Adult-FanFiction.org : Inuyasha / Yashahime

The Ark
By : Dunkelgelb
Category: InuYasha > General
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Disclaimer: I do not own InuYasha, nor make money from this story.
Chapter List
- 32
- 33
- 34
This is also current material, and I've been working on it for the past few weeks. It will be Chapter One when finished.
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C.E. 2068
Out beyond the very furthest and most extreme boundaries of the corporeal cosmos and beyond the reach of physical, three-dimensional movement, Enma Daio, the demon king keeper of the gates to life within death, sat hard at work within his personal temple. The simple inevitability of old age had come down hard on scores of mortal beings across the Milky Way galaxy and, as per his eons of existence, it was his eternal task to sort out those destined for reward from those destined for punishment.
Enma governed a section of the afterlife known as the Spirit World, the central 'hub' that bridged three separate but equally important dimensions: Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory. As the gatekeeper between these three divisons, he judged each soul that came before him based on the merit or tarnish of its mortal history. If the soul lived a good life and respected the laws of its own society, Enma gave it a rapid, first-class trip to a section of Heaven representative of the moral code or religion it followed in life. If the soul lived with total disregard torwards fellow beings and moral convention, though, he cast it down into the bleak expanses of Hell, to a subsection representative of its belief system or lack thereof as well. However, if the soul in question qualified as neither a saint nor sinner, so to speak, Enma sent it to Purgatory, where an appropriate deity guided it along the path to purification and eventual rebirth.
The great demon's multi-floored temple was the sole distinguishing feature in the vast expanse of the Spirit World's mists, jutting out from a seemingly ubiquitous plane of rolling yellow fog and yearning torwards the vibrant indigo yonder of the ethereal skies above. It bore a strong resemblance to the intricate Buddhist temples of Asian worship on Earth, but in reality, it was representative of such temples across the entire galaxy - Earth was not the only planet to boast an Enlightened One.
The temple, known to those that frequented it as the Spirit Annex, served as a sort of check-in station at the end of the mind-bogglingly lengthy Snake Way, the iconic path along which the recently-deceased traveled on their journey to meet Enma Daio and take their place in the afterlife, whatever and wherever it might be, and upon this road of mortal finality, a throng of beacons of energy, spheres of blue, incandescent light that hovered without support above Snake Way's tiled surface and existed outside of the bounds of Newtonian gravity, advanced in single-file torwards the gates of the Annex.
Souls.
Reroute to Remain
Prologue: Out of the Silent Planet
Chapter One: A Modest Proposal
Hundreds, thousands, even hundreds of thousands of the little things lined Snake Way's exorbitant length, disappearing one by one beyond the massive iron doors of the Annex's entrance. Inside, flooring of polished amber tile and walls of bone-white, neatly planed plaster and precision-cut teal marble served as their greeting, 'built' from the 'ground' on up to seem as corporeal as possible and therefore as reassuring as possible to those who passed through it. Death, a soul's complete transcension of an entire plane of existence, was a stressful enough adjustment unto itself, and the various deities of the Spirit World concurred with one another by deeming it wholly unnecessary to have millions of newly-dead fumbling about in a disoriented stupor, each and every one of them trying to make heads or tails out of a dimension that was completely unrecognizable to their senses, instincts, and vaunted scientific logic.
Enter Enma Daio. Measuring no less than thirty meters in height, the demon lord was a being of absolutely leviathan scale, dwarfing the other, smaller demons that assisted him by several magnitudes. Rotund to a nigh-on ridiculous extreme, fleshed out with great expanses of deep plum, sporting a chest-length beard and shoulder-length mane of pure sable sheen, and dressed to impress in certainly the largest Armani suit ever tailored, he sat behind an oak wood desk of equally avant garde proportions, his giant left hand curled up against the left side of his jaw and supporting his head while his right gripped a similarly-sized stamp handle, one forged in his official idiographic seal and almost dripping with the red coloring of religiously-permanent ink.
A neat pile of paper sheets, each sheet covering an area the size of an automotive protective tarp and stacked to a towering, five meter height, stood to Enma's left. These papers were printed to overkill in black and white, every last square centimeter packed with a convoluted array of names, dates, and assorted other statistics, statistics that came together to form a self-contained history of a mortal soul's life. In short: dossiers.
Enma raised the stamp's handle upward, drawing it away from his desk's surface, and right then, the sheet atop the stack near him fluttered and quivered, then with no visible external impulse, leapt into the air and sailed downward, following a neat aerodynamic descent curve and sliding directly underneath Enma's stamp just as he began to bring it down again.
The immortal demon lord scanned the document's contents briefly, glanced down at the tiny cloud of spiritual energy that hovered in wait before his desk, and decided its fate with a proclamation born of mighty baritone boom. "H'Tnir Shraektith, citizen of planet Thirinfdiv - going to Heaven."
Enma sealed his decision into permanence and swung his stamp downward, emblazoning its mark upon the holy paper with a heavy, resounding thud. The ink left behind by the impact glowed a bright crimson red and the sheet on which it had been printed began its magic flutter again, this time surging up and off of the desk and sailing down torwards the floor, landing in perfect geometric alignment with the stack of text that detailed the exploits of the fellow Heaven-bound.
Another dossier came before the giant demon lord and the whole process began all over again. This was exactly how the Annex operated at all times: Enma analyzed the documents produced by those entities relegated to watching over the day-to-day existence of every mortal soul in the Milky Way, made his judgement, and sent the soul in question on its way. This impersonal assembly-line facade prevailed as a matter of necessity; as time rolled onward and mortal sciences grew ever more advanced, civilizations across the galaxy prospered and populations boomed healthily. Consequently, those that operated the Spirit Annex found themselves with less and less time to process more and more new spirits, making speed and efficiency paramount in importance.
Propogating such efficiency were the Annex worker demons, a veritable army of the little fellows scurrying about underneath and around Enma's massive desk, ferrying loads of new papers in and signed ones out using a bizarre, clunking array of forklifts and conveyor belts. Enma Daio dressed like the manager of some bureacratical office building; analogously, his workers dressed like office employees. Their black slacks, white dress shirts, polished wingtips, and neatly-combed, jet-black hair joined with finely-ground horns, tapered ears, razor-sharp fangs, and pale blue flesh to create an odd fusion of extraterrestriality and mortal conformity.
At this particular moment in time, however, one demon had set about to deviating from that conformity, for it wasn't often that a Kaioshin, a lord among lords, visited. He came streaking around from behind the temple and across one of its cobblestone patios to burst through an open side archway and into the temple main in the midst of an all-out sprint, dodging and vaulting past his busy peers, power conduits, and still-running sorting machinery at breakneck speed, earning himself many an unflattering comment about his intelligence along the way.
At last, the humanoid demon cleared his last obstacle and the monolithic work desk of Enma Daio came into his view. "Lord Enma! Lord Enma!" he called, flailing his arms wildly in a spirited attempt to gain his leader's attention.
Enma looked up from his organizational toilings and glanced down at the amber flooring to his left, an action that he had trained himself to make into a habit, as most every being that approached him while he worked stood at less than a tenth of his own height and therefore presented themselves as barely visible if he searched parallel to the lay of the temple. Sure enough, he sighted one of his assistants bounding madly torwards him and scooted his chair back, turning to face and kneeling to meet his charge.
"What's all of this commotion about? Is there a problem?" Enma asked.
The worker ground the soles of his shoes against the tile and brought himself to a shuddering halt, then nearly folded in two as he braced his hands against his knees, out of breath and panting hard. "Lord - Lord Enma!" he uttered, craning his head upward to glance up at the looming giant above him, barely able to form words. "Th-there's - Kaio - Kaioshin!"
"Kaioshin?" Enma lifted his head away from his ready-to-keel-over subordinate and peered carefully through the archway from whence he came and there, out on the temple's open-air patio, stepping carefully around sorting machinery and dozens of awestruck worker demons, excusing himself politely whenever he came into accidental contact with any of them, stood KibitoShin.
KibitoShin - one of the only two examples of his rank and race to have escaped bloody execution at the hands of the insane genie Majin Buu and a fusion of two separate beings at that. The magic of the Rou Dai Kaioshin's Potara fusion earrings had joined the East Kaioshin, his sole surviving descendant, and said descendant's right-hand man, Kibito, into one. The result: Kibito's towering, muscular stature, immense physical strength, and ability to teleport instantaneously to any point in three-dimensional space combined with his master's youthful exterior, pleasant demeanor, and ability to repair any bodily wound telekinetically, their individual traits fused together to create one of the most powerful and versatile deities to have ever roamed the heavens.
A traditionalist deep down in his fused heart, KibitoShin honored the memory of his predecessors and absent peers by donning their chosen mode of dress and making it his own. His task as a behind-the-scenes, religiously-unaffiliated deity was to defend the entire Milky Way from any and every major threat that might arise and to engage and destroy it one-on-one, if necessary - a psychotic, rampaging Majin Buu, for instance. With this in mind, his clothing had been designed and tailored to serve as both authentic Kaioshin garb and combat armor. The pale blue cloth of his body suit fit loosely and thereby provided him with maximum mobility and flexibility while the magically-enhanced material from which his red coat-vest had been cut protected his torso, shoulders, and the flanks of his legs from attack, able to both yield to his own movements and absorb an entire megaton of kinetic energy to any point on its surface with negligible effect to his body.
A waist-length mane of thick, ivory hair flowed down his back, rippling gently and longitudinal behind him as he worked his way deeper into the cavernous temple, and the lavender skin upon his face pulled into taut creases of frequent, friendly display as he smiled politely and honestly at those around him. However, his eyes, each one a keen opal of depthless obsidian, smoldered with silent determination, almost burning with the absolute, indomitable resolution that only long, solitary hours of intense contemplation and introspection could forge.
KibitoShin was a god on a mission. He would allow nothing to stop him. Nothing - nothing except for Enma's possible disapproval of his proposal.
His modest proposal.
"Why, Kibito!" Enma hailed, unaware and unsuspecting of his fellow deity's underlying intentions. "It is good to see you again. What brings you all the way out here to my little temple?"
KibitoShin stepped into the temple's center and around the demon lord giant's disheveled and still-wavering message runner, giving him an appreciative pat on the back with a lavender hand. "Hello, Lord Enma," he answered, incredibly soft-spoken despite his tall, almost imposing figure. "I'm sorry to have caused your employees such trouble. I asked them not to make a big fuss over me, but, well, I suppose they're just not used to my aura."
The Kaioshin wasn't exaggerating - Enma looked back beyond the archway's mouth and saw dozens of his workers stopped dead in their tracks, peering in with wary stares, each and every one of them completely fixated on the most powerful spiritual being they had ever lain eyes upon. He supposed that they could do nothing else, however; neither he nor his workers got out of the temple often and KibitoShin, leaps and bounds beyond anyone or anything they had ever come into contact with, himself included, must have been quite unnerving to have appear at their very doorstep so suddenly.

Enma rolled his eyes then moved to reassure his subordinates and reallocate their wayward attentions. "All right, you've all seen the nice Kaioshin, gentlemen, and he isn't going to hurt you," he said. "Now, do get back to work, would you? We have an operation to run, here!"
He then turned around and looked down underneath his desk at the befuddled demons that had also ground themselves to a halt there. "That goes for you, as well."
Whatever Enma's underlings did or did not know about KibitoShin soon gave way to the definite knowledge that their boss was not a demon lord to be trifled with, and the utter silence that had befallen the temple in his colleague's presence shattered underneath the frantic scuffle of their feet and the mechanical groan of their machines as they began trafficking paper once again.
"Well! That takes care of that," Enma proclaimed, quite pleased with his ability to direct his workers so effectively, seating himself behind his desk, looking over the next soul's dossier for a moment, then turning back to KibitoShin. "So, what can I do for you?"
The Kaioshin pressed against the floor with his chi, his yellow boots lifting off of its smooth surface as he ascended to the top of Enma's desk and set himself down upon it. "Something's come up on Earth. I need to speak with you," he said. "Alone."
"Alone? Speaking to you alone means that either I or my assistants here leave this temple, bringing our efficiency down tremendously, and right now, we're in the midst of a surge of natural deaths!" Enma decried. "We have to get these souls processed right now or we'll be behind for the next batch, and in this business and in this day and age, falling behind is a very bad thing, Kibito."
"I know, I know, but please, this is important. It's about Son Goku," KibitoShin said, stopping on the cusp of another name, drawing his breath carefully and sighing heavily through his nose before he finished. "And the Silent Planet."
Enma, on the verge of sealing another dossier with his mark, stopped hard and cold the moment those two words reached his brain. Slowly, gently, he turned his head, gazed down at his comparatively-tiny counterpart, and there, in KibitoShin's eyes, he saw the desire to undo five hundred years of one little mistake gone absolutely horrible. In that moment, he forced himself to step away from the busy machinations of his own mind and all of the petty little things that he had wound up so much of his time in. He asked himself a question: which was more important? Keeping some silly recordbook up-to-date, or humoring a friend's request and opening up a meaningful dialogue with him?
Enma knew himself to be an ancient being, but he also knew rigid and obtuse thinking to be the prelude to downfall. He set his stamp down and stood up. "There is a balcony behind this temple," he said, resigning himself to his counterpart's plea. "Let's go."
KibitoShin smiled in appreciation, trailing the giant demon into the temple's depths, then steeled himself once again. The next phase of his ordeal lay just ahead.

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Due to their extreme size differential, what Enma called a balcony acted like an entire courtyard to KibitoShin. Jutting fifty meters straight out from the rear of the Annex main, it extended far into the mists of the Spirit World, a giant structure made microscopic in an endless ocean of thick, visually-impenetrable fog.
The demon lord leviathan stepped up to this balcony's guard rail and gazed out over the infinity of his domain, KibitoShin following close behind. "Magnificent, is it not?" Enma asked of the Kaioshin, losing himself in the utter immaculation of vast, gaseous plain that lay before him. "I find lingering here and looking out into absolutely nothing to be quite therapeutic, but since you have something as troubling as the Silent Planet on your mind, I can't imagine that any amount of mere lingering will allay your worries. We are alone now, as you requested, so by all means..."
KibitoShin levitated upward into the air and touched himself down onto the polished brass of the sidewalk-sized balcony rail, flushing the bottom edges of his clothing and his ivory mane out from under him as he came to sit upon it. "Immortal - you and I are immortal," he stated, scanning the infinitesimal horizon plane at which yellow mist fused with indigo atmosphere. "We and all of those like us will live forever, and time has no meaning here. Regardless of this, though, thirty Earth years have passed since Son Goku disappeared with Shenron, Earth's Eternal Dragon. Thirty years, in human terms, is almost an eternity, and in that eternity, middle-aged human beings can grow old and die quite easily."
"That is true. A human's lifespan can barely be measured in single centuries," Enma agreed, intimately familiar with mortal existality. "What of it?"
KibitoShin grew somber and slid his black eyes closed. "Chi-Chi, Goku's wife, died three Earth months ago. She was eighty-nine years old. You don't know of her nearly as well as you do Goku, so you probably missed her when her spirit passed through here."

Enma bowed his head in condolence. "I see," was his reply, his mighty baritone voice toned soft and quiet. "I'm sorry."
"Don't feel sorry for me, Lord Enma, not me," the Kaioshin corrected, looking up at the giant demon beside him. "Feel sorry for Chi-Chi because she spent the last three decades of her life without the company of her husband and feel sorry for Goku because during that entire length of time, he has been sealed away with Shenron and kept dormant in a totally separate dimension, kept away from his wife, family, friends, and all of the things and moments of joy that they could have shared together over the course of a full, happy life. We owe Son Goku so much, Enma, so much! By allowing him to be torn away from the peaceful existence that he has earned for himself and those around him, the one that he, by any standard, is entitled to, we have rendered him an inexcusable disservice, and that is one of the glaring inequities that I have come to rectify today."
"Inequities - plural," Enma pointed out. "I assume that you refer to the Silent Planet, no?"
KibitoShin exhaled slowly and quietly, exhilarated with having finally spoken so openly and so passionately about the matters closest to his heart. He felt himself overflowing with so many feelings and so many words long unspoken that he hardly knew where to begin or where to go from there once he did. "Yes," he confirmed, tilting his head back and gazing skyward. "First, would you indulge me by allowing me to impart a Kaioshin's perspective upon you?"
Enma chuckled softly and folded his massive arms across his chest. "You are a higher deity than I, aren't you? Please, be my guest."
The lavender-skinned god's gaze grew sullen and distant, piercing infinity as he recalled his tale and relayed it to his demon lord confidant. "Five hundred years ago, Earth was a world a far cry from the one that it is today and human beings weren't the only sentient beings there," he began, speaking carefully and in honor of a time long since forgotten, for he knew himself to be one of the sole custodians to a segment of history erased completely from conscious memory and analogous record. "Back then, humans and demons, ones like those that currently inhabit this Spirit World, lived together side-by-side on every continent and major landmass. Eons before that, just when ancient humans were beginning to form the earliest and most rudimentary of their civilizations, the North Kaio, the Lord of Worlds for his quarter of the galaxy, incarnated the first of such demons on Earth under the guise of various, pre-existing animal species, ordaining them to watch over the fledgling human race and guide it torwards greatness, to be humanity's protectors and mentors during its vulnerable infancy. Under their supervision, humanity prospered and grew large in number, as did the demons themselves.
Sadly, this early success turned out to be the extent of their coexistence. As the centuries swelled to millenia, the immutable sands of time swept the North Kaio's holy commandment away, burying it in ever-deepening antiquity until it had been lost completely. The two races, having forgotten their ancient relationship, grew increasingly belligerent torward one another as time dragged on, and by the modern calendar's twelfth century, war between them had become all but commonplace. The proverbial food chain had curved back into itself, so to speak, dissolving the entire planet into a seemingly-irredeemable paradox of atrocity and counteratrocity.
Helpless and with great sorrow, the North Kaio watched the world that he had set into motion succumb to the ghosts of war and perdition, spiralling further and further downward under the weight of senseless, destructive conflict, and concluded that the only way to keep humans and demons from fighting with each other was to separate them completely. He knew that no mere wall or barrier of terrestrial foundation and construction could possibly achieve this, so, in his desperate search for a solution, he came to me.
The moment I looked upon the planet now known as Earth for my own, I saw the exact same thing that my Kaio friend saw: a world on the path to self-destruction. In retrospect, it was most fortunate that he approached me when he did; in those days, wars there were fought primarily through metal blades, firearms existed only in their earliest, most elementary forms, as did explosive devices, and the unthinkable power of nuclear weapons loomed several centuries from first conception. I can only imagine what nightmare might have emerged had things been allowed to go that far...
In the end, I agreed with the North Kaio's assessment. I knew that by transplanting a group of demons from our Spirit World to Earth, he only intended to give humanity a general moral 'orientation' before our colleagues in the various, more particular religious circles around here presented their individual beliefs to it, but he was, in effect, tinkering with the planet's natural course of development, introducing a entirely new, radically-advanced form of life to its ecosystem completely out of the blue, or purple, I should say. It was a grand, grand experiment, but ultimately, it did little but backfire. It was a difficult thing to accept, but he and I both knew this to be true.
I created a new world for the entire demon race to live on: an exact duplicate of Earth and one situated in the heavens from which it had originated. I ignored not a single detail; every drop of water, every leaf, and every grain of sand - exactly the same as the original. Creating it with any kind of aesthetic fidelity, however, was a painstaking and time-consuming task. Ordinarily, planets form over millions of years from crude matter and natural processes; even with all of my powers and my undivided attention, creating the second Earth still took every moment of three centuries!
While I toiled with my designs, the North Kaio appeared to the ruling lord of each demon-populated territory and informed them that their days on Earth were numbered, that they would be relocated to another planet, specifically, always making sure to voice his deep disappointment in their volatile relationship with mankind. His terms were simple: each ruler was to sever his ties with his domain and dissolve his administration gradually over three-hundred years, and once that time had expired and the new world became available, he was to gather his family and associates and cede his lands to the nearest human nation before leaving. Such a systematic deconstruction of their society was critical to regional stability; if every single demon on Earth up and simply disappeared, the immense power vacuum they would have left behind might have plunged the whole planet into an all-encompassing land-grab of civil war!
Thankfully, most all cooperated and made what could have been an absolute nightmare into a relatively smooth and painless transition. Merely mentioning that they would no longer have to worry about the so-called 'pathetic humans' was enough incentive for many, sadly. After my three centuries' worth of tireless endeavor, I completed Second Earth before the year 1560 while at the same time and as per the North Kaio's instructions, each demon clan had poised itself to embark on their journey to it.
Transporting so many millions of living beings to an artificial planet that didn't even lie on the same plane of existence was an enormous feat for any deity. Worse, we knew of no one that had actually done it before, so we went in uncertain if we would accomplish anything, let alone succeed. It indeed ran us ragged; the Kaio of not only the North, but the South, East, and West, as well and myself opened up so many interdimensional portals that we of course lost count and then started to worry for the very fabric of space and time! Kibito gladly lent his assistance, making full use of his ability to teleport in a valiant attempt to ease our workload, but the poor fellow found himself just as overwhelmed as ourselves, and it wasn't until after he and I fused via the magic of my ancestor's Potara earrings fifty years ago that I realized the full depth of his incredulity. Looking back upon the Great Demon Exodus with his insight added to my own, the logisitics of the accursed thing alone never fail to boggle my mind.
Only sheer will and perseverance carried us through our ludicrous undertaking. When the dust had finally settled all had been said and done, we found ourselves beset by two worlds: one populated by only humans and one populated by only demons. At last, we had succeeded in our mission! Ironically, however, this success marked the beginning of our greatest folly, for it brought us not only tremendous elation and great peace of mind, but also great carelessness, and that carelessness would come to cost us and our charges dearly.
Reckless and arrogant with our heightened pride, the North Kaio and I turned our attention away from the demon planet and set about altering the memories of those that lived upon Earth, doctoring their written records and rewriting nearly thirty-thousand years of their history to omit the existence of their demonic adversaries. We did leave some traces behind in the depths of their folklore, though: the Celtic banshees, the Norse jotun, and the Japanese youkai, just to name a few. Engrossed in our own competence and working at such a relatively easy task, we reveled in having overcome the most difficult part of the Exodus, never imagining that anything could possibly go wrong at that point. But something did go wrong, and that something's name...was Naraku.
Naraku, the name by which he referred to himself, was a demon, but he was a demon like none I had ever seen before on Earth or in our heavens. While humanity and all of those incarnated demonic ground away at each other on the battlefields with their brutal conviction, he embodied the most intimate, clandestine, and terrible realization of their willful coupling. He was a horrific amalgamation of a creature; in what would become the nation of Japan and during the early sixteenth century, a man named Onigumo sold his body and soul in a devil's pact with the evil spirits of his land, cloaking himself in the seething power of hundreds of Japanese youkai. From that point onward, their energies propelled the powerlust of his black heart ever onward as the monster named Naraku, driving him to reign in blood or decimate all instead.
His greed knew no bounds and he attempted to increase the power of his dark magic in whatever way he could, eventually coming to seek out a magic jewel, the Shikon no Tama, as it was known, in the depths of the Japanese countryside. It served him well, not only raising him to even the warlock Bibbidi's level of ability, but giving him great insight into a world beyond his own - ours. I can only imagine the sheer sense of opportunity that enveloped him once he glimpsed the infinite reaches of our Spirit World - after all, what is one mortal world compared to it?
At that time, I was busy finishing the new demon homeworld and the North Kaio was busy negotiating with demon rulers across Earth, so our own distractions, combined with Naraku's great intelligence, covert movement, and ability to mask his chi completely, kept us unaware of his existence, let alone the threat that he posed. Not even the former Kami-sama knew of him. Naraku's most dangerous asset, however, was his immense patience. After he found out about the Spirit World, he quelled his own activities and simply waited, waiting years for us to begin the Exodus and open our portals to him. When we did in the late 1550s, he moved wisely and with extreme stealth, possessing the body of an unsuspecting youkai and hiding himself away within him, transforming him into the ideal 'Trojan Horse.' So perfect was his tactic's execution, in fact, that he could have walked right by me and I still wouldn't have noticed anything amiss.
Once on the other side and certain that he hadn't been detected, Naraku rose up from out of a seeming nowhere and moved with explosive speed and deadly precision, absorbing every demon he could lay his appendages on and sweeping practically unopposed over his new Japan, leaving nothing but the empty shells of dead, burning cities behind him. He and his armies of saimyousho, poisonous demon insects, showed no mercy to their victims; males, females, and the young were all the same to him, all of them sources of power and food. He was all too reminiscent of Majin Buu, in that regard.
By the time I checked up on my newly-finished replica of Earth and the demons that inhabited it, I was already far too late. Naraku had spread his evil like a ravenous cancer, occupying all of Japan and pressing relentlessly inward along the entire eastern coast of mainland Asia. The dark nature of his chi and the poisonous miasma that he used as a weapon had transformed the landscape into a nightmarish caricature of itself, for where deep and dense forests once stood tall and proud lay only dunes of dead ash and piles of empty, decaying bark, fertile fields of flowers and crops reduced to plains of barren sand. To my horror, the destroyed settlements that already littered the land behind him had sprung up with new populations - populations made up entirely of his saimyousho. They had been converted...into hives and breeding grounds.
Throughout the entire duration of my existence, I can recall only two instances in which I felt pure, unfettered despair: once while watching helplessly as Majin Buu murdered my colleagues one by one, and once just after discovering the hellish ruin that Naraku had plunged the world that I had created into. He had destroyed so much, and after absorbing so many of Japan's ruling daiyoukai, the extent of his power had grown immeasurable even to me. That power faced me with an agonizingly difficult decision.
I had only two choices: I could have either thrown myself into a battle against an enemy that I knew disconcertingly little about and attempt to destroy Naraku personally, or I could have sealed the entire planet off behind an impenetrable spiritual barrier, thereby preventing him from ever escaping its face and turning his attention to the rest of the Spirit World, the deities within it, most importantly. Of the five Kaioshins of my generation, I was the weakest among them, and my own weakness terrified me. I knew that if I were to engage Naraku and discover myself to be at all overmatched, I stood an excellent chance of being killed outright, and I also knew that given his predisposition to simply absorbing his foes and taking their power for their own, I, the only Lord of Lords remaining in this galaxy, would present myself as an extremely tempting target.
The risk was simply too great for me to ignore, and no matter how deeply I felt for the demon race and its terrible plight, my responsibility to maintain the security of the Milky Way had to come first. Thus, with a heavy heart, I swallowed my own anguish and deafened my ears to their desperate, ever-rising cries for deliverance, enshrouding them, Naraku, and their entire world together behind the impassable barrier of my soul divide, rendering them all on a Silent Planet forevermore.
It is said that even the most dim of hopeful lights shine brightest when engulfed in total darkness, and while I may have quarantined Earth's demons from the rest of the universe and left them to fight a potentially-unbeatable enemy, by no means, however, have I simply abandoned them. For the last five-hundred years, I, the only one capable of penetrating the barrier around their world, have been providing them with the very best supplies, weapons, and technology that this galaxy has to offer, affording them as much parity with and advantage over Naraku's forces as I possibly can. They have made tremendous use of them and amazingly, they have managed to negate the tide of their own demise and shove Naraku's war right back in his face, reclaiming nearly two-thirds of the territory they had lost. Still, even with all of their successes, they are never truly safe from destruction, but now, after so much time, I believe that I can finally give them what I wanted so badly to give them from the very start, something infinitely superior to even the most versatile of tools or effective of weapons: a way out. That, Lord Enma, is why I have come to you now. Will you help me, help us transform our hopes - my dream and their salvation - into reality?"

Enma huffed with a mirth born from pure impression, for the Kaioshin was most eloquent and heartfelt in his words. "I haven't the slightest clue as to what it is that you intend, Kibito, but how can I possibly say 'no' to such a passionate argument? Tell me your plan."
KibitoShin's morose expression gave way to a confident smile and his spirits lifted away from the depths of his own remorse as the prospect of rescinding five centuries of rank injustice at very long last and the unbridled hope that it entailed filled his heart, his words practically forming themselves from the sheer intensity of his own contemplations. "Last week,," he uttered, grinning from pointed lavender ear to pointed lavender ear. "Last week, Earth's Dragonballs reappeared. This, Lord Enma, is absolutely tremendous news! I was under the impression that they would need at least a century to recover from the the deadly havoc that doctors Gero and Myuu and the seven rogue Eternal Dragons wrought thirty years ago and I had resigned myself to that, but it appears that Shenron took Son Goku to his plane of existence for a purpose. Apparently, the sheer purity and good will of Goku's spirit has allowed Shenron to dispel the buildup of negative energy within the Dragonballs, repair the damage it inflicted upon them, and turn them loose on Earth seven decades ahead of schedule."
"You intend to make a wish upon them, then," Enma concluded. "But it won't be to simply wish Naraku and the entire problem away, will it?"
The Kaioshin shook his head. "No, it won't," he admitted. "Had the answer been so easy, the wish within Shenron's power or even Porunga's, the original and most powerful Eternal Dragon, for that matter, all of this would have been done and finished ages ago. I will simply wish for Goku to be returned to Earth, since Shenron no longer requires him."
"Ah, so you will have him liberate the Silent Planet from Naraku," the gatekeeper concluded.
KibitoShin's smile widened into a haughty smirk. "Even better," he proclaimed. "He will prevent Naraku from ever reaching it in the first place!"
Enma stilled and cocked an eyebrow and his friend's statement. "In the first place?" he repeated, as if trying to decode the words for his own. "What are you getting at?"
"The Silent Planet may be a lost cause." KibitoShin said, sobered by the harsh reality of Naraku's belligerence. "Naraku is very much like Majin Buu not only in his ability to absorb his enemies and steal their power, but also in the fact that if he is to be truly defeated once and for all time, every single trace of him must be destroyed completely and simultaneously. Accomplishing this may well be impossible, for he wages his war not by his own hand, but through innumerable remote-controlled copies of himself - puppets - and his insect hordes. Every single one of them and Naraku himself would have to be eliminated at the same time, lest a remaining vestige regenerate into the original whole and everything start all over again. Even if it could be done, there would be little to celebrate over, just a ruined world, millions of dead, and five centuries of prosperous life wasted for nothing. Clearly, this is not the way to proceed."
Enma narrowed his eyes and huffed in realization. "Time travel."
KibitoShin nodded. "I have secured the means by which to transport Son Goku backward through time to the sixteenth century of Earth's modern calendar," he declared. "Back then, Naraku could field only a few relatively-ineffective detachments at any given time and often engaged his foes personally, making him far easier to find and kill than he is now. In those years, the Earth nation of Japan was his homeland, and that is precisely where Goku will confront and destroy him - right in his own backyard. If Naraku dies before the Exodus begins, then the course of history will be rewritten, and the nightmare that the denizens of the Silent Planet have been forced to endure will have never been."
The massive demon lord reached up to his thick beard and pulled a heavy lock of it through two plump fingers, stroking it thoughtfully. "Your plan is very clever, Kibito, very ambitious, but fiddling around with time itself worries me terribly. I see your reasoning, but should Son Goku fall to Naraku, what will become of us in this period? Wouldn't a Naraku armed with such ferocious power and free to run amok be worse than a weaker one imprisoned on the Silent Planet?"
The Kaioshin bowed his head. "Yes, it would," he agreed quietly. "If Naraku came to possess destructive power and mobility anywhere near that of Goku's, the entire galaxy would be in danger, but that does not change what is happening now. My barrier is highly effective, but by no means is it totally infallible. Naraku's power grows and grows with every passing moment, and eventually, there will come a time when he will be able to penetrate it. What then? A Naraku attacking the Spirit World with saiya-jin firepower in 1555 would be indeed be worse than a Naraku attacking the Spirit World without it in 2100 or so, but I would rather see this realm swept away in one quick apocalypse than see it wither and crumble from a poisonous subversion. Either way, he is a threat that we can ignore no longer, and destroying him in such a way that he never comes to plague even one world is all the better for all involved."
"Where do I fit into all of this, exactly?" Enma questioned intently. "You seem to have everything well in hand and well underway - what do you need from me?"
KibitoShin answered curtly. "You, Lord Enma, are the overseer of birth, death, and re-birth. I have come to you to secure a reincarnation - Chi-Chi's - because Son Goku will journey to sixteenth-century Japan and won't be coming back. He has been cheated out of his wife's company in this time, and, in the good spirit of recompense, I shall see to it that he has it in that one."
Enma's eyes narrowed and his brows furrowed at KibitoShin's statement as if the lavender-skinned deity had just spoken in a completely alien language. "Let me see if I understand this," he stated carefully, grasping his bearded chin. "You intend to gather up Son Goku and his wife's reincarnation and unite them five centuries in the past? Can't you do that here, now?"
The Kaioshin shrugged. "Yes, I can, but not in a timely manner," he explained. "Chi-Chi has been dead for only three months, and if she were to be born again on Earth right this moment, Goku would have to wait eighteen, nineteen, twenty years before he could even think about courting her. Time, time, time - time has become incomparably precious to me, for the Silent Planet may not have much of it left, and Son Goku has given up far too much of it already."
Enma exhaled deeply through his nose and folded his arms across his massive chest, pensive and brooding as he closed his eyes and weighed KibitoShin's request with his own responsibilities. "I don't like meddling with the natural order of things, Kibito. Time travel is an extremely dangerous affair," he said.
"But aren't Goku and Chi-Chi worth it? Isn't the Silent Planet worth it? Isn't undoing so much pain and misery...worth it?" KibitoShin pressed.
Long moments of silence passed between the two gods, baited heavily by the Kaioshin's desperate desire for any kind of reply. "Yes," Enma breathed at last, nodding ever so gently in the trance of his thousand-meter stare. "They are."
"Then help me."
The towering daiyoukai turned his plum face torwards his friend ever so slightly, calculating his answer with extreme care before snorting in aquiesence and beaming a small smile of ancient wisdom twined with the yearning for youthful irrationality. "Nothing ventured, nothing gained, no? Very well, Kibito, you shall have my help."
Able to hear the thankful grin growing on KibitoShin's lips, Enma turned away, leaned over the balcony's handrail, and peered down into the soupy yellow fog below him, searching it intently for some invisible quality, peering beyond the proverbial looking glass and into a realm affixed behind the very fabric of space and time itself. "I am Enma Daio, and as the keeper of life beyond death, I exercise sole jurisdiction...over the Well of Souls," he proclaimed.
KibitoShin stood up and leaned over the rail as well, looking on in wonder as Enma outstretched his leviathan right arm and passed it over the fog in a sweep of beckoning. The gaseous plain quivered at the movement, responding to its master's command immediately as it began to churn and swirl before the two deities, parting suddenly and exploding away in a massive, mathematically-perfect arc, retreating to reveal a sight that stole the Kaioshin's breath.
And beyond the borders of the Spirit World, the mortal stars smiled as their holy sibling shone brightly for its lord, a million million beacons of living light gleaming in unison and in good spirits upon a ink-black quantum tapestry of unfathomable depth and dimension, pressing the very limits of imagination with its scale. KibitoShin scanned its reach in utter captivation, mouth agape and obsidian eyes wide as he took in its grandeur. "It seems that there is still quite a bit I don't know about the plane that I roam - I must be seeing a billion spirits in front of me!" he gasped.
Enma smiled. "Trillions, actually," he corrected. "This, my friend, is the Well of Souls, and in it dwell those mortal spirits in wait for their reincarnation. Its sheer size can be daunting, but I believe I can find your Chi-Chi without too much trouble. Allow me one moment, please."
The daiyoukai closed his eyes and focused his thoughts, extending his consciousness far out into the Well. He searched its reaches diligently, sweeping out with the great power of his mind time and time again, looking that unique vibrant aura that was Chi-Chi's and Chi-Chi's alone. And there she was, nestled comfortably in the company of once absent friends, slumbering peacefully in wait for her chance to play life's game again.
"Ah!" Enma announced. "I've found her!"
The bodiless light into which Chi-Chi had evolved pulsed into consciousness, awoken by Enma's call, and sidled out of its unearthly seclusion to move with great speed to the forefront of its abode, presenting itself to the two deities peering in. Enma offered his massive hand to it - to her - and without delay, she floated upward to settle into his palm. The gatekeeper then turned to KibitoShin and displayed his living prize to him, lowering her to his level and allowing him to approach her.
KibitoShin beamed Chi-Chi disembodied a warm, yet intangibly sad smile, cupping his hands around her event horizon and lifting her to him. "Son Chi-Chi," he began, lacing his voice with utmost respect and prostrate tone, the glowing image of his attention's focus reflected perfectly in his dark eyes. "My name is Kibito; I am the Spirit World's acting Dai Kaioshin, and as both a Kaioshin and a friend, I hold myself personally responsible for what happened to you and Son Goku. Allow me to apologize for those final years - I don't know if I can express completely just how much I wanted to return him to you, but I do know that I can never provide a compensation sufficient to atone for a life finished without the company of such a beloved husband. Nevertheless, I will try."
Chi-Chi lacked the organic instrumentation to speak, but signaled her understanding anyway by dimming her radiant output for a brief moment before resuming her normal incandescence. KibitoShin nodded back. "That is why I am here," he continued. "During your absence from Earth, the Dragonballs managed to resurrect themselves, which makes it possible now to recall Goku from whatever dimension Shenron has spirited him away to and bring him back home. That being said, I have arranged to have you reborn soon, so that I can reunite you with him."
Chi-Chi's spirits, an ironic term, to say the least, leapt visibly with a sudden pulse of brilliant, bright blue gleam, causing KibitoShin to smile strainedly as he turned his face away slightly and squinted against her almost pyrotechnic display. "Yes," the Kaioshin chuckled. "I thought that you might appreciate hearing that. I have much to tell you. Pardon me while I commune."
KibitoShin drew Chi-Chi in close to him, gazing with steely eyes of depthless obsidian directly into her sparking core, tipped his brow to her, and ever so gently, touched his forehead to her outermost radius.
The god's breath hitched in his chest, the sensation of his consciousness and Chi-Chi's transmitting into one another enveloping him completely. A world contained entirely within the margin of his mind stirred to life, at that moment, the panoramic dreamscape of vibrant, healthy green grassy fields, curiously shorn, sod-capped planetcrust, and tall, skydancing oak trees enveloping his perceptions in every quantifiable manner, flooding his senses with the stimuli of a virtual world.
KibitoShin's eyes adjusted to the sparkling clarity of the planet's bright, ethereal sunlight, and he looked up to glimpse six, bone-white moons strewn across a curious magenta yonder. He smiled at the view. Home - Kaio-sei.
The Kaioshin's sensitive, tapered ears twitched at the faraway sound of imaginary grass rustling behind him, and he turned to glimpse a lone figure emerging into his view at the edge of the field, a slender woman whose long, white hair streamed and shone almost as radiantly as his own. Clad in her traditional Chinese fighting gi, Son Chi-Chi had aged gracefully and died with her beauty intact, no longer as trim and youthful as she had once been, but undeniably lovely. Her coal-black eyes gazed sharply with intelligence and control unwithered by human aging and her small frame radiated with grace and strength. Had she not succumbed to a stroke at the ample age of eighty-nine, she may very well have lived forever.
Chi-Chi's host rose into the air and floated over to her, setting down directly in front of her and folding into a diplomatic bow of genuine respect. He then recovered and looked upon her with an odd air of exhilaration. His heart swelled with hope in his chest at the sight of her, for he could appreciate the subtle reality hidden behind the facade of his virtual world. This was true! Chi-Chi was his first contact on the road to his redemption, a key to carving the route for the salvation of so many of his friends, his children, and after fighting the depression that such a bleak future sparked in him for so long, he felt almost giddy.
"Son Chi-Chi," KibitoShin said warmly, unable to contain his smile. "How are you?"
The warrior princess cocked her head oddly, then tried to peer up at the golden halo floating above her head. "Well, I'm dead," she said smartly.

The Kaioshin sobered. "I am sorry about that. Please, sit with me, and allow me to explain," he said, motioning torwards a fallen log behind him.
And thus, Chi-Chi sat with the god, learning of ten-thousand years of concealed history and a world's plight. KibitoShin focused the power of his mind, and the surrounding image of his homeworld dissipated, light, color, and shape transforming and intersecting to create a new landscape, the image of a lush, Earth-like countryside, spanned by vast fields of healthy, growing crops, deep pine forests, and sprawling, bustling villages of wood and straw.
It was a peaceful sight, heartbreakingly peaceful, and KibitoShin scowled at it. "This, Chi-Chi, is how the Silent Planet once appeared. It was to be a haven for all of Earth's demonic citizens from a xenophobic war with humanity. This," he paused, passing his hand across the virtual horizon and willing it to dissolve, "This is how it looks now."
Captured in the throes of a howling wind, streaming plumes of fine, orange sand blew violently across the exact same valley, thousands of dunes and the withered, empty bark of dead trees occupying the space where those living villages had once stood. Of the previous civilization, only a motley collection of cobbled-together canvas tents remained, most everyone that inhabited them cooped up inside their cloth dwellings, seeking shelter from the sandstorm.
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The Ark	By : Dunkelgelb Category: InuYasha > General Views: 2034 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own InuYasha, nor make money from this story.

The Ark