The silence in the Fujibayashi clan archives was of a different quality. It was not emptiness—it was thick as twilight honey, saturated with the whisper of millennia sealed in scrolls. Hundreds of shelves of dark sandalwood rose upward, disappearing into the shadows beneath the ceiling. The air smelled of dust, ink, and time.
Akira followed Shiori through the narrow passages between the shelves. She moved silently, her fingers occasionally sliding over the spines of scrolls without pulling them out, as if merely greeting old acquaintances.
"What's kept here are not just records," her voice was muffled, as if absorbed by the silence itself. "Here are kept the 'fathers' of Scars. The primal events from which great Kokuro techniques began. Every scroll is a sleeping catastrophe or a blessing."
She stopped at a niche draped in cobwebs.
"Yukihime's murder... The Council believes it's the work of a hostile clan. But..." she turned to Akira, and in her eyes danced reflections of distant Scars. "...the archives have mentions. Of cases where Scars... disappeared. Not erased by a master, but precisely vanished. Along with their vessel. As if they were... cut out of the fabric of reality."
Akira was silent. He looked at the scrolls. To him, they were just old pieces of paper. But he felt the weight emanating from them. It wasn't Kokuro energy, but the weight of history itself.
"Why are you telling me this?" he finally asked. "You, a keeper. I am nobody."
Shiori averted her eyes.
"Because you are the only one who can see it. We, Kokuro masters, see only the traces. You see... the fabric itself. And the holes in it."
She took out a small case, blackened with age.
"Yukihime was my mentor. A week before her death, she sent me this. Said that if something happened to her, I should give it to the one who cannot be seen."
She handed the case to Akira. Inside lay a piece of wood, charred on one edge. There were no Scars on it.
"This is nothing," said Akira, examining it.
"Exactly," Shiori nodded. "This is a fragment of the Sacred Hinoe Tree, burned during the Crimson Moon Rebellion a hundred years ago. Its Scar should be one of the strongest in our history—a Scar of purifying fire. But it's not there. It's been erased."
An icy needle touched Akira's heart. This was proof. Not a single murder, but a system. Someone was hunting great Scars and devouring them.
Suddenly, the oil lamp at the end of the aisle flickered and went out. Then the next one. And the next. Darkness advanced, swallowing the rows of shelves like a monstrous spider.
"This isn't me," Shiori said quietly, and fear sounded in her voice for the first time.
Akira stepped forward, placing himself between her and the approaching darkness. He felt nothing. No energy, no Scars. Only the absolute, lifeless emptiness that was so familiar to him.
A whisper came from the darkness. It was soundless, but echoed directly in the mind, scratching and cold.
«...hunger...»
Shiori gasped, clutching her head.
"It... it's speaking directly to my Kokuro! It's speaking to my Scars!"
«...give back... mine...»
The darkness condensed before them, taking shape. It wasn't a body. It was a hole in reality, outlined like a human. There was nothing inside. No light, no darkness. Nothing.
"Kokuro: Whisper of the Withered Scroll!" Shiori cried out, trying to summon a defense.
From the haze before her emerged a phantom samurai with a pair of katana. He made one lightning-fast slash—the famous "Whirlwind" technique. But the blade passed through the shadow, leaving no trace. The technique disappeared as if it had never existed.
«...old... weak...»
The shadow took a step forward. Shiori retreated, bumping into a shelf. Her face went white with horror. She felt her own connection to the Scars thinning, dissolving into this void.
Akira stood his ground. The void looked at him. Or rather, didn't look, but was simply directed at him.
«...you... void... like me...»
"I am not like you," Akira quietly replied. "You are hunger. I am nothing."
He took a step toward the shadow. He didn't attack. He had no attacks. He simply walked.
The shadow reached out a non-hand toward him. Akira felt... attraction. Not physical, but existential. His own Mushiro nature, his absence, seemed to lure this entity.
«...become... part... of the whole...»
Akira was centimeters away from it. He looked into the void. And within it, in its very depths, he saw something. A flash of an instant. An image. A giant temple engulfed in black flames, and a woman with night-colored hair stretching her hands to the sky in desperate prayer. And a lone figure standing apart, with a face twisted in grief... a face he had seen in portraits in the main hall.
It was Director Keiden Fujibayashi. Many years ago.
And then the shadow grabbed him.
Not his body. It grabbed his very essence. Akira felt something inside him, his eternal "nothing," begin to waver, to fragment.
"NO!" Shiori cried out.
She lunged forward, not for a sword, not for a scroll. She grabbed that very fragment of the Tree that lay in the case by Akira, and threw it at the shadow.
Nothing happened. There was no explosion, no light. But the shadow froze. The soundless whisper turned into a screeching, mind-rending shriek.
«...MINE!..»
It lunged for the falling fragment, its form distorting, the void contracting into a tight knot... and vanished. Along with the fragment.
The light in the lamps slowly returned. The archives were quiet again.
Shiori, breathing heavily, sank to her knees. Akira stood, gazing at the spot where the shadow had disappeared. On the inside of his palm, where the non-hand had touched, a faint, almost invisible burn appeared. The first "trace" in his life. A trace from the touch of Nothing.
"It... it knew you," Shiori whispered, looking at him with eyes full of horror. "It called you void. How did it say... 'give back mine'? What did it want back?"
Akira slowly turned to her. In his empty eyes, something sharp and alien splashed for the first time. An echo of that vision.
"It's not a 'what,' Shiori. He... or it... was once human. And it's not just devouring Scars. It's searching for its own. The one that was taken from it."
He looked deep into the archive, toward the director's office.
"And now I know who created it."