Morning came clean and bright over Yugakure, the thin hot spring mist catching the early light and turning it gold before it reached the streets.
Keiko arrived at the House of Diviners before the first customers could and settled into her chair with the unhurried composure of a woman who had been in this role long enough that it no longer required effort.
The gauze curtain, the crystal ball on its velvet cloth, the mirrors arranged at their careful angles — the shop looked exactly as it should.
Mysterious.
Expensive.
Worth the trip.
The rumors, it turned out, had done excellent work overnight.
She’d heard fragments on the walk over.
Tora and Takisuke’s people had seeded the stories through the usual channels, and the stories had then done what stories always did — grown, mutated, acquired details nobody had put there, shed accuracy in favor of drama.
By the time they’d completed one circuit of the village they bore only a passing resemblance to anything real.
Koch is from another world entirely, with magic that can reshape destiny.
She’s the last heir of an ancient clan, tasked with saving the shinobi world.
The House of Diviners is the front for a powerful hidden organization that can make ordinary people into elite shinobi.
That last one was, technically, more accurate than anything else being said, which Keiko found quietly entertaining.
Takisuke’s involvement had added a layer of institutional credibility that the wilder claims would never have achieved on their own.
People in Yugakure trusted their village leader’s endorsement even when they weren’t sure why he was giving it.
The door opened before the morning had properly settled.
The woman who came in moved like someone carrying weight that wasn’t visible.
Light blue dress, hair not quite managed, eyes that had been doing too much work for too long.
She stopped just inside the threshold and looked at Keiko with the particular hesitation of someone who had talked themselves into something and wasn’t sure they’d made the right call.
“Welcome.” Keiko kept her voice soft, unhurried.
The woman blinked — momentarily caught by whatever she’d been expecting versus what she found — and then collected herself.
“I heard — they said you can divine anything here.
Is that…” She pressed her hands together.
“Is that true?”
“Within limits,” Keiko said, and gestured to the chair across the table.
“Sit down and tell me what you need.”
The woman sat carefully, as if unsure the chair would hold her, and was quiet for a moment.
“My husband,” she said finally.
“He was a shinobi.
He went missing on a mission — a long time ago now.
No word since.” She looked at her hands.
“I need to know if he’s still alive.”
Keiko placed a sheet of paper and a pen on the table.
“Write down everything you can.
His name, his date of birth, where you live, distinguishing features.
The more you give me, the clearer the reading.”
The woman wrote for three minutes without stopping.
When she pushed the paper back across the table it was covered on both sides.
Keiko read it.
Ah Bao.
Born the sixteenth day of the fifth month, thirtieth year of Konoha.
Six in the morning. The source of this chapter is g.com.
Residing at number sixty-one, First Street, Yugakure.
Half-grey hair.
Black mole below the left corner of the mouth.
“Wait here.”
She rose and moved to the half-length mirror beside the table.
Placed her hands against the frame and began to speak — the Witch language, the one the System had given her access to, the particular grammar of it that worked on objects and spaces the way regular language worked on people.
The words shaped an intent, a direction, a question with a specific target.
What is Ah Bao’s condition now?
She repeated it, settling into the meditative state that divination required — the particular quality of emptied-out attention, not passive but unfocused, making space for what came rather than reaching for it.
The mirror’s surface shifted.
The ambient light in the shop changed subtly — not dimmer, but different in quality, as if it had developed an opinion about where it wanted to fall.
The mirror began to glow, faint and unsteady, a light that came from inside the glass rather than reflecting off it.
The woman behind her went very still.
Keiko fed more spiritual energy into the connection and the image steadied.
A figure, seen at a distance but recognizable — half-grey hair, the mole exactly where it had been described.
He was in a fight he was losing badly, four or five opponents pressing him from multiple angles, no good exit available.
The scene had the compressed inevitability of something already decided.
She watched him fall.
His eyes, in the last moment the image held, were turned toward something in the distance.
The direction of it was clear.
Southwest of Yugakure.
Twenty miles, approximately, by the landmarks visible around the scene.
Then the image released and the mirror was just a mirror again.
Keiko turned.
The woman was watching her with the expression of someone who already knew but needed it confirmed.
“I found him,” Keiko said.
“He’s gone.
I’m sorry.”
The silence that followed had a specific texture — not shock, more like the moment a held breath finally releases.
The woman’s eyes filled and the tears came quietly, without the drama of surprise.
“Where?” she managed.
“Southwest of Yugakure.
Around twenty miles.
That’s where he was when he died.
Whether the body is still there I can’t tell you — the image shows the moment, not the present.”
The woman nodded very carefully, as if her head might come apart if she moved too quickly.
She sat with it for a moment.
Then she stood, slowly, and bowed — the deep, genuine bow of someone with nothing performative left in them.
“Thank you for telling me.
Not knowing was…” She stopped.
Started again.
“Thank you.”
“My condolences,” Keiko said.
“I hope you find what you need to grieve properly.” Enjoying the story? Read on at g.com.
The woman straightened.
Reached into her purse.
“How much?”
“First customer of the day — four thousand ryō.”
The woman set the bills on the table without comment and walked out.
The door swung closed on the sound of her footsteps fading down the street.
Keiko sat back down and looked at the money on the table.
The divination had been real.
Every piece of it — the incantation, the connection, the image, the spiritual cost.
The woman’s husband was dead and Keiko had watched it happen and told her so.
She sat with that for a moment.
War does this, she thought.
This world does this.
That’s not something I introduced.
It didn’t make the heaviness go away.
She wasn’t sure it was supposed to.
She counted the spiritual cost of the session quickly and worked out the ceiling for the day.
Then she went to the door and hung a small sign.
Ten readings per day.
That was the right number.
Enough to build a reputation without burning herself down to nothing.
She hadn’t opened this shop primarily to make money — the money was useful but secondary.
What she needed was presence, reach, the kind of name that moved through a community without her having to push it.
She went back to her chair and let the morning settle.
An hour passed.
Two customers came and went — questions she could answer, readings she could manage without anything dramatic.
The shop was functioning.
Then the door opened again and a figure in a black robe walked in.
Full coverage — hood up, face obscured, the deliberate anonymity of someone who had reasons for it.
The eyes that swept the shop were sharp, taking inventory quickly, cataloguing details with the reflex of a trained observer.
They found Keiko and held there for a moment with something that might have been surprise, quickly controlled.
The figure moved to the chair across the table and sat.
A silence.
Then: “I heard you read fortunes here.”
“That’s correct.” Keiko kept her hands relaxed on the table, her expression neutral and inviting.
“What would you like to know?”
Another pause, longer this time.
“I want to know my fate.”