One Side of the Story

Was a "special gift" good or bad? Was it ordinary, extraordinary, or something people had decided made you a freak?

Now that I finally had a chance to ask, I hesitated.

(1)

In the end, I chose not to ask Toji exactly what Heavenly Restriction was.

Because from the moment he declared Heavenly Restriction a mistake, every question poised on my lips would undoubtedly hurt him.

After settling Toji in and waiting for him to fall sound asleep, I returned to Megumi's room.

The house wasn't well soundproofed. Megumi must have heard everything in the living room clearly. He sat on his little bed with a complicated expression, his eyes full of bewilderment as he looked at me.

Was it that strange?

Was hiding here and refusing to see his own child because of an answer like that so strange?

Megumi's reaction gave me an opening to ask.

And so, for the next little while, the child told me everything he knew.

Countless new terms, new concepts, and new rules came together to form an entire worldview.

In this world, besides humans, there were jujutsu sorcerers, Heavenly Restriction, and cursed spirits. According to Megumi, humans were born with cursed energy, but ordinary humans leaked it like taps that couldn't be shut tight. Cursed spirits came from humans' negative emotions-the droplets beneath those taps that gathered into streams.

Jujutsu sorcerers, by contrast, were taps sealed shut. They could lock their cursed energy firmly inside their bodies. Even in the depths of grief, they wouldn't produce cursed spirits.

And Heavenly Restriction, to my ears, sounded like a miracle. A binding vow was forcibly imposed at birth, sacrificing some innate condition in exchange for tremendous power in a particular area.

Put simply, they were people who had made a deal with heaven.

I didn't think Heavenly Restriction was something that should be considered a mistake. So I immediately understood the expression Megumi had worn earlier.

Megumi gave me an example, too. He said an older girl at his school also had Heavenly Restriction. She had an exceptional talent for hand-to-hand combat, and her hits really hurt.

The child and I lay on our backs on his little bed. I tilted my head toward him and asked, "Then is that girl suffering?"

Megumi rolled over to face me. "Maybe."

I asked more detailed questions about the girl's story. Through our questions and answers, the source of that suffering came to light.

(2)

Both Toji and the girl named Maki had been born into a family of jujutsu sorcerers called the Zenin Clan.

Japan's ancient families always liked to preserve certain hidebound practices. Take the Kamo family, who reproduced through inbreeding during the Sengoku Period. Even after monsters had dragged the emperor from his throne, the Kamo family's onmyōji continued breeding with close relatives, all to ensure their descendants could work at the Onmyō Bureau.

Yuanyin and I had once seen the children born from those unions at a distance. They possessed abundant spiritual power, but they were all deformed children destined for short lives. Their onmyōji uniforms wrapped their bodies like sacks of rice. With vacant eyes and mouths hanging open, they looked up as the invading monsters raised their blades and cut off their clansmen's heads.

They had no choice in their birth, nor any choice in their suffering.

The children of the Zenin Clan were no different.

Megumi had never personally experienced the Zenin Clan's cruelty. He could only describe, in a few scattered words, the predicament of the two girls in that family.

I replaced the people in the story with Toji, closed my eyes, and tried to feel it.

It was far too pale.

Then I imagined what knowledge and reasoning I could use to rebuild Toji's understanding.

Still far too pale.

I lay in bed thinking for a long time. Late into the night, as my eyes grew heavy and I was about to drift off, something from the past inexplicably came to mind.

(2) Once upon a time

I had once traveled to Sicily with Yuanyin. On the second day of our trip, that peaceful, sun-drenched island inspired us to decide, on a whim, to stay for a while.

But on the very day I went house hunting, I rejected the idea entirely.

A local young man accompanied me to view the houses. The sun had baked his skin a wheat-gold shade, and his deep-set eyes seemed to hold a sorrow that would never dissolve.

He was surprised when he saw me. After all, my body was only fourteen at the time. He bent slightly at the waist when he spoke to me, his tone shifting from wariness to a kind of deference.

"You shouldn't be looking at houses on your own. Especially..." His gaze wavered as he looked at me, my reflection perfectly captured in his dark brown eyes. "You're beautiful. Like cherry wine."

For once, I was in an excellent mood. After all, my face bore a strong resemblance to Yuanyin's.

The young man led me through alleys planted with lemon trees, picking out house after house. None satisfied me. Their bright colors made it obvious they had only recently been built. Even without stepping inside, I could smell the faint, acrid odor of chemical paint.

I always hoped to live with Yuanyin in a house that felt lived in. After all, wasn't that what made a "home"?

We stopped in front of the last house.

I stopped because it was old and neglected; the young man stopped because of the story surrounding it.

With a barely perceptible tremor in his voice, he told me a sorrowful story, filled with the ugliness of human nature and beauty unable to protect itself.

Once human nature entered into stories like these, the journey was never kind, and the ending was never happy.

When he finished, he wiped the tears from the corner of his eye with his thumb and reassured me that times had changed. That story was ten years old. Things were peaceful now, and people were becoming better.

I nodded and put that irrelevant story out of my mind.

The sun was about to set. Warm sunset light spilled across Sicily's streets, passed through the windows, and cast wavering patches over us on the second floor. For that brief moment, I truly fell for Sicily.

Until Yuanyin appeared.

She stood downstairs in fitted clothes and waved to me. In the sunset, her red hair looked like a flame. She was warm and fiery, her vivid beauty impossible to forget.

I called back to her, but just as I was about to introduce her to the young man, the look in his eyes stopped me.

It wasn't simple admiration. It was filthy desire.

And it wasn't just him. The locals gathering and stopping in the street were violating Yuanyin with their eyes, with their gazes.

That story-the story of the woman who couldn't protect herself-suddenly surfaced in my mind. It no longer felt irrelevant.

Standing on the second floor, looking at everything outside the window, I began to share that woman's feelings across a span of ten long years.

Her despair, her circumstances, the unbearable anguish she had felt standing at this window and looking at these people-all of it leaped out of the story and seeped into my awareness.

In that moment, I felt what she had felt.

(3)

When I got up in the morning, I made a decision.

I would visit the Zenin Clan in Kyoto.

I would walk every corridor Toji had walked as a child. I would see everything he had seen with his own eyes in the Zenin household. I would feel all the suffering and hardship he had endured there.

Because only then could I truly see the wound deep in Toji's heart and find the right gauze and medicine.

I was a person of action. Once I had made a decision, I wanted to put it into practice the very next second. But before I could act, the problem before me was how to disappear for five days without raising suspicion.

As things stood, I had a body that had only just turned nine. How could a nine-year-old child reasonably disappear for five days?

While shopping for daily necessities with Megumi, I agonized over it. Just as I was about to tell him what I had in mind, he suddenly stepped in front of me.

I looked up and saw a tall figure slowly approaching us from a short distance away.

The man wore a traditional kimono. His hair hung down his back like a hedgehog's spines, each strand stiff and angular. He walked straight toward us with a clear purpose.

Megumi was afraid of this man.

I gently drew the child behind me and faced the man head-on. "Can I help you?"

The man rubbed his stubbled chin, his gaze passing over me and fixing directly on Megumi. "Brat, you're Toji's son, aren't you?"

The way he looked at Megumi made me uncomfortable. I shielded Megumi, reaching behind my back with my right hand for Quasar, and asked coldly, "What do you want?"

The man gave a disdainful chuckle. "To take him back to the Zenin Clan, of course. An ordinary person like you isn't qualified to enter the Zenin household."

I understood. Silently, I swapped Quasar for the powerful Eight-Star Gun.

Well, there was my reasonable excuse to disappear.

Oh, right. Hopefully this hostage would be tough enough to survive. After all, I needed someone who could walk me to the Zenin household.