My vision became blurry as I watched the life drain from Izanagi’s eyes. His mouth moved into words that I couldn’t hear, and he became still. I tried to focus my thought and stay conscious as I looked down at the sword which was still protruding from my torso.

I grabbed it by the pommel and pulled it out. More blood came forth with it, but I knew that he had not hit a vital spot. Reaching down into my sash I pulled out a small bottle of sake and drank. The pain was numbed a bit, and I looked over to Ikiru. If he was dead, I had no idea how I was going to get out of here.

Slowly I crawled in his direction, spreading the blood all over the floor. He wasn’t moving, and I tried to check for a pulse, but there was none. To be fair, he wasn’t exactly alive, to begin with, I thought to myself, and tried shaking him. He had a cut from his abdomen to his chest but compared to my wound there wasn’t as much blood. Unfortunately, he was still unresponsive. “Ikiru!” I shouted in his face, “Wake up!” I couldn’t just. Leave him here but judging by my own wound I wasn’t very capable of making it out either.

I pulled myself up to lean against the wall and took another drink of the sake. So let me get all this straight in my mind, I thought to keep myself awake. Inazagi, the ancient god of Wakoko with the eight-headed serpent Ooruchi from legends, teamed up to kill four people in blood rituals over different days of the summer solstice that would lead to opening a path to his wife and sister.  Said person, was locked in the farthest depth of Yomi the underworld and bringing her back to the world of the living would trigger a mass drought and famine which would ravish the entire world, and their armies would lay waste to those of Xi’an… or something dramatic like that. It had been a rough day. Of course, now I was dying and trapped in the depths of the underworld myself.

I took another drink of the sake. This is what I called a bad day. But on the bright side, I seemed to have stopped the apocalypse. Suddenly I began laughing uncontrollably at the absurdity of it all. It was absolutely crazy. Gods? World ending stakes? Human sacrifice? Ghosts? I couldn’t believe it.