Kagura openly hunted all kinds of demons with some Saimyosho.
Kanna, meanwhile, carried fragments of Naraku's flesh to one sealing site after another built by human monks.
On a platform halfway up a mountain outside a city stood a temple.
Its legacy stretched back over a hundred years.
According to legend, a giant beetle demon had appeared in this region a century earlier and wreaked havoc far and wide. It possessed boundless strength and was almost impervious to weapons, having destroyed several castles and countless human villages and towns.
The city not far from the temple had been built atop the ruins of one of those castles.
And this temple existed to suppress the sealed beetle demon.
That day.
Just as the fifth-generation abbot was conducting evening prayers with a dozen or so disciples.
A little girl dressed entirely in white, holding a white mirror, silently arrived at the temple's Back Mountain with a human boy of eleven or twelve.
The little girl was Kanna.
The boy was Kohaku.
There was a cave on this Back Mountain.
A statue of Ksitigarbha stood enshrined inside its entrance.
A boulder three meters in diameter blocked the entrance.
Several ropes covered in strange paper talismans were tied around the boulder, with numerous bells hanging from them.
The instant the little girl holding the mirror came within ten meters of the boulder, the surrounding bells began ringing without any wind. At the same time, every wind chime on a small, thirteen-story stone pagoda in the temple's front courtyard began swaying without a breeze.
They gave off unusually clear ringing sounds.
The abbot conducting evening prayers and the temple's other two elderly monks all paled.
"This is bad! Something's happened at the Back Mountain! A demon is trying to destroy the seal!"
The three old