Shiratori Satoru.
He is known as the most evil Majutsushi of all who ever lived, sharing this dubious title only with Narikawari. His name is synonymous with cruel, inhuman experiments that spawned not one but dozens of monsters and curses echoing through the centuries.
However, how truthful is this image considered to be?
History is written by the victors and the survivors.
And those who saw Satoru's true face rarely lived to see the dawn.
But some testimonies remain.
Not in the official clan chronicles, not in heroic ballads. They are lost in the interstices, in personal diaries that shouldn't have survived, in fragments of thoughts imprinted on Scar-crystals that store memory.
This is not a story about a villain in the usual sense. It is a story of intellectual obsession, sterile and emotionless as the surface of a surgical scalpel. An obsession for which morality was not an obstacle, but simply... an irrelevant variable in the equation.
And the darkest equation was derived not in thundering laboratories, but in the silence of the Shiratori clan's ancestral temple, where one day, under the cover of autumn leaf-fall, a shadow crawled.
October 21, 804 AD. Outskirts of Yamato province.
Autumn breathed icy vapor onto yellowed grasses. The air smelled of distant fire smoke, rotting leaves, and fear. From this predawn gloom, stumbling over roots and gasping raw air, she emerged.
Ayame. The last sprout of a forgotten, collateral branch of the great Kujō clan. Her clothing—once expensive, modest kimono—was torn and muddy. Her face, pale from exhaustion and terror, seemed carved from ice. But the most important thing was not outside, but within. Her soul was "Transparent." A unique, cursed heredity. Her body and spirit remained absolutely neutral to any external magical influence. To the world of magic, she was a ghost, a pure, undisturbed sheet of paper. This saved her from many dangers. And led to the most terrible.
In her arms, wrapped in rags, slept an infant. His breathing was strange, rhythmic, like the rustle of leaves in the wind. Through the thin skin on his small hands showed a strange, wood-like pattern, and in the dark strands of his hair, wilted cherry blossom petals seemed stuck—impossible for that time of year.
A runaway. An outcast twice over. Her family, the proud but degenerating Kujō, upon learning of her pregnancy, saw not a miracle. They saw the greatest disgrace. Defilement of blood. She had conceived not from a man. By accident, in a sacred grove, her "Transparent Soul" resonated with an ancient, wild Scar—the ephemeral spirit of the forest, a kami of a place of power. This was not violence in the usual sense. It was a fusion, fertilization by pure natural magic. Her family decided: both mother and "impure" child must be destroyed to wash away the stain.
Ayame fled. Wherever her eyes looked. And her feet themselves brought her to the high, impregnable walls of the estate of another great clan—Shiratori. Not out of hope for salvation, but out of desperation. Any end was better than being torn apart by her own.
She collapsed on the stone steps before the massive gates, clutching her son to her chest, no longer able to cry. Her quiet moan was lost in the creak of ancient trees.
The gates opened silently. Not because someone pushed them. Because the space before them simply decided to admit the guests.
On the threshold stood Him.
Satoru Shiratori. Or what flawlessly portrayed him.
His dark hair was smoothly combed back with an impeccable straight part, two thin, tight braids fell from behind his ears, bound with white, shroud-like ribbons. Face—an aristocratic mask of calm. A thin straight nose, compressed lips, arched brows. Eyes were closed. He was clad in a dark blue garment resembling a strict haori, with a high collar and wide sleeves outlined with golden thread. A white obi belt was tied in a simple, flawless bow. Wide hakama gathered at the ankles and white tabi on his feet completed the image of a scholar-hermit out for a morning stroll.
His closed eyes seemed to see right through Ayame. Not her dirt, not her fear. Her essence. The "Transparent Soul." And the strange, pulsating life in her arms.
"Interesting," he uttered. His voice was even, deep, without a single emotional note. A pure instrument of analysis. "A biological and magical paradox. A neutral vessel... and a hybrid fruit. A completely unique case."
Ayame tried to say something, a plea, a warning, but only a rasp came from her throat.
"You require shelter," Narikawari in Satoru's guise stated. It was not a question. "Your clan exhibits... shortsightedness. To destroy such a specimen is the height of scientific barbarism."
He made a light, inviting gesture with his hand. The movement was economical, devoid of any theatricality.
"Please. Enter. Your suffering is over. The study phase begins."
This was not salvation. It was a sentence pronounced in a polite, chilling tone.
Thus Ayame fell into captivity. Not in a dungeon with chains, but in luxurious, sterile chambers in the eastern wing of the Shiratori estate. She was kept impeccably. Fed exquisite, balanced food. Dressed in soft, expensive kimonos. Treated for exhaustion. But the doors weren't locked. There was no need. The entire world beyond her room was her prison. And the jailer came every day.
Narikawari appeared with the first rays of sun. His tabi-clad steps made no sound on polished floorboards. He sat opposite, folded his hands on his knees, and opened his eyes. Satoru's eyes were dark, penetrating, and in them burned an inhuman, predatory interest.
"Tell me about your sensations," he would ask. "About the resonance with the forest spirit. About the moment of conception. About every movement of the fetus. In detail."
And Ayame, under the hypnotic pressure of his will and her own despair, spoke. She told of warmth like sunlight through foliage, of the whisper of roots, of strange dreams where she was a tree. Narikawari listened attentively, sometimes making notes on perfectly clean scrolls with special ink that glowed and then faded.
The boy, whom she named Fudō ("Unshakable"), he studied separately. The child grew not by days but by hours. The wood patterns on his skin became clearer; in the silence of the room, tiny buds sometimes bloomed on their own. His magic was strong, wild, uncontrolled—pure manifestation of a natural Scar.
"A beautiful first result," Narikawari concluded, watching as Fudō unconsciously made a dry branch in a vase bloom. "But only the beginning. The 'Transparency' of your soul, Ayame-san, allows for experiments impossible for any other vessel. We can... impregnate you again. With other Scars. Create a comparative sample."
This was not an offer. It was the announcement of a research program.
And began the nightmare that Narikawari, with cold irony, called "Fruits of Distorted Wombs."
He did not touch her himself. He brought material. Clumps of energy sealed in crystals: the furious spirit of an extinct volcano, the weeping shadow of a drowned woman from an ancient river, the leaden horror of a forgotten battlefield. With sophisticated manipulations, using her "Transparency" as a conduit, he implanted these entities into her. Each pregnancy was a monstrous violation of her body and spirit. Her neutral soul, unable to resist, became a battleground for alien magic.
The first artificial pregnancy ended in the third month. The fetus, a hybrid of a mountain spirit, began to crystallize her insides. She screamed for a week, feeling herself pierced from within by sharp, growing stones. Narikawari, leaning over her, observed with clinical interest, recording temperature, magical surges, her pain responses. When the threat became mortal, he carefully, with the scalpel of his will, dispersed the forming monster. The energy escaped with a quiet sigh, leaving her drained and empty. He called this the "First Correction."
This happened five times. Five abortions, five failed "Fruits." The river spirit tried to turn her into water, and Narikawari drained her, studying the composition of the magical fluid. The battle shadow spawned a tangle of chitinous limbs and insane screams, which he dissected while it still thrashed in her womb. Each time he meticulously wrote in his journal:
"Experiment 3-B: maternal stress-factor peaked. Dissolution of hybrid matrix accompanied by interesting phenomenon of pain synesthesia—subject sees the sounds of her own sobs. Noteworthy."
Ayame was going mad. Her mind, already fragile, cracked. But the "Transparent Soul" had a reverse side—it didn't allow her to break completely or die. She was the perfect, eternally alive laboratory specimen.
The sixth and seventh attempts, conducted with perverse mastery almost simultaneously, were crowned with "success." Narikawari used two Scars: "Lost Dawn"—a fragile but shining essence of extinguished hope, and "Deep Sea"—the bottomless, crushing power of ancient ocean depths.
The twins were born in one night, separated only by minutes of agony.
First came a girl. She was named Hinata ("Sunny"). Her skin was pale, almost porcelain, her hair the color of dull gold. When she cried, tiny, dusty rays of light shimmered in the air around her. But in her eyes, from the very first glance, lay a deep, unchildlike melancholy—the legacy of the "Lost Dawn."
After her, slipping into the world like a shadow, appeared a boy. Tsukio ("Lunar Tide"). His hair was the color of calm night water, his skin tinged with blue. The air around him thickened, sounds muffled, as if absorbed by unseen depth. He watched silently, his gaze heavy and all-understanding.
Narikawari stood by Ayame's bedside, recording the final observations. On his impassive face played the shadow of what in an ordinary person might be taken for satisfaction.
"Experiments 6 and 7," he dictated to himself, voice even as a string. "Birth of viable hybrids: 'Hinata' (light/loss aspect) and 'Tsukio' (darkness/pressure aspect). Maternal organism shows signs of irreversible depletion of the 'Transparent' core, but maintains structural integrity for possible future... series. Collection of 'Fruits of Distorted Wombs' expanded. Protocol continues."
He glanced at Ayame. She lay staring at the ceiling with empty eyes. In them was neither the joy of motherhood, nor horror, nor even pain. Only absolute, scorched emptiness. An ideal clean sheet finally filled to the brim with such terror that even her neutral soul had become a dead mirror reflecting only the shadow of her tormentor.
Narikawari nodded, like a master satisfied with the completion of a complex stage of work. He turned and left the room, his dark blue robes dissolving noiselessly into the gloom of the corridor. Behind him remained three children—one natural, two artificial, and the living corpse of their mother, whose body had become a field for the most perverse experiments that a being devoid of all pity and obsessed only with cold, insatiable curiosity could conceive.
But no one knew that all this happened three years after the death of the real Shiratori Satoru in battle with the parasite—Narikawari. The genius was dead. In his shell, among his tools and under his name, worked only a thief, continuing the research with the barbaric scope that even the most ambitious and heartless original would not have dared.
True evil is often not where one looks for it.
It is in a quiet office, in impeccable records, and in the voiceless sufferings of those whose souls became merely lines in another's diary.