CHAPTER 13

Let’s start with the good news first: for once in their lives, Kou and Chi actually arrived before the scream emerged.

Also, at least it wasn’t an oni. Nothing big, nothing imposing, nothing terrifying. Well, okay, maybe terrifying to some, but not to Kou.

If anything, Kou’s mind immediately flashed back to the night attack just the other night when he patrolled with Onihime—the hitotsume-kozo attack.

This attacker was like that.

He came into view almost directly as soon as they entered the shopping district—both siblings were expecting a lot of people as the district was usually very crowded this time of the day, what with the kids going home from school and all, but it was surprisingly empty. Some of the stores were closing early, most of the people seemed to have gone back to their homes on the top floors of their little storefronts.

The poor victim was a middle-aged lady closing up shop, and in that instant, Kou caught sight of the attacker.

He was similarly dressed in traditional clothes, not unlike Kurotarou and the hitotsume-kozo. More than that, though, they were all in the shape of a young boy—they were only a little over a meter tall. Apart from the motifs of their outfit, there were only very few key differences.

The first: the attacker was wearing a large-brimmed hat, like the Enforcers—a type of hat known as kasa.

The second: the attacker’s head was large. Like, large large.

The third: the attacker’s facial features were complete. No lack of eye or anything at all.

The entire thing was also contorted in rage.

The crazy boy was attacking a middle-aged lady with an apron who seemed to be selling some meat, pouncing at her with all his might, immature front teeth bared and eyes white in madness. The lady had her hand raised, protecting her face, and she drew her breath.

Now for the bad news: she was going to scream.

“She’ll attract the neighbors!”

Chi hissed that, but Kou’s reaction was a lot faster.

Kou didn’t just jump. Kou didn’t just fly. Kou borrowed the technique he saw from Onihime: he jumped quickly to the nearest pillar, the entry gate into the shopping district, then landed himself vertically on that pole, propping himself for a launch—

He kicked with all his might.

Before a blink, he had reached the youkai.

Kou didn’t extend his claws this time. Like Onihime, he simply pushed the youkai out of the way before he could reach the woman—

And they disappeared from sight.

Kou gagged the youkai’s mouth with his arm, keeping him reined in, and he kept jumping ahead as fast as he could to get to the other end of the shopping district. Once he reached the intersection at the end of the corridor, he quickly took a sharp turn to the left, vanishing out of the woman’s sight.

“Ouch,” Kou winced a little as the youkai bit into his arm and started suckling his chi. The youkai kid was young, but not only that, he almost looked emaciated. He was even thinner than the hitotsume-kozo was. His eyes were frantic, his breathing ragged, the little thing wasn’t mad—he was just deprived.

Just like the hitotsume-kozo.

Kou squinted a little. Like hitotsume-kozo, this one was a humanoid youkai that took the form of a young boy. Like hitotsume-kozo, he was wearing traditional Japanese clothes for boys, a loose-fitting bluish kimono showing a pattern of white lattices, lines that criss-cross each other in square patterns as if making up little cages.

Unlike hitotsume-kozo, and like Kou observed the first time, he had all his facial features. He wasn’t lacking either of his eyes. As far as Kou observed, he didn’t lack anything on his face. His kasa had fallen from his frantic attempt to suckle Kou’s life essence, revealing that he was shaven into a nearly-clean buzzcut save for a lock of hair above his forehead.

Boyish kimono. Kasa hat. Childlike youkai.

Kou gasped.

“Nii-chan, are you—”

Chi just appeared from beyond the turn, but Kou hissed at her immediately. “Chi, go buy a block of tofu from the shopping district!”

She was left with jaws hanging. “Sorry?”

“A block of tofu—now!”

“Wh—why?”

“I’ll explain later, just get it!”

“The district is mostly closed, but….” Chi groaned, then turned back to the main street.

Kou patiently waited, hearing the echo of his sister asking the storeowners around that she could still reach if anyone was selling tofu. It took a few redirects—not helped by the fact that some of the residents were particularly irritable thanks to the weird mood—while the youkai still kept taking more and more of Kou’s chi.

This was more than the hitotsume-kozo.

Kou couldn’t help but notice the difference of times elapsed. The hitotsume-kozo would’ve had stopped suckling and regained his consciousness a good while ago, but this youkai kept going on. The frenzied movements were slowing down, but there’s still no sign of him regaining his colors or consciousness. Most nightwalkers wouldn’t dare to even think about the audacity of drinking life essence directly out of the King of the Night, so the fact that he was still sucking meant that he wasn’t aware of what’s going on yet.

This one was even further gone than the hitotsume-kozo.

“Sorry for the wait!” Chi returned, slightly sweating and clearly in a rush, with a plastic bag. Kou could see a block of tofu packed in there neatly, and he nodded.

“Thanks,” he said. “Now let’s wait for a bit until he’s conscious again.”

“Wait, you’re not feeding him this tofu?”

“It’s not to feed him.”

“Wh—so what the hell was the rush?”

“He’s already lost part of his identity by attacking a person,” Kou explained. “I had to get him back on track as soon as possible, because any further than this, he’ll go through an identity shift. If that shift was into something that attacks human beings, it won’t be pretty for everyone involved.”

“So this tofu was for his identity?”

“Yup.” Kou inhaled—the feeling of losing chi so rapidly was never nice, and he finally started feeling dizzy. It’s nowhere near fatal or the like, far from it, but the body still had to adjust. “It’s actually more ideal to get koyodofu instead of a plain old tofu block, but it should do the job just fine.”

“Koyodofu? Koyo as in ‘autumn leaves’?”

“Yeah.”

“So … ‘autumn leaf tofu’? Like that tofu dish in the shape of maple leaves, momijidofu?”

“Different dish. It’s a block of tofu pressed with a maple leaf mark. It was sold in the Edo period.”

Chi scratched her head. “Tofu dish … youkai? I’m not sure where I’ve heard of that.”

“You probably haven’t if you’ve only read older references. This little guy is relatively new for a youkai.”

Slowly, color returned to the boy’s skin. The frantic movement stopped. Kou let him touch the ground again, and after a few suckles, his eyes finally started to focus. He looked up, meeting Kou’s eyes.

His colors drained again right away.

The youkai jumped back almost as quickly as when Kou prepared to pounce him, landing on the ground in a perfect kowtow two meters away from Kou. The poor thing was trembling.

“Y-Your Highness…! I, I wish to say sorr—to ap—to apologize….”

The kid was stammering out formal Japanese as if he wasn’t used to saying that. Kou just smiled, then took Chi’s bag of tofu, carefully unpacking the thing. “No problem. Please raise your head.”

The youkai was still shaking in terror, but he started raising his head very slowly. The boy was crying. Eyes teary, nose snotty, the edges of his mouth contorted downwards. “Wh—what have I done … uu….”

Kou picked up the boy’s kasa. “Do you regret attacking a human?”

“Yes….”

“You won’t do it again?”

He sobbed again. “I won’t….”

Kou nodded. “Good boy.”

Kou gave him back his kasa, placing it directly on his head. The youkai finally raised his head to fix the position of the hat. “Your High … ness?”

“Here,” Kou handed over the tofu block. “I’m sorry I don’t have a plate, but I hope the plastic bag will do for now. I’m also sorry it’s not a koyodofu—it’s a bit hard to find one here.”

“It’s good, Your Highness,” the boy said, receiving the tofu block. “I’ll take care of this!”

“You can just offer them to people like usual if you want.”

“I—I can’t possibly—”

“In fact, I insist. Treat it like your usual tofu, yeah?”

“H-how could I….”

“Please?”

“Hnnggg!” the boy squeezed his eyes, then finally nodded. “Okay!”

“Good boy, tofu-kozo-kun.”

If hitotsume-kozo meant ‘one-eyed boy’, tofu-kozo meant ‘tofu boy’. Like hitotsume-kozo, the tofu-kozo were youkai in the shape of a young boy. In fact, they had enough similarities that some were suspicious that the tofu-kozo legend was an offshoot of the hitotsume-kozo legend. There was even a karuta card illustrated with a one-eyed boy licking a tofu block, showing that the hitotsume-kozo ate tofu, possibly starting the story of the tofu-kozo.

The difference was that, unlike the hitotsume-kozo, the tofu-kozo didn’t have a drop of malicious blood in his veins. The hitotsume-kozo was at least still something of a prankster spirit, but tofu-kozo was more often considered just a feel-good spirit. They’re even so weak that some old poems called them the ‘underling of the monsters’, and there were stories of other youkai laughing at the tofu-kozo for how weak he was.

It was why the tofu-kozo attacking a human was a compromise on his identity. The tofu-kozo simply don’t attack human beings. Kou couldn’t let him lose his identity, especially into something so dangerous.

Also, the fact that the tofu-kozo—one of the few extremely peaceful youkai—went as far as attacking a human for chi actually gave Kou an idea.

The tofu-kozo sobbed and nodded again. “Thank you….”

“Do you mind if we talk a little?” Kou asked. “I’m not from around here, so I want to know about how things are going.”

The tofu-kozo sat down in a proper stance, as if he was used to it. “Yessir.”

Kou sat in front of him. He could feel Chi shifting a little, monitoring the situation, but he was glad that she didn’t do anything reckless this time. The mention of tofu-kozo should’ve made it clear for her why it was important for Kou to keep this one normal. “Let’s start with what you remember. You usually don’t attack humans, right?”

The tofu-kozo nodded. Kou nodded back.

“Good. So what happened? Did you run out of tofu?”

“N-no,” the tofu-kozo shook his head fervently. “W-well, something like that.”

Kou smiled, ensuring that the tofu-kozo understood that he meant no harm. “That’s alright. Can you explain?”

“My … my tofu was always part of me,” the young youkai explained. “I offer it to people and sometimes eat it myself. But I usually just have it around. I like tofu.”

“It’s delicious, yeah.”

“Hmm! I like licking it. Oh, I don’t offer people the tofu I’ve licked, though!”

“Thank you!”

“Also, Your Highness, would you like to have some tofu?”

Chi obviously glared at him, but Kou couldn’t help but grin. “Sure, will a bite be okay?”

“Yeah!”

Kou took the offered tofu—he extended a little of his claw to slice a cut from the block, then ate it. “It’s great!”

The tofu-kozo beamed. He then cut a bit of the tofu to eat it himself, first licking it like he said, then chomping on the thing.

The tofu regenerated, if just a little. Kou sighed in relief—the tofu-kozo had incorporated the tofu block into his identity. That should keep him stable for a while. While the tofu-kozo was traditionally depicted with koyodofu, it’s not like all his accounts featured koyodofu specifically. He was just worried about that, since there was at least one account that mentioned the autumn leaf pattern as part of the myth, but it was not mentioned anywhere else. The fact that the tofu-kozo managed to incorporate the tofu block into his identity seamlessly at least meant that it was no problem.

“So, what happened? Why did you stop eating tofu?”

“My tofu was getting smaller,” the boy answered with a frown. “I don’t know why. But it’s hard to eat. At some point it just disappeared. Then I went hungry for days.”

Kou winced. “Will you be alright now?”

“Until I’m out of this tofu, yup!”

Kou took a deep breath. Then, he stood up again. The tofu-kozo cut a bit more of the tofu, chomped on it, then finally remembered that the polite thing to do was to also stand up. “Can you promise not to attack humans again?”

“Yes!”

“Good. If you’re out of tofu, you can ask around to see who knows where the mushiyoukai are gathering. Okay?”

“Got it!”

“Good boy. Off you go, then.”

The tofu-kozo promptly disappeared. Kou sighed.

“Nii-chan, you just let him go like that?”

“No damage was done,” Kou said. “Also, how much did the tofu cost? I’ll pay you back.”

“I’m not that stingy. I’ve never heard of tofu-kozo, how did you figure that out?”

They finally continued their stroll to the station—the shopping district finally closed properly this time. “Remember the hitotsume-kozo I told you about? The one I encountered with Onihime?”

“Yeah?”

“This one had a lot of similar signs. He’s a non-violent creature, but he’s starved so badly that he was pushed into attacking people.”

Chi fell into thought. “Just from that?”

“Well, the similarities with hitotsume-kozo just made me think of him. But he had both eyes, so I figured he must be a similar youkai. There’s also the location of the attack—he probably smelled the tofu here, which whetted his appetite. Since he’s starved, though, he decided to just attack the nearest creature with the most chi.”

“The human,” Chi supplied. Kou nodded.

“The question now is the source of the sudden starvation. This is already the third case of desperate attack like this we’ve encountered—but I think I finally figured it out.”

Chi’s eyes widened. “You have?”

“There were several clues,” Kou said as he folded his thumb. “The first: the mushiyoukai disappeared. The hitotsume-kozo was not a mushiyoukai eater, but he nearly attacked a human because he couldn’t find any other replacement for chi nearby. I had to feed him to give him the strength to go where the mushiyoukai migrated.”

“How is that an issue?”

“Because the mushiyoukai don’t migrate. They proliferate—and this used to not be a problem around here, so something changed.”

Chi went quiet. “Then?”

Kou folded his index finger. “The second clue is the mood at school.”

Chi frowned. “That’s related to this?”

“More than you think,” he grinned. “Himiko said she detected no magic, so this wasn’t a spell. You said it’s impossible to be hypnosis because the effect was too great—it’s even extended as far as here, right?”

She nodded. “So it’s something that could affect people’s minds, but it’s not a spell and it wasn’t hypnosis. Also it’s big.”

“Exactly.” Kou then folded his middle finger. “Third clue: the tofu-kozo said his tofu disappeared. There was no way for me to know what caused the starvation with the other peaceful youkai, but the tofu-kozo had a specific meal that could help him stave off the desire to attack humans.”

“What usually happens?”

“The tofu-kozo said it himself—he sometimes eats his tofu.”

“How does that explain how the tofu disappears?”

“It wouldn’t make sense if you think of the tofu as a thing. Try and treat it as … say, a mushiyoukai.”

Chi furrowed her eyebrows. “So it’s a living thing?”

“Yes, and no. Think again: what do the nightwalkers consume?”

She thought for a bit. “Life essence.”

“Exactly. The tofu-kozo eats the tofu to obtain this life essence. Meaning?”

“… the tofu contains life essence.”

“Precisely. Now think about it: how does a block of tofu contain enough chi to feed a youkai?”

That actually made Chi silent for a very long while—long enough for them to enter the train station. She looked half-aware as she tapped her card. “It’s alive?”

“Not quite, but almost. The tofu gathered chi from elsewhere, like a storage device. The tofu-kozo just consumed it from there afterwards. He could do this because the tofu was always part of his identity—so, in keeping with that, he had to have a mechanism that kept the tofu present at all times.”

“Which was why the tofu regenerated,” Chi guessed. Kou nodded.

“So the fact that the tofu disappeared meant that something tampered with this,” Kou said finally. “As we both saw, the tofu we gave him still regenerated, but the rate was so slow. So it’s not an issue with his identity, it’s not an issue with how the tofu worked—it’s an issue with the chi supply.”

Kou could almost hear the gears clicking together in his little sister’s mind. “So that’s why the mushiyoukai migrated—they couldn’t feed off of the usual sources of chi.”

“Yup.”

“The lack of mushiyoukai or other easy supplies of chi made the nightwalker attacks escalate.”

“Yes.”

“And it got in the way of the tofu-kozo’s tofu regeneration.”

“Right.”

Chi held her chin. “But what would all this have to do with the weird mood in the air?”

Kou grinned. “It’s to do with the fact that humans aren’t purely physical.”

He could’ve sworn his sister was thunderstruck. “You mean—”

“Yes—humans are also influenced by the leylines.”

The leylines, or dragon veins, were paths of massive energies flowing through invisible rivers underneath the earth. It’s so energetic, uncountably so, that just about any existence that had any little bit of spiritual portion in their existence would draw from it. The youkai used it to supplement their diets. The ghosts draw on it to keep themselves present and tethered. Humans drew upon it to keep themselves thinking, because otherwise, they’d be reduced to only their animalistic emotions.

Like Himiko explained once, an exorcism simply returned a spiritual creature’s energy into the leyline, breaking something down spiritually so that they became nothing but pure energy, not dissimilar to how a dead body decomposes into energy that fed the detritus-eating microbes. That was only possible because of the inherent connection that all spiritual creatures had with the leylines that tattooed the planet—the partly-physical humans were no exception.

“So you’re saying,” Chi concluded, “that something blocked the leylines around here.”

“Yes—and it’s been going on for a while now.”

The siblings hopped aboard the crowded train. The crowds of people going home pressed on them from all sides, but the pressure they both felt came from a whole other place entirely.

“How the hell do we even unblock a leyline?” Chi asked.

Kou could only shrug.

*