Let us now take a moment to look back several months, before all of this unpleasantness took place. You see children, throughout history sages and wise men have agreed that tribulation, or times of great trouble, often come in threes. So it was, on the same night that Abe no Seimei’s beloved wife fell gravely ill, that two other unfortunate souls met equally undeserved fates.
One of these unfortunate souls was a charming young man named Daisuke.
Daisuke was born an especially large baby, the kind that makes fathers proud and mothers regret their life choices. As he grew older, he grew larger still, with a strength equal to his size. Daisuke’s steps were heavy from the day he took his first step, and he outgrew his clothes faster than his mother could sew them. The family was poor, but no expense was spared on feeding the child; it was clear he was fated to do great things and would bring much honor to his family.
It should therefore be no surprise that by the time Daisuke reached thirteen years old, he was accepted to be trained for the honor of Sumai no Sechie. He quickly showed a natural talent for the sumo arts, and both his teacher and his parents swelled with pride at the thought of him competing for the first time at the annual Tanabata festival that summer.
Every day Daisuke would walk the hour to the nearest Shinto shrine for wrestling practice while his parents worked hard at home to keep him well fed. Daisuke would join in with the other trainees as they spent the day squatting, stamping, striking, and throwing each other around the ring. Then he would walk home each night, hungry and tired, but deeply satisfied with his lot in life.
This was how he found himself walking the long path home alone that fateful night, belly empty but heart full. His bare feet punched silent holes in the thin mist that curled above the rice paddies. The moon hung low, pale and uninterested, and the path bent around a deep pond that some claimed was, in fact, bottomless.
Daisuke had no particular fear of water. In fact, he quite enjoyed swimming, his physical gifts making him naturally buoyant. He skirted the very edge of the pond with a confident swagger, enjoying the cool feeling of mud and algae squishing between his toes.
It is a strange proclivity of the young to walk through life heedless of any possible danger. To believe, quite often mistakenly, that no harm could possibly overtake you. Heed me well children, in this life, trouble comes for us all eventually, and death, sadly, is no respecter of youth.
The only warning was a faint rustle from the rice fields. Then, before Daisuke could turn, a hard shoulder crashed into the center of his back, sending him thrashing into the water. Sputtering, he tried to rise, but two strong hands gripped his collar. Whoever held him was both stronger and taller than he, and utterly silent. One hand shifted to Daisuke’s wide neck, squeezing just enough to make him gag. Daisuke tried to fight back, but couldn’t get his feet underneath him, and only managed a great deal of splashing about.
He felt himself being half-dragged, half-wrestled deeper into the pond. His only glimpses of his attacker were of a tall, darkly clothed figure before he was dunked underwater again. The ground beneath him dropped away as his attacker waded deeper and deeper into the black water. Daisuke sucked in a huge breath the next time he surfaced, intending to scream, but the hand at his throat forced him to swallow it instead.
The silent figure offered no reason or apology for the act, only pressed Daisuke down into the deep, as the young man’s world became nothing but black water and the roar of blood in his ears.
The first few seconds were a blur of confusion and burning lungs. Daisuke would fight his way up, break the surface, and gasp for air with the taste of pond water thick on his tongue. But each time the hand returned, shoving him down, down towards the hungry black mouth of a watery grave.
Daisuke’s lungs ached. His vision flickered. But in the dark, he found a moment of clarity. He remembered every lesson his master had taught him: tuck your chin, tense your neck, attack your opponent’s elbow, never let go.
He reached upward, striking his attacker’s elbow painfully with one hand, while grabbing their belt with the other. Wrenching hard against the cloth, Daisuke pressed himself down until he felt silt beneath his feet. Then he twisted, guiding his opponent’s body past him and away, just as he had been taught.
He broke the surface, gasping, coughing, and clawing for the edge of the pond.
Behind him, he could hear his attacker splashing, though they were still eerily silent, not uttering so much as a curse as Daisuke’s fingers found the slick grass. He pulled hard until he could feel solid ground beneath him again. He stood triumphant. His opponent was strong, but Daisuke was a rikishi, well-trained and mighty. He would use his opponent’s center of gravity against them. He would fight, and he had no doubt that he would win.
But this dear, sweet boy misunderstood two fundamental facts. The honorable combat he had been trained in was a foreign concept to the type of rogue who would attack children in the night, and the real world did not fight fair.
As he turned, he got only another brief glimpse of his attacker already looming close behind him. One of the shadowy figure’s arms stretched high above them. Daisuke could see the symbol of a plum blossom embroidered against the back of their dark sleeve. Then the arm came plummeting down, and something heavy and hard connected with the top of his head.
The crushing force caved in the young man’s skull, leaving a perfect, bowl-shaped indentation in the top. Daisuke’s world turned red, then black, then disappeared completely.
Daisuke’s body sank slowly down into the womb of the wet, and it did not return.
But do not think this the end of Daisuke’s story. Oh, my children, you should know better than that by now. This is not a tale about good boys being rewarded for their virtues. Nor of wicked children being punished for their crimes. No, this is a story of what happens when a selfish world refuses to let you go.
As I previously mentioned, it is a rather well known belief that it takes three days for a soul to leave its body. During that time, the soul is too confused and frightened to venture out on its own, until finally the time arrives when they do. But some souls are neither confused nor sad. Some souls, like Daisuke’s, were only terribly, terribly angry. Souls like this had two choices: either to abandon their bodies as an onryō, a vengeful ghost, or to cling stubbornly to every cell, every sinew, and see their bodies transformed rather than let the world steal it away.
The pond was not truly bottomless, but it was quite deep. Daisuke’s body, which should have floated for days, instead sank instantly to the bottom. Mud was his only tomb. Pond weed and lotus stalks his shroud. When the villagers and his bereaved parents came looking for him hours later, they found not a trace of the struggle on the pristine pond’s mirror-black surface. Daisuke’s parents burned incense for him every day, and searched for him every night, until the world, as it always must, eventually moved on and the name Daisuke became nothing more than a hollow place in his parents’ hearts.
As for the boy’s body, he spent an inordinate amount of time not quite dead. It is difficult to explain the sensation of rotting without actually doing it, but suffice to say it is neither enjoyable nor something I would recommend. The pond’s water squeezed into every pore, and the creatures that lived there found their way in too, nibbling and biting, trying to take away the only thing he had left. But through it all, the boy once known as Daisuke fought off all comers. He had unfinished business, and even death itself would not wrestle it from his grip.
As the weeks turned into months, the boy’s skin, once pale and tender, toughened into a waxy, greenish hide. His nails curved into points sharp enough to pierce the soft bellies of river fish. Even the pond water, sloshing in his hollows, felt like part of him now: a new and powerful source of strength.
Still he slept on, as a sharp beak burst from behind his teeth, and a hard shell sprouted from his spine. Until nothing human remained. Until the night Abe no Seimei woke him up.
That night, the same night that Seimei watched his son’s new body crumble to dust, and the creature Nuppeppō was born, a ripple passed through the water. A necromantic shockwave that burst from Seimei’s pagoda in every direction, rolling over hills and pastures, and eventually over this selfsame pond. Deep within the black waters, something awoke.
And it woke up angry.
It surfaced and walked out of the pond, water streaming from its hulking frame, dragging duckweed and pond slime in trailing ribbons behind it. Though still approximately the same size as the boy it once had been, it was now much heavier, hard and dense where once it had been pleasantly plump.
The Kappa, for that is what the boy now was, followed the pull of the necromantic current unerringly back to the onmyoji’s tower. The sound of dripping water on the cobblestones, and a vague fishy stench were the only evidence of his passing. When he finally stood before the imposing pagoda, the creature paused.
Some part of him recognized the place. Every child in the prefecture knew the exploits of Abe no Seimei, the man of power, summoner of dragons and slayer of demons. But the forces calling him proved too strong, as did the hunger for vengeance boiling up from his very soul.
Claws like fish hooks raked across the pagoda’s exterior as the enraged yokai stalked forward. He found the door, and the iron lock proved of little value against his prodigious strength.
Kappa stepped over the threshold and into a world of madness.
Not many people can claim to have entered the home of a sorcerer in the midst of an existential crisis, but it is not an experience for the faint of heart.
The room reeked of blood and ozone. The floor littered with broken crockery, destroyed furniture, and objects that defied easy description. The walls, once elegant and spare, were now entirely concealed by a madman’s equations, talismanic sigils, and the stuttering, unfinished thoughts of a mind losing the ability to properly function.
Through the yokai’s supernatural vision, the room was blindingly bright and filled with bale fire, as hundreds of captured souls escaped from the spirit jars that had imprisoned them and swirled around the room.
The center of the room was piled high with carrion. Small bones and organs rose to the top of overflowing piles enclosed in red circles. A slaughterhouse worth of innocent victims. There was so much of it that the combined weight made the tatami groan in protest.
At the far side of the room, the great onmyoji himself lay, appearing very much dead. One arm was stretched across the floor, his fingers twisted around the tail of a lacquered cat toy. An empty eye socket, ever staring and horrible, regarded Kappa accusingly.
At the room’s heart, a nightmare crouched. No doubt responsible for the surrounding carnage.
A being entirely of meat and muscle, faceless and malformed, undulating and pulsing. It was, in every sense, the most grotesque thing Kappa had ever seen.
It was not the one who had killed him, but it had obviously killed many. Kappa, further enraged by the death of so many innocents, reacted accordingly.
He lunged forward, the webbed toes of his new feet gripping the tatami, squared his legs, bent at the knees, and assumed the stance that had been drilled into his very dreams: arms out, palms open, head low, gaze fixed straight ahead. The pond water still contained in the bowl-like indentation of his skull sloshed as he stomped each foot mightily in turn.
A monstrous tentacle rose lazily in the air, the monster seeming to only just notice him for the first time. Kappa slapped it aside with an open hand strike.
He followed up with the oshi-dashi: two open hands, clawed fingers extended, driving them into the center of the meat creature’s mass. The surface rippled, parted, then enveloped his hands to the wrist.
Kappa did not recoil. Instead, he drove forward, toes digging into the floor mats as he pushed the creature back. Its body offered no resistance, easily sliding backward on a slimy trail of fat and grease. Kappa barely registered a small blue spider leaping out of the way as he pressed the meat monster back all the way to the end of the room and then crushed it against his bulk. The creature lost all shape, as it was flattened and smeared across the wall.
Still the monster convulsed around him, almost enveloping him fully. Kappa yanked back with all his might, planted his feet, and executed a textbook tsuri-dashi throw. It felt more like tossing a sack of wet rice than a human opponent as, with a grunt, Kappa spun and hurled the creature across the room.
It hit the far wall with a splat. The impact cracked a board as pieces of flesh landed around the room. The mass of meat slumped, slithered downward, and then, astonishingly, re-formed, smaller, but with three new tentacles sprouting where once there had been only one.
Kappa, uncowed, waded in again. He dropped into a low stance, one hand forward, and battered the creature with tsuki-dashi strikes. The meat squished and quivered with each blow, chunks of it ripping free in his clawed hands, but the creature never made a sound, nor struck Kappa with its flailing tentacles. It simply received each blow, and allowed itself to be ripped apart piece by piece, until there was nothing left but quivering chunks littering the room.
Kappa breathed hard, his chest heaving, as he looked down at what remained of his foe. He had fought honorably, even if his opponent had not deserved the courtesy, and he would end the fight honorably. With a slow and solemn gesture, he turned to face the fleshy remains, doubled over at the hip into a deep bow, forehead touching the ground in an ancient show of respect.
The water in his skull bowl poured out in a single splash. The source of his power and his unnatural life force soaking instantly into the tatami.
The instant the water left him, Kappa’s legs buckled, and he collapsed backward onto his rear, slumping against the wall very much dead.
From her perch in the corner, the blue spider stared down in silence, every one of her eyes fixed on the tableau below.
“What in the jigoku just happened?” she said, utterly flabbergasted.
Thanks for reading. This story is a work in progress which I hope to some day publish. As such, I welcome all comments and constructive criticism.
If you find you enjoy my work and would like to read more, my first published novel, Grumble and Gasp, is currently available on Kindle and Amazon.
Want to know if I killed off your favorite character? I probably didn’t, but how can you be sure? Stay tuned. New chapters drop every Wednesday!
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You are a master of tension that keeps me eagerly reading. Then you stop at a tantalizing point. Very effective!
I am slightly concerned by the way your mind works 😩 but I am thoroughly enjoying this regardless 😂