CHAPTER 6: DOMAIN OF CONVICTION

The rain hissed as it fell in sheets against the concrete pavement of the abandoned district. Shuttered shops, broken signs, and twisted lamp posts painted a desolate picture. Cursed energy lingered thick in the air, oppressive and heavy like smoke.

Suguru Geto stood in the center of the street, expression calm yet stern. His dark robes fluttered slightly in the wind. His eyes were narrowed, watching… waiting.

From a collapsed shrine near the end of the street, an eerie laughter began to echo.

"Ho ho ho… they sent a child to face me?"

The voice came from an aged figure — a twisted old man with a hunched back and skin like dry bark. Black veins pulsed visibly beneath his flesh, and a grotesque third eye sat on his forehead. Cursed energy radiated from his body like heat from a furnace.

"You're the one who's been cursing this sector," Geto said flatly.

The old man raised a crooked finger. "And what if I am, little monk?"

Geto didn't respond immediately. Instead, he released one of the cursed spirits he had stored — a screeching serpent-like creature that lunged at the old man.

The man only smiled. "Foolish boy."

With a wave of his hand, the serpent was instantly disintegrated, evaporated into black dust by the cursed aura exuding from the old man's body.

"You are outmatched," the old man rasped. "I've cursed over a thousand lives. My strength is the weight of sorrow."

Geto's expression hardened. "And that's why you have to be exorcised."

With a flick of his wrist, several more cursed spirits erupted from the air around him — a towering insect, a three-eyed wolf, and a floating skeletal priest — each imbued with high-level cursed energy.

The old man snarled and struck with blinding speed. His claws met the cursed spirits head-on, tearing into them, laughing like a maniac with each blow. His movements were erratic, powered by decades of consumed rage and curses.

But Geto was patient.

He observed.

He learned.

And then he clenched his fist.

"…Enough."

A surge of cursed energy pulsed from Geto's body, warping the air.

"Ryoiki Tenkai — Realm of a Thousand Graves."

The world shifted.

The city faded away.

Suddenly, the old man stood in a silent graveyard under a blood-red sky. All around him, spectral figures floated — the cursed spirits Geto had stored, now multiplied, endlessly surrounding him. Gravestones rose in every direction, each etched with the names of those who had suffered from the old man's curses.

"This is… what… what is this—?" he stammered, panic replacing arrogance.

"You carry the weight of the dead," Geto said, walking toward him. "Now you will meet them."

The spirits descended — like shadows, like screams — swallowing the old man whole. His howls echoed into the blood sky until there was silence.

And the world returned to normal.

Geto stood alone on the wet street, breathing evenly.

The cursed presence was gone.

He brushed back a strand of damp hair and muttered, "One less plague in the world."

He turned, walking back toward the shadows of the city, Riko's safety still his mission.

But the storm hadn't ended.

It was only beginning.