Chapter 56: Taizan Fukun Festival: Success or Failure?
"This is the Tsuchimikado Clan's dragon. White Fox, how did you do that?!"
On the altar, Dairenji Suzuka stared in open shock.
It had only been a short while since Gin Tsumugi left, barely enough time for her to finish extracting all the sealed spiritual power from Tsuchimikado Harutora and fully activate the altar beneath their feet. Yet Gin had already returned riding atop Hokuto, the Tsuchimikado Clan's iconic earth colored dragon, with the bound Tsuchimikado Hirotaka, Tsuchimikado Chizuru, and Tsuchimikado Natsume in tow.
Even for Suzuka, that result was absurdly fast.
"Dad... Mom... Natsume..."
Harutora had been drained clean of spiritual power. His face was white as paper, and his body looked so weak that he resembled a gravely wounded soldier who had never properly healed. Suzuka had casually thrown him aside. Even without talismans binding him now, he could not rise. The moment he tried to move, a crushing weakness spread through his limbs. Lifting an arm alone felt enough to rob him of the last of his strength.
He had never expected Gin to be this powerful.
Though Harutora knew little about Onmyodo because his Spirit Insight and spiritual power had been sealed since childhood, he was not completely ignorant. Given the status of Tsuchimikado Hirotaka and Tsuchimikado Chizuru within the clan, and with Natsume herself being the heir, there was no way the three of them were weak.
Yet Gin had crushed them in almost no time at all.
"This involves a special ancient technique tied to my body."
Gin offered the same dry excuse as before. He had Hokuto set the bound trio down beside Harutora, then sent the dragon back inside to watch over them.
Suzuka rolled her eyes so hard it was almost theatrical.
"Who are you trying to fool?"
The explanation was so familiar it had practically become insulting.
Hirotaka, Chizuru, and Natsume all fell silent in perfect agreement.
Was Gin treating them as idiots?
He had already used that same excuse when he made Zenki and Koki submit. Nobody had believed it then, and no one believed it now. What kind of "special ancient technique" could make those two demon gods kneel, or make Hokuto, a dragon so proud it barely listened even to its own masters, lower its head to him so meekly?
That was not even mentioning the method he used to draw Hokuto's power directly into his own body. Nothing like that had ever been recorded in Tsuchimikado history.
Hirotaka lowered his gaze toward Harutora, then toward the altar below them, now fully awakened.
"It seems there is no stopping this any longer."
His tone was bitter, but calm.
The Taizan Fukun Ritual was already in motion. At this point, neither he nor anyone else could stop Gin and Suzuka from carrying it through.
Gin, however, was frowning as he stared at the altar beneath his feet.
Suzuka noticed at once. "What's wrong?"
"Even though the altar has already been awakened with Tsuchimikado spiritual power, something still feels incomplete."
His voice was low, thoughtful.
The altar on the Sacred Mountain did not exist in the period of Abe no Seimei's life that Gin had seen within that thousand year dream. By the time "that person" had built this altar, he had already fully mastered the Taizan Fukun Ritual. Gin's current role playing progress had not reached that stage yet, so the structure before him still carried blind spots.
Suzuka clicked her tongue. "Incomplete? What could possibly be missing? It looks fine to me."
She examined the altar again, carefully this time. She had prepared too long for this moment to tolerate any flaw, but no matter how closely she observed it, she found nothing wrong.
Hirotaka and the others looked at each other. According to the Tsuchimikado Clan's records, the altar's activation process looked exactly like this.
Then Natsume suddenly stiffened.
"No... there is one possibility."
Everyone turned toward her.
"It might be bloodline guidance."
Natsume's voice was faint at first, but steadied as she continued.
"I once read an old text in the Tsuchimikado Library, written by our ancestor Abe no Yushu. It vaguely mentioned that the altar on the Sacred Mountain was Lord Abe no Seimei's private altar. To reveal its true form, one must be guided by his bloodline."
Harutora stared at her in disbelief.
"Natsume, why are you telling them that?"
To him, these people were enemies. They had abducted him, turned Mitsuwa Town upside down, and were now trying to perform the Taizan Fukun Ritual on clan land itself. Yet Natsume was helping them.
Natsume did not even look at him.
She had already made up her mind.
As Hirotaka said, things had reached the point of no return. They could no longer prevent the Taizan Fukun Ritual from beginning. Since that was the case, then the best outcome left was making sure the ritual did not fail the way it had in Yakou's era. If a flaw here caused another wave of unstable spiritual disasters across Tokyo, the consequences would be even worse.
Suzuka frowned. "Abe no Seimei's bloodline? So ordinary Tsuchimikado blood isn't enough?"
She was visibly irritated.
After preparing for so long, only to discover there was still a missing condition at the very last moment, anyone would lose their temper. The altar was already awake, and the Taizan Fukun Ritual could probably still be forced through, but "probably" was not good enough when her brother's life hung on the line.
Natsume answered quietly, "If ordinary Tsuchimikado blood were sufficient, then Abe no Yushu would never have written that distinction in the first place."
Suzuka cursed under her breath.
"That makes sense." Gin kept his eyes on the altar. "Then there is only one thing left to test."
He cut his wrist with a casual motion.
Bright blood spilled over the altar stone.
Suzuka stared. "She just said it needed Abe no Seimei's bloodline. You do not even have Tsuchimikado blood, so what exactly are you trying to prove?"
But before she finished speaking, the altar answered for him.
A low hum spread across the stone structure.
It sounded almost alive.
Not like simple vibration, but like something sealed for more than a thousand years finally exhaling in relief. The patterns already etched across the altar turned crimson, as if fresh blood had seeped into every groove. The lines began to flow like streams, and the pulses spreading from the structure instantly grew far stronger.
Then came a series of heavy clicks.
On the very top level, where Dairenji Suzuka's brother lay, a smaller stone lotus platform slowly rose from within the altar itself and lifted his body into the air.
Suzuka froze.
"It actually worked..."
Even Gin's eyes shifted.
This result was both within his expectations and beyond them.
Suzuka slowly turned and pointed at him with a lacquered fingernail.
"White Fox, you are not secretly Tsuchimikado Yasuzumi's illegitimate son, are you?"
Gin gave her a flat look.
"Your imagination is getting worse."
Chizuru leaned against the cold stone pillar behind her, still bound, but the shock in her eyes was impossible to hide.
"The fourth layer... the fourth layer of the altar really opened for him..."
She could barely force the words out.
He was clearly not a Tsuchimikado, yet the altar had accepted his blood without the slightest hesitation.
Since meeting Gin, her understanding of the world had been overturned again and again. This time was no different.
Hirotaka, meanwhile, went completely still.
At the moment Gin's blood awakened the altar's hidden layer, all the scattered clues in Hirotaka's mind suddenly linked together.
Zenki and Koki breaking through the ancient seal.
Hokuto recognizing Gin and severing Natsume's Shikigami Contract without hesitation.
The family head insisting that the senji ryakketsu be used as a means of judgment.
The strange sense of familiarity within the bloodline.
His gaze slowly turned toward Harutora.
"If Harutora could reincarnate..."
His voice was rough, almost hoarse.
"Then for that person, the first man ever to perform the Taizan Fukun Ritual, how could reincarnation have been beyond him?"
He lowered his head and laughed once, but there was no humor in it.
"I should have realized it sooner."
Chizuru blinked. "Realized what?"
Hirotaka looked at the altar, then at Gin.
"Why Zenki and Koki suddenly shattered the seal."
"Why Hokuto became so agitated the instant it saw him."
"Why the family head insisted the senji ryakketsu be brought out."
"And why that bloodline familiarity felt so impossible to ignore."
His words were not a full explanation, but Chizuru and Natsume no longer needed one. From his expression alone, they knew Gin's identity was tied to something far beyond what they had imagined.
Gin, however, had no interest in clarifying anything. Even if he wanted to, there was no good way to explain it. Saying less was still safer than saying more.
He turned to Suzuka.
"Begin."
Suzuka's expression immediately hardened.
Using the altar as the foundation, using her own spiritual power as the anchor, she began attempting contact with the Gods of the Underworld and Taizan Fukun themselves.
At the same time, Gin moved as well.
The Taizan Fukun Ritual was not something Suzuka could manage alone. He was responsible for stabilizing the altar's operation and weaving the ritual's core array.
"Purification, return to the Pure Land. Vajra, purity. Let all that is impure become pure. Barrier, Yin and Yang, break all obstruction, seize auspiciousness..."
"I take refuge in the universal vajras. Let violent demonic obstacles be broken..."
As his incantations continued, the talismans already attached around the altar lit up one by one.
Beams of light shot from each talisman and anchored themselves to fixed points across the stone structure. Those beams intersected, split, reflected, and multiplied, forming a breathtakingly vast ritual array over the entire altar.
There were over a hundred visible nodes alone.
The sight was so complex, so exquisitely layered, that even seasoned onmyoji would have lost themselves in it at first glance.
"The Taizan Fukun Ritual..."
Hirotaka's voice dropped to a whisper.
"So this is what the real Taizan Fukun Ritual looks like..."
He, Chizuru, and even Natsume fell silent.
No onmyoji devoted to the path of Onmyodo could remain unmoved before such a scene.
Even Harutora, drained and weak, stared without blinking. His eyes carried something strange now, not just shock, but a faint sense of recognition. Everything Gin was doing looked uncannily familiar to him, as if he had seen half of it before in some distant, broken memory.
But no matter how hard he searched his mind, he could not find the source.
Then the sky changed.
Above the Sacred Mountain, black clouds began spiraling into a vast vortex. A pressure like the silence before a storm settled over the entire area. Yin energy flooded downward. The aura of the Underworld spread so thickly it felt as though hell itself were about to descend into the mortal world. In the wind, one could almost hear the howls of malevolent spirits and the ecstatic shrieks of ghost gods.
Standing at the center of it all, Suzuka felt it most clearly.
Cold sank into her blood. Into her marrow.
Yet when she looked at her brother lying upon the newly risen lotus altar, all hesitation in her vanished.
Her teeth clenched.
Her hands moved in rapid sequence.
A pillar of spiritual light surged from her body and shot into the sky, piercing the rotating black clouds as she reached out toward the Gods of the Underworld and Taizan Fukun.
At the White Fox Office, her earlier attempt had been instantly rejected.
This time was different.
Far too different.
Gin's gaze sharpened.
From his perspective, Suzuka's connection was proceeding with unnatural ease. Using her spiritual power as the anchor, she had already established contact with the Underworld.
That made no sense.
Back then, at the White Fox Office, he had not lacked the hand seals. He had not missed a step. Even without an altar, all he had wanted was a simple connection and a basic communication attempt.
Yet he had been rejected immediately.
Now, standing here, he felt no such resistance at all.
"Was the problem... me?"
The conclusion was vague, unsatisfying.
Still, it lodged itself in his mind.
He pushed the thought aside for now. There would be time later to calculate and investigate it properly.
What mattered more at the moment was the system.
He opened it with a thought.
[Abe no Seimei, Founder of Onmyodo]
[Role playing progress: Youth 69%]
[Character abilities: Basic Talisman Compendium, Minor Achievement Shikigami Contract, Minor Achievement Five Pointed Star Incantation, Minor Achievement Spirit Word Technique, Mastery Uho, Mastery Immovable Binding Technique, Mastery Fire Boundary Spell, Mastery Ghost Averting and Evil Dispelling Incantation, Advanced]
The Taizan Fukun Ritual had only just begun, and his progress had already risen by eight percent.
Of course, the earlier battle against Hirotaka and the others had likely contributed as well. Hokuto had been raised by that person in the past, and the method of integrating its spiritual power into one's own body had also been developed by that same hand. Even if Gin was only reproducing those techniques through memory and instinct, that was still enough to satisfy the role playing system's requirements.
By his estimate, once the Taizan Fukun Ritual was fully completed, his role playing progress would climb to around eighty percent.
.....
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