#Drifted Relic (漂流貴物)

Contents

Authority. The sample-card values of this document are narrow Canon — canon only within this volume, covering no slot of the canonical relic categories (Masterwork Compendium · Exotic Sacred Objects) and creating no slot anew. The §Law 3 homebrew guide is Scene Tool. As with all the content of this volume, it is premised on GM permission, and fc cannot override the co canon (Canon). And this document is the last bridge of this volume — this book is not a book that makes the modern person strong. It is a book that gives the drama of a future being consumed. What remains after that drama has been consumed to the very end — that the end of Depletion is not extinction but story, is shown here.

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#Scent — An Object Remembers Time

#Opening Fragment — The Fire by the Grave

The onmyoji reached the graveside before the sun went down.

Too small to be called a burial mound, it was a heap of earth with a single stone laid on it. They said it was the grave of one taken by Kamikakushi, dead five years ago. Against that stone — a rod-shaped object had been stood, leaning.

"Every night that thing lights up," the headman said, keeping his distance. "A goblin-fire, surely. The monk waved his hands and withdrew, and the yamabushi could not put it out even after three days of rites. By cutting or by burning, make an end of it, please."

The onmyoji picked up the object. A smoothness he had never touched, neither iron nor lacquer. When he shook it, a dead metallic sound rattled within.

The sun set.

The head of the object — without a sound — lit. A straight light, like a hundred lanterns gathered, cut long through the darkness toward the pass. The headman gasped and stepped back.

"It is a monster, surely," the headman whispered. "Do they not say a spirit dwells in an object a hundred years old? Yet that thing has been here only five years, and that is what is the more dreadful. How venomous a thing must have dwelt in it."

The onmyoji did not answer and peered into the light. He looked for a long while. And he looked where the light pointed — at that pass, which the dead man, while alive, had gazed at every night.

"The reckoning of a hundred years," the onmyoji began, "is the reckoning of a closed age. Since the gate opened — the years do not flow by their count."

"Then... by what do they flow?"

"By the heart." The onmyoji stood the object back beside the grave. The light was lighting the pass without a waver. "This is not an object five years old, but five years' worth of waiting. It is not a thing that ends by cutting — but a thing that ends by reaching."

"Then the exorcism..."

"Not an exorcism but a guiding of the way is needed." The onmyoji moved his steps toward the pass. "What that light waits for — I shall go beyond and see. Set out a dish of rice cakes — they are things that become gods if you enshrine them."

#Scent — The Reckoning of Years

The old tradition has a clear reckoning. A spirit dwells in a tool a hundred years old — the reckoning of the tsukumogami (付喪神). A hundred years' worth of handling, a hundred years' worth of use, a hundred years' worth of being forgotten must pile up before an object at last opens its eyes.

Yet the same book that wrote that tradition wrote this on the next line — since the Spirit Realm opened, the number of yoma has grown. A discarded object becomes a tsukumogami. This era is the era of the most yoma (What Is a Yoma). Therefore this document declares at the outset. In an age when the Spirit Realm is open, the reckoning of years differs. A hundred years is the reckoning of a closed age. The years of an open age do not flow by their count — they flow by the concentration of heart. Sooner than a mortar that rolled about heedlessly for a hundred years, a flashlight that lingered five years with a single heart awakens.

And is there, in this era, an object on which heart steeps more thickly than the object of one taken by Kamikakushi? It is the last fragment of an age one cannot return to, the last voice of a dead family, the trigger never pulled in the end. An object that takes upon itself four hundred years' worth of longing — as for concentration, it is filled to the limit from the very start.

The canon has already made a name for such an object. Spirit-Realm Wandering Treasure (靈界鬼物) — an object that, having strayed from time, drifts (Masterwork Compendium). If the canon's Spirit-Realm Wandering Treasure is a blade that flowed out of the Spirit Realm, the drifted relic is the reverse direction of that road. Coming from the future, living through this era together with a person, growing old in this era, finishing Depletion — a thing on whose silence heart has pooled and come to bear spirit-power. The word "tsukumogami candidate" that the cards of the 03 series wrote in their "Value After Silence" field, the promise Vehicles passed on, saying "the story of the day something truly dwells in the iron shrine is taken up over there" — that final field is all this document.

Imagine a hundred years hence. If the Sengoku has ended and an age of peace has come — in the appraisal ledger of some treasure house there will be a line that reads, "origin unknown, a lamp (燈) that gives off light of itself." The tellers of strange tales of that age will reckon it a common tsukumogami. With no one asking from what age that lamp came. The Kamikakushi is consumed and vanishes — but the object remains, and becomes a story.

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#Law 1 — The Place of the Drifted Relic and How to Read It

#It Is Not a New Category

The drifted relic is not a new category but a sub-case of the canonical Spirit-Realm Wandering Treasure. It satisfies as is the definition of "an object that, by its era, cannot exist in this era," and it receives as is the four lore rules of the Spirit-Realm Wandering Treasure too.

• Choosing the master — only the heart it sees differs. If the canon's blade saw bloodlust and rectitude (義), the drifted relic sees longing and reason. That is the "bond condition" field of each card.
• Spiritual trace — the onmyoji and the master of perception read a faint yoki or shinki from the drifted relic. That the onmyoji at the graveside set out on the road instead of performing rites was because the grain of that trace was not resentment.
• Risk of loss — when the bond runs out, the object leaves the hand. Instead of returning to the Spirit Realm — it goes to the end of its own story (the "Value After Silence" field of each card).
• Time rift — the drifted relic too is counted in the number of Spirit-Realm Wandering Treasures. Gather three or more in one place, and the gate of that place stirs. A scenario hook just as the canon has it.

The place in the game rules is not made anew either. The equipment slot and the principle of acquisition are the same as the masterwork — scenario reward, inheritance, spoils. Not for purchase. And it cannot be starting drifted goods — what is in the backpack of the Kamikakushi is only a living object, on which heart has not yet pooled (The Principles of Drift).

#The Boundary of Relic and Yoma

When a silenced object holds years and heart, the road forks into two strands.

The boundary is one line. While it can be held, it is a relic; once it walks out, it is a yoma. A flashlight that lights by itself is a relic — the light is merely willful, but it is within the hand. Once that flashlight begins to roll about on its own in the dead of night and bewitch people, from that day it is not a card of this document but a stat block of the canon. fc does not rewrite that block.

#How to Read a Card — Seven Fields and Two Fields

The card follows the seven-field standard format of Depletion System Law 4 with two fields added — fields added for this document only, the grammar borrowed from the masterwork-implement supplement volume. The bond condition field borrows the ownership-condition grammar of The Relationship of Weapon and Master, and the room for tatari field borrows the curse-design principle of Curses, Blessings, Devotions. Their 1st principle comes along too — a curse is not a penalty but a mechanic of choice. Tatari is not a trap that punishes the PC, but a transaction in which the PC chooses what to receive and what to give.

The two standard fields change in grain in this document.

• [Depletion] — for the most part, none. These objects have already passed the end of Depletion. The battery is dead, the fuel has dried up, and yet they move — in the place where a unit ought to be, a reason is written instead.
• Degradation Special — replaced by a single common special. The drifted relic does not receive the 4 degradation stages, maintenance does not take, and it does not even need maintenance. Breaking it is possible — destroy the original form and what dwells within scatters (ignoring the Wounds reckoning, the same grain as the weakness of the canonical tsukumogami). But where the scattered heart goes becomes a question the GM must answer on the spot.
• Value After Silence — since it is an object already beyond silence, this field is read as "after the heart is loosed." On the day the bond meets its end and the spirit-power sleeps, what remains.

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#Law 2 — Six Sample Drifted Relics

All six are scenario rewards. The fifth — the iron shrine — alone has even its card as GM-only. The tale of origin before each card is not ornament but half the data — the bond condition and the tatari all come out of those few sentences.

#Goblin-Fire Flashlight (鬼火懷中電燈)

The master was a Kamikakushi who did not survive the first winter. In a mountain hut he lit the flashlight every night and shone it toward the pass — because he believed his companions, scattered on the same night, would see that light and come find him. The battery died in the autumn of that year, and the master died in the winter of that year. What came down the mountain in spring was the flashlight alone — and ever since, this lights by itself whenever a person of the night road is in peril. The village called it a goblin-fire and feared it, but those who followed that light and came back alive already number three.

#Voice-Holding Tablet (納聲牌)

The master was a Kamikakushi who, on the fifteenth of every month, would climb the hill behind and speak for a long while into a dead screen. The power went out in the second month of having crossed over. The monk gathering the relics after the master died abroad was struck with terror — for on the night of the fifteenth, the black tablet floated up white by itself and asked, in the voice of a young child, "When are you coming?" Ever since, once a month, on the night of the fifteenth alone, the tablet replays the stored voices in order. The same words, in the same order — the words of absence left by a family four hundred years away.

#Unrusting Scalpel (不錆手術刀)

The master was a medical worker who crossed over with a single house-call bag — a Kamikakushi who cut and stitched for twenty more years in this era. Though it had never been put to a whetstone the blade did not die, and from some year on the places cut by this blade no longer festered. On the day the renowned physician died the disciples divided the relics, but the blade alone clung to the bottom of the box and fell into no one's hand. After it was left empty for three days, when the youngest disciple, who had wiped the master's hands all his life, took it up — it came along obediently.

#Homeward Needle (歸路針)

It was the compass of one who walked the mountains. The master walked toward the north all through the first year of having crossed over — believing that going north, he could at least tread the land where his home had been. One morning, the needle abandoned the north. The master raged, wept, and in the end followed the needle — and where the needle stopped was not the north but before the mountain hut of the companion scattered on the same night. Even after the master grew old and died the needle did not return to the north. Even now it points to the place the one who holds it must return to.

#Iron Shrine That Carried a Thousand (千人鐵祠) — GM-Only

There was a night bus hidden away whole with its passengers aboard. The body, its fuel spent, stopped at the entrance of a village where the great highway ran out, and the passengers scattered into their own stories, and the lump of iron alone remained. At first it was a roof to keep off the rain, and next a traveler's bed, and in one year of poor harvest the children of the village wintered inside it. After that winter the village began to build an altar and offer rice cakes — for all came to know that one who sleeps within the body does not dream a bad dream. Counting together the guests it carried in its running days and the guests it sheltered after it stopped, it is long since it passed a thousand.

To the GM. Tie this vehicle to that night bus that the sample characters of this volume rode across, and the starting point of the campaign becomes a sanctuary just as it is — you need not tie it. "The day something dwells in the iron shrine," which the ruin-becoming grammar of Vehicles promised, is precisely this card.

#The Last Single Round (最後一發)

The master was a Self-Defense Officer who crossed over from a disaster dispatch — the live rounds in his backpack came to fewer than ten. Nine rounds were spent on the road of the first year. The tenth round — one night, before the brow of a nobushi who had surrendered and lay prostrate — he did not fire in the end. He drew that one round from the chamber and carried it in his breast all his life, and dying, pressed it into the hand of the companion beside him and said, "I pray you have no occasion to fire it. Should you have occasion to fire — take the reason first."

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#Law 3 — Homebrew Guide: The Formula of the Threefold Product (Scene Tool)

This section is a Scene Tool — not a rule but the GM's workbench. Roll the table, choose from it, or override it, as you like.

#The Formula

the nature of the relic = the original function × the years dwelt × the heart of the last master

the original function  — the skeleton of the effect. Either an extension of the function (what gave
             off light protects with light) or a reversal (what cut now saves).
the years dwelt     — not the count of years. A variable that multiplies the count of years by
             "the concentration of heart." Sooner than a heedless mortar a hundred years
             old, a flashlight that lingered five years with a single heart awakens —
             just as the reckoning of §Scent.
the heart of the    — the foremost of the three. The bond condition and the direction of the
last master        tatari all come out of here. The heart is the lock, and the heart is the thorn.

#Generator — 3-Column d10

The assembly is three steps. Column 1 gives the skeleton of the effect. Column 2 gives the strength and the cycle — the thicker the concentration, the closer the effect is to always-on; the thinner, the farther it recedes toward 1 time a fifteenth, 1 time a scenario. Column 3 gives the bond condition and the tatari — only one who knows that heart forms the bond, and a thorn grows on the hand that defies that heart.

Give it a roll — get 4·8·1 and it is "what pointed the way × guarding the side of the dead × I want to return." The Homeward Needle comes out almost as is. The six samples of this document are all points on this table.

#The Cap — The Line Not Crossed

The values of a generated relic the GM decides, but they do not cross the line the six samples drew.

• An always-on bonus is up to +2. For most, +1 is the fitting garment.
• A check-less hit or automatic success is up to 1 time a scenario — and like The Last Single Round, attach a condition of the heart as well.
• A Wounds effect is up to 2 Wounds (a Critical Hit 3 Wounds). Above that is not the vessel of a drifted relic.
• A devotion technique is not made. That is a slot of the Divine Treasure, and not elevating a masterwork into a Divine Treasure is just as in the principle of the masterwork-implement supplement volume.
• Make the tatari a mechanic of choice. Not an automatic punishment but a transaction — the PC must be able to choose what to receive and what to give.
• Awaken and walk, and it is a yoma. In that instant fold the card and open the stat block of the canonical tsukumogami.

Lastly, one line to the GM who makes one. The effect of a drifted relic is not a reward of strength but the reverberation of a story. The instant the table takes up this object and asks, "Whose was this?" — the card has fulfilled its part.

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The gun rings sixty times and falls silent. But the silence is not the end — when a spent future holds the heart of this era, the object begins its own story from then on.