Chapter 11: Daichi Comes UpYuki heard him before she saw him.

  Her fox ears picked up uneven footsteps on the shrine path—the careful, deliberate gait of someone who’d climbed this mountain enough times to know exactly how much it costs, but was pushing the pace anyway. She set down the rope she’d been coiling and walked to the gate.

  Daichi wasn't due for his weekly maintenance visit for another four days.

  He emerged from the treeline at the path’s st bend, moving with purpose if not speed. He spotted her and raised one hand in a greeting that was also an acknowledgment that yes, he saw her expression, and yes, he knew arriving off-schedule meant trouble.

  “The stairs,” he said, arriving at the gate, slightly breathless. “Get harder every year.”

  “You came up yourself. Early.”

  “I did.” He adjusted the pack on his shoulder—more supplies, because Daichi always arrived with something practical. “Is there tea?”

  They sat in the main building, the pack unpacked onto the kitchen shelf while water heated. Daichi moved with the comfortable familiarity of someone who’d been making himself useful in this space for decades. Yuki let him, because watching him told her something about the shrine’s history she couldn’t read from any document.

  “Hana asks about you,” he said, settling at the table. “Every day. What you’re working on, whether you’ve tried any of the old recipes she’s been copying out for you.” He offered a fond, tired smile. “She’s been talking about shrine work since she was nine. Drove her mother wild—too much climbing, too much forest, not enough sensible career pnning.”

  Yuki thought of Hana’s instinctive ease the first time she’d come up the mountain. “Hana mentioned her grandfather the day she brought the dumplings," Yuki said. "That's you."

  “It is. Her mother is my eldest. The worrier of the family.” He accepted the tea Yuki set in front of him. “Hana takes after my side. The part that can’t leave things alone.”

  He gnced across the shrine courtyard, where Kuroki was finishing her morning sword forms before the day’s patrol.

  “How are the rituals going?” Daichi asked.

  “I'll show you,” Yuki said instead.

  She walked out to the altar and went through the morning purification sequence. All of it—incense, offerings, the haraegushi channeled with the clean, even pulse Tsukuyomi had been drilling into her. She could feel the shrine’s boundary hum in response, vibrating in her fox senses like pulling a rope taut.

  When she finished, she found Daichi watching her with an expression she hadn’t seen on him before. Not surprise. Something more like recalibration—the look of a man updating what he’d expected against what he’d just observed.

  “The st miko,” he said carefully. “It took her three months to do that properly.”

  Yuki turned around. “The st miko. Who was she?”

  Daichi set down his cup.

  “Her name was Sachi. She came to the shrine when she was nineteen—different circumstances, but not entirely unlike yours. Tsukuyomi called her.” He traced the rim of his cup. “She served here for almost twenty years.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “She disappeared.” He said it quietly, the way you say something you’ve said many times over many years without it getting any easier. “One morning she was gone. No note, no sign of struggle. The shrine was in perfect order. She was simply... not in it.”

  “And you never found out why?”

  “We searched for three months.” He looked at his hands. “Nothing. After a year, the shrine went quiet and nobody came to take her pce. The provincial authority sent letters. There was talk of appointing someone. The talk went on long enough that people stopped expecting it to produce anything.” He looked out at the courtyard. “Over two decades is a long time for talk.”

  After lunch, when the supplies were properly stored, Daichi unrolled a piece of paper on the table—hand-drawn, roughly mapped. The province roads, the vilges, the mountain passes between them. Small marks dotted the parchment in dark ink.

  “I’ve been speaking with travelers on the market roads,” he said. “I asked them to tell me if they’d noticed anything unusual.” He smoothed the paper. “These are the pces they mentioned.”

  The marks were not random.

  Seven locations. All of them west and northwest of the shrine. The incidents ranged from ‘horse refused to continue past a certain point’ to ‘birds all went silent’ to one traveler who said he’d felt watched for an hour on the ridge road but seen nothing. Three of the locations perfectly matched the cold spots Yuki had already mapped out.

  “The pattern runs northwest,” she noted, tapping the parchment.

  “That’s where I started worrying,” Daichi said. “Individually, these mean nothing. Travelers have strange days. Animals spook. But together, all in the same direction, all in the past six months—”

  “Something is moving through,” Kuroki said. She’d come inside quietly at some point and was standing at the doorway with her arms folded. Neither of them had heard her approach. “Or it's something with an expanding radius.”

  “Either way.” Daichi rolled the map back up and held it out to Yuki. “You should have this.”

  She took it.

  He left in the te afternoon to make the descent before dusk. At the shrine gate, he paused with the particur quality of a man who’d been holding something back all day and had decided to let it out before he ran out of time.

  “Sachi would have known what this was,” he said. “She had twenty years of experience I never thought to document while she had it. And when she was gone...” He stopped. “The knowledge went with her. Whatever she’d learned about this mountain, this forest. Gone.”

  Yuki waited.

  “That’s not on you,” Daichi said. “You’ve been here two weeks. None of this is your fault. But I want you to understand...” He met her eyes. “The vilge let this shrine sit empty for two decades. We got used to managing without it. We thought we could.” His voice was steady, but something underneath it wasn’t. “We were wrong. And the bill is coming due now.”

  He walked down the path before she could find the words to reply.

  She stood at the gate until his footsteps faded. The forest was quiet. Not the easy quiet of morning—the held-in kind, the kind that feels like something rge is not making noise on purpose.

  Sachi disappeared. Nobody trained a repcement. Twenty years.

  What did it mean that no one had found her? What did it mean that the shrine had quieted, and the cold spots had started, and nobody had connected those two things for two decades?

  If the old knowledge was gone, Yuki couldn't rely on a teacher. She would just have to tear the problem down to its base principles and rebuild the shrine's defenses from scratch.

  She went back inside. The fire had burned low. Kuroki had set a fresh cup of tea beside her empty one without making a thing of it.

  Yuki sat down, wrapped both hands around the tea, and didn’t say any of what she was thinking.

  She just drank it.

  That counts, she thought, feeling the warmth spread through her chest. That still counts.

  Author note

  Hey guys, as I mentioned before, my favorite novel is now uploaded here — you can check out the first chapter. I'll be dropping more tomorrow all at once, so stay tuned. It's called A Tale of Regression.

  A Tale Of regression