Moonlight clung to the ridge and faintly tinted the mountain’s shoulders.
Kokushibo narrowed his eyes and followed the man’s footsteps ahead of him.
The man wore a rope tied around his waist and a torn hemp garment, dressed like an ordinary farmer. But his steps were anything but ordinary.
He changed the rhythm of the wind, bent the grain of fallen leaves, and opened an invisible path through space.
Even at the edge of a cliff where the road seemed to end, the man did not hesitate. He stepped neatly between rock and root, laying a road across the void.
As if following the line of a dance already choreographed, the rhythm of his breathing held the air itself in place.
Kokushibo glared at those footsteps for a moment.
His six eyes trembled. The shape of the steps was unmistakably human, yet the presence behind them could not be grasped like the edge of a blade.
When the narrow path ended, the forest suddenly opened.
Low stone graves stood in a circle, and at the center lay a flat rock as if it were a practice ground. Around it, an old drum, a brazier faded by the wind, and two small bells hanging from a tree waited for the breeze.
The man stopped there.
Moonlight resting on the rock settled onto his shoulders.
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