Suiko, Are These Your True Feelings? Is the Jewel Rejecting Chiyo?

Outside the tent, moonlight flowed like water.

Suiko suddenly opened her eyes, drenched in cold sweat.

She lowered her head to look at the Four Souls Jewel on her chest. It still gave off a gentle, pure glow, pressed against her heart and faintly warm.

As if nothing had happened.

Suiko gasped for breath, her heart pounding wildly.

Just moments ago, Suiko had had a dream.

In the dream, she stood atop a sea of corpses and blood, the Four Souls Jewel in her hand.

The jewel spun in her palm, radiating a brilliance fiercer than the sun.

She looked down and saw Izayoi lying in a pool of blood.

She had not been killed by demons.

Suiko had killed her.

She sat up and wiped the cold sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand, only to realize that her hand was shaking.

It was just a dream.

Just a dream.

She kept telling herself that, but she could not suppress the fear seeping out from her very bones.

The image of herself standing in that pool of blood was too vivid.

So vivid that she could smell the blood and feel the blade cutting through flesh.

And what frightened her most was not the killing itself.

It was that the "her" in the dream had shown neither fear nor regret. There had only been...

Calm.

As though she were doing something entirely natural.

Suiko closed her eyes and pressed her hand against the Four Souls Jewel on her chest.

"Are you influencing me again?"

The jewel did not answer. It merely radiated quiet warmth.

Suiko lay back down, tossing and turning, unable to sleep again.

Chiyo's figure kept surfacing in her mind.

His black robe was dark as ink, his white hair like snow, and those