When a Hundred Demons Walk Abroad
In the first year of the Changde era of Heian, Minamoto no Yorimitsu cut off the head of Shuten Doji. The thousand-year-old Demon King’s fearsome body was sealed deep in the ley lines beneath Fujisan Sengen Shrine. In the fifth year of Enkyu, the shrine established an eternal sake offering, refining demonic forces with the sacred fire of the mountain god and annual rites. Divine blood was forged from the essence of yokai, and a Shinto system maintained across a thousand years kept order among the demons of Yingzhou.
More than twelve hundred years passed. The year was now 2214.
Beneath Tokyo, the entire Tokugawa clan offered themselves as a sacrifice to set fate in motion, bringing to a close a ritual that stole the Way from the gods and the laws of heaven. The very concept of the former Demon King was completely overwritten. The body of the slumbering apocalypse awoke with a start, bearing a heaven-defying destiny that would sink the Four Islands, and descended upon the mortal world.
At the summit of Fujisan, the ancient, immutable rules of the seal crashed apart. The call for sake that had endured a thousand years fell silent. The divine-blood crystals that nourished the spiritual ley lines ceased to form. In a single day, the thousand-year system of balance maintained by Sengen Shrine was rendered useless.
In the Mirror Chamber of the Inner Shrine, a mountain ascetic bearing both the remnant soul of Kamo no Tadayuki and the divine rank of Abe no Seimei was trapped by the shackles that bound his body to the sacred mountain. His left eye reflected the cause and effect of the world; his right imprisoned a thousand-year-old fox demon. He was the observer guarding the seal, and a prisoner bound by a thousand years of duty, quietly watching this upheaval overturn the order of gods and demons.
The old King of a Hundred Demons had conceptually ceased to exist. The new master of the apocalypse had appeared in the world, bearing a destiny of ruin.
A thousand years of divine rites were voided. The spiritual ley lines of mountains and seas trembled, the Shinto seals weakened, and belief systems old and new collided and shattered. As the old order came to an end, a darkness dormant for ten thousand years followed the light. In this age of chaos...
The hundred demons have come at last, walking abroad in broad daylight.
