CHAPTER 22

In the English-speaking world, gogyo—or wuxing, going by the system’s original language of Chinese—was often translated as the ‘five elements’. This wasn’t entirely true. While the system does refer to the elements as physical things, it was meant to stand for something much more essential, much more dynamic and much more pervasive than just the physical things.

Most of the experts on the subject translated it as five moving ones or five phases, but that didn’t really capture the more physical idea like the word ‘element’ does. The closest translation was probably five agents, which was what gogyo was basically: the idea that the five elements were simply agents that carry properties on their own and undergo specific changes when interacting with the others.

“Interactions,” Kou explained, “such as redirection.”

“You got this idea from the curse removal?” Chi asked. Kou nodded.

“It kind of made me think—the curse was moved before it was exorcised, right? So there was a way to transfer chi that had already taken shape. And this was done with onmyodo, which was based on the gogyo. In other words….”

“By principle, if you know what could cause this chi movement, it’s not impossible to redirect chi.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And you think this was how the leylines got drained?”

Kou snapped his fingers. “Exactly.”

Onihime furrowed her eyebrows a bit, covering her mouth with the long sleeves of her kimono, diving deep into thought. Chi pressed her temples. “Wait,” Chi said, “are you saying that an onmyoji is behind this?”

“Whoever’s behind this knows the art of gogyo at the very least, that’s for sure.”

Chi punched Kou’s arm. “Do you know how little that narrows it down?”

“Ow! It at least brings us closer to a solution, don’t you think? If a ritual’s behind this, then it’s not impossible to disrupt it. As long as we have the intent and the method….”

Chi fell silent. “So this is your attempt at figuring out the method.”

“Yeah.”

“And what are you going to do about the intent?”

“This ritual’s effect is pretty big. If we figure out the method, we can at least figure out the culprit—that way, we can figure out the intent, right?”

Chi shared a look with Onihime. Onihime’s eyes were sparkling. Chi sighed. “So what’ve you got?”

“First—leyline chi redirection wasn’t actually a new thing at all,” Kou explained. “I had a whole talk with Himiko’s mom. It’s actually quite enlightening.”

The hint was actually there the whole time. It was as Reiko said, Something happened to the dragon veins here. It’s such a massive scale, the kind of thing that only happens when someone builds a new major shrine or moves a city.

Back then, way back then, all major shrines and temples weren’t only built upon existing power spots—they also sometimes functioned to create power spots. This was the case not only in Japan, but also in other countries with ideas of dragon veins. China, Korea, Thailand, Indonesia, nearly all Buddhist countries had a semblance of this or another throughout their histories.

These temples would be built in such a way that they redirected the flow of chi under the earth to flux around them, acting as some sort of a crux for the energy to gather.

“But shrines were major undertakings,” Chi frowned. “Are you saying an organization did this?”

“Nope,” Kou said. “What made the energy swirl, and redirected the energy, wasn’t the shrine itself. It was the way its elements were made.”

In gogyo, the way elements interacted were defined in at least five ways. All of these ways either have an element encourage or discourage the next element in the cycle. Both encouragement and discouragement would dampen the element who acts on it, dampening them, dulling them, sometimes even destroying them.

One of the ways this could happen was by turning that into motion instead. For example, the element of Earth could obstruct Water—but, with just the right amount, at the right time, it simply redirects Water instead.

All things in the universe obey these rules.

There were other considerations, too, of course. There were hot elements and cold elements. There were elements at yin and elements at yang. Heck, onmyodo meant ‘The Path of Yin and Yang’. The interactions could get plenty complicated, but the bottom line was that when it comes to spiritual energy flow, it’s always less about the how—it was always about the why.

The how simply followed.

“The ceremonies to officiate a shrine also didn’t take that many people. If anything, shrine maintenance could be done by as little as two people, and this was with the shrine already being a power spot. If we go further back to pre-onmyodo, so based on just gogyo, you’ll find that redirecting whole dragon veins could even be done without involving anybody at all.”

“How?”

“Feng shui.”

“Are you serious?”

“Completely. There’s a building in Hong Kong armed with model cannons because another building nearby had sharp objects pointed directly at it—that apparently cut the chi going into the building and screwed the people up a lot, causing incidents and such until they installed the cannons to counteract the effect.”

Chi pouted. Kou sighed.

“Look—what I’m saying is, leylines are essentially chi pathways and can be treated as such. The scale didn’t really matter, they still obey the same rules as your usual chi pathways.”

This time, Chi actually rested her chin on her hands. “So if we find the gogyo principle that allows for this kind of major leyline bending, we should know what to search for—and if we can find it, we can figure out the culprit from there.”

“And if we figure out the culprit….”

“We find the intention, letting us dismantle whatever it is and bring the leylines back.”

“And there you have it.”

Chi didn’t react immediately. Onihime was nodding. How did the oni formulate mystic arts, anyway? Did they systematize it like humans did? Kou had no time to ask. Chi just continued. “You said that was the first thing. What’s next?”

“Second, as soon as I connected the dots on these things, I asked Himiko and her mom about what could’ve been done to do this.”

“And they’ve got an answer?”

“Ooh, that they did.”

“Well? Out with it.”

“No panache for the dramatic, have you?” Kou pouted a bit. “There were a few things that would be needed to cut the entirety of the chi flowing into Tokyo. The first is that the chi must carry an attribute, one of the five phases. For example, in the ritual we did with the kudagitsune, Yamato-san gave the curse an attribute of water, because she needed the curse to flow.”

“Oh … the dripping mist thing.”

Kou nodded. “This was done so that Yamato-san could use the attribute of wood in the hitogatashiro to manipulate the curse, because in gogyo, wood depletes water.”

“That weakened the curse’s effects?”

“Allowing it to not force the spirit it possessed to go anywhere else, so Himiko could just exorcise it right there.”

Onihime nodded. “That sounds like our arts. We listen to the world, and the world tells us how things are in motion. We just set these motions into reality.”

To Kou, that honestly sounded a lot like magic—retranslating the spiritual into physical. Not the time to comment on that, though. “So this person needs a center of spiritual power with enough effect to put an attribute into the leylines. For example, if there’s an attributed kami being enshrined at a power spot, then….”

Chi’s gears started connecting. “… the leylines in that power spot can carry that kami’s attributes as well.”

“Yup.”

“And then?”

“Then, now that the leylines had an attribute, the culprit would have to use gogyo to manipulate this attribute, like how Yamato-san used the hitogatashiro.”

“What does that mean?”

“The culprit needs to use elements that could force the attribute of the leylines to move as they wanted—either to sever them or to bend them entirely.”

Chi shared another look with Onihime. Kou could almost see a sparkle of shared inspiration. Chi nearly slammed the table as she stood up. “So if we know the attribute of the missing leyline—”

“We can figure out what ritual was used to move it, yup. And thankfully, we do know the attribute—because Tokyo’s leylines had exactly two attributes since ancient times, and only one was actively maintained.”

Finally, Chi shut up entirely, waiting for the answer hanging in the air. Kou smiled, satisfied.

“It’s water. Mitsuhanome-no-kami, daughter of creator goddess Izanami and the Goddess of Water, was enshrined at the Atago Shrine in Minato Ward. The Atago Shrine also enshrined her brother, Kagutsuchi-no-Mikoto, the God of Fire … but the Atago Shrine was created specifically to combat fires breaking out in Tokyo. The hill where the shrine is, Atagoyama, used to have a vantage point over all of Tokyo. The shrine does not maintain its fire attribute, it suppresses it. Because of that, the leylines of Tokyo were meant to fight fire—and their attribute is water.”

Chi’s eyes actually widened. “So that’s where our answers will be? Atago Shrine?”

“That should be. It also explains why Himiko found that the nightwalkers were moving north—south of Shinjuku was where the drought began.”

That was when the single absent girl in the meeting decided to barge into the Kokonoe living room, her breaths short and ragged, and her short hair a mess.

“Tenka!” Onihime was the first to react—she glided entirely off the chair to catch the exhausted oni before she fell. “What happened?”

“I had to—huff, huff—get here as—huff, huff—as fast as I could,” the blonde oni was seriously out of breath. “I came here from further south.”

Kou and Chi shared a look and knew immediately what the other thought. “How far down?”

“Some … three or four ri.”

Classical unit—a ri was around 4 kilometers or 3 miles.

Tenka had gone rather close to Minato Ward.

Onihime was more concerned about her fellow. She let Tenka sit in her chair—Tenka was so tired that she just obeyed. “What happened?”

“The nightwalkers,” Tenka said, controlling her breathing. “The nightwalkers are gathering for an attack.”

Chi slammed the table. “A what?”

“They’re going to strike any human hotspot they could find. Any and all.”

“They must be desperate for chi.” Onihime softly touched her chin. “Not a lot of them could move due to various reasons, so they had no choice but to stay. But if they stay….”

“They only starve further,” Kou completed the sentence. “Okay, we need to go to Atago Shrine now. Himiko said her mother had prepared to take her there as soon as she explained it to me—she’ll meet us there. Let’s go.”

Tenka wheezed. “I … I think I’ll pass.”

“I’ll be with her,” Onihime said. She bowed—a perfect 90-degree bow. “Milord, I’m sorry. I know this is a defining moment, but I can’t imagine being anywhere else right now. I humbly beg your apologies, I—”

“You don’t need to apologize to me,” Kou nodded. “Take care of Tenka. If anything happens at all, can I rely on you?”

Onihime stood up almost immediately with a beaming smile. “Absolutely, Milord!”

With that, Kou and Chi disappeared into the shadows.

They reappeared right in front of their school, and Chi ran ahead of Kou. “This way!”

Kou followed suit. “Are we seriously going to run all the way to Atago Shrine? It’s way up on the hill, you know.”

“Yup.”

“It’s got a crazy number of stairs, daunting enough to even be called the Stairs of Success.”

“Uh-huh.”

“We’re probably going to be all out of breath when we get there.”

“Maybe, yeah.”

Kou sighed. “Fingers crossed, then.”

Does God allow vampires to pray? Kou would have to ask Himiko later on.

Tenka was right. For once, the night did not feel silent—the unease wasn’t only in the air, it was physical. Literally. For the first time ever, Kou passed by so many nightwalkers on his night walk, even if they barely recognized him due to the speed he ran with his sister.

They all had the same gaunt look. At least those with faces did.

They all had the same dead eyes. At least those with eyes did.

Kou could almost feel every twitch of their muscles around him as they started to coalesce into residential places.

The attack is happening soon.

*