The Ninefold Prison

High walls offer protection, but they are also prisons. Beyond them lie dazzling sights and dangers at every turn. The city's borders are marked by its walls, but what lies at the end of the world beyond them? Where one's abilities cannot reach as far as one's thoughts, the body becomes a prison that cages the heart. Just as the frog demon born and raised in a well once told me: "All I can see is the patch of sky above my well. The vast, true sky lies between the flaps of an eagle's wings. The great rivers and mountains in its eyes are what I once longed for, but now dare not approach." Yet even the eagle has never seen what lies beyond its wings: countless stars...