In the dim tatami room, several monks knelt on cushions, chanting sutras with their eyes closed.
Several thick sacred ropes hung from the ceiling, and lanterns casting a dusky yellow glow crowded the floor at every step.
Incense curled through the air, filling it with haze.
At the center of the room, half the face of a black-haired youth was hidden in the smoke. She sat upright on a cushion, looking somewhat drowsy.
When several overlapping silhouettes appeared against the paper sliding door, the monks stopped chanting.
Two warriors brought in a man who had been tightly bound.
The black-haired youth gathered her pristine white sleeves, bent forward slightly, and stroked the unfamiliar man's head.
"Fushihara, could you praise me?"
Her tone was gentle, her voice reverent and slow. Candlelight cast a lustrous glow over her fair face.
"Why would the request be so simple?"
At that question, the Fujiwara Clan elders waiting for the cost to reset began whispering among themselves.
More than a month had passed since the incident at Tōdai-ji. Another Rope Person incident had plunged the nobility of Heian-kyō into an inexplicable panic.
This Rope Person incident had been much smaller in scope than the one involving the Sugawara Clan. Apart from the temple's monks, more than twenty nobles had died, and two elite jujutsu sorcerers from the Northern House of Fujiwara's Sun, Moon, and Stars Squad had been caught up in it.
Unlike the Fujiwara Clan and the Sugawara Clan, who knew the truth, the other nobles of Heian-kyō had been badly frightened by this indiscriminate, random killing.
Every year, from the fourteenth to the sixteenth day of the first month, the court nobles celebrated the stomping dance festival with great fanfare. In previous years, Rokujō-in within the Palace had bustled with activity on those days, but this year, the Rope Person incident had left attendance sparse. Even the Emperor had pleaded illness and stayed away.
Unlike the others, the Sugawara Clan's young Six Eyes heir had gone straight to the abbot of Tōdai-ji after the second appearance of Rope Persons. The head of the Fujiwara Clan soon learned some of the details that had been concealed.
Fujiwara Michimitsu had no choice but to reveal Alluka's existence.
Just as he had expected, once the head of the Fujiwara Clan learned that a wish-granting cursed technique existed, his first thought was to conceal the cause of the incident from the Emperor.
They moved Alluka to a shrine near Heian-kyō, intending to use the lives of commoners unconnected to their clan to probe the limits of her wish-granting ability.
The child generally made three requests. They experimented with having people agree to some and refuse others, or agree to all of them or refuse them all.
After several attempts, they gradually discovered the rules governing the wishes.
If someone fulfilled the child's three coercive requests, she would grant them one wish.
But after someone refused four of her coercive requests, at least one other person would die an unnatural death along with the person who refused.
The greater the previous person's wish, the harder the coercive requests the next person had to fulfill. If that person could not fulfill Alluka's requests, then after a large-scale Rope Person incident, the difficulty of the child's requests would return to its initial level.
Genkai and the others who had died had been paying the price for Huixiang's wish.
The Fujiwara Clan head had sent people to investigate the pattern behind the Rope Persons' deaths for a long time before they finally established the connection between the victims.
Every one of the dead had been in contact with Genkai recently.
The temple's monks had the most frequent contact with Genkai in everyday life.
Most of the nobles who had died had come into contact with Genkai when he brought monks to their residences to perform exorcisms.
Every jujutsu sorcerer in the Fujiwara Clan's Sun, Moon, and Stars Squad had been carefully selected from a pool of promising children. That two of these elites among elites had secretly maintained contact with the monks of Tōdai-ji was something the Fujiwara Clan's leaders had never anticipated.
After deducing some of the rules behind the appearance of Rope Persons, Fujiwara Michimitsu found that a fine layer of cold sweat had broken out across his back.
He had once been only a step away from death.
Fortunately, he usually communicated with Genkai through his subordinates.
After learning that such a power existed, the Fujiwara Clan head and elders feared Alluka even as they sought to exploit her.
The child's ability used names as its activation condition. Their own names were kept hidden, so they only needed to take care not to have contact with anyone who made a wish or refused a request.
The Fujiwara Clan wanted to use refugees' lives to determine the limits of Alluka's wish-granting ability. These refugees had left their homes because of the snow disaster before the new year and had little contact with the nobles of Heian-kyō. Even if some died, no one would notice.
For wishes such as creating jujutsu sorcerers or killing political enemies, the deaths triggered by the next person who had to pay the price were not particularly widespread.
The Fujiwara Clan elders planned to alternate their use of this ability, but the previous person's wish had clearly been to eliminate that monster in Mutsu.
The monster created by the Sugawara Clan had troubled the Emperor for a long time. Countless commoners in the surrounding area had been killed or injured. Some jujutsu sorcerers who thought highly of themselves had attempted to destroy it, but every one of them had failed.
The Fujiwara Clan intended to have the entity within Alluka destroy the monster, and that was precisely the wish the last person they had prepared had made. Yet after a wish of that magnitude, had the next person's coercive requests actually returned to their initial level?
While they discussed this, the bound man in the room had already fulfilled Alluka's three requests.
The two warriors seized the opportunity to step forward, drawing a dagger and slashing the man's throat.
Bright red blood flowed from his slit throat.
The man curled into a bow in agony, the gurgle of flowing blood filling his ears.
He whimpered in pain, but his severed windpipe made speech impossible.
"Make any simple request this time. We can decide what to do once we've investigated the matter of that monster."
The Fujiwara Clan elders conferred quietly for a while and reached a consensus.
Judging by the cost of the previous wishes, eliminating that monster should certainly have cost more than a reset to the initial level, and the death toll would undoubtedly have been enormous.
The man lying on the floor was a tool they had painstakingly selected.
The only people this man had previously had contact with were the residents of his own village. He had been in Heian-kyō for only two days before the Fujiwara Clan's people seized him.
The Fujiwara Clan did not want anyone else to learn about the wishes, so everyone who made one would be killed on the spot.
When the deathly pale monster appeared, its features like black holes.
A man in an opulent kimono walked into the center of the room. He crouched halfway down and gazed at Nanika, who sat upright on the cushion.
"Please take a rest!"
As soon as he finished speaking, the warriors behind him began pinning down the fallen man, forcing him to agree.
The so-called sacrifice's nostrils flared. In a wretched struggle, he dug his fingers into the stone tiles beneath him, his trembling lips producing short, broken sounds.
He shook like a leaf and nodded desperately, great tears spilling helplessly from his eyes.