They’d told her the theory two nights ago.Yuki had done most of the talking—the cold spots acting as infrastructure, the vilge attacks serving as a distraction, the northwest pull pointing toward something much rger. Kuroki had filled in the physical evidence: the cw marks, the height progression, the brutally consistent path. Together, it made an argument that Yuki thought was coherent, if deeply uncomfortable.

  Tsukuyomi had listened without interrupting. Without floating. Without any of the amused, mischievous expressions she usually wore when deciding how much to enjoy herself. She’d sat on the courtyard steps like a normal person and listened to the whole thing.

  When Yuki finished, the goddess had simply said: “I need to check something.”

  And then she was gone.

  That had been two nights ago.

  Yuki now found herself doing the purification ritual twice a day—evening as well as morning. Not because Tsukuyomi had told her to, but because she’d just started doing it the night after the south ridge visit.

  She reached for the routine because it grounded her, and because the shrine's boundary needed to be as strong as she could keep it while they waited.

  Kuroki had extended her patrol routes. She didn’t say anything about it; she just started returning ter in the evenings, coming in quietly, only offering information about what she’d observed if explicitly asked.

  They were both, in their different ways, bracing for impact.

  The silence from Tsukuyomi stretched through a day, then two. This was unusual enough that Yuki stopped expecting the goddess to simply appear at inconvenient moments for entertainment, and started actively listening for her instead.

  On the morning of the third day, she found her.

  Tsukuyomi was sitting on the front steps of the shrine. She wasn't floating. She was sitting on the actual stone, her eborate twelve-yer kimono arranged with much less care than usual, her silver hair loose and undecorated.

  She was looking out at the valley below—quiet, present, like she’d been sitting there for hours and didn’t feel the need to make an entrance out of it.

  Yuki stopped in the doorway.

  The goddess looked different without the performance. Older, somehow, despite the ageless aesthetic she had going on. She looked like someone who’d been thinking hard, about terrible things, for a long time.

  “Sit down,” Tsukuyomi said without turning her head.

  Yuki lingered in the doorway just long enough to gnce back into the hall and catch Kuroki’s eye.

  Then, she walked out and sat. Kuroki appeared on the veranda twenty seconds ter, quickly read the tension in the courtyard, and sat down on Yuki’s other side without having to be asked.

  Tsukuyomi looked at them both.

  “I’ve been looking at the province from altitude,” she said. “The full spiritual geography, not just this mountain. It took longer than I expected because the disruption is significantly older than I thought.”

  She looked back out over the treeline.

  “The cold spots you’ve mapped form a spiral. From above, it’s undeniably clear. There are twelve collection points in total—you’ve found seven of them—arranged in a descending arc that converges on a single location.

  It's approximately four hours northwest of this shrine, deep in the high forest, well above the tree line.”

  "What's there?" Yuki asked.

  “Something has been accumuting spiritual energy from the ley lines of this region for somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-five years.” Tsukuyomi kept her voice level, which somehow made the news worse. “The timeline won’t compress further.

  The disruption is old enough that the chronological edges have eroded. But the beginning coincides perfectly with the disappearance of the miko, Sachi.”

  The morning air felt suddenly, oppressively heavy.

  “She didn’t disappear,” Yuki said slowly. “She—”

  “I don’t know.” Tsukuyomi’s voice was careful. “I genuinely don’t know whether she left because of what she found, or whether something else happened.

  There’s no trace I can read at this distance.” She met Yuki’s eyes. “I’ll keep searching for that. But I wanted to be clear with you: I don’t have that answer.”

  "What is it?" Kuroki asked, her hand resting habitually near her sword. "At the center."

  “I don’t have a name for it. It predates my clear records of this area.” Tsukuyomi said this with a ftness that communicated exactly how much she disliked admitting it.

  “And considering I have existed since the dawn of the current age, that means whatever this is... it is very, very old. It is patient.

  It is deliberate. It is not an impulsive creature of raw appetite. It pnned this. Thirty years of pnning.”

  “And the vilge attacks?” Yuki asked.

  “Overflow. It is nearing capacity. The energy it’s been siphoning is pressing outward. The organized raids on the vilge are not aggression—they’re symptoms.

  The accumution is full enough that the lower-level spirits in the area are disturbed and acting on that disturbance.”

  “Which means it’s almost done,” Kuroki said.

  “Which means it’s almost done,” Tsukuyomi confirmed.

  “How long?” Yuki asked.

  The goddess was quiet for long enough that the answer began to form in Yuki’s chest before the words were even spoken.

  “Six months,” Tsukuyomi said. “Perhaps somewhat less. It’s an estimate based on the current rate of overflow, not a precise calcution.”

  Six months. Yuki did the math she desperately didn’t want to do.

  The shrine’s current barrier was strong enough for minor spirits. She’d reinforced it, and the markers were holding.

  But she’d just tried to purify the cold spots on the south ridge, and the energy had slid off the infrastructure like she wasn’t even there. If the thing at the center had built this whole network with active resistance built in...

  The shrine barrier wouldn’t hold if it actually moved on them.

  She’d only been here three weeks.

  “What do we need to do?” Yuki asked, because that was the only question that mattered now.

  “Three subsidiary barriers,” Tsukuyomi instructed. “Points situated roughly north, southwest, and east of this shrine, positioned to create a trianguted reinforcement around the mountain.

  Together with the shrine’s central boundary, they would create a resonant field strong enough to hold against something this old, even if it chose to act directly.”

  “Can I do that?”

  Tsukuyomi looked her up and down. “In six months? If you train significantly harder than you have been... Yes.” She said it with a certainty that offered no reassurance—just cold assessment.

  “And the thing itself?” Kuroki pressed. “If we can’t purify the cold spots—”

  “Not with what you currently have, no. The network is protected.” Tsukuyomi’s expression was that of someone who had been turning an incredibly unpleasant problem over in her mind for two days and had not found a comfortable solution.

  “I need more information before I can give you a path to the source. I haven’t been idle—there are older records, regional histories that predate my regur attention to this area. I’ll find out what this is. And I’ll give you what I find.”

  No promises beyond that.

  Yuki nodded once. “When you do,” she said, her voice hardening. “Tell us immediately. Not in three days.”

  Tsukuyomi looked at her for a long moment, and something in her divine expression shifted—a small adjustment, like recalibrating against a mortal pushing back in a way she hadn’t expected.

  “Yes,” Tsukuyomi said softly. “I will.”

  She left between one breath and the next, the way she sometimes did. No shimmer of moonlight, no ceremony. The courtyard just suddenly had one fewer person in it.

  The emptiness it left behind felt about three sizes rger than before.

  Yuki sat completely still on the steps. The forest was quiet below the shrine—not the threatened, suffocating quiet of the south ridge, just the ordinary morning quiet of a mountain that didn’t yet know what was coming down at it from further north.

  Six months. She thought of the cold spots she hadn’t been able to purify. The fifth one she’d felt lurking at the edge of her detection.

  The pattern she’d been mapping that was now confirmed as a massive spiral. The cw marks worn deep into the bark by whatever had been carving this route for longer than she’d been alive the first time.

  She thought of Sachi.

  She didn’t feel ready. But she was going to have to get ready anyway, which was an entirely different thing.

  A presence settled beside her. She didn’t look—she knew the quality of it now, the specific weight of someone sitting down close without making a ceremony out of the proximity.

  “So,” Kuroki said.

  “So,” Yuki said.

  “Six months.”

  “Yeah.”

  The valley below was brightening as the sun finally crested the peaks. Faintly, the sound of one of the merchant bells carried up from Wakaba.

  “Then we start earlier tomorrow,” Kuroki said.

  Not you can do this. Not it’ll be okay. Just: The situation is what it is, and we start earlier tomorrow, and that’s what you do with six months.

  Yuki exhaled. It was a slow, full breath, and something tight and panicked inside her unbunched slightly.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Okay.”

  Her tails were perfectly still behind her. Not wagging in the contented way, not puffed up in the uneasy way. They were just present. Just hers. Steadying themselves the exact same way she was.

  That evening, Yuki unrolled her map. She inked in all twelve cold spots, now that Tsukuyomi had given her the complete picture.

  The spiral was starkly visible when you had them all plotted out. She drew the connecting line—a slow, tightening curve from the shrine’s nearest surroundings, out and around, dipping down to the northwest convergence point.

  In the center of the spiral, right where everything led, she drew a heavy circle.

  She wrote two words inside it.

  Unknown. Six months. She went to bed and stared at the dark ceiling.

  Harder than I’ve been training, she thought. Starting tomorrow. Then: Earlier tomorrow. She almost smiled.

  Her tails shifted once, settled comfortably against the futon, and she slept.