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The balance of the world is altered on a cold December morning.
Yukina-sama has laboured for a full day and night, the ladies and maidservants of the house hovering around her as the old family doctor and his apprentice monitor her status; her sister, the only child allowed into the birthing room, has drawn her hair out of her face and into a braid, making her look younger and softer than her twenty-two years of age. Despite the process being so slow, not uncommon for a young mother on her first birth, she looks no paler than usual; she has hardly bled or been in pain at all, dilation seeming to come comfortably at its own pace.
As the dawn breaks, the standstill comes to an end. The doctor calls out as the child’s head crowns; cousin Mamiya slips out of the room and into the men’s quarters, where those unallowed to see the birth await news; Hiroshi-sama, the head of the clan, sits up in his imposing stature and makes his way to the delivery room to see his heir being born, each step thunderous on the wooden floors.
A birth is a momentous occasion for the Gojo clan: children are born with a certain regularity, or as often as brides and concubines can carry ever-aging fathers’ children to term, but each birth in living memory has been infused with an ever-renewed sense of hope, a gamble on each new child being the one who will bring the Six Eyes to new life. Hiroshi-sama has had other wives, two before wedding his niece a little less than a year ago, none able to carry a child to term that survived more than a handful of days; the most recent wife before this, a cousin nearing forty with Limitless to her name like her husband, died of grief a week after her fifth stillborn, and the white kimono her body donned for viewing was carefully arranged to hide rope bruises on her neck.
Now, in the middle of the room, Yukina-sama pushes and screams, her sister wiping her damp brow with a cloth, and as the child is delivered she smiles weakly under her uncle’s stern gaze. The world holds its breath, time stretching into infinity for the second the child is quiet; the tension breaks with a loud wail, tiny lungfuls of air filling the baby’s chest, and a collective sigh of relief is taken as the women crowd around the new mother to congratulate her for the newborn’s sex. He’s a boy, a proper fit for an heir should he manifest his father’s Limitless technique, and Hiroshi-sama allows himself to smile at that.
The baby boy’s eyes are sealed shut, closed tight even as a wet cloth washes his body and a dry one is wrapped around him to keep him warm; he is placed into his mother’s arms, a white shock of hair in a bundle of dark woolen blankets, and his father lifts open his eyelids with gentle fingertips. His son gazes at him with wide eyes, and the telltale colour of his iris is almost enough to make him falter; something shifts in the room, and the world readjusts itself on its axis. As with most of the clan, Hiroshi-sama has never witnessed it in his life, yet even he knows there is no doubt about this, and everyone present is quick to understanding: the Six Eyes have blessed their next vessel, and his newly born child is the chosen one.
Reclining in bed, Yukina-sama looks up at her uncle expectantly, asks him if it really is true, if she really did deliver the child of the Six Eyes from her womb, and he assents with a swell of pride in his voice, his niece’s eyes growing bright and handsome like her son’s as she looks down at him. The strength of the energy in the room is suffocating, the solemnity of the moment something no one quite knows how to handle, an occasion so rare there is little protocol or set ritual to be followed; the women shuffle out of the room, leaving behind a trail of whispers and congratulations as they cover the new mother with blankets for modesty and warmth, and he calls for the elders to come in, announces news that seem redundant given the most mundane of sorcerers could sense the abnormality of the power coursing through the small child’s body.
Celebration ought to be in order, an elder states; another loudly demands confirmation with notes of envy in his tone; the ultracentenarian granddaughter of a previous Six Eyes, who a hundred years before had buried her own blessed daughter a month after her birth, asks to hold the child, and decrepit fingers eaten through by arthritis brush out soft white hair from the baby’s bright eyes. Though her own eyes fail her, her inner sight is gifted, a heavenly restriction heightening her inward senses where they fail her outward; it is him, she confirms, superfluous though it may be, and her words hold such heavy weight that no one seeks to question their legitimacy.
“Uncle, you have yet to find a name for our son,” Hiroshi-sama’s bride notes later, the child latched onto her breast and eagerly suckling as the family doctor surreptitiously checks his vitals. Outside the room, elderly wives order servants around to prepare a celebratory feast, while disgruntled youths loudly argue about money they had bet on which of the childbearing women of the clan would birth the next Six Eyes; inside, a window drawn open on a snowy garden lets in some much-needed cold airflow, and the servants change Yukina-sama’s bedding as her sister fusses over her and her newborn nephew.
The child opens his eyes, silently demanding more milk despite having been bounced from one breast to the other, and he stares at his father with a fascination, as if committing his time-worn features to memory; better yet, as if he were searching for something inside him. Looking into his son’s eyes feels like looking down the barrel of his very own existence and finding otherworldly judgement etched into its walls; Hiroshi-sama prides himself on being a level-headed man, who has somehow managed to rule the clan with peace and reason through the latter half of the Showa era, yet now the world itself seems turned sideways, drawn onto itself by the magnetic field that is his child, an otherworldly being crammed into a human body so small it’s fit to burst at the seams with power. The boy’s humanity is a blessing and a curse, an aid as much as it is a hindrance; as he watches him turn to his mother and aunt’s coos and smiles, he wishes for enlightenment to come upon his child, that he may be able to walk the balance between humanity and godhood.
In this moment, he knows. “Satoru.”