The city did not sleep so much as it held its breath.
Kyoto's old storm drains ran like black arteries beneath the streets, a second city where things that didn't belong above ground were bartered in whispers. Reiji moved through the condensation and rust with Akari at his flank, the aftertaste of the Hollow Monarch still metallic on his tongue. Every few steps, the mark in his palm pulsed—slow, venomous, like a wound that refused to close.
A sigil had guided them here: 裂—Retsu, fracture. It had been scorched into the cobbles after the mirror-shade dissolved. The same character was carved, small and deliberate, on the hatch he forced open.
Inside, lanterns burned without flame. Shadows pooled along the ceiling like ink held by surface tension. A dozen figures turned as he entered—faces masked, eyes hidden, voices traded for gestures. The Retsu Exchange. A market for things that shouldn't exist: stolen memories, bottled dreams, blessings from gods that had stopped answering.
A woman in a half-cracked kitsune mask stepped off a dais. Her movement made no sound at all.
"You carry a debt," she said. Not to him, but at him—like a diagnosis. "And your debt hums."
Reiji's hand closed over his palm. "I need a name. The one who is severing threads."
"The Weaver? The Seamstress of Null? Depends on who you ask." The woman tilted her head. "But names won't help you if your tether snaps first."
Her gaze dipped to the mark on his hand. For an instant, her pupils reflected not Reiji, but a hollow crown of broken mirrors. She flinched.
"You made a pact," she whispered. "Worse—you made it knowingly."
Reiji said nothing. He did not need to defend a sin he still kept.
"Then you must choose what type of oath you carry." She slid a lacquered case across a table. "One that uses you… or one you control."
Inside the case lay a shard of mirror as thin as a fingernail, webbed with hairline cracks. At its center: the same character, 裂.
Akari reached for it, but Reiji stopped her. The shard's surface rippled—then showed him himself, but emptied, eyes dark as dry wells.
"This is a Riven Glass," the woman said. "Place it on the mark and the pact will reveal its true language. But know this—every truth has teeth."
Reiji pressed the shard to his palm.
The world tilted.
Cold rushed up his arm like water. For a heartbeat he heard bells submerged in tar, and then he stood—no longer in the market, but in a corridor carved from night. Walls breathed. The floor mirrored the sky. Ahead, a door rose, not built but grown from the same darkness that gnawed at the edges of his sight.
This is the place where your oath was written, a voice murmured from nowhere and everywhere. This is where you became useful.
Reiji opened the door.
A room unfolded that he somehow remembered and didn't. At its center sat a low table and, opposite him, a man whose face was his own before it learned to be cruel. Not the mirror-shade—something older. Between them lay a knife and a bowl of water blacker than ink.
"You came late," the other Reiji said, warm in a way that chilled. "But not too late. Do you remember why you asked me in?"
"No," Reiji answered truthfully.
"You wanted a blade that never dulls." The other smiled. "A way to cut through lies, through fate, through the men who made you. I offered a pact. You signed with a memory."
Reiji's throat tightened. "Which memory?"
"Your first," the other said gently. "The one that made you human."
The bowl shivered. Images pressed against its surface: a summer afternoon, cicadas so loud they stitched the world together; a woman's laugh; small hands holding a wooden sword too big for them. The memory hurt with a pain that wasn't violence, but belonging.
"I don't recall this," Reiji whispered.
"You do," the other said. "But the pact took its edges. Power demands room. Where do you think that room came from?"
Rage flared—clean, bright. "I want it back."
"You can't," the other said. "But you can decide the terms going forward."
The knife gleamed between them. "A pact is a conversation," the other continued. "It fractures when one voice drowns the other. Yours is failing. Every time you force the shadow to obey, it eats louder."
"And if I let it lead," Reiji said, "I become the Monarch's echo."
"Exactly." The other slid the blade across the table. "So cut new terms. But blood won't do. Choice will."
The corridor shuddered. A door appeared to Reiji's right, another to his left.
"Right," the other said, gesturing. "You surrender. Let the shadow carry you. You'll never fear again, because you'll never feel again."
"And the left?"
"You abandon the pact. Break it entirely." A pause. "You live human. And die human. Maybe tomorrow."
Silence pressed like a hand to the back of his neck.
Reiji stared at the knife, at the bowl holding the ghost of a summer he could no longer reach. He thought of the girl from the court—you're no different from them—and of Akari calling his name when the city tried to forget itself. He thought of the Monarch's throne, and of how close he'd come to liking the quiet that followed each kill.
He set the knife down.
"I'll take neither door," he said.
The other Reiji's smile thinned. "Refusal is a door of its own."
"No." Reiji lifted his marked hand. "A pact isn't a chain. It's a balance."
He plunged the hand into the bowl.
Cold lanced up his arm. The shard in his palm cracked with a sound like ice splitting under weight. Darkness surged—but this time he did not push it down or give it rein. He held it the way one holds grief: firmly, without romance, without denial.
The corridor wailed. In the market above, Akari staggered as the lanterns guttered. The kitsune-masked woman backed away, whispering old prayers to gods who had forgotten their worshipers.
Inside the pact-room, the other Reiji reached across the table and gripped his forearm. For a moment their veins pulsed in synchrony—black and red, tide and undertow.
"Name your term," the other said, voice rough now.
"My shadow does not choose why," Reiji said. "Only how."
The mark burned, then cooled, then settled—as if a tight band had been loosened but not removed. The bowl stilled. The summer in its surface held.
The other Reiji exhaled. His features blurred, then clarified into something neither kind nor cruel—simply true. "Then you will pay a different price."
"I always do."
"When you draw on the pact," the other said, "you will feel the weight of the lives you end. Not as guilt. As memory. You won't be allowed the mercy of forgetting."
Reiji's jaw tightened. "Accepted."
The room cracked from ceiling to floor. The corridor buckled. The pact—fractured, yes, but not broken—re-shaped itself around the boundary he'd named.
When Reiji opened his eyes, he was on the market floor. Akari knelt over him, breath hitching, the shard of mirror in her palm now a scatter of glittering dust.
"Reiji…?"
He sat up slowly. The mark on his hand had changed: the original sigil now crossed by a thin diagonal stroke—裂 carved through it like a scar.
The kitsune-masked broker kept a polite distance. "You lived," she said, sounding faintly impressed. "Most drown in their own bargains."
Reiji stood. His body felt heavier, but his feet were sure.
"What did you choose?" Akari asked, voice small.
"Not to be a monster," he said. "And not to be weak."
A hush rippled through the market. Somewhere, a stringed instrument began to play a song with no melody.
The broker cleared her throat. "You asked for the Weaver. Your fractured pact will let you follow seams others can't see." She nodded toward a tunnel mouth no one had noticed a moment before—a piece of space folded backward, edges shimmering. "Her work leaves a weft—thin, but there. Follow it, and you'll find one of her looms."
Reiji faced the tunnel. The air around it tasted of iron and old rain, of the kind of rooms where names were taken off ledgers and people stopped existing.
Akari touched his sleeve. "If this breaks you—"
"It won't," he said. The certainty wasn't bravado. It was a decision he would have to remake every day until the work was done. "If I crack, hold me together. If I vanish, remember me."
Her smile trembled. "Always."
They stepped into the seam.
As the market fell away, Reiji felt the pact shift under his skin—no longer a command he hated or a hunger he feared, but a knife he chose to carry with the edge sheathed until it was needed.
Somewhere far ahead, a loom clicked.
Threads tightened.
And in the dark between heartbeats, a crown of broken mirrors turned toward him and—just for a moment—hesitated.
Morals instilled (without being patronizing): power without choice will enslave; power limited by values keeps you human.