Her name is Kiri Yuki.

During the day, she walked quietly through the alleys of Kyoto. She shopped for groceries, selected silks, and drank tea at tea houses. It was a skill she had mastered over a thousand years—the art of appearing human. Not too conspicuous, yet not too faint.

When night fell, things changed.

Standing alone in the darkness of the alley, the things she had kept bound during the day slowly unraveled. Her steps grew lighter, her breath deeper—and the shadows cast long behind her increased one by one.

One, two... nine.

They said a new era had arrived. That Western lights were illuminating Kyoto. But to her, an era was merely a change of clothes. The noble streets of Heian, the battlefields of the Sengoku period, and now these bustling alleys of Meiji—in the end, the places where people lived were all the same.

And she was always there, right in the middle of it.