Chapter 70: Blind Spot of the Heart

Chapter 70: Blind Spot of the Heart

✿———✦———✿

“I no longer know whether the voices I hear belong to the dead…
or to the fragments of myself buried alongside them.”

Inside the claustrophobic depths of the building, the world felt compressed. The concrete walls muffled the apocalyptic thuds from the streets above, but they could not dull the terror vibrating through the survivors. People huddling in corners, clutching blankets, weeping softly under the low, flickering emergency lights.

Yukifuyu stood by the logistics crates, her chest heaving as she scanned the crowded hall for the hundredth time. Her hands were cold, her fingers digging into the fabric of her coat. She had helped guide the citizens, she had assisted Jiro and Yorishiro with the barriers, but now that the initial adrenaline had ebbed, a suffocating realization pierced her mind.

Kazuaki isn’t here.

He wasn’t among the technical staff huddled around the broken mainframes. He wasn’t with Amagai Hiruma, who was still desperately trying to trace his daughter. The last time she had seen Kazuaki, he was in the lower command pit of the JAA building when the Horizon Array detonated.

“No,” Yukifuyu whispered, her heart hammering against her ribs.

She turned sharply, marching toward the emergency exit corridor.

“Yukifuyu! Where do you think you're going?” Genki’s voice cut through the gloom. The girl rushed forward, grabbing Yukifuyu’s sleeve, her eyes wide with frantic worry. Behind her, Yorishiro stepped into the light, his expression grim.

“The main doors are sealed, but the maintenance vent in Sector 3 is still clear,” Yukifuyu said, her voice trembling but resolute. “Kazuaki didn't make it in. He’s still out there, Genki. Or he’s trapped under the rubble of the command center.”

“Are you insane?!” Genki hissed, her grip tightening. “You saw what’s out there! Chinatsu-san and Captain B are fighting things that shouldn't exist! You don't have a divine weapon, Yukifuyu! You’re just a human right now. If a single one of those Yokai spots you, you’re dead!”

“She’s right,” Yorishiro added, his voice a calm but heavy anchor. “The streets are a warzone. The Self-Defense Forces have deployed heavy artillery, but they are barely holding the intersections. Going out there is suicide. So chill, maybe he's with Konoha and the others.”

Yukifuyu looked at Genki’s tear-streaked face, then at Yorishiro. She knew they were right. She knew she was fragile, completely devoid of the reality-bending powers Chinatsu possessed. But the thought of Kazuaki lying alone in the dark, crushed or bleeding while the world ended, was a pain worse than death.

“I know what I am,” Yukifuyu said softly, gently but firmly prying Genki’s fingers off her coat. “But I can’t sit here in the dark pretending he isn't out there. If I stay here, the fear will kill me anyway.”

Before Yorishiro could grab her, she slipped past them, darting into the darkened maintenance tunnel. She slammed the auxiliary hatch behind her, throwing the manual lock. Genki pounded on the steel from the other side, her cries fading as Yukifuyu sprinted up the concrete stairs toward the surface.

✿———✦———✿

The air on the surface was an assault on the senses.

The indigo sky seemed to press down on the skyscrapers like a physical weight. The streets of Shinjuku were unrecognizable. Tank treads had gouged the asphalt, and the air was thick with the black, oily smoke of burning military vehicles.

Boom! Boom!

A block away, a squadron of Type 10 tanks fired simultaneously, their muzzle flashes illuminating the grotesque, multi-legged silhouettes of spider-yokai crawling down the glass face of a department store. Soldiers in digital camouflage were shouting over the roar of heavy machine guns, firing desperately into the encroaching mist.

Yukifuyu pressed her back against a crumbling concrete pillar, her breath coming in ragged gasps. She was terrified. Every instinct screamed at her to turn back, to run to the safety of the bunker. But she forced her eyes forward, navigating the alleys, staying in the deep shadows left by the overlapping military searchlights.

She was heading toward an auxiliary research basement—a secondary tech lab Kazuaki often used when the main JAA servers were overloaded. It was only three blocks away, but in this nightmare, it felt like crossing an ocean.

Dashing through a smoke-filled intersection, she finally reached the stairwell of the ruined building. The glass doors were shattered, and the steps leading to the basement were flooded with ankle-deep, freezing water.

“Kazuaki…?” she called out, her voice barely a whisper as she descended into the pitch blackness.

She clicked on her phone’s flashlight, the beam cutting through the damp, stagnant air. The basement was a mess of severed cables and overturned servers. But at the far end of the room, illuminated by the pale light of her phone, was a chair.

A man was tied to it, his head slumped forward, his unkempt hair falling over his face. He wore the tattered lab coat of a JAA researcher.

“Kazuaki!”

Relief, pure and blinding, washed over her. Yukifuyu splashed through the water, dropping her phone onto a nearby desk so she could use both hands. She reached the chair, her fingers instantly flying to the thick, coarse ropes binding his torso.

“Kazuaki, thank God, you’re alive! Can you hear me? We have to go, the shelter is—”

She stopped.

The rope beneath her fingers didn't feel like hemp. It felt cold. It felt smooth, like the scales of a serpent, shifting and sliding against her palms.

Slowly, the figure in the chair began to laugh. It wasn't Kazuaki’s voice. It was a high, mocking purr that echoed off the damp concrete walls.

The illusion dissolved like ink in water. The lab coat vanished, replaced by billowing, dark robes that smelled of sulfur and celestial incense. The face that looked up at her wasn't Kazuaki’s—it was a pale, handsome mask with slit-like eyes and a cruel, jagged smile.

“Such a fragile, predictable little creature,” the voice hissed.

Yukifuyu stumbled backward, her boots splashing in the water, her mind reeling in absolute horror. “A… an illusion…”

Before she could turn to run, a heavy shadow loomed directly behind her. She didn't even have the time to look up before a massive, ornate weapon cut through the darkness. The blunt end—the heavy, brass-capped handle of a celestial spear—slammed violently into the back of her head.

Crack.

The pain was instantaneous and blinding. Yukifuyu’s legs buckled beneath her. She collapsed into the freezing water, her vision fracturing into a sea of static before rapidly narrowing into pitch blackness.

As her consciousness slipped away, the last thing her fading eyes registered was the figure in the dark robes stepping over her, leaning on the massive spear.

The entity looked down at her prone body, his smile widening as he stroked his chin. This was no foot-soldier of the Moon. This was one of the masterminds who had crossed the Konron border to orchestrate the archipelago's downfall.

“Shin Kōhyō,” the deity whispered his own name into the dark, his voice dripping with venomous satisfaction as he looked toward the stairs. “The bait is set. Let us see how much the Sun is willing to bleed for a mortal girl.”

✿———✦———✿

The roof of the JAA building grew devastatingly quiet.

Sagume and the remnants of the Night Guard had vanished into the smoke below. Upon realizing the cosmic horror of Tsukuyomi’s true betrayal—the indiscriminate slaughter of the very mortals they were sworn to shepherd—the celestial spy had dropped her shattered mirror and fled into the ash, leading Inugamikazuchi and the swarms of Yosuzume to protect the fleeing civilians. It was a desperate, frantic penance.

Enji did not follow them. He could not.

He stood alone on the edge of the helipad, his fingers slipping from the iron railing. The obsidian coat around his shoulders suddenly felt impossibly heavy, as if it were woven from lead rather than dark matter. A sharp, high-pitched ringing pierced his ears, and with a dull clink, the ancient coin he always held slipped from his hand, rolling across the concrete before stopping in a puddle of rainwater.

His frequency was collapsing.

The divine resonance of the Daishimei within his chest was flickering like a dying bulb. Enji fell to his knees, his hands slamming against the cold ground. But he didn't feel the concrete. Instead, his fingers sank into something soft, cold, and liquid.

The physical rooftop blurred, dissolved, and reformed. The burning skyline of Tokyo vanished, replaced by an infinite, suffocating expanse of pitch-black water reflecting an endless cosmos. The Seikai—the Ocean of Stars. But the stars here were not bright; they were dying, bleeding silver ink into the dark sea. The air smelled heavily of dried autumn orchids and wilted hemp, the ritual scents of the ancient Soshi.

This was the core of his consciousness. The graveyard of his divinity.

“Life and death are preordained by the heavens…” a voice echoed across the dark water. It was his own voice, yet it carried the cadence of a thousand years ago. “Yet who preordains the lifespan of the Fate-Giver?”

From the center of the dark ocean, the water began to swirl violently, forming a massive, pitch-black vortex—a cosmic singularity that resembled the gaping maw of an abyss-like coffin. The gravity of the black hole pulled at Enji’s spiritual form, dragging him toward the edge.

Enji did not resist. He lay flat against the liquid mirror of his mind, completely resigned. Hopeless. His human eyes closed, ready to let the void swallow him.

He awoke in the void.

It was a boundless ocean of pitch-black water, utterly still, reflecting a sky devoid of warmth. This was the true Seikai—not the Ocean of Stars he projected to intimidate his enemies, but the internal graveyard of his own soul. The stars above him were not burning with the fire of creation; they were dying, bleeding streaks of silver ink into the dark water like tears on a parchment.

The air was thick, heavy, and ancient. It smelled of dried autumn orchids and gardenias, wilted hemp, and sweet angelica—the fragrant, melancholic herbs of the Soshi, the ancient Songs of the South.

“The autumn orchid and the deer-parsley grow thick together...”

A voice drifted over the water. It was a whisper, carried by a phantom wind.

“...I ride the whirlwind and lift the clouds as my banner. But sorrow, sorrow is my only companion, for the Lord of Fate commands the end, yet cannot command himself.”

Enji stood up. His reflection in the dark water did not show the twenty-something researcher in a lab coat. It showed a mosaic of shifting faces. A beautiful woman in winter furs. A beautiful spy in the moonlight. A wise and poetic prime minister. A Heian poetess holding a brush. As well an astronomer with a quirky, gal-style vibe.

It was a terrifying paradox. He was not looking at ghosts of other people. He was looking at himself. Every vessel, every incarnation, was a fragment of the singular entity known as Daishimei. The Great Arbiter of Fate was a mirror that had been smashed a thousand times, and every shard reflected the exact same tragedy.

In the center of this dark ocean, the water began to swirl violently. It formed a massive, pitch-black vortex—a cosmic singularity, a black hole that resembled a gaping, abyss-like coffin. The gravity of it tugged at Enji’s spiritual form, a silent invitation to let go, to finally sleep.

Enji walked toward the edge of the vortex. His human heart, the heart of the dead boy named Enji, felt a profound, crushing sorrow. It was a sorrow born not from external defeat, but from internal mutiny.

Why do I keep waking up? Enji thought, his own consciousness fracturing. Why do I force myself to breathe when the heavens have already written my epitaph a thousand times over?

As he stood at the precipice of the black hole, the surface of the dark ocean broke.

Thousands of pale, translucent hands emerged from the water. They were his own hands. Some were delicate, stained with the ink of poetry; others were calloused from the grip of a bow or a sword; others still were small, the hands of children who had died of fever before their tenth winter.

They reached out, grabbing his ankles, his calves, his wrists. They did not pull him with malice. They pulled him with a desperate, agonizing pity. It was a collective suicide of the ego—the god tearing himself down because the burden of existence had become too grotesque to bear.

“Why?”

The voice that hissed from the dark wasn't a separate entity. Enji felt his own vocal cords vibrate, even though his physical lips did not move. He was speaking to himself, confronting his own reflection.

From the silver mist at the edge of the vortex, a figure manifested. She was draped in heavy, northern furs, her face breathtakingly beautiful but frozen in a mask of eternal, icy sorrow. Oushokun

She stepped forward, her bare feet gliding over the water. She reached out, her freezing fingers wrapping gently around Enji’s throat. As she touched him, Enji felt her memories—his memories—flood his mind. The biting cold of the frontier winds. The scent of foreign sand. The overwhelming isolation of a political marriage to a barbarian king, sacrificed for the peace of a Central Plains empire that had never truly loved her.

“You wrapped us in silk and jade,” Oushokun whispered, her voice layered perfectly over Enji’s own thoughts. She wept tears of frozen starlight, and Enji felt those same cold tears sliding down his own cheeks. “You sent us across the borders to freeze in the wastes. I was your beauty, your sacrifice. I died before my hair could gray. Why, Daishimei? Why must the vessel always burn so the god can see in the dark? Are we nothing but kindling for your grand ledger?”

Enji choked, not from her grip, but from the unbearable weight of self-loathing. I am sorry, he tried to say, but the words caught in his throat. I didn't want you to freeze.

Before he could breathe, the water rippled again. Another fragment of his soul stepped out of the dark. She wore the layered, vibrant silks of the Heian court, her fingers stained with the charcoal of a writer’s brush. Kiyohara no Nagiko.

Her eyes were sharp, filled with an intellectual fury that cut deeper than any blade. She joined Oushokun, her ink-stained hands pressing against Enji’s chest, pushing him toward the swirling black hole.

“I wrote the beauty of the world,” Nagiko’s voice echoed in Enji’s mind, a symphony of frustration and unfulfilled genius. Enji remembered holding that brush. He remembered the smell of the paper, the joy of capturing the fleeting beauty of a spring dawn or a crisp autumn evening. “I recorded the twilight, the changing of the seasons, the fleeting grace of human emotion. Yet you cut my ink short! You dragged us into the grave before I could finish the masterpiece, all because a vessel of the Arbiter is cursed. We cannot outlive our sixty-year sentence. We were your masterpieces, Daishimei, yet you treat us like disposable parchment!”

The spiritual pressure became suffocating. It was a visceral, psychological assault. It was identical to a hollow inner demon clawing at its host, or a sealed beast roaring against its cage, but infinitely sadder—because there was no monster here. There was only Daishimei, confronting the abused, discarded fragments of his own humanity.

The echoes of a thousand young deaths screamed simultaneously inside Enji’s head, a chorus of agony, resentment, and profound exhaustion.

“You stole our twilights!” a voice cried—it was a christian military general from the Sengoku period who died of execution.

“You brought us nothing but the cradle of the grave!” wept a noblewoman from the Tang dynasty, poisoned by rivals. 

“Why do you force Enji to breathe while we rot in the Underworld?!” screamed a chorus of forgotten children.

“We want to live too! We want to live too!” cried the spirits.

Enji’s spirit buckled. His knees hit the surface of the water, and he began to sink. The dark, freezing water rose to his waist, then his chest. He was halfway submerged into the crushing gravity of the black hole coffin.

He didn't offer an excuse. He couldn't. The tragedy of Daishimei was that the voices were absolutely right. He had never asked for the heavens to murder his vessels, but he had continually used their lives. He was the Lord of Fate, the cosmic bureaucrat who kept the universe in balance, yet he was entirely powerless to save his own flesh. Every time he incarnated, he knew it was a death sentence. And yet, out of a twisted sense of duty, he kept doing it.

“Enough.”

The command did not come from outside. It came from the deepest, most profound depths of Enji’s own soul.

The sea went dead silent. The thousands of squirming hands froze. The scent of the autumn orchids grew heavy, overwhelming the senses.

From the absolute center of the black hole, two figures stepped upward, walking on the surface of the void as if it were solid glass. They did not pull at Enji. They simply stood before him, the ultimate manifestations of his intellect and his martial prowess. The apex of his thousand lives.

The first was magnificent, clad in the ancient, blood-stained armor of a prince. A massive, legendary sword—the Kusanagi in its spiritual form—was slung across his back, radiating an unyielding, archaic authority. This was the pinnacle of the Yamato history—Yamato Takeru.

Beside him stood a figure of quiet, devastating brilliance. He wore the flowing, elegant robes of the late Han dynasty, but matching the legendary blade of the prince, he held an imposing, ornate mechanical trident—the Northern Star Trident. It was a masterpiece of lethal engineering, its three prongs forged from a dark, swirling metal that seemed to absorb the light. He was Ryuka, known as Kanki—the son of the Emperor, the grandson of the Grand Minister. He was the Shadow Prince, the phantom mastermind who had intellectually outmaneuvered the grand architect of the Sima lineage.

Even Yamato Takeru, the proud, unyielding champion of the archipelago, turned his head and offered a deep, respectful nod to Kanki. Their shared trauma linked them across centuries and pantheons. They stood as equals—the two greatest, most powerful vessels Daishimei had ever ignited, and both had been unceremoniously snuffed out by the cruelty of fate.

Kanki stepped forward, the mechanical trident in his grip shifting slightly with a heavy, metallic click. He looked down at Enji, who was currently drowning in his own despair. When Kanki spoke, Enji felt his own mind analyzing, dissecting, and condemning itself.

“You gave us the intellect to rewrite the destiny of the Central Plains, Daishimei,” Kanki spoke, his voice calm, chilling, and heavy with a thousand years of unrecorded grief. “You let me sit in the shadows. You let me outplay the cunning serpent, moving generals and armies across the board like pieces of jade. I held the fate of the Three Kingdoms in the palm of my hand. My mind was unparalleled.”

Kanki paused, his eyes burning with a cold, calculative light. He slammed the butt of his mechanical trident against the liquid floor of the void, the shockwave echoing like a gavel striking wood.

“Yet, when the betrayal came from within the kingdom, you did nothing. You let them strike my name from the scrolls. You let the damnatio memoriae wash over me. I died a ghost, completely erased from the Imperial Annals. My brilliance, my sacrifices, my strategies—swallowed by the void. We were your finest weapons, your greatest minds, and you cast us into the dark the moment our frail human bodies reached their expiration date.”

Enji wept. The tears of a god who had forgotten his own name. He remembered the cold exiled forest where Kanki had drawn his last breath, the agonizing realization that history would belong to the victors, while the true architect of the era would rot in anonymity. I failed you, Enji thought, his mind screaming into the void. I had the power to judge the heavens, but I couldn't save a single page of your history.

Takeru stepped forward, his armor clinking. He knelt down, the sheer weight of his presence creating ripples of pure celestial gold across the dark Ocean of Stars. He placed a heavy, gauntleted hand on Enji’s forehead. It wasn't an act of violence; it was an act of brutal mercy. He was pressing Enji further into the abyss.

“You came to this pantheon looking for an anomaly, Arbiter,” Takeru said, his voice a rich, tragic baritone that shook the foundations of Enji’s mind. “You wanted to stop Tsukuyomi. You wanted to protect the balance. But the error… the true anomaly… has always been you.”

“Look at us,” Takeru commanded softly, his eyes reflecting the flames of the Ibuki mountains. “We fought your wars. We wore your mask. I slew the gods of the mountains and cleared the paths for the east. I bled for Yamato. Yet, when the white boar appeared on the slopes of Ibuki, when the curse struck me down in my prime, where was the Great Arbiter? You allowed the sickness to take me. You let me sing my final song, turning into a white swan, flying away into the void, leaving my heart broken on the earth.”

Takeru leaned closer, his face inches from Enji’s.

“You claim you want to save this archipelago from Tsukuyomi’s coup. You claim you want to save humanity. But why should we let you? Look at what you do to humanity! Every time you awaken, the land bleeds, and a new youth is sacrificed to your name. You steal bodies. You steal lives.”

Takeru pointed a finger upward, toward the physical world they had left behind.

“Look at the body you wear right now. Look at Enji. He was a brilliant, kind researcher. And he died four years ago in a laboratory accident! His soul is gone! Yet here you are, animating his corpse like a macabre puppeteer, forcing a dead boy to walk through the apocalypse just so you can play judge!”

The accusation hit Enji with the force of a collapsing star.

I am a parasite, Enji realized, the absolute horror of his existence crystalizing in his mind. Tsukuyomi slaughters mortals to feed his ambition. I steal their corpses to feed my duty. We are both monsters. We are both defying the constelation. We are both breaking the laws of life and death.

Enji looked up into the eyes of his two greatest vessels. Kanki, the erased genius holding his humming trident. Yamato Takeru, the broken hero with his legendary blade. They were not rebelling against him; they were pleading with him. They were the collective conscience of Daishimei, begging for the right to finally rest.

A single, human tear escaped Enji’s eye, dissolving into the cosmic sea, mingling with the ink of Nagiko, the frozen tears of Oushokun, and the rest of his victims.

“I never asked for the sky to murder you,” Enji whispered, his voice cracking, his frequency dropping to near-zero. “I never wanted to use you. I just… I couldn't let the ledger fall into ruin. I thought I had to carry it.”

“But you let it happen,” Takeru replied coldly, though his eyes held a profound sadness. “You accept the silence of the heavens when they strike us down. You accept the cruelty of fate.”

“Therefore,” Kanki added, lifting his mechanical trident as the interlocking gears turned with absolute precision, guiding the dark gravity around them, “you must accept the silence of the grave. You cannot fight Tsukuyomi by becoming the very thing he accuses you of being. You cannot enforce the law of the heavens while wearing stolen flesh.”

The hundred of hands wrapped around Enji tightened their grip.

“Come back to the void, Arbiter,” Kanki said, his tone striking with the weight of a final, unalterable strategy. “Let Tsukuyomi have his ashes. Let the coup run its course. It is no longer our burden.”

“Let the human Enji die on that roof,” Takeru said softly, his grip on Enji’s forehead firm, guiding him down. “Let the dead stay dead. Let the boy rest. Let the ledger burn. Your duty as Enji has long since been fulfilled.”

Enji closed his eyes.

The fight left him entirely. The desire to save Japan, the need to protect Chinatsu, the duty to enforce the laws of the Central Plains—all of it dissolved into the fragrant, melancholic scent of the autumn orchids.

He was so tired of watching his own faces die. He was so tired of the sixty-year curse. He was so tired of being Daishimei.

“The journey is long, the road is dark,” Enji whispered, reciting the final lines of the ancient song as the water closed over his chin, his nose, his eyes. “I leave the clouds behind. I return to the root.”

With a final, massive surge of force, Takeru, Kanki, and the hundreds of hands pulled downward simultaneously.

Enji’s vision fractured into a billion pieces of silver light. The black hole collapsed inward with a deafening roar of absolute silence, swallowing his consciousness, his memories, and his divinity whole.

The Arbiter of Fate had abandoned the board. He was gone, trapped in the absolute dark of his own ancestral prison, leaving the empty throne of the archipelago ripe for the taking, just as the sky over Japan tore completely apart.

The Ocean of Stars vanished. The internal world was snuffed out. Everything withered in a thousand winters.