Keiko took her leave of Takisuke and walked out into Yugakure’s streets.
The town deserved its reputation.
Every other shopfront carried some advertisement for hot springs — steaming pools, mineral baths, therapeutic soaks — and a faint sulfurous warmth threaded through the air from the vents beneath the stone roads, giving the whole place an atmosphere that was simultaneously relaxing and slightly otherworldly.
Mist drifted from the gaps between buildings, catching the morning light.
The largest establishment in the area was a hotel called the Suiyun — a sprawling place with a noble family from the Land of Hot Springs somewhere in its ownership structure, though nobody seemed to know exactly which one.
It dominated the block it sat on with the quiet confidence of a building that had never needed to try very hard.
The shop Lin had secured was nearby.
Close enough to catch foot traffic from the Suiyun’s guests, which meant the location should have been expensive.
For some reason, the previous owner had been eager to move and had priced it accordingly low.
Takisuke had also quietly smoothed things over on the administrative side.
One-point-two million ryō per year.
Keiko had accepted the price and spent the intervening time not entirely trusting it.
She had been burned too many times by things that seemed like good luck to take this one at face value without at least looking for the catch.
She hadn’t found it yet.
She remained suspicious.
Half an hour of walking brought her to the address.
Four or five shinobi were still working inside, moving with the efficient energy of people on the final push of a job.
She stopped at the threshold and looked in.
Whatever the shop had been before, it wasn’t that anymore.
The walls had been repainted a deep, saturated purple, and across every surface — irregular, organic, clearly done by hand — ran symbols and patterns that suggested ancient scripts without quite being any recognizable one.
A crystal chandelier hung from the ceiling, its facets throwing soft light in shifting patterns across the room.
The centerpiece was a square table draped in black velvet with a crystal ball at its center, perfectly clear, catching the chandelier light and refracting it into faint rainbows at the edges.
Around the walls, arranged with deliberate asymmetry: bound volumes, wands, crystal ornaments, items with the visual grammar of accumulated mystery.
A long semi-transparent gauze curtain divided the interior from the entrance, letting light through while softening edges.
And mirrors.
Everywhere mirrors — small ones set into the wall, a half-length mirror beside the door, a full-length mirror in the back corner.
Every angle covered.
Keiko stood in the entrance and looked at it all.
Yes, she thought.
That’s exactly right.
One of the working shinobi glanced up, registered her, and bowed slightly.
“Lord Keiko — you’re here.”
She raised an eyebrow.
“You know me?”
“Takisuke-san mentioned you.” A pause.
“We all know you.”
She filed that away — the village leader’s influence moving ahead of her through the village, smoothing the way, which was useful and also slightly annoying in the way that anything useful from Takisuke currently was.
“How much longer?” This story is hosted at g.com.
“Just the sign.” The shinobi held up what he’d been carrying — a wooden plaque, a little over two meters long, five characters painted large across its face.
“Then let’s put it up.”
What followed was twenty minutes that Keiko would not describe to anyone.
The positioning of a shop sign, it turned out, involved extensive negotiation between her eye and the reality of the wall.
Too far left.
Back slightly.
No, the other direction.
Up a fraction.
Hold it there — actually, down.
The shinobi doing the actual hanging became progressively more damp around the collar while maintaining complete professionalism throughout.
Eventually the sign was level, centered, and correct.
THE HOUSE OF DIVINERS.
Five characters.
She looked at them against the backdrop of the purple-walled, mirror-lined, crystal-ball-centered interior visible through the open door.
Perfect.
“You can go,” she told the shinobi.
“Good work.
Settle the remaining payment with Lin.”
They filed out with the quiet relief of people who had been released from something.
Keiko stepped inside, let the gauze curtain fall behind her, and sat down in the chair at the center table.
She looked at the crystal ball for a moment.
Looked at the small mirror resting beside it.
Then she placed her palm flat against the mirror’s surface, let a thread of spiritual energy run through her fingers, and spoke the words in a low voice — obscure syllables, rhythmic, the particular cadence of a genuine Witch incantation rather than theatrical dressing.
“Mirror, mirror — tell me what you see.”
The surface of the small mirror stirred.
A faint mist appeared, thickening at the center, and beneath it — light and shadow moving in patterns that weren’t reflections, that didn’t correspond to anything in the room.
Shapes that suggested rather than showed.
Something was happening, something was responding, but whatever it was reaching toward kept sliding away from resolution.
Keiko frowned.
No answer.
That was expected — genuine divination operated within constraints and limitations, required proper ritual conditions, could be disrupted by any number of factors.
The lack of a clear response wasn’t the surprising part.
What was surprising was the quality of the interference.
It didn’t feel like an empty channel.
It felt like something had met her attempt and deflected it.
There are people in this world who understand divination, she thought. This chapter is updated first at g.com.
Or something that does.
She sat with that for a moment, deciding whether to try again properly.
The shop door opened.
Keiko looked up.
The man who walked in had white hair worn loose, a headband bearing the kanji for Oil at his forehead, and the specific kind of entry that belonged to someone who hadn’t decided whether he was coming in or just looking.
His eyes moved around the shop once, quickly, taking inventory — and then they found Keiko, and the inventory process shifted targets in a way that was immediately legible.
He was looking at her the way a large number of people looked at her, and he was being considerably less subtle about it than most.
“We’re not open yet,” Keiko said.
“Come back tomorrow.”
Jiraiya — because it was unmistakably Jiraiya of the Sannin, the white hair and the headband and the particular energy of someone who had never in his life been described as subtle — blinked, apparently registering that he’d been caught in the middle of something, and covered it with a laugh.
“Just wandered in out of curiosity.” He was still looking.
“When did someone like you come to town?
And a shop like this—” he glanced around, taking in the crystal ball, the mirrors, the gauze curtain— “can it really tell fortunes?”
Keiko considered him across the table.
Of the Sannin, Jiraiya was the one she’d least expected to walk through her door first.
But then — he traveled constantly, went wherever his research and his network took him, and Yugakure with its open borders and tourist traffic would be exactly the kind of place he’d pass through.
She let the pause hold a moment longer, then answered.
“Not reliably.
Divination is inherently uncertain — it provides direction, not answers.
External interference affects it, the framing of the question affects it, the state of the practitioner affects it.” She kept her voice level, informational.
“What it offers is possibility, not certainty.”
Jiraiya nodded, something shifting behind the amusement in his expression.
He’d met the Great Toad Sage of Mount Myōboku — prophecy and foresight were not abstract concepts to him.
He was, of all the people who might have walked in off the street, probably the least likely to dismiss what she’d just described.
“Hm.
Reasonable.” He tilted his head.
“Could you find someone for me?”
“Divination can provide clues and direction toward a question,” Keiko said.
“It won’t give you a location or a guarantee.
It narrows possibilities.”
“That works.” He dropped into the chair on the opposite side of the table without being invited, with the ease of someone accustomed to being welcome everywhere, and grinned.
“I might be leaving town tomorrow anyway.
First customer discount?”
Keiko looked at him.
Jiraiya of the Sannin, sitting in her divination shop, asking for a deal.
“One session, complimentary,” she said.
“Consider it the opening rate.”
He leaned forward, elbows on the black velvet, eyes bright with genuine interest now beneath the performative charm.
Above them, the crystal chandelier turned slowly in an air current neither of them had made, sending soft light in slow arcs across the table.