The Kaizaka March ceremony was performed to drive away a fallen god. It was first performed over a century ago, and Yae thought it was similar to tsuina, an exorcism rite performed in Japan to expel evil demons. It was held once a year, and a chant was performed to drive away the fallen god named Lady Bihin that appeared in Kaki Province to spread impurity. A fallen god was an evil spirit that brought harm to people and dried mountains and rivers.
There was no state religion in Kaki Province—or anywhere in the world, for that matter. You could say there was no concept of religion at all, but it was more complicated than that. People had faith in nature and in supernatural objects, but no one thought of it as religion. The world was brimming with supernatural phenomena that Yae would once have thought looked like magic or something out of a fairy tale. Divine power was one such example.
The standard of living was reminiscent of Japan before the spread of gas and electricity—it should have been equivalent to the Edo period. But this fantastical divine power was used in a variety of ways that allowed further advancement of civilization.
Even the most unnatural phenomena were accepted as regular occurrences. Lady Bihin was greatly feared by the populace, but no one denied her existence. And this was by no means limited to people such as psychics. Where there were mountains, there were valleys, and where there were people, there were spirits. It was thought of as a fact of life.
Lady Bihin left a trail of filth that looked like black oil as she passed over the land, which Yae purified by placing the tied loquat fruits onto branches of shrubbery along the path. Loquat fruits were much bigger in this world than in her last.
The Kaizaka March had many rules. You were not to sing when Lady Bihin turned around. You were not to move, either, or breathe. You were not to touch Lady Bihin. You were not to speak to her. You were not to look away for long while pursuing her. You were not to extinguish the light of the paper lantern until Lady Bihin finished her lap around the Kaki Province basin.
No one knew what happened when the envoy broke these rules. There was one reason for that—those who broke a rule all went missing the same night, never to return.
This fallen god didn’t originally have a name, and people just called her the Fallen Lady. That was until many years ago when an uroko reborn in Kaki Province surmised that her name was Bihin.
Through some strange fate, the place Lady Bihin appeared was near where Yae had devoured the seeds of the rotten pomegranate-like fruit shortly after her resurrection. If Yae had pushed herself to crawl just a little farther that day, she probably would have found Kaki Province.
Near that spot was a giant crimson pillar stuck into the ground. It was now too weathered for the text to be legible, but it was said that Bihin, spelled with kanji meaning “beautiful” and “bride,” was carved into the pillar.
The people of Kaki Province thought the characters on the pillar must be a name that showed the fallen god’s true nature. However, the script used for writing in everyday life in Kaki Province resembled the jindai moji characters some believed to have been used in ancient Japan, and no one could read kanji. Then one day, an uroko arrived who had retained the memories of their past life for longer than usual, and they deciphered the characters that had been a mystery for so long.
Given the meaning of the characters, there was no doubt the fallen god’s true form was that of a beautiful woman, but something had corrupted her and reduced her to this state. That was what the uroko who deciphered the characters had conjectured.
Yae had formed another hypothesis on top of that. The pillar stuck into the ground was likely the remains of a torii; that made her think Lady Bihin might have been a deity who was once worshipped at a shrine. The torii and the shrine could have been carried to this dimension from Japan, or perhaps it was simply that so much time had passed since the shrine was in active use that all of those who had maintained it had abandoned it over time. And now that the shrine had collapsed, the enshrined deity had fallen to evil.
The reason Yae had been chosen as the envoy for the Kaizaka March was because she was found collapsed next to this pillar. Misao, the son of Kaki Province’s chief, had found her unconscious on the ground while playing in the mountains. His family took her in after she was rescued, becoming her caretakers until she grew accustomed to life here. Most uroko ended up with the chief of the province as their guardian. As such, Yae owed Misao’s family and couldn’t refuse the assignment.
She may have been unable to refuse the role, but she was by no means mistreated. Misao and the others had accepted her as a member of their community. Still, Yae didn’t really get along with Misao. That was because Misao did a poor job of masking how little he wished to be around her. Yae could sense his discomfort, and that made things increasingly awkward between them.
That didn’t apply to Misao alone, however. Everyone in Kaki Province felt slightly anxious around Yae because she was different from the other uroko. She still had the memories from her past life that were supposed to have faded with time, and she didn’t behave in a way that matched her physical age. She knew that was the primary reason she made people uncomfortable, but acting like an innocent child while having the mind of a grown woman was not something she could do. It would be too embarrassing.
Back to the matter at hand, thought Yae. Ten years had passed since she became the envoy for the Kaizaka March, and unless it was her imagination, Lady Bihin had been growing weaker over time.
“By the earth, and by the heavens.”
Yae was conscious of Kuroashi’s presence beside her as she sang the spell. She couldn’t look away from Lady Bihin until she was driven away, so she focused on the soft padding of his footsteps.
“We worship high, we worship low.”
Lady Bihin’s transformation was a mystery, but Kuroashi was an enigma as well.
Yae thought back to the first time she had served as the Kaizaka March envoy. Lady Bihin had been even more monstrous then. She walked on four legs like a beast and held her sword in her mouth. The miasma around her body was significantly thicker, and its suffocating presence could be felt even from a distance. Yae would catch glimpses of the faces covering her body only when the miasma flickered and thinned like flame. Every one of them was the face of a demon. The innumerable arms on her back wriggled like insects. She was the most repulsive sight Yae had ever seen.
Yae may have had an adult mind, but there were still times when she was held back by her physical age. She panicked when she first saw the unimaginable nightmare that was Lady Bihin, and she dropped the lantern and fell to the ground. Lady Bihin halted her march and turned around, approaching Yae in a fit of hot rage. Just when she thought she was going to die, Kuroashi appeared out of nowhere and bit Yae’s arm hard to pester her to stand up. The sight of blood running down her arm snapped her to her senses, and she climbed to her feet.
The scar from that bite was still faintly visible on her arm. It was a scar of warning. She would die if she gave in to fear. The scar reminded her to not forget the hidden, frightening side of this world.
“We worship here and gifts bestow.”
As Lady Bihin weakened, Yae thought Kuroashi’s form had become clearer. Kuroashi was initially also covered by a thick, fog-like miasma. His eyes were a darkened color like impure honey, and full of hate. Yae didn’t know why he’d saved her, but she sensed that it wasn’t out of kindness. He growled at her threateningly every time she flubbed one of her lines.