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Gin wasn’t aimlessly trodding away every day. He followed a route. A great and circuitous trail that began at the southernmost shores and went all the way to the Karibusa archives in the north. Certain points along the way required more frequent visits but Gin tried to keep these at the very least irregular so as to avoid local mushi getting used to him passing by and waiting in ambush. There was not a lot a shrewd, old mushi wouldn’t do to get at the little bit of kouki Gin usually carried round with him.
One of the many advantages of having a trail to follow - besides keeping Gin sane and mitigating the terrible loneliness he sometimes struggled with - was being able to keep an ear to the ground. After some years of crossing paths with people in passing, local folk started to recognize him and came to him with issues that he previously would have had to eavesdrop in roadside inns to find out about.
This time two older women approached him, clearly stopping for dango on their way to the fields that Gin had just passed through on his way into the village. As they were all waiting for the treats to be brought out, the older woman began to recount a story circulating among the locals. It was about a village hidden in a deep gorge a mountain over where for years now no children had been born. Women fell pregnant like they usually did but none of them carried to term. And it was only in that one village that it happened - people who moved out had kids like everyone else.
Ostensibly the women weren’t asking Gin to do anything about the situation. Didn’t even suggest he could maybe go take a look. But they also didn’t let him pay for his own order and Gin didn’t bother to argue. He knew from experience with situations like these that the owner wouldn’t take his money. All he could do was thank them and ask for directions.
In any case, at the moment Gin had nothing but time at his hands and checking out this particular wives’ tale would be easy. There were not many causes for mass-infertility. All of them were instantly recognizable to anyone who knew what to look for.
None of them were good.
A little detour wouldn’t hurt.
***
Tanyuu got to know many mushishi over the years, though maybe not by the casual definition of knowing someone. What she did know was how these mushishi approached their calling. What they thought was right, what they thought was wrong and what they in particular had to do about it.
There was no denying that among all the mushishi Ginko was her favorite. He was the first friend she made of her own volition and a clear example of what exactly bothered Tanyuu so much about the stories she had to keep writing down. The thoughtlessness of it all. Such… needless destructive violence.
She was also obviously a bit in love with him the first few times he came by, but mostly desperately jealous. He seemed to have and be everything she ever wanted. Free to traverse the world. Able to observe mushi in their natural state. Kind. Polite. Knowledgeable about his craft. The stories he'd told Tanyuu for her to write down had always been well thought-out and beautifully worded. He did what he could to help the people who were powerless against things they couldn’t see, and he didn’t fear the mushi. He didn’t wantonly destroy them as a point of pride.
Tanyuu’s favorite story Ginko had told her had been the one about cotton spores - so similar and at the same time nothing like her own. Ginko had even shown her the jar he kept the captured mushi in, and while she couldn’t see it for herself - she could only see the moving ink inhabited by the forbidden mushi - Kumado confirmed there was a green goo inside. And it had a face. Interestingly, Kumado couldn’t hear it speak, even though Ginko insisted it did. She had half a mind to ask Gin to open the jar for Kumado to see better but… Well. It was obvious neither of the men would agree to that with Tanyuu right there.
She looked forward to Ginko’s visits - infrequent as they were. She also suspected that more than seeking out her company, he looked forward to reading the texts she and other Karibusa scribes had written down. That hurt - at the start, when Tanyuu was still taken with him. But with time, listening to the things he said, writing down his stories, she realized - maybe Tanyuu’s first ever adult realization - loving her would only hurt him. Would mean he would have to leave her over and over and over again. She couldn’t go with him. He couldn’t stay at the archives for more than a day at a time. It would be irresponsible.
Neither of them could shake the burdens that made them.
***
The last stretch of the climb had been almost vertical. Only the sky and the crowns of the trees stretched around him on the horizon. And Gin did not stray off the beaten path - this was really the intended way to get to this village. He groaned, bending back until his spine cracked, then forward to rest his hands on his knees, and only then did he look down to the valley below.
There, right over the village huddled in the dale, hung a sangyou, clearly visible and perfectly recognizable from this angle. It was huge. Nothing like small lines shimmering over shallow streams when water creatures bred there.
Gin had read this was possible - sangyou gorging themselves giant on unborn children - but he didn’t really believe it at the time. Those were Minai records!
While Gin was not usually one to judge, the Minai were, as a clan, crazy enough to force enslaved, artificial mushi into flesh prisons made of their own children. Whatever records they chose to share with the world had to be taken with a grain of salt.
Still. There it hung. Shimmering in the golden light of early sunset.
***
“Oh.” Tanyuu gently set her cup down. “What did you do?”
“I went into the village and told them what was happening.”
Not one to appreciate a tea ceremony, that Ginko. Kumado had noted that about him before. For all his innate grace, the white-haired mushishi seemed hewn from rough stuff. Certainly rougher than Tanyuu. Or Kumado himself for that matter. A simple man in a complicated world - that was Tanyuu’s Ginko.
It could not have been easy to stand before regular people and tell them whatever livelihood they had hoped to build there wouldn’t have a future but there was no doubt in Kumado’s mind that Ginko at least attempted to reach them. He was a man who was not afraid to try.
Sangyou were simple things, more phenomena than creatures. They didn’t act out of spite. They didn’t act at all. Mostly they just existed at a certain time - collecting who knows what that was there to be collected from spotted salamanders and melting back into the river of light at the end of spring. One of Kumado's ancestors wrote an entire treatise theorizing on the nature of sangyou that would be an utter waste of time to read, if not for one elemental detail: sangyou could eat people. Not people who were already born or even larger fetuses but anything freshly conceived was fair game.
There were no safeguards around it, no way to stop it. No way to repel the mushi or chase it away. Ginko had to tell people living in that village - wherever it was, Kumado was only half-listening at that point - that they wouldn’t have any children unless and until they moved away. The only way to deal with a sangyou once it had already fed on humans was to starve it. Which was a long process - at least the length of a human life. Maybe longer.
That wasn’t why Ginko was unwilling to look at either of them, though. There was another fact about sangyou and all three of them sitting here, enjoying tea, knew it.
“Were they still there?” Kumado asked when it became clear Tanyuu wouldn't. His own cup remained untouched. He was sitting on the same side of the table as Ginko but turned away from him slightly. Tanyuu didn’t like that they didn’t like one another but not everything revolved around her. Ginko knew what Kumado really was and Kumado knew Ginko felt he was an abomination. He was right.
“No. She was a goze. She moved on after her husband died. Timing fits.” Gin reached for his cup and took a sip, not bothering with the pleasantries usually associated with the ritual. Tanyuu rolled her eyes at him but said nothing. They were all thinking the same thing: that woman who was attracting mushi but unaware of it was a danger to herself and others but she had no idea. As a goze, she would be safer if she followed the rules but… Well. If she was willing to take a husband, obviously she didn't.
Kumado looked away from his companions, contemplating the stony plains surrounding them. There could be cattle grazing here but the Karibusa were too paranoid about the forbidden mushi finding a way to attach itself to anything alive in its vicinity. Maybe. It still seemed wasteful.
“It wasn’t her fault,” Tanyuu whispered, not looking at Ginko or at Kumado but clearly only speaking to one of them. The one who was likely to care. “She couldn’t know.”
No. She couldn’t. Kumado agreed with that. Still, there were rules. And there was always a price to be paid for breaking the rules. Sometimes you paid it - like Kumado did when he was born unable to see mushi and so had to go through the ritual for the clan to forgive him for this transgression - sometimes the innocent people around you did. Like the villagers who will have to uproot themselves to survive because they tolerated the rule-breaker among them.
To Kumado, that was the way of the world.
***
Not everyone who could see mushi also attracted them as strongly as Gin did. For example, Tanyuu's Kumado shrugged them off like he was made of glass. To an extent he was. Still, it grated Gin somewhat to remember how Kumado worked - indifferent to any sort of balance, focused on the singular goal of his existence. Not everyone had that luxury.
Her name was Imi. It would be unwise to tell that to the Karibusa scribe or to the head of the most vicious mushishi clan Ginko knew of, but he kept her story in mind to tell someone who would appreciate it.
Tanyuu was right - Imi had done nothing wrong. Certainly not in Gin’s mind. It was natural for a woman to want to find love and start a family. It wasn’t her fault she lost her sight as a child, nor that her parents sent her off for goze training. It wasn’t what she wanted but it’s not like what anyone wants has any particular bearing on what happens in their life.
She wandered around, performing, until she met a man who promised he had a place where both of them could live peacefully together. A quiet place, away from the world, where she and their children would be safe.
They had no children. Gin couldn’t know exactly when it happened but there was a stream right outside the village, right behind the house Imi pointed out as her late husband’s. The sangyou had probably been attracted as soon as it had the opportunity to be.
When Gin asked her, Imi admitted she had seen weird, impossible things when she was young but her eyes were sick for a long time before she lost her sight. She had never paid much attention to the weird things no one else could see. Nor should she. She had already lost one life and had to learn to live a new one.
Her husband had died recently. An accident. He was crushed by a felled tree. He had pushed another man out of the way, and Imi was staying with that man’s family. She was devastated when Gin told her it would make no difference to the village situation whether she stayed or left. The sangyou was not attached to her - it was just there. Feeding on new life every time some was available. It would remain for years. Until it starved.
Gin made sure the elders of the village understood their situation before he moved on. In this case, he could ultimately do nothing but explain, warn and feel powerless help.
It was a familiar feeling he had gotten used to but not one he liked.
***
The number of times Adashino suggested, prompted and finally insisted Ginko could, and really should, feel free to invite himself into Adashino’s house, study and even the shed if Adashino himself was for some reason not immediately present to receive him, was exhausting. After all the years of easy friendship it would simply be embarrassing if any of the locals saw the mushishi lurking like a stranger at the good doctor’s veranda.
Despite this Adashino saw the exact scene - Ginko fast asleep, slumped against one of the beams, with his medicine chest resting beside him - enough that he would be able to draw it from memory.
Since Ginko insisted on pretending this was not his home, where his every return was eagerly awaited, Adashino will probably keep experiencing this exhaustion for the foreseeable future. Maybe Ginko just didn’t want to consider himself as part of the collection. If so - too late. And anyway it wasn’t up to Ginko to decide.
“Oi!” Adashino called, reaching down to shake the sleeping mushishi, “Come on. Come inside. I’ll make tea.”
Some tea, a dinner, a bath and mostly symbolic pretense at trading later they were both back on the veranda, watching the setting sun and enjoying a bit of the local sake, gifted to Adashino this very day by one of his patients.
Ginko had been telling a story about a blind woman who unknowingly brought calamity to her village while sipping from his cup a lot more than he usually would. Adashino had previously wondered whether the mushishi could get drunk but now he knew that yes, he could and that’s why Ginko usually didn’t imbibe. Something about the story must have been bothering him but without asking questions Ginko was unlikely to answer Adashino couldn’t tell what.
He could take an educated guess though.
Instead of trying to press water from a stone, Adashino, careful not to hit Ginko in the process, flopped bonelessly down the wall they were both reclining against. From this lower angle he just about could see the depression of Ginko’s missing eye, his eyelid open just a bit to show the flat darkness behind it.
Were they both drunk enough for this? Adashino thought that yes, maybe they were so he reached up to move Ginko’s fine white hair aside and have a better look. Then, a little wistfully, he asked, “Will you let me give you another one already?”
Ginko had refused a new prosthetic eye time and time again, ever since he came around with the one Adashino gifted him missing and a story of how Ginko used it - a piece of colored glass, mind - to restore sight to an eyeless child. At one point Adashino had to stop asking so as not to force mild-mannered, patient Ginko to rudeness.
But it felt important right now, if maybe not appropriate.
“You could give it away again. I don’t care.” Adashino added, sitting back up properly, eyes on the last remains of the sun disappearing into the sea. His throat felt tight but he didn’t want to think why.
He could hear Ginko taking a breath, as if he wanted to say something but stopped himself. They were both quiet for a while before Ginko, audibly amused, said, “I don’t want to keep giving out pieces of myself.”
A distant echo carried the hoot of an owl, inadvertently mixing in with Ginko’s voice. The first stars began to blink in and out of view over the sea.
“Could have fooled me.” Adashino muttered, then laughed a bit as Ginko elbowed him for it.
end.
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