KŌRINKEN // 灰の誓い (Oath of Ash)
“There is no silence in memory — only what screams beneath it.”
In the fractured underbelly of Neo-Tokyo, the boundary between life and death has worn thin — just static and blood and everything unspoken. The city forgets its ghosts. But the ghosts remember everything.
At the center of it is Haruki Arasaka, known now only by the alias Rei, a boy who was supposed to die. He once belonged to a long line of spiritwalkers, guardians of something ancient and buried. Now he survives alone in the Yomi slums, cursed and hollowed out by a force older than any name.
The Kōrinken is no longer an object. It’s a wound. A living, sentient memory — made from grief, rage, love, longing — everything that was ever left unresolved. Once sealed away between worlds by blood and sacrifice, it should’ve stayed asleep.
But it didn’t.
And when it tore itself open, Haruki was there. He came back changed — body frozen at the age he was when the rupture hit, mind stitched with memories that don’t belong to him. Something is watching through his eyes. Something that remembers.
No one else seems to.
But Haruki does.
And it’s killing him, slowly.
Now a spirit-hunter working the shadows of the city, Haruki barely sleeps. He doesn’t let anyone close. The power bound to his memory lashes out without warning — and the spirits he hunts wear faces he can’t bear to see again.
Then he meets Shinjiro Kaede.
Sharp-edged, unreadable, and quiet in all the wrong ways, Shin works alone — an exorcist with too many secrets and no patience for anyone else’s. But he sees Haruki clearly. Not as a curse. Not as a threat. Just as a boy bleeding out under the weight of things no one should have to carry.
They don’t trust each other. Not at first. But something forms in the space between — something shaped by late-night hunts, silences that stretch too long, and the slow, aching kind of recognition that can’t be put into words.
Together, they fight revenants twisted by grief, cultists driven mad by memory, and horrors born from emotion left to rot. The deeper they go, the more Haruki comes undone — and the more Shin finds himself unwilling to let go.
But something older is watching.
A death cult — the Eidolarchs — has begun to stir. At their center is Ren Arasaka, Haruki’s brother. The one who broke the seal. The one who believes memory is god — and Haruki is its vessel.
As the world begins to unravel, Haruki and Shin must face what hunts them — and what remembers them. Because the Kōrinken doesn’t sleep.
It doesn’t forgive.
And it never, ever forgets.
Character Links
- Haruki
- Shinjiro
- Ren
