Strongest Among the Heavens
Chapter 453: Yomi?

Chapter 453: Yomi?

At first, there had been fractured skies and land. A forestry of jagged trees and hoards of monsters to fight through. Too many monsters. They went deeper and deeper and fought until they reached their limit. They decided to go to enter a cave.

After what seemed to be weeks, they reached its end too.

Marta Kowalski stood at the edge of oblivion. The cave was smaller than they had hoped. It had an end—and the strangest kind of end too. A bottomless pit of despair. Marta had tossed some torches. Let’s just say they never help.

Walking corpses walked everywhere in this cave. They were teaming with death and this peculiar aura of death. But the corpses never attacked them. It was these other monsters, these birds and half-dead tanukis and kitsunes that attacked Marta and Sasaki Kojiro. Marta pursed her lips as she stared down at the bottomless pit, then over her shoulder at the platform she was on.

Sitting at a fire, tossing chunks of rotting flesh from previous monsters, was Sasaki Kojiro himself. The fire was unnatural and black in colour. It was as though the very properties of this realm were different from the real world.

How many days had they been here? Too long to count for either.

"Look, is that a smart idea?" Marta proceeded to ask.

"I’m smart and it’s an idea," Sasaki Kojiro replied, "so it must be."

"Smartass," she murmured. "The fire is going to attract attention. Look, can’t you see them?"

This was not a cliff with a comfortable amount of height. This was just a platform in a cave. There wasn’t that much of an advantage.

"Marta Kowalski of Poland, do you know where we are?"

"...? The realm of Yomi."

"What is Yomi?"

"An afterlife."

"Wrong. It is the Land of the Dead. The World of Darkness. These walking corpses you see? They are the people of Matsue. It is not a paradise. It is not a place to aspire to. It is where men rot with their own ambitions and moans of their old life."

"Wait, but those monsters..."

"Most animals do not possess the same wisdom as humans. With wisdom comes hope. With hope comes wisdom. The humans here understand that we are no threat. Eating each other, fighting each other, it makes no difference. But the tanukis and kitsunes? They do not know better."

"What difference does that make? We’re here, we’re fighting, and..." She pointed a thumb behind her. "...it’s the end of the line."

"I ask again but with different intentions: where are we?"

"Some cave, I don’t know."

"A foreigner through and through." He laughed. Marta rolled her eyes. "This is the cave we entered this world through. This is Inome Cave."

"H-huh?"

"The rest of the world we have explored? It is Matsue. See, the Realm of Yomi is a dark mirror of our real world. A polluted, pathetic world ruled by Izanami. Tell me...where is she?"

Huh...?

"You, foreigner, have entered her realm. You have also met the people here, all unable to speak or communicate. You have discreetly collected silver and divine iron and you have not been punished."

Marta winced. ’He noticed?’ It wasn’t out of malice, she was genuinely curious about what the metals and dirt of the Realm of Yomi could mean in the Academy or in the markets. This was something akin to hell, so the logic was that it was a difficult place to reach.

"Do not worry, it is no sin. At least I do not believe so myself," Sasaki Kojiro said. "But it is a slight. I would not allow any man to steal my masks. Izanami with her great pride as a goddess would do the same."

"S-so should I return them or...?"

"No. This is the end of the line for you." Kojiro stood up. In his left hand, she noticed, was a brown mask with a long nose. He did not wait, he only smiled and put it on.

"Hey, what—" The words froze in her throat. Kojiro’s body quivered, then shifted. Feathers sprouting along his arms, his back broadening. His fingers stretched, nails sharpening into talons and with a single rustling breath, wings unfurled from his back, great and imposing, layered with plumage so dark it seemed to drink in the dim, spectral light of Yomi.

Marta gaped.

"What the hell—?"

Kojiro turned his head, the brown Tengu mask now looking like a part of him rather than something he wore. "Get ready—"

"W-what?"

He closed the distance between them faster than she could blink and he swept Marta into his arms with an effortless grace. She barely had time to yelp before he leaped.

He flew fast.

"H-heeeey! Waaiiiiiit!" The wind tore past them as Kojiro’s wings beat with a power that defied nature. The bottomless pit below loomed, an abyss with no end. The sheer endlessness of Yomi’s depths unsettled her. No stars, no sky, just yawning nothingness below.

Kojiro stopped her from joining that nothingness.

"We are moving. Stop complaining."

"You just turned into a damn bird!"

"I received many gifts from the when I was alive. Not from gods but from the friends of Japan."

’F-friends? What is he talking about?’

A kitsune mask. A tanuki mask. Now, a Tengu mask. Sasaki Kojiro had travelled his country and had been gifted in ways no other man had. Miyamoto Musashi studied the blade through human means. Sasaki Kojiro studied the blade outside human means. The Tsubame Gaeshi or "Swallow Cutter" was but an example of that.

He did everything and anything to attain strength. That was his way.

In and out, in and out. Deep breaths, Marta.

"Where—where are we going?" Marta finally asked, pressing herself against the warmth of his chest. The feeling was odd, knowing those same arms that carried her so gently could wield a blade that cut through hoards of demons. She was not sure if she enjoyed it either.

Kojiro did not answer immediately. Instead, his wings carried them higher, farther.

"Patience," he said at last. A couple minutes passed until he spoke again. "It is here. I knew it."

Marta looked over. Certainly, there was a flicker of something in the distance—black on black, an anomaly in the void. At first, Marta thought her eyes were deceiving her. But no, it was real. Land.

As they closed in, the island revealed itself in full. A tiny, isolated mass of rock floating in the nothingness. At the very back, acting as its beating heart was a white portal. A rift between realms, pulsating with the energy of the living world. Flanking the portal were two tall stone walls.

Kojiro’s wings angled, slowing their descent. He landed on the solid black ground, his talons scraping against the stone. He did not let go of Marta immediately, only setting her down once he was sure the footing was stable.

She stepped forward, eyes darting between the portal and the markings on the wall. She swallowed.

"Carvings...? "

Kojiro stood beside her, silent. The portal flickered, inviting yet foreboding. Both of them ignored it in favour of the stone walls and their carvings. Marta slowly approached it.

The carving stretched across the stone. Was it ancient? Fresh? Probably ancient, right?

At its center, an eight-handed dragon coiled like a living storm with every single one of its eight clawed hands reached outward, grasping at unseen forces, some clutching jagged bolts of lightning, others curling into wicked talons. Its maw, wide and furious, spewed an unrelenting torrent of fire—thick, spiraling waves of carved flame.

Following where the flames were going, they were led to the edge of the stone wall and a colossal black tower. Underneath the tower was a language unlike any Marta had seen. She squinted.

"An eight-headed dragon...that must be Yamato-no-Orochi."

Sasaki Kojiro crossed his arms, analyzing just the same. "You know of the eight-headed dragon?"

Something of a smirk appeared on her face and she pushed back her glasses. "I have an undergrad in English. A classmate and I once did a threefold translation—Japanese to English to Polish. I know a bit of stuff."

"Can you read the words underneath the tower?"

"N-no, but..." She fiddled with her glasses. "Linguistically, I believe it’s of old Japan."

"Shouldn’t you know? You live here?"

"I am a samurai, not an educator."

Marta clicked her tongue. "This is just a guess from what I remember of the project but...it reminds of the Ryukyuan languages."

"Hm. Okinawan then?"

"Yes! That’s where she was from too."

"I see...so, even in the future, Japan lives."

"....what did you say?" She craned her head ever so slightly. "The future...?"

Sasaki Kojiro let out a disgruntled sound. "You have come this far and yet you still do not understand anything."

She fully faced him, eyes flaring. "Then just say it and help me understand!"

"You are an Otherworlder to the people here. You are a manifestation of the gods. That is both a lie and a truth. You were sent by divinity. You were not sent by our divinity."

This man...

"Understand this," Sasaki Kojiro continued. "I am not a clone. I am not a fake. I am the real Sasaki Kojiro. I die in my duel with Miyamoto Musashi some years from now. Like any soul of my time, I was sent to the realm of the dead." A long pause. "I was not born from your Heavenly Tower."

The Heavenly Tower? H-he knew about it!? How!? That shouldn’t...

This had never happened before!

"Y-you...you know about—"

The scholars. Kazi himself. All of them theorized that the gates of the Heavenly Tower were created. That they were built by the "Architects" of the Heavenly Tower.

"I do not know about the other worlds you have encountered but this world is NOT fake. It is not created. It has always existed. Its people are real." Sasaki Kojiro clicked his tongue. "To think I had to explain that."

He went utterly silent. Marta had to break that silence with logic and reasoning. "N-no, that doesn’t make sense, you existed on Earth. In real history. My Earth. You can’t have sacrificed yourself in a battle against a whale skeleton o-or end up here in Yomi, you have to die by Miyamoto Musashi, your rival."

"I did."

"You did?"

"I died by his hands, yes."

"T-then what the hell is going on. How are you...even..."

He died in 1612. This Matsu they were sent to was in the year 1610 or 1611. A full year before his death, Sasaki Kojiro knew of his death? It didn’t make sense!

"How am I here?" Sasaki Kojiro asked. "Let us figure it out. I do not know myself."