Chapter 458: Let Us Count Your Sins
"This thing the leader sent over... it's really supposed to be that impressive? It just looks like an ordinary mirror to me, yeah."
Uchiha Shisui carried the Karmic Reflection Mirror carefully in both arms as he walked through Ember's main underground corridor. Deidara walked beside him, studying the object with the particular skepticism of an artist confronted with something that did not explode.
"It does sound difficult to believe," Shisui answered, his voice even. "But the leader sent it specifically, with detailed instructions and an explanation of what to expect. That's not something he does without reason. We'll see what it does once we try it."
He paused. "Where's Kakuzu? I haven't seen him."
Kakuzu was someone who tended to take an interest in any situation involving potential value assessments or post-judgment arrangements. His sensitivity to profit had a way of drawing him toward exactly these kinds of proceedings.
"Apparently the leader finally sent over the payment or the handling rights for that batch of goods he promised him. Kakuzu has been a wreck about it for days, barely eating, barely sleeping, irritable about everything. Right now he's probably locked himself in wherever he keeps his money and he's going through it one stack at a time." Deidara gave a slight shrug. "Unless the whole organization is about to collapse, there's no way he's thinking about anything else right now."
Shisui nodded. That did track. The value of three hundred billion explosive tags was sufficient to push everything else out of Kakuzu's priority list entirely, at least for the time being.
They reached the holding area while they were still talking.
The heavy reinforced door, covered in layered seal inscriptions, slid open ahead of them.
An assault of noise came through with the air.
Specifically, a voice. Coarse and carrying, soaked through with aggression, impatience, and a very particular brand of delusional self-importance.
"Let me out! Are you listening to me?! Damn Ember! How dare you treat me like this! These filthy chains! The Jashin Lord will bring divine punishment down on every last one of you! He will destroy you! Tear you apart! You will all be offered as sacrifice!"
The voice had no range to it beyond loud and louder, and the content repeated without variation. Shisui recalled that their leader had specifically flagged a few of the prisoners for priority assessment. Hidan was one of them, a member of the Akatsuki who followed a deity called Jashin, wielded an immortal body, and had built his entire existence around the act of killing.
Shisui didn't know the specifics of what Jashin actually was. He didn't need to. The enthusiasm with which Hidan described the process of inflicting suffering made the general picture clear enough.
He signaled the guard to raise the cell door. The heavy panel lifted.
Hidan was inside, bound thoroughly by multiple chakra-suppressing chains, arms pinned, legs pinned, his body fixed to the center of the cell floor in a way that left him capable of nothing but noise. In a concession to basic decency, the limbs that had been severed from him during the previous battle had been reattached, crudely but functionally, also held in place by the chains. He lay there like something that had been packaged for storage and was deeply unhappy about it, twitching uselessly against his restraints.
"You bastards! What are you staring at?! I'll tell you right now, I am an immortal who has devoted himself completely to the Jashin Lord! There is absolutely nothing you can do to me! Do you hear me?!"
"Nothing! I'm warning you! Even if every last one of you got on your knees right now, crying and begging to convert to Jashinism, confessing all your pitiful sins, I would not spare any of you! Every one of you is getting sacrificed! Every single one! Ha! Ha ha ha!"
His eyes were locked on Shisui and Deidara as they entered. The threats continued without pause.
"So noisy," Deidara said, with the flat displeasure of someone being kept awake by construction work. "Jashin, what a boring name. Doesn't have even a trace of artistic quality to it, yeah." He tilted his head slightly. "Immortal body though? That's a little interesting. Hey, Shisui-senpai, once we're done with the judgment part, any chance I could request him as a long-term close-range observation subject for my art? Test the actual limits of this so-called immortality, yeah?"
"Art?! Ha?! I have absolutely no interest in that soft, girly painting-and-drawing garbage! That sounds like the stupidest thing I've ever heard!"
"Get me out of here! The Jashin Lord requires an offering! A fresh one!"
Hidan clearly could not parse what Deidara meant by art and had apparently decided to treat it as an insult to his faith. His struggling intensified.
Watching what amounted to two people talking past each other with equal sincerity, Shisui exhaled slowly. He reached back and pulled Deidara gently by the shoulder, steering him out of the trajectory of whatever this exchange was becoming. Give it a moment.
Then Shisui stepped forward, calmly lifted the Karmic Reflection Mirror out of the crook of his arm, and set it down squarely in front of Hidan, its face aligned directly with the prisoner's.
Hidan's shouting cut off.
He stared at the mirror, thrown by the complete unexpectedness of being asked to look at himself. For a few seconds he seemed to have no frame of reference for what was happening, which was, for Hidan, apparently sufficient to produce silence.
He glared at the mirror. He looked at Shisui's expressionless face. He looked at Deidara, who was watching the mirror with genuine interest. The aggression was still there but the certainty behind it had been temporarily replaced by suspicion.
The mirror's surface moved. Light shifted across it like something stirring just below the glass. Then text began rising, line by line, carrying that faint blue luminescence.
Subject: Hidan
Direct warfare/non-mission killing: Accounts for more than 85% of total killing activity
Total suffering value: Extreme
Detailed notation: Individual behavior produces suffering values that are statistically anomalous. Hidan's ritual killing method, which involves self-inflicted wounds linked sympathetically to the victim in order to extend and amplify the dying process, produces an average suffering output per kill of approximately three to five times that of conventional methods, accounting for both the physical and psychological dimensions.
Retroactive estimation of deaths directly caused or led by this individual: exceeds one thousand.
Karmic Index: 9.87 (approaching theoretical maximum of 10)
Judgment: A beast clothed in belief. A slave to the sensation of inflicted pain.
Killing for you has never been a means toward any end. It is the end itself. Blood is not a price you pay to receive a blessing. It is the sacrament you drink for pleasure.
Every act of harm in your record belongs entirely to the category of private indulgence and distorted sensory appetite. Under no banner have you ever shown loyalty. In no mission has any purpose been visible beyond your own gratification.
You are not a player moving pieces on the board. You are not a soldier following orders. You are a thing that has made self-consumption and consumption of others the only reason for its existence.
Overall assessment: The purest of willing participants in evil. Your karmic debt has solidified into something with physical weight. You have no desire for redemption, and this soul and body carry nothing left that could be redeemed.
The text sat on the mirror's surface in clean, cool lines, and laid out the inner architecture of Hidan's entire life in terms that left no room for alternate interpretation.
Hidan stared at the words.
First came blankness. Then his eyes lit with offense. With fury. The fury of someone who has been profoundly misunderstood.
"What?! This broken piece of junk dares to talk like that?! Lies! Every word of it!"
His voice cracked into a full scream. "Every single person I killed was gloriously offered up to the supreme and magnificent Jashin Lord! Their lives were transformed into sacred sacrifice to bring pleasure to a god! That was their honor! That was their ticket to eternal peace!"
"Redemption? What do I need to be redeemed for? What exactly did I do wrong?! For those lucky enough to be chosen, to be offered to the Jashin Lord, that was the only meaningful thing their small, worthless lives ever amounted to! The one real salvation available to them!"
"You ignorant fools who know nothing about faith! Using this ridiculous broken mirror to slander me! To slander the Jashin Lord's grace!"
The mirror's text was precise and detailed to a degree that was almost clinical. Hidan's response to seeing it laid out in front of him was not horror or shame or the faintest recognition of what was described. It was outrage that anyone had dared describe it at all. Not a single word of what the mirror said had produced in him anything resembling guilt.
Standing to one side, Uchiha Shisui's expression had gone cold and gray.
"So it's all true," he said, his voice low, pressed out from somewhere deep in his chest. "Every last word of it."
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