Mizu promptly folds the slip of paper, slides it into a pocket, and looks around the room at what company the fox leaves her in. It's simple enough what she wants. It's simple enough why she came here. The fox's games don't matter. Only revenge. Unless one of them introduces himself as Skeffington or Routely, that means knowledge, knowledge about Fowler's magic word:

London.

"Who here can tell me anything about London?" Mizu asks the room, "Or find information about London in these books?" 

She doesn't even know what London is—a person who can lead her to them? A place where she can find them? Mizu will find out all she can about whatever Londons she can identify, the closer in proximity to Meireki 3 (1657 in the white man's calendar) the better.

The trick with the clock catches on, and once Mizu has completed enough research for the moment, not a full search but a basic one, she supposes it's best that this exercise doesn't end in a bloodbath due to her delaying departure too late. People always run out of patience with half-bred Japanese like her. In a private corner of the library, Mizu pulls out the slip of paper and reads it:

Great Fire of Meireki.

That fire… is her fault. No one but Fowler knows she started it, no one but Fowler and the fox. It was burning across Edo when she left, not only the shogun's palace but the entire city. How many people will die in it? How many more lose their homes, all their possessions? Her blood sacrifice to revenge, Fowler called it. A pit forms in Mizu's stomach, hollow and empty. Of everything, this action, this most recent action, is what the fox holds her captive over?

It's fair. The fox saw the fire. The fox might know what the final costs of the fire are, from what Mizu's learned in her library. She swallows and finds a history book on Japan. Her finger scans the Japanese text until a sword starts to rise from it. Mizu grasps the hilt and pulls it free. That's a first. It's quickly forgotten, even in hand, when she reads the number dead.

Mizu falls back against the stack, knocking some books out. She doesn't care. The books don't care. She's a monster. A demon. She's the monster everyone's called her her whole life. Mizu never meant to burn down the city, only to trap Fowler. The fire doesn't care what she intended. It caught, and it carried, and it killed. It killed so many more people than Mizu's killed in her entire life. Than she had killed.

She closes her eyes and has trouble breathing. Ringo. Taigen. Akemi. Even Madame Kaji. Are they all right? Like that makes up for the rest if they are. They're simply the only people in Edo whose name Mizu knows that she cares whether they live or die. "Fuck," Mizu swears.

Mizu has no home, but the feeling in Epiphany, the town she exits the library and school in, feels wet and clinging, like her thoughts can't escape her. Like she can't stop seeing the fire spread. So she draws her hat down low and makes for the closest edge of town she saw from the school doors. Mizu avoids people on the street, sure they will hate her as much as she feels like she has to hate herself. She gets out of the town and continues down a road in countryside. Cold because it's winter now, not spring.

The cold air isn't as good as cold water, but it's welcome to numb Mizu's face as she walks and to freeze her wet lashes together. No one needs to know she shed tears for anyone. No one will ever shed tears for her. The crack of a branch makes her freeze. She draws the sword, not made by Master Eiji, not made by her own hand, and waits, listening.

The footsteps sound odd, off for a normal person. What walks out of the forest looks… wrong, with two heads and extremely long limbs and— no it's two people. It's the Ashinaga-tenaga, one with legs six meters long and one with arms nine meters long. Mizu glances around, confused as she's not near Kohama Village, not near the ocean at all. These two spirits are often cited by the sea, responsible for poor turns in the weather, but they don't attack people.

Perhaps they attack demons. Mizu shrugs, draws her sword, and gets in position to fight them.

Though Mizu dislikes anything having her name on it—how many people even know her in this place?—she dislikes it staying outside the shrine she slept in even less. Somehow the box is heavier than the steel she made her sword from, heavier than the newly forged steel she left with swordfather. After a minute or so of grunting, pulling, and straining over it, she decides to handle it where it is. Fine, a box may be heavy, but a lid usually is not. This isn't Hajimodo's family's tea steelworks. Even if it were, she could push it off the box without Taigen's help. This box is the wrong shape for that. It's the right shape for a sword.

Mizu lifts up the top, foolishly hoping for something forged by Master Eiji, even though she already refused a sword of his hand, and something explodes.

Mizu leaps back into the shrine and draws the sword she found in the library. Her ears ring, and her vision is wrong with all sorts of bright colors. Nothing more happens. Mizu blinks. The floor of the shrine is covered in tiny specks of color. So is she. She wipes off what she can, but there's so much of it, the task feels impossible. Each speck is as small as sand and as difficult to get rid of by hand.

"Uuuuuugh!" Mizu roars.

Mizu ignores the second box, seeing how she doesn't need more glitter on her, for a whole day. A second day. A third. It seems to disappear for a while, but it returns. Persistent and taunting her. Even when she changes shrines, it changes with her.

She sits next to it one morning, drinking tea, and takes in the view. Just a man and his box.