Chapter 11

  “Can you… can you hear me?”

  I couldn’t hear her reply.

  I could sense it.

  “Teira… sama….”

  “Vow to me that…” I blinked away the tears. “That you will serve me… unquestioningly. And I will spare your life.”

  “Teira… sama…”

  “Vow it. Vow it!”

  “I… vow… Teira-sama.”

  I felt our connection snap into place like the lashing of a whip.

  Her cursed womb lowered, to the floor. I touched it, brushing my hand gently against the outer membrane of her womb. “You are not to harm anyone without my expressly stated permission. Not a single soul. Not even a fly, or a Juchū. Understand?”

  “I… understand. I live… to serve… my master…”

  I winced in agony at her word, that word. ‘Master’.

  “Don’t call me that. Call me Teira.”

  “I understand… Teira…”

  This wasn’t Michiko. This was a remnant of Michiko. An apparition. Not an incarnation of her soul. A cursed spirit.

  But what if this was her soul?

  Then this was for the best anyhow.

  This way, I could ensure that in her second life, she…

  …didn’t hurt anyone.

  Or me.

  In the far distance, I could sense my Juchū herding the clan within our compound. Many of them had tried to escape.

  I hadn’t let them.

  I still had to save them, after all.

  000

  I had done this before.

  And I knew what was required. To take control.

  If I had other tools, I would use them. If those tools were as keen as I needed them to be, if my skill in them were as keen as I needed it to be, I would use them. Unfortunately, I couldn’t in good conscience let optimism and sentiment lead me.

  I knew what worked. And I knew my forte.

  I just had to make sure that I wouldn’t lose myself when all this was said and done.

  I sat atop a throne at the end of a wide courtyard, every single living clan member before me.

  Iemon was next to me, on a wheelchair. He was still missing blood, but he was a curse expert through and through. He would survive in spite of his currently weak constitution.

  Hirotada was in the crowd, shivering.

  “Hirotada-sensei. Step forward.”

  He looked shocked by my proclamation.

  “Step forward. Now.”

  He hurried to obey, stepping between the members of the clan until he reached the foot of my throne.

  “What do you have to say for yourself?” I asked. “From where I’m sitting, you look a whole lot like a nail. Should I hammer you?”

  I stood up from my chair and walked up to him.

  “Please, Teira-chan—“

  That suffix set me off instantly.

  I jumped, raised my fist, and hammered it down to his skull.

  Black Flash.

  Hirotada was as much an object as the throne that I was sitting on. My timing had been perfect.

  He collapsed, head exploding into gore, spraying the front row. They screamed.

  “SILENCE!” I roared, backing up to my throne. “You wretches have precious few options before you but to obey.”

  They quieted down. As expected. These weren’t hapless civilians. They existed in the world of Jujutsu.

  My Juchū, blocking the back exit, ensured that none would leave too quickly.

  “I am the hundred and third head of the Hibana clan,” I announced. “Hibana Teira. Born of no one. I have no parents. I simply appeared here. And this is now your reality. I have the Reverse Cursed Technique.”

  I summoned my Juchū above their heads.

  They gasped at the sight of so many hundreds of thousands of Juchū filling the air.

  I held them there, just to keep them aware of what I was.

  “Hibana Sosuke, curse his name…” I waited patiently. No one said anything. “I said curse his name!” I screamed.

  They did. They cursed him.

  His wife and children did not participate in the reluctant curse fest, though. I’d keep an eye on them.

  No, that was reductive. I’d keep an eye on everyone. This sort of social shift would require the sort of implementation of law that would terrify most. But the Hibana were a traumatized and wretched people. They could handle some bitter medicine.

  “Enough!” I shouted. “That accursed devil is dead. By my own hands. I broke every single bone in his body one after another before ending his miserable existence.” His wife whimpered. “And I would do it all over again for what he took from me. Listen, and hear me well: I am not your friend. But you shouldn’t worry about that. No, you should worry about the fact that I am not your enemy, either. You will feel this way, in the coming years. You will sense that I might hold you all as my greatest enemies. You would be wrong to think so. I advise you all to try your best to disabuse yourselves of that… quite-frankly offensive notion. I’m not your friend, but I’m not your enemy.” I grinned. “I’m your medicine. And before you ask? No. You’re not leaving. You can try. You can try and rebel, try and resist, try and thwart me. And I will make it my personal mission to break you all. Every single one of you. You are nothing but an extension of my cursed technique. Believe that. This meeting is over.”

  000

  Many objected.

  Some tried to run away. None of them died. I wouldn’t let them get off just like that.

  And we returned to the same courtyard.

  “Keep trying,” I said, crossing my leg and grinning. “Please. Stress-test my system. Suss out my sleeping patterns if you can. I’m sure you’ll succeed!”

  000

  They were persistent.

  “We can do this until the sun in the sky burns out. You have thirty days.”

  000

  By the thirtieth day, none tried to escape. They had gotten the picture.

  In fact, they had gotten the picture by the fifteenth day. The remaining fifteen days was simply myself confirming whether I had broken them or not.

  In the mean-time, I ran experiments on my newfound powers—so, so many new powers. It was difficult to keep track of.

  Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

  We buried what was left of our dead clansmen, attending a mass funeral for all those that had fallen in the day that I had marked in our history as ‘the Betrayal of Sosuke’.

  With the Reverse Cursed Technique, I no longer needed to sleep. Positive energy could replenish every single aspect of my physicality, leaving me perfectly able to continue my vigil no matter how much time had passed.

  On my right side, Iemon. On my left, Michiko.

  Her vengeful spirit had hatched from its womb. It was cloaked, and the expression visible underneath her hood was bent into spirals that were distressing to look at directly. I could inspect her features through my Juchū, but my eyes remained a stubborn weak point for her technique to exploit.

  The wider applications of her technique, however?

  A less scrupulous part of me appreciated the fact that had I allowed her to persist, in spite of this undignified state of hers.

  At this point, I could see her as nothing but an asset—as always.

  “We have gotten the picture, it seems,” I grinned widely. “Don’t worry, I have not lowered my guard. On the contrary, it will never lower. Now, I would like to inform you of some simple facts.”

  I told them about the Swarm Queen. Hibana. I told her about what few insights I could glean about her life from the time I had been within the Cursed Tool’s Innate Domain.

  “The moral of the story? Women are equal to men.” I laughed. “It’s—it’s just that plain and simple, you idiots. Women? Men? The same. And in case you, too, wish to view me as some kind of benevolent spirit—or a cursed spirit, given my actions—then I ask you all one thing: what are you going to do about it?!”

  I had whipped the builders into rebuilding the wrecked remnants of the main compound in which my battle with the clan’s curse experts had occurred. We were well underway in rebuilding, thanks to my dogged insistence on not fucking off.

  “I promise, it’ll get worse,” I said. After all, they had no idea what I meant with that fact.

  ‘If women are equal to men, then can women rape men, too?!’ That was probably the thoughts going through their idiot brains. That was fine. They were uneducated fools. I would educate them.

  “In the interest of instating justice, we shall enact the Feminine Tribunal.”

  000

  “Have you ever taken your wife outside of her wishes?” I asked.

  The man kneeling before me, Hibana Riki, shivered. “Wha-what do you mean?”

  “Answer to the best of your ability,” Iemon tiredly announced, for the thirtieth time today.

  I had put him through the same tribunal, one that demanded he submit to a binding vow of honesty. He had… passed. He had never raped his wife.

  That was my yard-stick of all-encompassing disapproval: marital rape. I needed these men out one way or another. There were way too many of them, and I needed the worst of them gone such that a new beginning could bloom in the wake of their disappearance.

  “Well…?! Ah…?! Yes?! But she was tired, and I needed—“

  “Move to the right,” I flicked my hand to the side, where all the other condemned men stood. “It’s fine. Just move.”

  The lie eased him into his new reality, and I accepted the next bastard whom I would likely be forced to kill.

  000

  “You can’t kill them,” Iemon hissed at me desperately, leaning forward while on his wheelchair. “Please. They are too many.”

  Too many rapists.

  I laughed at his face. I met him in my new quarters, the clan head’s quarters. I held a gourd filled with sake in one hand, leering at him. Was this asshole serious?

  “What would you have me do, vice-head?” I asked. “Exile them? I can do that, too.”

  He stopped himself from exclaiming, and instead winced. “No. No, that would be equally destructive. Slightly less so. But I have this.” He presented to me a document.

  My eyes were giving me such a hard time as of late. It was a booklet. A booklet of letters.

  Petitions?

  “These are wives pleading for the sake of their husbands. None of them have asserted that they were perfect, but they need them.”

  I took a gulp of the sake, trying to think. It was hard to do so. Answers always became so clear when you had this… elixir at your disposal. But the process was difficult. Either I had an answer, or I didn’t.

  I liked that simple binary.

  My impaired decision making wasn’t the intended goal of my drinking, however. It was learning how to deal with poison using my Reverse Cursed Technique. Training, in other words. I challenged myself to finishing a gourd without getting too drunk. With the constitution of a child, this was an incredibly difficult proposition, and using the Reverse Cursed Technique while inebriated was doubly difficult.

  But that was important. I had to simulate extreme conditions in order to hone my control. Otherwise, any old poison-user could get a drop on me no matter what. And as the next clan head, I had to be extremely cautious about poisons.

  “I don’t need them,” I said, referring to the men.

  Iemon didn’t say something as provocative to me as ‘you do’ even though I knew he wanted to—and I wouldn’t have held contradiction against. But Iemon carried some trauma from the last clan head that had betrayed him, so it was easy to understand why he was walking on egg shells around me.

  But I believed it actually, almost. We… did need them.

  But as a clan head, it was my place to be… sweet-talked into sparing the rod. And I was training Iemon’s compassion to boot! As of late, I had discovered what a soft spot that my ‘uncle’ had for the clan. He would have made for a competent clan head for certain.

  In that capacity, I had come to cherish him. He was harmless to me.

  He reminded me of Michiko.

  “Yubitsume,” he suggested.

  I stopped for a moment.

  Then I grinned. The ancient Yakuza punishment. Yubitsume.

  “I like the way you think,” I said. “Yes. The condemned men? All shall be condemned to yubitsume. Their entire right pinkie, down to the last knuckle.”

  Iemon grinned ingratiatingly. “That is most compassionate of you, Teira-sama.”

  000

  We were back in the big courtyard. The entire clan had shown up, once more.

  One by one, the condemned men cut their pinkies off and presented the fingers to me in a wrapped-up cloth. They were a biohazard, so I instructed the servants to burn them as soon as possible. By the day’s end, a hundred and nineteen men had lost their pinkies.

  That dismemberment would etch the new order into their bodies so that they would never forget.

  “Servants. Distribute the booklets,” I said. A fleet of servants behind me started handing out booklets to the clan members. One for two. It took a few minutes before they were done. Once they were, I cleared my throat and spoke. “This is our new system. A point-based social credit system, in which dropping below a certain point-threshold will lead to punishment. Things that will lose you points are all indicated in the booklets. Study them well. Just to summarise, however, I am indeed enforcing a ban on speech and teachings that contradict the new ethos of our clan, one that espouses gender equality and freedom of choice. Until this social reform has been engraved into your bones, you will, unfortunately, not have a single moment of privacy in this clan.”

  My booklet encouraged people to keep each other accountable, to be rewarded for reporting the wrongdoings of their neighbors. I wasn’t really trying to foster unity—they were united in fear, and a lack of other choices. Unity wasn’t an issue. Change was. And this sort of change couldn’t happen in a single generation unless drastic measures were taken.

  “I encourage you not to give me the chance to make the first accusation,” I said. “I encourage you to go through the proper channels. Anything that I catch, that has yet gone unreported by a witness, will lead to the accused, and the witness, losing points. Anything that occurs behind closed doors that lacks a witness, I will discover. Even the most errant comment to your child demanding that they adhere to the old customs, will lose you points. Our first year will be difficult, but together, we can manage and keep the executions and punishments to a minimum. That is all. You are dismissed.”

  I walked inside the courtyard building, Iemon wheeling after me. “Our rogue experts are arriving soon. And they are not happy.”

  I could sense them. They were five miles away, making their way to the clan compound by foot through the wilderness. They were planning to ambush me.

  These fifty Juchū experts who had been stationed all across Japan, keeping us in the loop about the goings-on of non-sorcerers, had lost brothers, fathers and sons on the day of Sosuke’s Betrayal.

  “We need to win them over,” Iemon said quietly.

  “It would be nice to have them working for me,” I said. “It would be nice if they submitted.” I had much use for experienced curse experts. In the coming days, as our responsibilities as Association members caught up to us, we would have a buffer to stave off the jackals until I finally got my bearings.

  I had yet to even fully crack the barrier technique that the Mori clan had provided us with. The talismans that guided cursed energy with special characters were… opaque, to say the least. I needed more time. I was certain that eventually, I would be able to figure out how to keep the barriers on without the Mori clan’s help.

  And there was also the fact that the Mori clan knew about our internal activities from the surveillance feature in our barrier.

  “But…” I said in a low tone. “I won’t let them run away.”

  000

  I was in the clan head’s private quarters, eating dinner, paired with sake. Even from a distance of miles, I could still take their Juchū, leaving them all with but a single one to their name. Using them, I spelled the circumstances of the clan, my credentials, and the conditions of their surrender in the air with the bugs.

  And when one tried to run away. I sent a Juchū down his throat. A mother bug and a hundred other normal Juchū.

  Immediately, I had to stop eating as something came over me. Something real.

  There was a curious strain that I could perceive when I used Reproduction. Especially when the targets were alive. Sosuke had stated that this strain was of the soul. Curses had souls, then. After all, I could still Reproduce through captured cursed spirits—though those had to be eaten alive because they were so prone to dissolving after death.

  A fully healthy male being implanted with a mother bug had given me further insight to what it meant to strain one’s soul.

  It felt like a shot of sake without the emotional high.

  Just depressing, relaxing, and slightly worrisome.

  At the sight of their comrade’s flesh turning into cursed egg sacs, they froze in place.

  In the meanwhile, I used the Reverse Cursed Technique to process the alcohol out from my blood as quickly as possible, regaining a mental and physiological equilibrium as I did.

  I sensed for that thing that had just been rattled. My soul, ostensibly.

  And in searching for disorder, I found that metaphysical aspect of myself.

  It felt like… something out of this world. An object that existed on several layers of reality at once. The soul was the body and vice versa. My body had reacted to my soul’s strain, and I could see it now.

  Hairline fractures. Extremely thin. They were already healing.

  Something layered within the soul seemed to come out to fill the gaps while the core of the soul slowly generated more… soul stuff.

  There were five layers of soul.

  As in, five souls occupying the same exact metaphysical space.

  …why five?

  And why did reproduction affect my soul?

  I focused my attention through my Juchū, at the mother bug that was busy eating away at a man’s cursed energy and flesh—

  The soul was the body.

  But not in a perfectly literal sense. I reckoned that flesh could heal more easily than the soul did. Something about the damage being done to my soul, albeit minimal and temporary, was still enough to give me chills.

  The only relevant factor I could imagine as to why my soul was being affected, was because I was pitting it against another’s soul.

  Ergo, my Juchū ate souls to reproduce.

  The bugs herded the rogue curse experts closer to one another, and spelled new characters in the air.

  I asked them to fight. I told them that surrender would spare their lives, but I gave them my intention should they continue to resist.

  They would become experiments.

  They roared at the indignity of bowing to a child who was miles away, and fought.

  And I learned a lot about Reproduction that day.