The mist had no mercy.
It wrapped around Gomi Kirā like the memory of every insult carved into his skin, every night he scrubbed floors until his knuckles split open and bled, every morning he woke to find his "family" had eaten without him—again. The violet fog didn't just surround him. It knew him. It whispered in voices he'd never heard but somehow recognized: the chorus of the discarded, the hymn of the forgotten, the requiem of those who died with their names already erased.
Hosogiri Shirudo walked three paces behind. Always watching. Always silent unless acknowledged first.
The kid had learned that lesson fast—Gomi didn't do small talk. Didn't do comfort. Didn't do anything that required him to pretend the world wasn't a rotting corpse wearing a smile. But Hosogiri followed anyway, that strange violet earring swaying with each step: a cross resembling a broken sword, two shattered circles clinging to its edges, three lines etched above like scripture abandoned by whatever god once bothered to care.
They walked for what felt like days. No sun rose in the Skys of Misfortune. No moon set. Time was just another thing that died here, buried alongside hope and mercy and every other lie the surface world sold to keep people obedient.
But eventually—impossibly—they saw it. Light.
Not the sickly purple glow of cursed mist. Not the pale gleam of bone-dust drifting through dead air. This was warm. Amber. The color of lanterns lit by people who still remembered what living meant.
"What the hell...?" Gomi muttered, stopping mid-step. Hosogiri's eyes widened. "Is that...?" "Shut up. Let me think." But there was nothing to think about. The light was real. And in a place where reality came to die, real was the most dangerous thing you could find.
They followed it for hours—maybe longer, maybe less, time still refused to make sense—until the glow crystallized into a beam tearing through the fog like a knife through silk. The ground beneath their feet changed from ash to stone. Solid. Ancient. Intentional.
And then they found it: a massive crack in the earth, a tunnel descending into darkness lined with stones covered in moss and carved prayers in a language Gomi didn't recognize but somehow felt. The words hummed with desperation. With defiance. With the kind of rage that builds monuments out of spite.
"We going down?" Hosogiri asked quietly.
Gomi didn't answer. He just started walking.
The descent took hours. The air grew warmer. Thicker. The smell changed from decay to something almost alive—steam, wet stone, the faint sweetness of... flowers? Impossible. Nothing grew in the pit.
But the sound was unmistakable: life. Voices. Laughter. The clang of metal on metal. Running water. Music—actual music, not the screaming wind of the cursed wastes above.
They emerged from the tunnel's mouth and froze.
Yasugiri—the City of Evening Mist.
It sprawled across the cavern floor and climbed the stone walls like a fever dream of stubborn survival. Wooden bridges arched over slow-moving streams that glowed faintly with bioluminescent algae. Paper lanterns—hundreds, thousands—hung from every surface, casting warm amber light across cobblestone streets that shouldn't exist. Cherry blossom trees, carved from reclaimed stone and decorated with real petals scavenged from gods-knew-where, bowed over winding paths like guardians of something sacred.
The houses were built from the bones of the forgotten and the souls of the cast-away. Not metaphorically. Gomi could see it in the architecture: support beams carved from femurs, roof tiles shaped from flattened skulls, doorframes inlaid with ribs arranged in geometric patterns. The dead hadn't just built this city. They were this city. And somehow, impossibly, it was beautiful.
People moved through the streets. Real people. Not ghosts. Not corpses. Living human beings who laughed and argued and haggled over fish at market stalls. Children chased each other through alleyways. Old men played board games on stone benches. A woman hung laundry between buildings, humming a tune Gomi's mother used to sing before the nobles cut her throat.
He felt sick.
Not from disgust. From confusion. From the sheer wrongness of seeing life in a place where only death should exist.
"This doesn't make sense," he muttered.
"Maybe it doesn't have to," Hosogiri whispered, staring at everything with eyes too wide, too hopeful.
They stepped into the main square.
Every head turned.
The conversations died like candles in wind. The laughter stopped. The music faltered. Hundreds of eyes locked onto Gomi Kirā—onto his horn, his scarred flesh, the violet aura that clung to him like funeral incense.
Some eyes filled with awe. They recognized the mark of Yagumi, the blessing of the dead, the sign of the chosen. Others filled with disgust. An oni was an oni, chosen or not. Monsters didn't stop being monsters just because they had a tragic backstory. Some people whispered behind raised hands. Some spat on the ground and turned away. Some just stared, frozen between reverence and revulsion.
Gomi knew these looks. He'd worn them his entire life.
"Trash Kid." "Garbage." "Should've stayed buried." Different words. Same meaning.
His fist clenched. The horn on his head pulsed with heat. For a moment—just a moment—he wanted to burn it all down. Prove them right. Show them exactly what kind of monster a lifetime of rejection created.