It was early autumn. The last dregs of heat had gone. Outside the window, paulownia leaves thinned day by day; temperatures slid downward, and the cicadas had died in the husks they'd shed.
Kira felt the cold settle in his bones.
He lifted his head and gazed out at the heavy gray sky. Then something struck him, and he pulled the invitation from the drawer.
Red text on black. It looked weighty but was light to the touch, the edges finished in gold.
No ornamentation, no pattern. Only a few lines of small print:
Amber Hall.
Amber Hall... Amber Hall... Is that a name?
What he could now confirm:
1. Done Again is still in its cooldown phase.
2. Even after the set timer elapses, detonation is optional—he can choose whether to trigger it.
3. He is going to deploy Done Again.
Very quickly, Kira arrived at the truth.
He had just experienced a Time Reshaping.
In the original timeline, he had successfully planted Done Again, then traveled to Amber Hall as scheduled to attend the auction. Something had happened there—something grave enough that his future self had chosen not to let time continue forward. He had given up that timeline.
Time rewound. He returned to the point at which he had first planted Done Again.
His fingernails began to grow, slow and steady. He set his index fingernail between his teeth, chewing lightly as he thought.
That event, whatever it was, had not been ordinary.
Likely something that endangered his life.
Because he had lost his memory of those days.
But by the nature of Done Again, he should have been reborn with those memories intact.
This was not memory loss at the level of the brain. This was memory loss at the level of the soul.
An autumn wind brushed the window frame with a soft rustle. The sky was darker still. Rain was coming.
A tricky business. Extremely tricky. His premonition had not misled him.
Something had been waiting for him in that mansion. An enemy to the quiet life he'd built.
Provoking him. Drawing him in. Kira could hear the footsteps of fate again, so light, so close, and the secret of The Arrow might well be hidden inside that mansion—the feeling was overwhelming. There was a gravity to this world, and gravity pulled people into meeting...
Kira sighed and set the invitation down.
In a situation like this, what was there to deliberate?
He pulled out his phone, tapped in a string of numbers, and waited for the line to connect:
"Hello, is this Principal Yaga?"
"Mm. Yes, it's me. I want to return the invitation."
The screen was dark. The line was silent for a long time.
After a long pause, a calm voice replied:
"Are you sure, Kira-kun?"
Yes... That was how Kira meant to answer.
And then he stopped.
That was not Yaga's voice.
Very familiar. And yet very much a stranger's.
"Who are you?"
Silence at the other end. Silence wrapping both of them.
No sound at all.
By the time the sun had vanished behind descending clouds and the gray had pressed low against the earth, Kira lowered the phone.
The screen was pitch black, reflecting his own face.
Or rather—it had never lit up. He had never actually placed the call.
The voice had been his.
Irritating.
Irritating beyond reason.
He set the phone aside and picked up the invitation again. Red ink on black, meticulously crafted.
This invitation was a curse. A Binding Vow.
The duration he'd been about to set was ten days. Which meant, in the prior timeline, he had spent ten days at that mansion before reshaping time.
He had asked Yaga about it. The auction was being hosted by a private collector. The Big Three Families were the best-known clans in the jujutsu world—but far from the oldest.
Plenty of older lines existed, hidden deep in the shadows, few in number, like the aristocracy of the jujutsu world. This collector was among them; his bloodline traced back to the Tachibana clan of the Heian court.
Every three years, the collector hosted gatherings like this one, sending out invitations exactly like the one Kira now held.
Per Yaga, these events ran strictly on invitations—the invitation was what mattered, not the bearer. Anyone holding one could attend.
These events had been running a long time—and no one had ever shown signs of anything like what he was facing now. Everyone came out intact. Which meant something had gone wrong.
What he could confirm: the invitation had come from Yaga. And Yaga had given it to him specifically because of his mention of the Travelogue of Monk Manyo.
Was it deliberate? Was he being targeted?
His nails were lengthening faster now, joint by joint, a sound like small branches splitting. He pinched the knuckle, his expression gone heavy:
There is one way in which I am different from everyone else.
Kira's consciousness had looped back from the future. What if more than just his consciousness had come back with him?
What if something else had latched on to his consciousness—some peculiar thing?
Or rather: a Binding Vow. A rule.
Like the Binding Vow between him and Hoshino Ei. Like the Binding Vow between him and Desire Po Chou Fei.
And that Binding Vow would be: he must go to Amber Hall.
Only a Binding Vow could bypass time itself. A Binding Vow lasted forever.
What, exactly, had happened in the last timeline!
Kira bit through his fingernail. He braced himself on the edge of the desk and rose to his feet. His eyes had turned cold—bone cold.
The temperature of the whole bedroom plunged.
The invitation was clenched tight in his fist. His gaze went colder still.
The ability to form a Binding Vow with him at all implied one thing. One terrifying thing.
In the prior timeline, for some reason, the existence of Done Again had been exposed.
His deepest-held secret had been known.
Which was why a Binding Vow had been forced on him, carrying this condition:
After Time Reshaping, you must return to Amber Hall.
Kira analyzed coldly, stringing the threads in his mind together.
This was a Binding Vow, a pact. Every Binding Vow demanded equivalent exchange. At the cost of his forced return to Amber Hall after rebirth, he must have gained something in turn. And that something was the key to breaking the game open.
The Kira of the previous timeline had not lost. If he had, the entity in Amber Hall would never have needed to bind him; it would only have resorted to such an exchange under duress.
The last round had ended in stalemate.
His current advantage: whatever was waiting in Amber Hall did not retain its memory of those ten days either. It did not even know that time had been reshaped.
Nor did it know the secret of Done Again.
The existence of Done Again must have been exposed in those ten days of the prior timeline. If the entity had known Done Again's nature from the start, it would never have been caught so flat-footed. It would not have waited for a ten-day timer to expire. It would have eliminated him on day one.
One more point: it very likely bore some powerful Heavenly Restriction of its own, forced to operate by certain rules. Like the dealer in a game.
What did the prior me leave for the current me, then?
Kira looked out at the deepening gloom. He shut the window. His expression settled into calm.
He tidied away the clippings on the desk, took a glass vial from the drawer, slotted each piece in one by one.
Let us play properly, then... Anyone who tries to break my quiet life will die.
A puzzle. A fun little puzzle of a game.
Unraveling time. Time, tangled with itself.