Isles of the Oni
This is my most expansive scene to date. Welcome to the Isles of the Oni, wherein you will find the sum of all my 3D skillsets and knowledge. Maya, zBrush, Houdini, Gaea, Speedtree, Substance, and lots of work inside UE4 itself, from the Material Editor to blueprints to Niagara Effects.
No particular base concept was wholly enforced in the manifestation of this scene, though I'd be remiss not to mention some of the works which served to inspire much of the aesthetic across the isles, including but not limited to Naruto: Shippuden, Japan's Okunoin Cemetery, Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, From Software's Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, One Piece, etc.
Music Credits : Carameii https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gfwpDm7IbI
Shinigami no Shinden | 死神の神殿
( Death's Temple )
We are not just assassins here within the Temple. We are Death's executioners, thus shinigami in our own right. From the moment we begin our lives in the mortal arts, the reapers are disciplined to be three things above all else.
Be swift. Be sudden. And for the sake of all kami, be silent.
That is our law. So long as a reaper abides this simple tenet, he remains a Child of the Temple. And a child of Isshiki, Lord Sage of the Temple, whose battle prowess is beyond the might of mere men.
Shinden no Shima | 神殿の島
( Isle of the Temple )
Inari no Niwa | 稲荷の庭
( Garden of Inari )
We are reapers. Our lives are death, our duties to the Temple.
For most in our order, we die before we ever live, thus a reaper counts his blessings if the kami deem that he should see beyond even thirty. Yet for those so fortunate as to survive into our dotage, there dawns a day on which we must trade our cloaks and blades for sickles and washing stones. Joints ache and bones creak like old hinges, thus we are given little choice but to lay down our swords and longbows, our kanabō and kusarigama.
We abandon our skills to rust like a katana left forgotten in its scabbard. So too ends a reaper's life. We find ourselves as men again, released from our vow to adjudicate as shinigami. Yet we are ever Children of the Temple, now tasked to nourish a new era of reapers just as the elders who came before did for us, though it has been so long that I cannot remember most of their names. I can see their faces, though. There are times I toss a pebble in the lake and see their reflections ripple clear across the waters, solemn and wrinkled and wishing me safe deliverance as I went forth to fulfill my first contract.
Every so often the isles welcome a troupe of biwa hōshi, the lute priests. It is for the elders to host them in our village and feast them at our own table. The troupe master is a leal friend of the reapers, who serves us well as our eyes and ears beyond the isles, a watcher of the wellborn. Lanterns are sent afloat downriver to herald the troupers, who arrive in their caravan of wako galleys to the dim beat of ikko drums and the crispness of toasted rice biscuits in the air. We reapers have our own music, to be sure, our own songs and stories, though it must be confessed that we lack the stagecraft of true showmen, the kitsune masks and the kimonos of crane feathers that so enthrall the little children. Lest their sole amusement in adulthood be found in the execution of orders, the Lord Sage insists the little ones must also be educated in the ways of cheer and celebration. Before their consecration into the Temple, children should be taught that our kami do not thirst for death, that murder is not the only means by which we honor them. I am old enough to recall a time before Lord Isshiki, when such a notion never befell the reapers until their establishment as elders. These were shinigami who never learned to laugh, who considered the desire for peace a symptom of the utterly weak, who found little purpose in a life without death.
Thus every now and then we elders tolerate the biwa hōshi to don their painted faces and flaunt their sacred dances. Our drowsy little village comes alive as paper dragons roar across the sky and the night crackles to the radiance of fireworks. The troupers recite the ancient verses of Tenjin, the poetry god, and kneel in thanks to Uzume for all the joy she brings us. On their wooden stage the lutists strum their strings for Ōkuninushi to heal our wounds and fill our bellies, and the singers call for the eternal favor of Inari, whose garden we elders tend.
Kodomo-tachi no Bochi | 子供たちの墓地
( Graveyard of the Children )
Here abound the souls of shinigami, those Children of the Temple who gave their lives to the service of the kami. We have long lost count of the tombstones, for there are so many, and most are not even etched with names or dates. But they are our oath-brothers, even them from ages before, and so we must honor them.
The Lord Sage himself once told me that if the night is unclouded and the moon is fully waxed, the grace of Tsukuyomi shall befall the Graveyard of the Children, and our forebears shall rise as pale spirits and drink with the oni whom they slew in the days of their duties. I confess to have thought it nonsense for a longer while than most do, but sometimes we elders wake in the night to laughter amidst the tombstones, despite our ears so old and shriveled, and I like to think we hear such noises echo through the moonlit mists when two reapers who died centuries apart are now meeting each other for the first time and mocking what the world has become. Perhaps that is because I am ancient, for men become sentimental fools as the decades hunch our backs and turn our beards grey.
The time is fast coming that I shall be just another tombstone here. In these old bones of mine I can feel it, though I take care not to worry overmuch at such a trifling matter as death. I have sent so many souls to the amatsukami for judgment that I can scarce wish to be spared from their sentence myself. Jigō jitoku. We are given what we give.
Husk of Yobuko
He Who Transcended Into the Ranks of the Akuma
Of all the reapers who lived and died for the Temple, none have exceeded the might of Yobuko, whom the kami struck down in their envy.
To be sure, there is little to offer in the way of concrete evidence for the piecing together of Yobuko's life. As the histories oft demonstrate, tale muddles with truth over the ages in the telling and re-telling of such a warrior's conquests, for words written of ink and words spoken into the air both are wont to fade in the dawn and darkening of centuries, thus we must rely on stories in the absence of written records.
Yet by all accounts, Yobuko was destined to be a great warrior from the earliest days of his boyhood. It even persists that as a mere infant he loved best to play with kunai and shuriken, stashing them in his crib, and preferred the company of shinobi to that of other children. He took up katana-craft at the age of three, the legends tell us, and had his first kill at five.
There is debate among those versed in lore concerning his origins. Some have it that Yobuko was orphaned to the narrow alleys of Heiankyo following the death of his mother, who perished in her sickbed not long after the earliest skirmishes of the Genpei War called his father to arms--and likely, to his own demise. Such is the nature of war, though, to widow women and orphan children. Others will insist that both mother and father earned their tombstones in the Graveyard of the Children as reapers of the Temple, and so left Yobuko to the instruction of the Lord Sage sometime in the late Nara Period.
The Children of the Temple are taught to abandon fear at the advent of our training, for the years which are required to make us into reapers are grim and merciless. Even so, you shall find no man willing to make mention of Yobuko's end, for to speak it aloud has served in the past to remind the kami of their shame and so incite their fury. I shall write the story here rather than give it voice, and pray that Fujin and Raijin are not inclined to smite me where I stand.
Yet allow me first to speak of warriors.
The histories show us that a warrior's worth can be measured by the incentive for which his blade is unsheathed. For many, that lure is wealth. We daydream and hear the clink of silver coins, or elsewise imagine the weight of gem-encrusted gold on our heads. Such avarice has proven time and again to yield the feeblest warriors, weak in both conviction and skill, for he who wishes naught but to grow fat and lavish is damned by his nature to lack the will of one who wishes to grow able and invincible. So others find themselves compelled by reputation, a fierce hunger to hear your name whispered on the lips of monks in their timber monasteries as well as nobles in their tatami halls. Such ambition wakes a dragon within us, rousing a warrior to fight harder and more often so that his name is made known to all the world. And last there is power, the most treacherous motive, forged in red flames of anger and tempered in cold lakes of blood. Power for the sake of more power, the desire to transcend beyond the realms of mortal and divine, which sealed Yobuko's fate. He was ordained into the ranks of the reapers as little more than a child, but despite his undeniable talent for mayhem and murder, there is scarce evidence to advocate that Yobuko ever truly considered himself a Child of the Temple. Swift to renounce our manner of silent service by his deeds and his heart, he began to seek out his own battles rather than await those he was assigned.
I have heard it said by those who claim Yobuko an orphan of war that if a boy must choose between swearing a vow or starving to death, then only a fool might pretend there was any true choice at all. Grain is worth more than gold to one who had the ill-luck to dwell in gutters and alleys. And there are some who blame Yobuko's madness on the chaotic disposition of the stars when he came into the world, while others shall doubtless insist that he was merely seduced by the notion of learning violence under the counsel of seasoned killers. Nothing is certain. Perhaps he donned the silver cloak of our order for no higher virtue than to feed his hunger for blood and battle, I would think.
Nonetheless, at the age when other men took wives and daimyō fathered heirs, Yobuko was no longer content to simply fulfill a contract and dispatch his targets. Our oaths to the Temple demand that we kill, but a reaper's duty goes no further than to make a man into a corpse, for it is the business of the amatsukami in their heavenly realm to pass judgment on the dead. Yet it was not long before Yobuko was inclined to slaughter for his own amusement, we are told, then robbed the kami of their sentence in his vile habit of devouring the souls of oni and warriors and farmhands alike, loosing his hatred on those who were deserving as well as those who were not. If ever he was entirely human, none who live today can be certain, but most of us suspect that somewhere in his malfeasance Yobuko had become something that was neither man nor monster.
We have ancient records in our annals which tell us that a certain evil haunted the land in those decades. Such chronicles detail both rumors and credible accounts of villages which had been suddenly flooded, of rice fields set mysteriously ablaze, of hot spring onsens and bathhouse sentōs wherein the steaming waters had boiled the flesh of distinguished samurai clean off their bones. We are a superstitious folk, our forebears even more so, thus it was fate that a great sum of these apparent natural disasters should be blamed on vengeful oni, or otherwise chalked up to the mischiefs of the Yōkai. The worst came when our sanctuaries of worship were profaned and plundered, one following another, mocked in depraved acts of sacrilege and desecration. There is a certain forest in the jade mountains where a shrine of oiled black marble is reputed to bridge our earth to the realm of Takamagahara, the High Plain of Heaven, and a wanderer might well chance to witness Izanagi and Izanami thereabout if the wisteria is full in bloom, locked in their eternal dance of the kagura. Perchance it was a band of rogue shinobi who could answer for the sudden beheadings that infested the hallowed shrine waysides, as well as for the hideous mutilation of the bodies left behind for the crows--but report of claw wounds and blade slashes together hint elsewise. Yobuko of the Akuma, who craved to make foes of all the kami, a devil of skin and blood.
Every now and then I do wonder if the sibling deities have missed us these last few centuries, for even today a man is loath to take his wife into the wisteria grove whereupon the sohei warrior monks once brought their lovers to receive the Hiruko no Megumi, the Blessing of the Leech Child. Yet those two have scarce felt our loss, I'll wager. It must be enough for them to dance forever beneath sakura and azalea and matsu whilst the seasons rise and ebb all around them, twirling to the music of trees as the leaves change and fall and blossom again. Others of us are not so blessed. Our dance is death. I have made more widows than I can bear to count, but I took a vow and so tolerate the wails that pierce my conscience.
Reapers who forswear their oaths to the Temple are a blight on the lands of the living, thus it was deemed that Yobuko should die, for every breath he drew served to attaint our sacred duties as shinigami. He was met on a distant slope in the sunset hills, where he faced the full strength of the Temple and the amatsukami, an unforgiving host of all those whom Yobuko had betrayed. As children we are told that Amaterasu led the charge herself, and called the dusk forth to blind him with brilliant swords of scarlet light. Yet to recount the contents of the battle is nothing short of absurd, for so little is agreed therein but for that Yobuko's wrath gave rise to countless tombstones in the Graveyard of the Children.
So humor me, if you would, for a tale of great battle should at least be a little absurd. Yet to even call it a battle does an injustice to those slain there, in truth. I have fought battles, indeed, and this was something much else.
A battle is two hordes of anxious foot soldiers all clad in iron and leather, thick ranks of warhorses pounding the soil and biting the air, shields raised and lances couched in bleak anticipation. Your commander bellows at his men to form up whilst banners of dyed silk snap overhead in a fierce wind. A skin of saké is passed between the rows of men just moments before it all begins, so drown your dread and toast the kami of war, Takemikazuchi. Suddenly the battlefield is a disorder of screams and entrails. Spears are thrust and thrown, prayers go unheard beneath the throes of warriors and impaled kisouma, samurai of great renown are cut down in the blink of an eye and vanish under the reeds. A swarm of arrows is loosed one after another to whistle across the sky and shower down like rain upon the chaos. Footing is lost as horses slip on the blood-slicked dirt and then again as soldiers tumble over the gored bodies of friends and foes alike.
But even that cannot compare to the splitting of earth and heaven as Yobuko was availed his clash against the kami. It lasted for so long that Amaterasu would lay down to rest at moonrise, and her brother Tsukuyomi woke to take her place on the field until the first rays of dawn broke over the horizon. Three days were said to pass before Yobuko was at last felled to his knees, where he took a dozen of Hachiman's arrows to the lungs and throat, thus claiming his breath. Yet even then he roared and took turns dueling Susanoo and Ryūjin, both of whom are monstrous storm kami, and so heaved them from the skies.
It might have ended there, if not for Sarutahiko Ōkami, who surfaced from a crevice deep underfoot to encase Yobuko within a husk of jade and bronze. A few heartbeats went in silence as the legion of reapers and kami believed him subdued, but fissures were then sprouting along the metal's surface. Yobuko was yet able to stir inside his prison. As the cracks went on veining outwards, all fled but for one. The deity of trees Kukunochi willed the thickest roots to rise from beneath the earth and tether Yobuko where he knelt, and bound him there for all time. And it was done. Yobuko was still. At last it was done.
The Children of the Temple make the short pilgrimage to his husk thrice in a year. He remains within, and there awaits our offerings. Perhaps it insults the kami to pay an akuma tribute, though I should think it even less wise to risk incurring the ire of one. Most of us suspect that Yobuko never truly died, truth be told, but merely slumbers as the centuries fade by and the divine roots continue to sap his strength.
The kami bring no thunder to the isles, lest they wake him. And in our offerings we too remain silent, or else Yobuko shall break from his shackles and trample the world.