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<\/a><\/p>\nYugureda Shosaito\u2019s home lies on a small, private island in the middle of the lagoon. The surrounding landscape is unnaturally muted, drained of color, bathed in gloom and breathing stagnant air. Leaving Numataro-sama\u2019s home for Shosaito\u2019s is not a fair trade by any stretch. We\u2019re told his pearl divers have a small village over there. How anyone at all manages to live within that umbra and maintain their sanity is anyone\u2019s guess.<\/span><\/p>\nQatana and I can see there\u2019s magic pretty much everywhere. Not anything overt, but a sort of faint aura that permeates everything. Why do people do this sort of thing to themselves? By all accounts, Shosaito\u2019s pearl business is quite lucrative, and he\u2019s clearly a wealthy man: you don\u2019t spend your money on geisha and private islands unless gold flows like water. Yet his home is draped in malaise. What\u2019s the point of opulence if that\u2019s how you live?<\/span><\/p>\nOne possibility is that it\u2019s a function of the means he used to achieve his success. Some actions leave scars on the world. That thought is certainly disturbing, especially because it\u2019s far from wild speculation. If Numataro-sama is correct, this is a man who killed O-Sayumi\u2019s mother, knowing that she had an infant child. We\u2019re also reasonably certain that he is O-Sayumi\u2019s father, which would mean that he intentionally murdered his wife or lover. What kind of person would do these things? (Uncomfortable answer? Ameiko\u2019s father. Which may in part explain why Ameiko has taken a personal interest in the matter.)<\/span><\/p>\nWe\u2019re leaving Koya here. With someone spying on us, that was not an easy decision, but we can, at least, mitigate the risks, and it\u2019s arguably less dangerous than her tagging along. Numataro-sama has agreed to let me cover his home with my spell that will keep it, and them, hidden. That way, if they try to come for us, it won\u2019t be so easy to do it through her. At least for the immediate future. Long term, we need a better solution.<\/span><\/p>\nDesnus 29 (Yugureda Shosaito Home, Late Morning)<\/h3>\n
S<\/span><\/p>\nometimes, a coincidence that is far too unlikely to be more than just a coincidence really is just a coincidence. And sometimes that magical trap that you see, which is quite obviously a magical trap, and that you\u2019re told outright is a magical trap, is, in fact, a magical trap. These are the valuable lessons I have learned today.<\/span><\/p>\nHonestly, I thought the shogi board was important because shogi just kept coming up: meeting Hatsue and her passion for the game, the large set in Numataro-sama\u2019s home, the piece he gave us that could summon a great shogi player when broken, and even Shosaito himself. So there had to be more to what we were seeing, right? Wrong. It was just a trap for the unwary (or, I suppose, for people with a penchant to out-think themselves); retaliation against anyone motivated and clever enough to come looking for O-Sayumi, but careless enough to casually touch things as they explored.<\/span><\/p>\nThe shadow realm we were trapped in may not have been entirely real, but the undead shadows that stalked us were no illusions. One of them touched me, and I felt my strength draining away as a horrible chill pierced my heart. It was an unwelcome reminder of my own fragility and mortality.<\/span><\/p>\nOne odd thing did happen while we were in there. OK, fine, the <\/span>whole thing<\/span><\/i> was odd, but I mean relatively speaking. Zosimus broke the shogi piece Numataro-sama had given us as soon as we realized we were trapped in a giant shogi board made of shadowstuff, and <\/span>Hatsue<\/span><\/i> appeared. Not her, but a spectral image of her, as though it were some sort of projection. She looked at me and asked, \u201cWhat are you doing in my dream?\u201d I didn\u2019t really have a good answer.<\/span><\/p>\nShe may have saved our lives. Her image or projection, or whatever it was, was real enough to the shadows. She tore two of them apart with relative ease.<\/span><\/p>\nCurious. I\u2019ll have to ask her about this later.<\/span><\/p>\nThe shadows were not our only encounter with undead. I recognized his housekeepers as manananggal, though only <\/span>after<\/span><\/i> we found them curiously difficult to restrain, both physically and magically. From what I remember of the Tian legends, they are significantly more hideous by night, when they tear away from their lower torsos and fly around to feed on the living. We didn\u2019t get to see that part. I am not really broken up over it.<\/span><\/p>\nNormally, I\u2019d say that invading someone\u2019s home is best done after dark. That makes this the exception that proves the rule. Our original intent wasn\u2019t even to break in. We were just going to see the man and ask a few pointed questions, but things got pretty weird from the moment we landed on his island, and entered a downward spiral soon after.<\/span><\/p>\nYesterday, I asked who would choose to live in this faded landscape, and the answer to that turned out to be \u201cno one\u201d. The pearl divers were lacedons, which implies rather strongly that there was an outbreak of ghoul fever in their village at some point in the past.<\/span><\/p>\nI would not be surprised to learn that this was also Shosaito\u2019s doing, because just look at his cleaning staff. It\u2019s not like he couldn\u2019t know, which makes him either complicit or responsible. Ironically, Zosi and I were making offhand remarks (perhaps in poor taste) about using undead, or at least animated dead, for pearl diving. We had no idea how right we were. It seems Shosaito figured out long ago that his pearl business could benefit significantly from employees with no overhead, no upkeep, and no need to breathe air.<\/span><\/p>\nAll of this went a long way towards answering my <\/span>other<\/span><\/i> question from yesterday: we more or less know what kind of person we are dealing with, and that\u2019s someone who cares little for human life, or for anything beyond his own self-interests. It\u2019s still not clear how his daughter fits into the picture, but it\u2019s a fair bet that he needs her for something. For what, exactly, is still not clear, but\u2026the fact that they are related by blood must be the key.<\/span><\/p>\nEarlier, we came across a set of cards from the Minkai game uta-garuta. I was thumbing through them idly as we explored, and noticed that several of the cards had arcane writings mixed in with the poetry verses. It took me a little time to decipher it all, but the writings were similar to a spell I am vaguely familiar with, though I don\u2019t know myself because it is abhorrent. This spell transfers a person\u2019s consciousness from their own body to a receptacle of some sort, typically a rare gemstone of modest value. From there, the caster can forcibly possess another living body. What I was reading, however, seemed both different from this spell and incomplete in some fashion.<\/span><\/p>\nIt occurs to me now that we never asked anyone if Shosaito is married, or has a lover, or even any children (other than O-Sayumi). His home looks lived in and neat but\u2026neglected. Hay is molding in the stables, there\u2019s very little food to be found, and the bedrooms are unoccupied, with only one showing any sign of use. It\u2019s like he just stopped living here a few weeks ago.<\/span><\/p>\nThis all occurs to me now because he has taken his own daughter, who he is related to by blood, and who has been missing for a few weeks. Because he was researching a variant of a spell that can transfer a person\u2019s soul. A spell whose material component requires an object of value; a requirement that could quite possibly be satisfied by a pearl, of which I am sure he has plenty.<\/span><\/p>\nMy gods. What has this man done?<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Desnus 29 (Namikadame Lagoon, Morning) A grand magnolia tree sits on the shore of the Jikko River just upstream from where it empties into the Namikadame Lagoon. It\u2019s nearly in full bloom, with flowers large enough to cover my hand and a creamy, sweet fragrance that would be the envy of bath houses in Magnimar. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_import_markdown_pro_load_document_selector":0,"_import_markdown_pro_submit_text_textarea":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[32],"class_list":["post-3962","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journal","tag-kali"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dungeonetics.com\/gamediary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3962","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dungeonetics.com\/gamediary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dungeonetics.com\/gamediary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dungeonetics.com\/gamediary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dungeonetics.com\/gamediary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3962"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"https:\/\/www.dungeonetics.com\/gamediary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3962\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5723,"href":"https:\/\/www.dungeonetics.com\/gamediary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3962\/revisions\/5723"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dungeonetics.com\/gamediary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3962"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dungeonetics.com\/gamediary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3962"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dungeonetics.com\/gamediary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3962"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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