The physical country of Kiga—“Ningen-dō” in cosmographic terms—occupies a crossroads between several regions of spiritual import. Save for Yume-dō, which follows its own dream logic and dwells in human thought, these realms are not alternate dimensions, realities, planes, or universes. They occupy the same world as Ningen-dō, lying above, below, or beside one another. But their spatial relationship is hardly Euclidean. A map of these realms would resemble a sheet of paper, fragile and old and frayed, folded and crumpled and torn and repaired over and over since time began. One might wake up one day and find the land rent and ripped beside one’s home as if by cosmic hands, another realm jutting upward through the gap in the world. Or the transition between realms might be subtler, like a gradual curve that eventually leads to a new
perspective on reality.
Time has confused these regions’ placement and relationship. Tales from long ago, for example, say the underworld comprised a gateway realm, called Meido; the sorei’s, or ancestor spirits’, final resting place, called Yomi; and a forgotten hinterland where oni lived, called Jigoku. Humans spoke of Yomi as if it were the whole of the underworld, for Yomi’s impregnable borders kept Jigoku’s evils in check. But Fu Leng’s fall into the underworld ruptured those borders, letting
evil taint Yomi as a cadaver might taint holy ground. As Fu Leng, saturated in Jigoku’s evil, increased his power and influence, Jigoku encroached further on Yomi, even capturing several unlucky sorei, who suffer there to this day.
Then came the Day of Thunder. Because they so loved the Thunders, the Kami petitioned Heaven that the fallen Thunders might ultimately live alongside them in Heaven instead of risking corruption in Yomi.
The stewards of the Heavens went further, transporting the entirety of Yomi and all its sorei into the sky, where Jigoku’s defilements could not reach them.
Yomi was safe, but the underworld was lost to Jigoku, save for Meido. Ekron, his Kings of Hell, and their loyal mazoku descended from on high to reconquer the world below. They seized the levels now known as Meido, Gaki-dō, and Tōshigoku from the forces of Jigoku, but keeping control of Gaki-dō and Tōshigoku has proved vexing even for one of the greatest gods.
To understand these worlds’ relationship, one must understand the soul and karma. The soul of every extant human, demon, animal, ancestor spirit, and god (large or small) has always existed, repeatedly reincarnating upon death. Upon reincarnation, a soul’s karma—the spiritual weight of its most recent life’s deeds—determines their form and destination. The worst offenders become the underworld’s demons and hungry ghosts. Those of middling stature become animals or humans. The most virtuous become sorei.
The Fortunist and Shinseist religions, while formally joined and reconciled by Emperor Hantei Genji’s edict, interpret the concept of karma differently. The Fortunes hold that karma comes in good and bad varieties, and that positive and prosocial actions accrue good karma proportional to the effort spent on the action and its effect. Shinsei, the Little Teacher, on the other hand,
theorized that all karma is “bad.” He taught that every action generates karma, which binds the individual to the reincarnation cycle, although actions motivated by fear, regret, or especially desire generate more. No one has proved one or the other right. Probably, no one ever will.
Above
The Heavens float far above the surface of the earth, above the clouds. Mystical creatures such as dragons and ki-rin can fly to the Heavens, and presumably could carry riders there if they deigned to do so—though few tales speak of any mortal worthy enough. The most direct route to the overworld, however, is via sky ladder: any feature, natural or artificial, that allows humans
to climb to or descend from the Heavens without the benefit of flight.
The best-known sky ladders, divine gateways guarded and administered by Tengoku’s servants, surmount sacred mountains. Others are magical artifacts—folding ladders, chains, grapnels, the feathers of sacred creatures—or even living things like tall trees. Many seem to exist only when the Heavens are in the proper alignment, revealed by the light of the crescent moons or a shining pattern of stars.
Tengoku
Tengoku is where Lady Sun, Lord Moon, the most important Fortunes, the Elemental Dragons, accomplished Emperors of times past, and their staffs of shinzoku live. Towering pagodas and bridges constellated with stars rise from dark, billowy clouds that double as rice paddies to feed those who walk above.
Handsome shrines of gold, jade, and other stone receive offerings sent from below.
Kiga's Imperial bureaucracy follows the form and organization of Tengoku’s, whereby Lady Sun and Lord Moon rule a cascading pyramid of courtiers and administrators. Petty quarrels, bureaucratic inefficiency, scandalous assignations, and similar imperfections may occasionally spice celestial life, but Tengoku as a whole remains staunchly committed to the orderly operation
of the cosmos and the progress of all sentient beings toward wisdom and virtue. Current throne-room debate often concerns the question of what to do about Jigoku.
Once, long before the fall of the Kami, Jigoku was a bastion of just reward and rehabilitation, but it devolved into a breeding ground for evil plots. Corrupt demons who twist Jigoku’s machineries toward selfish and destructive ends outnumber Ekron’s loyal servants, but dividing the honest and just mazoku from the villainous ones challenges even the Fortune of Death himself, whose
ever-swelling workload sees him visiting his home in the Heavens less and less each year.
Since Tengoku crowns the literal sky, one of its most important functions is the maintenance of the weather.
Elemental Dragons oversee giant divine machineries that cycle the seasons, adjust heat and cold, deliver rain and snow, clear away clouds, and mete out natural disasters.
Yomi
Since the Day of Thunder in the first century, Yomi has been a fine precinct of the Heavens, a sort of province of Tengoku. Sorei walk its halls, manors, and offices, where they fulfill their duties as tutelary caretakers. Most commonly, their duties involve watching over the families they had in their more recent lives. Occasionally, sorei may oversee regions or organizations.
One woman, known as Chifune, a merchant without any living blood relatives, devoted her whole life to a large shipbuilding business, treating both employees and clients with the utmost fairness and paying her employees generously. As a sorei, she wound up watching over her shipbuilding business, and she has taken on the protection of similar shipyards, enjoying the veneration and sacrifices of various shipwrights and their laborers.
Yomi’s edifices are largely sulfur yellow, a reminder of the subterranean Yellow Springs that originally gave Yomi its name.
Beside
Senkyō
The realms closest to human life are, paradoxically, the least understood. One might translate the term “Senkyō” as either “enchanted country” or “immortal country.” There, in the forests and highlands beyond rice paddies and castle walls, capricious and unpredictable beings wield mystical powers toward ends humans may never grasp.
Legends and folktales describe humans wandering into Kiga's backcountry, where wild entities either play tricks on them or aid them in their endeavours, depending on the tale. These sentient animals may take the shape of a beast, a human with bestial features, or something in between—or they may shift between these shapes. Souls whose karma rates them higher than common animals but below humans are reborn as these creatures, their mercurial natures
tempting them to sow mischief and chaos and squander their shot at a higher rebirth.
Chikushō-dō and Sakkaku
The tales often identify these creatures’ untamed territory as Chikushō-dō, the Animals’ Path, and Sakkaku, Illusion. They have it almost right. Chikushō-dō and Sakkaku are in fact political categories, not regions—though their adherents do control certain territories.
Chikushō-dō’s animals are committed to living, and helping one another live, lives of virtue and service that will guarantee them better rebirth. Many, especially among their leadership, are lay Shinseists or even pursue ordination as Shinseist monks or priests. Sakkaku’s adherents, though, want nothing of the sort: they believe their animal incarnations are ideal, their final and perfect forms. They think that embracing their animal natures (and all the mayhem they sow) and achieving immortality in their current life is the best use of their time.
Chikushō-dō and Sakkaku treat one another as foreign courts. Their interactions are usually neutrally diplomatic, although each undermines the other’s influence through skulduggery, social engineering, and occasionally outright violence. Each one, while made up of individuals rather than territory, dominates some Kigani wildernesses, keeps out of others, and struggles with their opposite numbers to claim contested territory. Some animal spirits swear allegiance to one
or the other, while others walk the line between them or try to play them off each other for their own benefit.
Historically, a Great Tengu has usually been in charge of each court, though that office has sometimes passed to an animal spirit of some other species. Chikushō-dō’s oral tradition maintains that one of these Great Tengu, who renounced his name and identified himself simply as “the High Shinseist Priest,” learned the Tao of Shinsei personally from Shinsei and Shiba so he could bring Enlightenment to animals. Sakkaku, on the other hand, maintains he did so as an elaborate joke that Chikushō-dō has yet to comprehend.
Yume-dō
Yumeji, the pursuit of supernatural wisdom through dreams, is a fashionable and fast-growing activity among Kigani of all social classes. Spirits both good and evil, high and low—from hungry ghosts tormenting living folk they blame for their sorry lot to Fortunes announcing great heroes’ destinies to them—have communicated with Kigani via their dreams since time immemorial. However, the era when a samurai might receive Hachiman’s nod in their sleep, then wake up to find an enchanted bow and arrows beside their bed is long lost now.
Dreams provide a scandalous and thrilling escape from Kiga's social conventions and niceties. In Yume-dō, a scholarly samurai and a curious farmer may interact as equals. A beggar may explore a palace in an Emperor’s memory. A general may unburden herself to a child. Even lucid dreamers with a little practice can conceal their true identities and appearances beneath a disguise of intention and will. A mazoku may dream he is a lovely human geisha. A fisherman may dream he is a butterfly. Rumors even spread of spies and saboteurs filching secrets from privileged minds through dream.
The question of whether a given interaction was a mere figment of someone’s imagination or a legitimate transmission from beyond the veil fascinates budding coteries of dreamwalkers, who practice lucid dreaming and divinatory techniques to explore the Path of Dreams more and more deeply. While interest in this field is growing, the most successful practitioners—the Dreamweavers of the Moth Clan’s Kaikoga family—have explored Yume-dō for centuries.
Concerningly, since this pastime has caught on, the veil between the dreamworld and Ningen-dō
has begun to fray. Stories of dream-born yōkai once thought apocryphal, such as the long-trunked baku who either torment sleeping souls or fight off their nightmares, have multiplied fast, particularly stories of sinister baku escaping into the waking world to bedevil the innocent. These stories greatly trouble the Kaikoga, who may ultimately be the only ones with the ability to clean up the mess created by careless dabblers.
Beneath
Deep underneath the ground on which the people of Kiga walk, deep beneath the crypts where they leave the honoured dead’s ashes, beneath the mines drawing ore from the earth, beneath the seafloor and the lava churning below it, deeper than anyone has ever dug, is the underworld. It is ancient, far older than human civilization, old enough that everyone wonders but no one knows what happened in this place before its current use.
The underworld comprises stratum upon stratum, regions stacked one atop another like the floors of a crumbling building, or the pages of a decaying book.
A soul weighed down with karma at the end of a selfish and misguided life suffers rebirth as a
demon, banished to a realm and an existence of cruelty and pain. Demons must struggle to remain virtuous despite such privations if they hope for a better rebirth. Many stripes of demon and many flavours of hellish dystopia make up the underworld’s layers, most of them too remote and too unpleasant for discussion.
The best of these worst beings call themselves mazoku: demons bound to serve Ekron and his Kings of Hell and keep the underworld running efficiently and justly. Sacred texts depict these beings as humanlike, but with red or blue skin and sharp claws, teeth, and horns.
Mazoku serve the reincarnation cycle as jailers, torturers, prison guards, judges, scribes, couriers, custodians, and sundry other roles. If they acquit themselves honourably, rejecting the savagery that comes easily to one so occupied, perhaps rebirth as an animal or human is in store.
Jigoku
Ancient documents and religious apocrypha claim that the maze of tortures and torments called Jigoku was once a place of rehabilitation rather than damnation, scouring oni souls of their villainy to prepare them for fresh starts. But Fu Leng and Jigoku brought out each other’s worst tendencies, and the prisoners have conquered the dungeon. It is no longer a penitentiary, but a fortress.
Technically, all the present underworld is Jigoku, but in common parlance, that word refers not to the three sectors over which Ekron claims dominion. Instead, it describes the numberless strata of woe beneath them, lost without hope of reclamation to Fu Leng, his oni lieutenants, and the evil spirits born into his service. These oubliettes are evil’s foul country, where oni plot to undermine all the world above, literally and figuratively, and consume it in corruption and vice. Perhaps one day, heroes as great as Shinsei and the Seven Thunders may venture into the depths
where even the gods fear to tread, wresting the underworld from their diabolical grip and reshaping it into a place of order, justice, and rehabilitation. But so far, no one has volunteered to go first.
Meido
All Kigani dead go to the level of Meido before their eventual reincarnation. This gateway region is the seat of power of Ekron, the Fortune of Death and Judge of the Dead. In Meido, the souls of the dead line up to be counted, recorded, judged, and assigned to a reincarnation befitting their karma. Ekron presides over this process with the help of his nine Kings of Hell: Shinkō, Sokō, Sotai, Gokan, Benjō, Taisen, Toshi, Byōdō, and Tenrin. A king or subordinate judge reads the soul’s karma and assigns them to reincarnation in a form and realm that befits their triumphs and shortcomings. Mazoku guards, scribes, judges, aides, bailiffs, and custodians facilitate the process, hoping to win a better reincarnation through loyal service in one of the universe’s dirtiest jobs.
However, mazoku can stray from their path just like humans. Fu Leng’s agents and influence hide even in Meido, offering weak-willed mazoku power or favours if they can influence how certain souls are processed: perhaps a great hero could wind up consigned to Jigoku proper, or a mix-up in paperwork could see a villain inclined to Fu Leng’s service reborn as an influential samurai instead of a hungry ghost. Rooting out and punishing such corruption makes Ekron's already
stressful job even more so.
Gaki-dō
A soul corrupted thoroughly by desire is called a gaki, and is reborn into Gaki-dō. Although its name is sometimes translated as “hungry ghost,” a gaki is not, strictly speaking, a shade that has failed to pass on; all gaki have been through Meido and been found…disappointing. Mediocre. Below average. Each gaki’s previous misdeeds are neither so violent as to consign them to Tōshigoku, the Realm of Slaughter, nor so base and evil as to banish them to Jigoku proper, but they haven’t done nearly well enough to warrant an animal rebirth, either. Instead, they pass into the vast subterranean slum surrounding and contrasting with Meido’s handsome and austere citadels, office blocks, and gateways.
Each of Gaki-dō’s precincts and parishes is the size of one of Kiga's provinces, administered by mazoku magistrates and guards. The weather is always bad. The air smells stale and foul. The gaki live, work, eat, struggle with one another, and expire in this miserable sprawl.
Ekron does not readily admit it, but Gaki-dō’s size exceeds his mazoku’s administrative reach. In fact, it’s all too easy to escape Gaki-dō. The edges of certain precincts seem to blur and merge into some of the worst parts of Ningen-dō: mass graves, the sites of battles and massacres, desecrated temples, fouled wildernesses, and the roughest neighbourhoods of large cities. Rumours abound that if a traveller gets lost enough in a big city’s most corrupt neighbourhood, they might wander into Gaki-dō. Only grit and good luck could lead such an unfortunate to a demonic magistrate willing to hear their case before gaki accost them. While certain local shades are shrewd and generous enough to show a lost traveller a way out, most likely through a bargain, most are possessed of a terrible hunger, and the living smell especially delicious.
Tōshigoku
Ekron originally created Tōshigoku, the Realm of Slaughter, as a special division dedicated to rehabilitating the overabundance of Kigani dead who fell in unjust and unproductive war. He cleared out a particularly miserable neighbourhood in Gaki-dō, built a castle there, and appointed an especially competent mazoku—Mujōki, the Ghost of Impermanence—as warden of its legion, whose ranks swelled swiftly with souls who died engaging in pointless violence.
But unbeknownst to Ekron, treachery has befallen Mujōki. Fu Leng deployed crafty oni to squeeze through Gaki-dō’s fraying edges, infiltrate Tōshigoku Castle, and kidnap Mujōki. An impostor now rules in Mujōki’s place, taking his shape and sending false reports to Ekron (who is, of course, too busy to check in with what seems to be a loyal minister). The false Mujōki, a sadistic oni who enjoys violence for its own sake, now trains Tōshigoku’s denizens in increasingly brutal martial arts and tactics. Meanwhile, Fu Leng’s minions seek out Ningen-dō’s most ruthless warriors, manipulating them into bloodthirst and carnage in hopes that they will find themselves in Tōshigoku.
Little do the tortured souls realize they are training to become Fu Leng’s shock troops when he finally makes his move to drive out Ekron.
Veneration of the Dead
While not every ancestor ascends to watch over their family from Yomi, filial piety ensures that their descendants will honour all but the worst of them as if they had. Every family, even among the peasantry, keeps a small altar with memorial plaques or statues to their beloved dead.
Wealthy homes sometimes have a niche built into a wall, or even an entire room, specifically to shelter the ancestral altar; in other houses, the altar occupies a place of honour in a main room.
Even those few Kigani who have no interest in Shinsei or the kami maintain such an altar, appeasing their dead by bowing, clapping, speaking prayers or mantras, and leaving offerings of incense and rice with chopsticks jabbed vertically among the grains—the only time a Kigani would ever dream of stabbing anything with chopsticks.
These altars exist in addition to, rather than instead of, cemeteries. Burial mounds are seldom built in contemporary Kiga, but ancient ones—sometimes small, sometimes elaborate mausoleums full of clay grave goods and surrounded with moats—still dot the landscape, diligently tended by the land’s current residents even if their occupants’ descendants do
not remember them. Since the Imperial proclamation mandating cremation, remains are often interred in a graveyard beneath a stone block inscribed with the deceased’s name and perhaps a death poem. Families visit their predecessors’ resting places to tidy up and remember from time to time, especially during the annual Bon festival.
Graveyards sometimes also feature statues; however, these represent not the dead, but Fortunes or exalted Shinseist figures, especially the Fortune Jizō, who is said to roam the underworld comforting the dead as best he can. Families sometimes decorate Jizō statues with clothing, jewellery, or toys to honour children who died before their time. As a wanderer, Jizō is also the patron of travellers, featuring in many small roadside shrines.
A Kigani rarely brings up other people’s ancestors unless they’re extremely close. Partly this custom is practical: a sudden mention of a friend’s dear departed grandmother might plunge them into melancholy.
Partly it is philosophical: who among the living can pretend to the wisdom of the elder dead? This courtesy even extends to enemies. Any criticism to the effect of “you shame your sorei” is thought to reflect exceedingly poorly on the speaker rather than on the recipient, incurring the disfavour of the speaker’s own forebears.
