After several dozen minutes, the music from the three-stringed instruments; which Duria had called shamisen; drifting from the shadows of the hall abruptly shifted its rhythm.
It became shrill and grating, perfectly mimicking the dreadful sound of fingernails scraping against glass.
The Matron of the establishment offered a slight wave of her hand.
A servant girl, her face caked in stark-white powder, approached the table, barely managing to conceal the violent trembling of her hands, and poured a measure of liquor into Duria’s porcelain cup.
The liquid was not clear.
It was thick, dark crimson, and viscous as dense syrup.
“That isn’t sake,” Lengos observed flatly from where he stood leaning against the wall.”That is blood.”
“Blood generously laced with mercury and silver,” the Matron corrected dryly, not bothering to lift her gaze from her pipe.”The only concoction that allows us to see what comes crawling out of the dark before it buries its fangs in our throats.
To your health, Grandma.”
Duria snatched up the cup and downed the thick fluid in a single, unhesitating gulp.
She licked her lips, her prominent fangs gleaming sharply in the gloom.
“Oishii!
(Delicious!)” she marveled, her eyes flaring a brilliant scarlet, shedding all semblance of humanity for a terrifying fraction of a second.”It has a distinct aftertaste of…
raw iron, sheer terror, and ancient magic!
Granddaughter, you are spoiling me!”
At that exact moment, the sliding entrance doors were thrust open, allowing a biting gust of freezing air to sweep into the sweltering hall.
Perval swaggered inside, casually adjusting the sash of his coat with a look of satiated contentment plastered across his scarred face.
Right behind him stepped Neira.
The priestess looked entirely different than she had out on the street.
Her skin practically glowed, her serpentine tail lashed with lazy satisfaction, and her entire being radiated a palpable aura of absolute gluttony and potent, fully restored power.
“Phew!” the monk sighed, dropping onto a cushion beside Figlin.”Those pa…trols are awfully expensive.
But I must admit, the service is incredibly professional.
Neira, everything alright?”
“I haven’t felt this good in ages,” she purred, stretching luxuriously like a contented feline.
But then she abruptly froze, her abyssal pink eyes narrowing to slits.
“But in here…
the atmosphere in here is utterly rotten.
I smell pain.
Fresh agony.”
“She is right,” Duria confirmed, her tone instantly hardening to steel, shedding every last ounce of her prior carefree demeanor.
She set the porcelain cup down on the table with a sharp clack that pierced the silence.”It reeks of raw fear in here vastly more than it reeks of fish.
Granddaughter, why does Gray Water look exactly like a fortified citadel bracing for a siege?”
The vampire swept her gaze across the gathered locals, gesturing sharply toward the barred window shutters.
“I am well aware that during the Festival of Silent Ancestors, the veil between the realms wears thinner than wet rice paper.
It has always been this way.
But historically, a line of salt across the threshold, a handful of blessed amulets, and keeping the doors locked after sundown was more than sufficient.
I have never seen you barricade yourselves in as if bracing for total war.
What exactly has changed?”
The Matron slowly exhaled a thick plume of smoke, and her wrinkled face, illuminated solely by the dying embers of the hearth, looked exhausted not by mere years, but by centuries.
“This has been going on for three months,” the old woman replied, staring grimly into the glowing tobacco ash.
“The yokai (specters) have always grown restless during the festival, this is true.
But this time, they aren’t merely slipping through the cracks.
They are actively invading.
They are terrifyingly bold.
Unflinchingly aggressive.
They are no longer just fleeting shadows darting through snow-choked forests or lonely mountain trails under the cover of darkness.”
“Are you saying they are striking inside the safe zones?” Lengos interjected sharply.
“They no longer acknowledge the existence of safe zones,” the Matron hissed.”They manifest in broad daylight, dead center in the village.
They rip solid oak doors clean off their hinges, snatching people straight from the crowded market at high noon, wreaking bloody devastation for all to see.
They do not fear the sun, and they certainly do not fear our prayers.”
The old woman gripped her pipe so fiercely that the bamboo stem groaned in protest.
“The temple guard can barely keep pace, even with every able-bodied soul capable of bearing arms supporting them.
I must admit…” her gaze drifted off into the gloomy distance”…that those lizardfolk have proven to be exceptionally useful.
They possess zero fear of monsters, perhaps because they themselves look like abominations.
They fight on the front lines with a raw, feral fury that my own people severely lack.
But even that is not nearly enough.”
“And this…
pain?” Neira asked quietly, pressing a hand to her chest.”This agony I am feeling right now?”
“Yesterday, the captain of the guard and his men returned from a patrol of the eastern ridge,” the Matron continued, her voice dropping lower, growing raspy as if the very words were lacerating her throat.”They dragged back a ‘discovery.’ It is my personal retainer; we had assumed he fell into a ravine, or was simply devoured by the winter wolves.” The old woman lifted her heavy gaze to Duria.”We were all entirely mistaken.”
The Matron looked at the assembled newcomers with a grim, unyielding determination.
“Since everyone is finally present…
It is time for dessert.
Witness precisely what we are up against.”
The old woman clapped her hands sharply together.
The sliding shoji doors behind her, leading deeper into the private chambers, snapped open with a violent crack.
Everyone froze dead in their tracks.
Even Figlin instantly ceased his frantic calculations regarding the heating costs.
Deep within the smaller chamber, securely shackled to a wooden pillar with thick iron chains, stood a “man.” But he was no longer human.
Across vast swathes of his body, his skin had been completely excised and replaced with gleaming, stark-white porcelain.
The jagged fissures between the raw, living meat and the cold ceramic were filled with liquid, pulsating silver.
Instead of hands, crude, rusted blades had been brutally grafted directly to his forearms.
Worse still; he was completely alive.
The porcelain plates grafted to his chest rose and fell with every ragged, wet, wheezing breath.
Zedora furrowed her brow, staring hard at the gleaming, metallic scars crisscrossing the wretch’s ruined body.
“What is that vile filth filling his wounds?” she growled, pointing the edge of her axe at the creature.”It looks like quicksilver, but it’s moving on its own, like it has a pulse.”
Duria took a slow step closer, the glowing silver veins perfectly reflected in her wide crimson eyes.
“That is Kintsugi,” she said very quietly, her voice entirely stripped of its usual, theatrical childishness.
She sounded exactly like a seasoned curator leading a tour through a museum of horrors.”‘Golden Repair’.”
She glanced at the barbarian, seeing the total lack of comprehension on her scarred face.
“In my culture, Zedi, when a highly prized porcelain cup shatters, we do not throw it away.
We meticulously bind the pieces back together using lacquer dusted with powdered gold or silver.
We believe that an object which has suffered destruction and been lovingly repaired is infinitely more beautiful and vastly more valuable than a flawless new one.
Its scars literally become its history; a badge of pride, rather than a mark of shame.”
The vampire clenched her pale hand into a tight fist, staring with utter revulsion at the silver throbbing within the servant’s ruined flesh.
“But this…
this is pure, unadulterated blasphemy.
Someone took that sacred philosophy and defiled it.
Instead of a teacup, they ‘repaired’ a human being.
Not to honor his history, but to brutally trap his soul within a shattered vessel.
This isn’t a repair, Zedi.
This is eternal, agonizing torment locked inside a beautiful, grotesque shell.”
Yerga rose slowly from her cushion, gliding closer fascinated.
“Exquisite…” she whispered almost involuntarily, her neon-green eyes surgically analyzing every single suture and silver joint.”Extremely cruel, undeniably vulgar, but…
from a purely technical standpoint, it is quite impressive.
Someone has forged a living sculpture out of him.
This isn’t your garden-variety necromancy, darlings.
This is the masterful engineering of suffering.”
“He was my most loyal retainer,” the Matron announced, her raspy voice hardening to solid stone.
“He vanished a week ago, when I sent him to inspect the eastern mine.
Yesterday, a patrol found him discarded on the trail.” The old woman took a deep, dragging pull of smoke to actively hide the violent trembling of her hands.
“They lacked the heart to put him down.
They foolishly deluded themselves into believing it was a curse I could simply lift.
That I could somehow save him.” She exhaled a thick plume of gray smoke toward the chained, whimpering creature.
“But my exorcisms failed completely; they only succeeded in dragging suffering into our halls.
He screams constantly, even though he has been robbed of his mouth.
What was done to him…
is a sick, twisted mockery of our powerlessness.”
A suffocating silence slammed down over the hall, broken only by the rhythmic, metallic rattling of iron chains.
Zedora, who had listened to the entire exchange with a face carved of unyielding stone, furrowed her brow.
Her calloused hand tightened around the leather-wrapped haft of her axe so fiercely her knuckles instantly turned bone-white.
She leaned toward the vampire, making no effort to mask a potent cocktail of deep irritation and sheer incomprehension.
“That’s a massive tactical error,” she growled in a harsh whisper, actively trying to keep the Matron from overhearing.
“You stumble across an abomination like that on the trail, and instead of taking its head off and burning the carcass to ash, you drag it straight into the heart of the city?
What in the hells were they thinking?
It doesn’t even look human anymore.
How did they even know what it was?”
Duria let out a very quiet sigh, taking a slow sip of the thick, bloody sake as if desperately trying to wash a bitter taste from the back of her throat.”Look closely at his hip, Zedi.”
The barbarian squinted through the gloom.
Protruding from beneath the tattered, mud-caked, and blood-stiffened robes was a torn fragment of a silk sash, intricately embroidered with a distinct crest: a stylized chrysanthemum tightly entwined in frost.
“That is a kamon; the sacred crest of our clan,” the vampire explained in a low, dangerous whisper.
“Only the absolute most trusted retainers are permitted to wear that sash.
Here, when you see someone wearing those specific colors, you don’t merely see a human being; you see a direct, physical extension of their lord’s will.
Destroying him without explicit orders from the top would be akin to casually breaking the ruler’s favorite toy.
To those guards, he wasn’t a monster.
He was a wounded comrade, and…
someone’s rightful property.”
“Property that is likely to get us all slaughtered,” Zedora scoffed, shaking her head with a disapproval typical of a Southerner, where raw survival always trumped rigid social conventions.”Hope and honor.
Where I come from, we just call that ‘suicide’.”
“Hope is a ruthless bitch, my dear,” Duria replied quietly, setting down her cup.”They likely thought the young one could somehow fix him.
That beneath that shattered shell, he was still in there somewhere.
They couldn’t bring themselves to put him down.
Their hearts were simply far too soft.”
The vampire’s demeanor turned deadly serious as she concluded the whispered exchange.
Her childish, theatrical smile vanished without a trace, instantly replaced by the cold, unfeeling mask of an apex predator.
She turned and spoke loudly to the old woman:
“Yare, yare…
(What a nuisance…) Someone took your rightful property, Grandma, broke it, and dumped it on your doorstep just to see exactly how we would react?
How terribly rude.
How unforgivably rude.”
At that exact moment, the porcelain servant jerked , as if directly reacting to the sound of the vampire’s voice.
The iron chains pulled taut to their breaking point, groaning ominously.
The rusted blades grafted to his arms ground against his iron shackles, showering bright sparks in a desperate, frenzied bid to break free.
His hollow eye sockets locked a dead, unblinking stare directly on Duria.
“He is reacting to you,” the Matron observed, her gnarled hand tightening around the stem of her pipe.”He smells blood.
Immensely powerful blood.”
Suddenly, the vaulted ceiling above them groaned loudly.
The frantic music of the shamisens abruptly died with the sharp snap of a breaking string.
Figlin looked up, squinting his eyes and instinctively shielding his golden tankard with his hand.
“Oi!
Why is the bloody roof cracking?!
I was just complimenting their solid architecture!
And why in the hells is it raining…
coal dust?”
It wasn’t dust.
Slithering through the widening cracks between the crossbeams came long, thick strands of pitch-black hair.
An impossible amount of hair.
It was alive, writhing and undulating like a nest of starving worms, actively hunting for prey.
“It appears we have company,” Neira hissed.
Her serpentine tail instinctively lashed the air like a whip, and a violent, pulsating pink aura began to rapidly coalesce around her hands.”And I doubt they were invited for tea.”
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