Ranmaru's diagram of the mortal world and Jigoku blazed, its rivers of fire and shadow coursing across the gorge. With a sweep of his hand, the titanic skeleton roared and fell under his dominion, its bones thrumming with black light.
"Mine," he whispered, sealing the colossal remains into the Pavilion Tower that hung like a shadow in his soul. The structure quaked, its halls filling with the weight of yokai bones, their ancient power chained to his foundation.
The hell gate still yawned, vomiting forth chains and screams. His eyes fixed upon it, ambition burning. If he could seal all within Jigoku itself, then even hell would kneel beneath him.
But before he could step forward, the world froze.
The air thickened, heavy with divinity.
And then—
A vast golden palm descended from the heavens.
Its fingers stretched across the sky like mountains, its glow drowning the gorge, the forest, the gate—everything. Ranmaru's pupils shrank. His instincts screamed, and without hesitation, he dragged the onryō into the Pavilion, vanishing inside its dark refuge.
The palm fell.
The gorge ceased to exist.
Mountains folded like paper. The Pavilion shattered as if it had been no more than mist. The hell gate crumbled, its chains snapping, its wailing cut short. The forest was erased in a single breath. Ranmaru, the onryō, the yokai skeletons, the battlefield—all were swept away.
The palm pressed down until nothing remained but a wasteland scorched into glass.
And above the ruin, a voice resounded across the provinces, rolling like thunder:
"The priest who strayed to serve Jigoku is no more. What was borrowed, now reclaimed from the grasp of evil. Tonight, darkness is purged. A being beyond kindness has been slain."
The sutra sword, freed of corruption, rose into the sky, reclaimed by the heavens themselves. Its glow vanished into the void.
Far and wide, peasants, warriors, even nobles fell to their knees. Monks wept. Farmers pressed their heads into the dirt. Entire villages broke into prayer as the palm's radiance lit the night, declaring the will of the Buddha.
Darkness had been ended. Or so they believed.
—
Days later, monks from distant temples arrived at the scorched gorge. They whispered sutras as they stepped across the glassy earth, their beads clattering, their eyes wide. Nothing remained of the battle—no bone, no blade, no trace of the Pavilion. Only silence.
Yokai hunters followed. Hardened men and women, veterans of curses and shadows, walked the site in awe. Some knelt. Others drank heavily, unsettled by the sheer absence of what should have been.
Rumors bled into the wind, woven together like threads of a hidden tapestry.
One hunter spoke of a band sent to a daimyo's manor long ago. The lord had searched desperately for medicines to cure his frail son. Failing that, he had turned to wickedness, sacrificing his people, offering them to yokai in blasphemous rituals to "bless" the boy.
The temple caught wind of it. They dispatched a band of third-rate hunters to cleanse the corruption. Those hunters fought five high-ranking yokai across the manor's grounds. The daimyo died, his head taken in fire and blood. They claimed his son perished too—slain when Ranmaru, one of their own, demanded his body brought out.
The hunters left the following day. But on the road they were ambushed by a Wanyūdō, the flaming wheel yokai. It carried with it two corpses—the daimyo and his son. It slaughtered several hunters before vanishing into the night.
The survivors, shaken, delivered their captives to a temple. Most believed the story had ended there.
But whispers persisted.
They said the hunter called Ranmaru had received a blessing at a shrine not long after. That he left his band behind, riding off into obscurity. That he was later found in a distant village… a village which had, on that very night, been annihilated by a tide of yokai.
Suspicion grew sharper. Witnesses swore that when the hunters found him in a cave, he lied about his name. And when an oni, from Jigoku itself, cursed the name "Hayate," it was Ranmaru who flinched.
The truth came into focus.
Ranmaru was not merely a hunter.
He was Hayate no Kuro—the son of the damned daimyo. The boy everyone believed dead, the vessel of every wicked deed his father had wrought.
Neither the hunters nor the monks knew it at the time. But now, after the golden palm, after the destruction of the gorge, the pattern was undeniable.
Ranmaru's secret was too great. So great that both Jigoku and the Buddha themselves had stretched their hands into the mortal realm to end him.
And together, the tale was etched into legend:
The boy who was cursed by hell, and slain by heaven.