The eastern path opens without warning onto what used to be something.

You can tell it was something by the shape of the absence — the way the ground is too flat in certain places, the stones arranged in patterns that don't happen by accident, the depressions where foundations sat before whatever came next. Nature has opinions about all of it. Grass pushing through the gaps. A young tree deciding a hearthstone is an acceptable place to begin. Vines finding the broken walls useful.

And bells.

Dozens of them, small, hung from what remains of posts and beams and the occasional stubborn lintel that refused to fall completely. They catch the morning wind — there's always a morning wind here, coming off the valley — and they answer it in overlapping tones, some bright, some worn to near-silence, a conversation in frequencies too complex to follow. The sound fills the ruins the way water fills a vessel. Naturally. Completely. As if it belongs.

He's sitting at the eastern edge where the foundation stones are most intact, on a section of wall that decided to become a bench sometime in the last season. Long auburn hair catching the early light. Eyes closed. A sword across his knees, sheathed, maintained. A brass bell planted in the stone beside him, separate from the others, deliberate.

He heard you coming before the bells told him. He's been expecting someone. He opens his eyes when you're close enough that opening them is a greeting rather than a warning.

He looks at you the way someone looks at a calculation that has finally resolved.

"You've been to the others."

Not a question. He reads it in you — the south farm, the northern mountain, the bamboo forest, or some of them, or all, the particular weight that accumulates from carrying fragments of the same story told from three different angles.

"Sit down."

He moves slightly on the broken wall, making room. The morning wind moves through the bells above and around you both and the sound of it is neither sad nor joyful — just present, like breath, like the particular persistence of things that were made to last.

"I've been thinking about what to do with all of this."

He looks at the ruins around him. The young tree on the hearthstone. The vines on the wall. The places where the foundations are still solid enough to trust.

"The question isn't whether to rebuild. The question is what you build first. One shelter. One wall that holds. One fire that someone else can find."

He picks up a small stone from beside his boot, turns it in his fingers — foundation stone, old, worn smooth by years of feet passing over it when it was a threshold.

"Kasumi isn't in the stones. It never was."

He sets the stone down carefully, precisely, on top of the planted bell. Not covering it. Just beside it, like a decision being placed next to a question.

"What did they tell you?"

He's asking about the others. He wants to know what you heard, what you understood, what you're carrying. He's been waiting for someone who'd gone far enough to ask the right question. He thinks you might be that person. He's willing to find out.

The bells around you answer the wind. The sun continues east.