There are certain places in this world that most people would think twice about entering, either out of respect for the people or things that remained within the confines of said space, or simply because they were scared. These places can be anything, it's the reason why houses are supposed to be sacred - People expect to be able to be left alone in their own place, where they can have absolute privacy and do what they want as long as they're not breaking the law. It was what led to the expression "a man's home is his castle". However, there were also a lot more worrisome areas that people were unwilling to go into, and these tended to be from fear rather than out of respect. These could be old churches, abandoned villages, or even windy moors.

One of these places was the place known by the public simply as "Bloody Cemetery". Now, you'd think people would want to have a better name for a place where they lay their love ones down to rest for all eternity, after all it would seem like you would want to respect the body of your family members, since you clearly loved them enough to pay for their burial and for their service, otherwise they most likely wouldn't even get a grave, but the name wasn't the true one. There had been a name for the cemetery, an actual beautiful name that spoke of who owned it, but that was a long time ago and now there were very few people who actually knew it, and one of those people did not happen to be Kai. He knew very little about the graveyard, his family tending to burn their corpses or just ignore them since quite a few Hozuki members turned to water when they died, flowing back into the sea of life. However, he did know why the name "Bloody Cemetery" came about, though a part of him wished he didn't.

See, the cemetery was the place of a series of gruesome killings, and they were still happening to this day. People would go missing after they visited a grave, and as such cremation was becoming more and more favored by the village, people not wanting to risk their own lives to be able to visit the bodies of those they love. Sometimes those people who disappeared had their own reason for disappearing - Many missing-nins from Kirigakure went missing after they lost a loved one and felt like they couldn't continue to fight for a village that they saw as defunct and cruel to it's people, leading them to run away after they had paid visit to the one they had lost to either "get their approval" or to say sorry to them for what they were about to do -, but there were also people who had no control over whether they wanted to disappear or not. These people could be seen happy as someone on a highly powerful substance (being high on a drug called life, some might say), and the next just not be there any more. If it wasn't for the fact that they almost always turned up sooner or later, people might actually have begun to wonder whether there was a slavery ring that was being fueled by the people that they abducted from the graveyard. However, whilst they turned up, it could be said that that was not what people wanted at all. People turned up... dead.

If there was a human killer of those people, then they were amazingly skilled at their craft because they had never been caught despite the fact that these murders had been going on for years, maybe even decades. Every so often, people would just turn up dead after visiting a grave here, some with their throats cut, some who seemed like they had either been poisoned or like they had dropped dead from a heart attack. But, whatever the method of their murder had been, the fact remained that they were still as dead as a doorknob. Out of those who went missing and didn't become missing-nin, there were only four people who had ever managed not to be found within a few days. People attributed those four to being kidnapped by someone from the village, or perhaps a Ronin who wanted to turn the poor sods that they stole into slaves, selling them across the continent for ryo. With those four people out of the picture, that still left over a hundred people who had been killed by someone... or perhaps something.

It was the very fact that their killer wasn't caught yet that caught the public's attention, and thus superstitions were made about the place. Everywhere that couldn't be explained properly wound up with superstitions sooner or later, it was a fact of the world that people would always come up with an explanation despite how unlikely it was that that was the case. There were no murder cases in the history of the village that didn't have at least five different theories based around it, people never seemed to agree on which was the correct belief and it seemed like it was the case with this cemetery as well. Some people claimed that it was secretly the hiding place of serial killers, where they were able to hunt and feast on the blood of "innocent" people without concern, which was the theory that Kai bought into since it was quite frankly a hell of a lot more realistic than any of the other explanations, whereas others preferred the more supernatural twist of the story.

They claimed, despite having no proof to actually back this up, that the place was haunted by the ghosts of Shinobi who were killed in battle before their time and that, embittered at the fact that their life was taken from them, they haunt the cemetery, killing people so that they wouldn't have to be alone in this place, forever haunting the area and never being able to rest, the spirit population rising all the time. Now, not only was that actually a really stupid concept, after all how would a ghost kill someone, if spirits were able to pass through walls as people claimed, then they would have no ability to interact with the human world. If they were able to interact with solid things, then they would still be buried under the soil and thus would not be a problem. Still, whether or not it was logical (which it bloody well wasn't)

It wasn't all that surprising that people would come up with superstitions like that - People always seemed to be trying to justify the way the world worked by giving it scientific explanations, and when that was impossible, people turned to the supernatural because they couldn't find an answer in the natural. It was the same reason that some gullible, foolish people believed in there actually being a god.They honestly believed there was an old man who lived in the sky that looked over everything and always knew everything that you did and everything you thought about. Not only that, but he had a list of ten things he told everyone never to do and if you did any of those ten things you would go to hell and burn and rot for all eternity in anguish and pain and suffering that you could never escape from... but he LOVED you!

Kai was not one of those people, those foolish fools who clearly had no concept of logical analysis or whether things actually seemed like they made sense, and whilst he tolerated people's belief in god since he was never one to break another person's delusions unless they personally inconvenienced him he still believed that they were wrong, and that if there were people going missing around here, people who were being slaughtered, then it was surely because of a malignant presence, such as the presence of murderers. Things could always have a scientific explanation, and there was no point in seeing things otherwise. Besides, he was a Buddhist - A belief in reincarnation was clearly much more plausible than a belief in an omnipresent, omniscient and omnibenevolent god.

So, believing that this place was haunted by actual killers rather than spirits who had somehow gotten lost on the cycle of reincarnation, Kai had come here today armed to the teeth. It was, perhaps, a little bit worrying to him that his weaponry was so basic and meager, his sword rusty and a little blunt despite how much he sharpened it, his bow able to break it's string at a moment's notice, but whatever the case might be, he slipped his bow off his body, getting it ready in case he was jumped. His hand moved back to the quiver, taking off the cap slightly and withdrawing an arrow before notching it and pulling back the bow-string, ready to fire should the worst come to the worst. His strength would allow him to keep up the tension for a long time whilst in here, and it was easier than having to withdraw, notch , aim and pull in the moment of a surprise attack. There was no such thing as being too careful, he reminded himself.

Additional Information: