rehabilitated monk +18

He departed from the Hanok after awakening, leaving his world behind without flourish. With no supplies save for a knot bag thumping against his hip from where it hung around the obi of his mother's yukata, he walked wordlessly to his chosen tomb, the crunch of the ground underfoot softening from pavement to dirt as the day drowsed and his large body split the sunrays cresting Yesteryear's empty horizon. The wind cooled while it traveled the desolate expanse, reaching him as autumnal currents slicing through his hair, between his fingers. It ferried all sounds with it, taking the beat of his own footsteps away but bringing the hurried gait of another's toward him. Aside from the swiveling of his slanted eyes, Sukuna offered no acknowledgment of the other man joining his journey.

As the day aged, jagged shadows stretched darkly out of the serrated vestiges of the ruined city, and the warm terracotta of the stone walls chilled to dim, indistinct purples. Vigils of unspoken history warded the silence around them; and in wading between these spaces laden with the failures of a fallen people, the inherent irony in the question which broke the quiet around them drew a flat laugh through Sukuna's nose.

"That's right," he affirmed without turning his head from the vista before him. "To put it more accurately, it's not about strength at all." He then adjusted his course, veering off the main road to pick through a vague path snaking through the rubble and overgrowth.

"Regardless of who you think you are, failing to prepare for winter properly will spell your end. Obviously, you kill game ahead of time... but you don't stop at that. You salt the meat, dry it, then store it in a cache underground. You eat because you preserved your food in such a way that it won't spoil or be found by scavengers. You prepare, and so you survive." He passed into a deep shadow, his shape assimilating with the dark. "Just as you aren't born with the knowledge to preserve meat, the idea of 'elongated life' is unnatural to you because the process is something you have to bother to attain. It isn't even a matter of skill... but a test in comprehension."

Sukuna's baritone voice cleanly severed his observations. He turned his head to look at the large silhouette sinking into the shadows by the retreating sun. He listened to him, brows knitting in concern over the startling simplicity of immortality. Yet, his bi-halved soul could not deny its truths. Images from a life beyond his own shuttered across his mind's eye. Flickering videos dusted with interference showed the progress of limestone cliffs being carved into by thousands of workers, overseen by officials and priests, marking the cliff face with immense, frightening figures of his faith. He winced from the fresh knowledge of another life which he had no context. He sighed restlessly, overwhelmed by the lack of full comprehension from the simple testament of truth.

He followed the Cursed Spirit into the empty void like a sleepwalker, wading through his microcosm of grief. The smell of damp dirt and rich earthiness deluged his lungs. As he descended into the void, his mind detracted the existentialism that haunted him on the surface, and he felt suddenly desperate for light and air. His breathing hitched, immediately rapid in pace, and his eyes burned as he attempted to see through his blindness. He halted his trek to grope at at his bag, fingering the pockets he memorized from meticulously packing his resources. He retrieved a flashlight and turned it on. The stream of light allowed him to breathe, and he gulped in the light in as if it were his only source of air. He swallowed his panic and looked ahead, hoping to see the large form waiting for him. There was nothing, but the endless void stretching before him.

Zhang San grimaced and hurried forward, toes catching on the jagged floor. He kept his body moving until something large shifted in front of him. He threw his hand forward and groped it before meeting it with his body; he felt the moist skin drenched in sweat and humidity and he pressed against the taut muscle that stretched with another lumbering step. Then, the figure was out of his reach again. Zhang San proceeded to follow the figure in dreadful silence. Light cast down now to observe the heels that appeared and disappeared into the darkness.

The several hour descent became mere minutes in the desolate void. He had been lost in aimless thought, recalling to the long days forlorn in dense, humid jungles. He had practiced all his life aimlessly ambling to one place or another, hoping to find purpose in the words and people that he met. Now, the only difference is he understood purpose existed at the end of this journey, yet knew not the lesson that would come from it. The light flickered, and air was sucked out of his lungs.

Zhang San, distracted in the counterfeited iridescent trim, chuckled warmly, softly, happily, "You're still you."

The holy womb bloated as the divinity within the temple bent the wooden pillars; the distressed wood moaned louder than any earthly sound. Zhang San's eyes rolled back, body limply stumbled forward before standing tall in a slow roll. The unamused took his place, and Tang Sanzang held his ground as his radiant eyes bore witness to the young human soul.

"And it is because of you that you find eternal suffering." Pity poured with each word as Tang Sanzang took a long step forward. "I am worth nothing in this world, but it is enough to keep you at bay." He spoke, eyes looking through the young man before him towards the epicenter which all things bowed. Tang Sanzang winced as the curdling cursed energy suffocated all living things. His cheeks paled with the immense suffering attempted to conquer the young soul. His eyes met the youth one last time, and he spoke the last words to be heard with deep remorse.

Through the buffeting trees bowed in prayer and the smudged shadows of the forest's cloudy dark, he saw the outlines of things he neglected to remember, things whited out by inspiration's myopic glare. Distant smokestacks rose from the smolders of Hida's yearly stubble burning, and he had looked up to see swaths of migratory birds pulsating in the sky like midges. Through the bare trees overhead, he could glimpse vague shapes coalesce within their flight pattern before their small bodies scattered apart into erratic grains across the sky. The birds, the burning-- they told him that winter approached quicker than usual that year, and so he tightened his old yukata around him and hastened his pace.

The second year he returned to Hida, he had done so to satisfy an indescribable obligation nagging his mind. Like the ancestral pull of a homeland, the region's tall mountains pocketed in rice farms, clear rivers dotted with spear fishers, and primeval ecosystem claimed by his muse haunted him when he returned to his own territory, for in everything different he remembered what Hida had done right for him. As he shrugged through the cold boughs and crunched across the frost underfoot, his heart quickened to see patterns in the forest he recognized, paths he knew led home; and as he neared Hida's heart, a scent he'd never known before reached him, slowing him to a halt at the edge of the wilderness.

In a clearing tucked between the mountains, Hida's population had gathered around a massive stone pot, wide as a lake, within which a vat of stew slowly boiled. A few men stood atop the edge of the bowl to stir the hot pot with long poles while the rest of those gathered thronged around the cooking fire, warming themselves by flame and body. Engrossed in the unfamiliar sight, he beheld each detail, his eyes traveling the scene until his gaze stopped on a wooden effigy watching over the people from a short distance away. Carved with two faces and standing at one jou eight sun, Ryomen-sukuna's smiling eyes oversaw the festival. The man in the wood was someone he knew by heart but never thought could be embodied, just as he could have never imagined capturing the image of sunlight. His breath staggered in his throat, and ∎ once again fell to his knees.

Now, transfixed by reveries he saw within the dark eye of the approaching storm, ∎ remained standing as he should have back then. He winced again; a sharp then wet pain slid along the width of his throat. But even as his heart seized and his skin tightened, bright understanding prompted his awareness away from the inevitable-- away and into the virtue of the festival he saw that day. At the time, he thought they had taken something from him by bottling the sunlight, but as the storm pulled his existence into the enduring unity of those people, his mind opened to other facets of reverence--the knotted gnarls of wood, the smell of smoke, the hearty warmth of a shared hot pot, and amongst it all, his pale blue autumn sky. Slowly, his lips parted to answer the priest with hoarse but level words that half-escaped through the widening cut to his throat. "That day will come."

The vertebrae in his neck cracked, the last thing he saw a blur of tilted vision-- and his head and body fell separately to the ground.

Sukuna's large shadow pressed out of the darkness between the trees, two fingers still raised to cleave. He approached the corpse, already liquifying in some unnatural, accelerated decay, and grabbed the head by its hair.

"No use talking to this one. His thoughts are slicked in rot." Beneath his grip, the scalp began to loosen, and so he dangled the head into his stomach's mouth. What remained of the body broke apart into fats and oils and pooled around Zhang San's crude sign, attached to it even in death. He watched the decomposition seep up the base of the wood while he ingested his sour meal, then flicked his eye back to Zhang San. The man wore a dismal expression heavy with the burden of processing an overload of thoughts, and Sukuna interjected before anything could be said. "... I've no interest in whatever it is you think you learned here. Think about it for yourself before you decide what's 'true'... and commit what you please to your own reality."

"The curses you reject are a part of everything! People only think they can control it. It's no different than you thinking death showed you how to live your life. 'Death' didn't do anything. You did!" He blew a taut breath from his nose, his tone evening slightly. "I'll do what I must, too. I won't be beholden to your idea of god... just as I won't be to mine."

His god, his muse, herded into the earth and culled within a mountain's stone tomb, left traces of his shape in the world, traces that he learned to perceive on his pilgrimage to Hida in search of the kami. He saw everything he needed to in the burnt hue of diffused storm-light, in the blue-bright shine of the open sky, in the shafts of smoky sun filtering through the autumnal trees--for the first time, he saw the world through inspiration's prismatic lens. The twinned kami whose legend hearkened his first sense of kinship would never die; even when he fell to his knees at the base of the burial mountain, even when he learned of the common lie, his profound experience with his own will to live preserved its source against death. As long as ∎ lived, the shape of Ryomen-sukuna would yet linger in the world-- and so would he.

∎ clenched both hands until his knuckles blanched, then unwound the muscles in his fingers and features, knowing the strain pointless. This man--his perspective, his words, his beliefs--did not matter to ∎ and the story of the kami which survived with him.

Zhang San, distracted in the counterfeited iridescent trim, chuckled warmly, softly, happily, "You're still you."

The holy womb bloated as the divinity within the temple bent the wooden pillars; the distressed wood moaned louder than any earthly sound. Zhang San's eyes rolled back, body limply stumbled forward before standing tall in a slow roll. The unamused took his place, and Tang Sanzang held his ground as his radiant eyes bore witness to the young human soul.

"And it is because of you that you find eternal suffering." Pity poured with each word as Tang Sanzang took a long step forward. "I am worth nothing in this world, but it is enough to keep you at bay." He spoke, eyes looking through the young man before him towards the epicenter which all things bowed. Tang Sanzang winced as the curdling cursed energy suffocated all living things. His cheeks paled with the immense suffering attempted to conquer the young soul. His eyes met the youth one last time, and he spoke the last words to be heard with deep remorse.

"Me, or 'him'? Either way, the answer is the same. If you know his name, you should understand that much." The corners of his mouth twitched downward, unable to hold his strained sneer.

"I believe I said kami," he corrected, and canted his head to welcome the young man onto the grounds. Only a few strides were taken for Zhang San to stand beneath a wilted tree. A few pale leaves continued their toil and they clung to branches, waiting for spring.

Zhang San gazed up, blinded by the approaching sunset. He squinted and endured the light to watch the leaves shiver from autumnal breath.

"Am I curse?" he questioned the young soul, predicting the immediate backlash from misconceptions born of differing time periods. "That's a title I've earned when I was born," he continued, adamant to speak his piece. He drooped his head to the side and smiled peacefully as he recounted the three decades full of hurt. "Those without control tried to conquer my whole existence with a single word, just to feel power for a second. Death," he opened his golden eyes to look at Sukuna, "encouraged me see my name is my dominion." The fiery sun shined iridescent eyes, exuding heavenly authority; the setting sun elongated his presence upon the temple grounds.

Suddenly, two voices spoke at once. One boomed from within the consecrated halls that echoed across the grounds; huge presence swallowed reality towards each entrance as a divine horror began to claw its way out. The other, softer voice, poured from the lips of the human. "The world is mine to save-- yours to destroy, for you are a god. Curses and angels are titles born from humans to control us."

"A waste of time," he asserted, tacking his statement onto the end of the other man's sentence. He then straightened his back, leaning away from the sign but returning his gaze to the letters.

"Invoking a kami's name without intent is foolish. I have no interest in whatever it is you think this sign will achieve. But more than that..." His eyes snapped up to the man, watching his reaction carefully as the inflection in his tone flattened to recite the word of the common lie.

A shinto priest native to Kyoto uttered the word kami in reference to the enshrined god of thunder.

Now, that he understood Sukuna, he felt a sudden swept of grief. He didn't believe his claim; he refused to accept the idea that the Cursed Spirit he admired, he befriended, vanished from this world. The grief continually ruptured from the uncanny familiarity. His soul was Ryomen-Sukuna's, and yet he attested he was non-existent.

Zhang San scowled, discouraging the unkind joke. The wrinkle in his brow softened when Sukuna made no attempt to correct his statement, to assure him that they are friends, and Zhang San tightened his grip on his broom.

"What name has this world given you, if not the title of kami?" The question poured from genuine curiosity, and despite his hurt, he remained in curiosity, refusing to let the pain capture his soul. He had practiced fending off the ever creeping despair; he practiced looking towards nature for peace. Now, his discipline waned, and he felt years of compounded suffering latch its claws onto his shoulders, threatening to pull him under.

The moonlight tumbled off his arm as he reached down. At his feet, a cold entrail shed by the curse oozed a moldy mucus, the impact site splattered with black blood. He ran his thumb across the meat's slick surface and swiped his tongue over the residue to sample its poison, tasting not only its curse but its history.

'Not bad,' he mused with a grin. Pausing, the slanted eyes on his mask rolled to their uppermost corners, straining in the direction of the overgrown path behind him. Another presence catered to morbid compulsions.

"Any human should know that 'death' is near." The curse's distant death rattle choked to a hush upon hearing his voice, its sound stopping as suddenly as a petrified cicada. He then stood and turned his body toward the familiar shape emerging from the black shadows.

The bulbous, fleshy mass seemed to shudder when Zhang San's eyes fell upon the gore. Nausea tore his stomach into shreds and he clasped his mouth by instinct. He stepped back and to the side to gain space between the viscera. His eyes turned upward for guidance to the elder curse, only to meet his gaze with the soiled fingertip; sanguine, blurred bars decorated the large pad, and quickly Zhang San did the math.

"EW!!!! Did you eat that!?" Zhang San pointed at the blobby flesh, admonishing the hulking beast. He wasn't one to lecture on eating food off the ground. He's taken to the trash in times of need-- but gnawing on abandoned entrails was where he drew the line.

"You don't know who that belonged to, what if--" the series of diseases, bacteria, and viruses flooded his brain (wasn't much with the extent of his knowledge), but quickly retreated, rather sure the cursed spirit defied all human illness.

"Oh, whatever," the omitted you're gross hung silently in the air. Now adjusted to his surroundings, he searched the vacant dark. "You said death's somewhere around here?" he blinked and searched harder. "I don't see them--" he turned his gaze up, "wait, that's theirs!?" he mathed successfully, again. "What are we trying to do with it? Eat it?!" His face twisted into an unimaginable swirl, disgusted by the idea.

ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤno Ryomen-Sukuna allowed

ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤyou’re allowed in Sukuna - Z.S.

The inflexibility of his literacy, stiffened further by disuse, left him doubting what he read; but upon drawing closer to the writing and tracing the characters under his fingertips, the uncertainty soured to agitation.

"... What nonsense."

He cast a distant look upon the stranger, recognizing the attention drawn to the sign meant for no one in particular. It's purpose was to welcome one soul, a soul that refused to venture this far, and thus the sign grew useless. Still, Zhang San hoped that one day, the damned soul would surface and grant him company in the house of bliss.

Zhang San approached the young man, speaking habitual words in his monotone voice, "Don't worry, that sign isn't meant for you."

His eyelids grew taut as he carefully observed his visitor. He saw the inner composition of the stranger's soul and distinguished his familiar friend. With a light, satisfied voice, he corrected his words, "Hah, maybe it is," and he laughed with the indescribable joy of an old man.

She listened unflinchingly to the ghost's words, letting its truth pass over her--accepting but not believing. Although the entity was possessed of a living body's intelligence, she raised her hands to sign to it in its primitive, ancestral language in addition to addressing it through Zhang San's ears. "You are proof that something 'remains'," she replied flatly, gesticulating as she spoke. "Your body, too, is gone. Yet you 'remain'. Do you desire the same freedom he found? Do you want Nirvana?" She paused, frowning at it as she considered the circumstances of the possession. "Perhaps you don't. That is why you 'remain'."

For each spoken instance of the word 'remain', she gestured to different aspects of herself, attempting to pinpoint which part the ghost considered the most significant--the 'heart', the 'mind', and the 'body'.

At first, he laughed wholeheartedly. He saw her speculations based in the seeing, hearing, and feeling world-- a world that she merged with the astral plane. One exists solely without need of the other, and yet humans derive so much from their own world to draw connections to the other. His laugh softened to a chuckle as she began gesturing again, careful not to interrupt nor ignore her next words.

Then, his mirth flickered into nothing. His face petrified upon hearing the question that has haunted him over for a millennial.

He forced his mind to travel to his last memory. The bittersweet good-byes to all his friends and loved one. He remembered feeling free, pure, and overwhelmed with resolve. Though, the source for those feelings, the purpose which drove them, became transparent. Its structure visible, though its design eroded with time.

Tang had been patient with Zhang San. He had given him the choice to meet at the riverbank and in time rejoin as one soul. Though, he never considered how Zhang San came to exist. He is the by-product transgressional cycles. Slowly, Tang Sanzang looked skyward to the glistening, four kings. He winced, adverting his gaze. Did he fail? Did he succeed? Was he abandoned? Or was he found? Tang Sanzang closed his eyes. He suffocated in the sea of unanswered questions. All he could do now was meditate on every doubt until the answer was found.

The fierce god on his back stared at her with hard eyes that seemed to challenge her claim to life. Despite its aesthetic similarity to the painting, the inked god bled into the space around her with a scope of presence markedly different in intent. It radiated before her, passing some silent judgment she could only guess at, and with a pang of fear she concluded that 'He'--the god itself--guided Zhang San's master in rendering it.

Weakness hollowed her legs, and He forced her to sit.

"Y-Your master died channeling this," Reier managed, "yet I don't feel him. I feel the... god. Oh... oh no, where did your master go?" Without thinking to ask for permission, she reached forward to brush her fingers over the tattoo in search of its artist, but before she could make contact, she paused as if listening to something, then flinched and retracted her hand. "I don't understand it. The... g-god overtook your master's presence. It's different than the painting I saw. But you're saying his passion did this?" Squeezing her eyes shut, she roughly shook her head to banish her unease, but her skin yet prickled with fright.

She flinched. His eyes snapped open and he rose his head. His eyes searched the corners once more. Her fright oozed, pouring around him and suffocating the hall. He swallowed, uncertain what to expect if he looked back.

Reier spoke her fears into reality, and his confusion spiraled. He redressed, hiding the source of her terror behind cotton and spun to face her. Her eyes were screwed shut. Her pale skin lost color as light shimmered off the newborn dew on her forehead.

"Reier--"

He could not contend with her questions. She dreaded the wrathful deity on his back as if he breathed fury upon her hand and willed her surrendering. He parted his lips to speak false truths uttered by every human to rationalize the afterlife, but his lips fell limp and he dropped his eyes, yielding to his vast ignorance.

A defeated sigh escaped his nose. His body slacked. His heavy head dropped, then carefully rose again. Zhang San's shoulders straightened in a straight, yet loose posture, and his sunken eyes opened. Incandescent hue replaced the dull irises. An halcyonic smile blossomed upon his face.