"I delight in drifting through reincarnation. Life and death are merely forms of the world. I do not wish to free myself from life, for beauty binds me to this human world. If I wish to fly, none can stop me; if I wish to stay, none can condemn me."
A small boat drifted upon an incomparably broad river. Countless souls soaked in the gray water, painfully stretching out their arms and begging those aboard to pull them up. Yet the current dragged them onward, toward the fated other shore.
This river was called the Sanzu River, or in the more ancient tongue, the River of Forgetfulness.
A beautiful blond man stood at the bow, gazing at the sea of red flowers blooming along the riverbank. They were so dense that their crimson petals seemed like flames, illuminating half the sky. In a tone like he was reciting poetry, he spoke to the woman steering at the stern, though she looked more like a beautiful corpse dressed in a white kimono.
She was breathtakingly beautiful, but it was not a beauty that belonged to the human world, because she too was Satan.
Hearing the beautiful man's words, she lightly covered her pale lips with the fan in her hand. Her eyes curved into crescents as she murmured softly:
"I understand the freedom and pride you desire, just as I did when we first met. But why today? Why have you entered my Yellow Springs Hell again? You know I have always wanted to kill you, don't you?"
Each of the three questions was sharper than the last. By the end, the woman's face had transformed into a Hannya Ghost Mask. Slender curved horns grew from her forehead, and her features twisted beyond recognition.
"Ahem, can we not bring up the