And then the remastering began.

The shrine to Kagachi-sama was not a building. It was a hollow: a wound in the earth where a great serpent was said to have coiled and died centuries ago. Or perhaps it was not dead. That was the ambiguity his grandmother had warned him about.

Haru tried to stand, but his legs had turned to root and stone. The phosphorescence crawled up his arms, not burning, but replacing —skin becoming scale, blood becoming cold light. His grandmother’s final words surfaced from memory, words he had dismissed as the rambling of age:

“Kagachi-sama, great coil beneath the root. We have not forgotten. We have not abandoned. Take this solace and sleep.”

“You don’t pray to Kagachi-sama for blessings,” she had said, her voice dry as old bones. “You pray so that it does not remember you exist.”

Not a voice. A pressure. A thought that was not his own, pressing against the inside of his skull: