack* echoed through the field as his radius snapped. He gasped, his mouth opening in a silent 'O' of shock.
I didn't stop. I drove my palm into his chin, snapping his head back, and snatched the falling sword from his limp hand.
I spun, the blue light of the stolen blade tracing a lethal arc in the air. The second man, who had been closing in from the left, didn't even have time to raise his weapon. The steel slid through his neck with the ease of a hot wire through wax. He fell into the black wheat, his life-blood spraying the obsidian stalks, turning them a deep, shimmering crimson.
I stood there, holding the *Reikon* blade. It felt light. Wrong. It wasn't my steel.
The leader and the fourth man froze. The sneer had vanished from the leader's face, replaced by a pale, trembling mask of realization. He looked at his dead comrade, then back at me.
"You... you're faster than the stories," he whispered.
"The stories were softened for the children," I said.
I dropped the stolen blade. It hissed as it hit the mud. I didn't need it. If I was going to kill these men, I was going to do it the right way.
I walked toward my hut. The men didn't move to stop me; they were paralyzed by the sudden, violent shift in the atmosphere. I reached the porch, stepped over the threshold, and knelt by the hearth. With a single, forceful tug, I ripped up the loose floorboard.
The bundle was wrapped in heavy, oil-soaked silk. It felt cold to the touch—a cold that didn't belong to this world. As I unwrapped it, the air in the room seemed to thicken. The shadows in the corners of the hut lengthened, stretching toward the blade like starving dogs.
*Shinketsu no Kiba.* The Divine Blood Fang.
The hilt was wrapped in the skin of a deep-sea creature, rough and unyielding. The guard was shaped like a weeping eye. Even in the dim light of the hut, the blade didn't reflect the sun. It swallowed it.
*Do you remember?* a voice whispered in the back of my mind. It wasn't a sound, but a feeling—a cold, oily pressure against my consciousness.
"I remember," I muttered.
I gripped the hilt. Immediately, a searing heat shot up my arm. The curse was waking. It was hungry. It had been five years since it had tasted the specific vintage of my soul.
*Give me a memory,* the blade demanded. *Give me the taste of your heart, and I will give you the world.*
I looked at the door. I could see the men outside, gathering their courage, whispering about how to surround the house. I thought of Shiori, hiding in the back room, her hands over her ears, trusting me to keep the monsters away.
I reached into my mind. I found a memory—a small, insignificant one. The smell of the first meal Shiori had cooked for me, a burnt bowl of rice porridge that we had laughed over for hours.
I pushed the memory toward the blade.
The sword shivered. The darkness in the room pulsed. In my mind, the image of that bowl of rice flickered and died, replaced by a cold, grey void. I could no longer remember the smell. I no longer remembered why we had laughed. The joy of that moment was gone, consumed by the steel.
In exchange, my vision sharpened. The walls of the hut became transparent to my senses. I could feel the heartbeat of the men outside. I could feel the flow of the blood in their veins.
I stepped out onto the porch.
The leader saw the sword, and his knees buckled. The blade was bleeding—a dark, ethereal mist poured from the edge, staining the air.
"That... that's not a sword," he stammered, backing away. "That's a demon."
"No," I said, stepping down into the dirt. "It's a contract."
I didn't run. I moved with a deliberate, haunting slowness. Every step I took felt like it was crushing the earth beneath me. The fourth man, driven mad by the pressure, charged with a guttural roar.
I didn't even look at him. I swung the Fang in a casual, horizontal flick.
The air itself seemed to tear. A wave of crimson force erupted from the blade, a crescent moon of pure, distilled violence. It caught the man at the waist. There was no resistance. His upper torso continued forward for a second before sliding off his legs, his entrails spilling onto the black wheat like tangled silk.
The leader dropped his sword. He fell to his hysterical knees, his hands clawing at the air.
"Please!" he shrieked. "I was just told... I was just following orders! The Kujo family... Seiran Kujo sent us!"
Seiran. The name hit me like a physical blow. The architect. The man who had tried to turn Shiori into a sheath for a god.
I stood over the leader. The *Shinketsu no Kiba* hummed in my hand, the vibration rattling my bones. It wanted more. It wanted the man's life, and then it wanted another memory.
"Tell Seiran," I said, my voice sounding like grinding stones. "Tell him that Raigen Kurosawa is dead."
I raised the blade.
"There is only the Father of the Fang now."
I brought the sword down. There was no scream, only the sound of the wind through the wheat, and then, silence.
I stood in the center of the carnage, the blood of the men seeping into the thirsty soil. The blue spirit-blade lay forgotten in the mud. The sun was setting, casting long, bloody shadows across the valley.
I felt a hollow space in my head where the memory of the rice porridge used to be. It was a small price today. But as I looked at my house, I knew the harvest was over. The silence was gone.
"Shiori," I called out.
I waited.
"Shiori."
One more time.
"Shiori."
The door of the hut creaked open. She stepped out, her eyes wide, looking at the bodies, then at the black, smoking sword in my hand. She didn't cry. She didn't scream. She looked at me with a profound, terrifying sadness.
"You found it," she whispered.
"I didn't find it," I said, the blade's mist curling around my fingers like a caress. "It never left us."
I looked at the ridge. More would come. The wolves had found the scent. I had traded a piece of my past to protect her future, and I knew, with a soul-crushing certainty, that by the time this was over, I might not remember her face at all.
But she would be alive. And that was the only contract that mattered.
I began to wrap the blade back in its oil-soaked silk, but the blood on the ground refused to dry. It stayed red, bright and defiant, under the darkening sky of the Land of Silent Blood.