Dialogue with the Spirits of the Skin
A Mystical Beauty Saga

Season 1 – When the Moon Descends: The Tale of the Loquat Spirit

Episode 9: Proof of Fermentation

Returning to the farm, it was just past 4 p.m.
Kodama Takano parked the Aston Martin quietly behind the storage hut.
Though daylight remained, the air already carried a chill.

A few steps into the field, he stopped short.

—It was devastated.

Broken branches and dead leaves strewn across the ground.
Among them, crushed fruit—
loquats split open, pulp spilling, darkened as it mingled with soil.

—Another tornado must have passed after that night.

It was nothing like the place he had seen a week ago, beneath the full moon.
Then, the orchard had been alive with fragrance.
Now, silence.

“…With winds like that, no wonder it’s come to this.”

Takano’s voice was low, shoulders slightly hunched at the memory
of the tornado’s terrible force he had first witnessed that week.

Behind him came the faint rasp of a broom across the earth.

“It was the night you left,” Shimabukuro said.
“Another tornado came.
It took pieces of the orchard—branches, leaves, fruit.
Plenty fell.”

His voice held the quiet pain of one who had watched over the land for years.

“But… maybe it happened for a reason.”

Takano lowered his eyes.

At his feet, partly hidden beneath broken branches,
lay a single loquat.

Its skin was richly orange, ripened to the last.
Slightly split, it rested half-buried in a bed of fallen leaves.

Takano crouched, brushed the leaves aside, and took it in hand.

“—Ah…!”

The jolt struck instantly.

Every nerve reversed its flow.
His vision burned.
Muscles seized.
Electricity raced his spine.

He collapsed to one knee.

“…hah…hah…”

His sight wavered.
His breath would not come.

Shimabukuro’s voice rang out,
shouting from far away.

“Takano-san!?
Are you all right!?
Hey—!”

Then even that voice drifted off.

Sound vanished.
Air froze.
Light dulled.
Gravity warped, time bent.

The world turned inside out.

And he was at the center.

Contours dissolved,
leaving raw sensation.
Utter stillness—
yet everything spoke.

—He saw it.

The fruit.
The leaves.
Moist air.
Okinawa’s sharp swing of temperatures.
Moonlight.
All of it—forming a single structure.

The night of the full moon.
The fall of the moon.
The instant the moon sank deepest toward the horizon,
sap swelled within plants,
fruit too heavy to cling to the branch.

And its own bed.
The place where loquats fall by themselves—
onto a carpet of their own leaves.
There dwell the natural microbiota,
the very agents of fermentation.

They alone set the fruit upon its course.
And Okinawa’s day–night contrast quickens it.

Thus—

The loquat can begin its own fermentation,
with no hand but nature’s.

These conditions aligning—
this alone awakens the material.

—Fufu. At last, you see it.

The quiet voice returned.

Takano remained kneeling, gazing at the fruit.
The pain had gone.
Only deep, profound recognition remained.

The material chooses itself—
its time, its place, its environment.
And to teach him this truth—
perhaps the spirit had allowed even a tornado.

A sacrifice made,
so that he might understand.

At his chest, the vial of Shisui rang faintly.
A sound small, yet unmistakably in reply.

That night beneath the full moon,
Takano had kept every loquat harvested with Shimabukuro.
Now he carried them to OIST once more.
This time, the ferment would be prepared with full understanding.

The fruit: ripe loquats gathered on the night of the full moon.
On their skins lingered faint traces of the microbiota
that lived upon their fallen leaves.

He recreated Okinawa’s natural conditions:
temperature, humidity, day–night difference.
Everything nature had revealed,
now repeated deliberately, by design.

Days later—
gold shimmered in the beaker.
Its bubbles rose gently.
Its fragrance was deep and true.

When Takano touched the liquid, it trembled softly.
The Shisui at his chest chimed in answer.

—It had responded.

Proof that the material had awakened.
Not mere understanding,
but recreation.

Still, he sought confirmation.
Was this material truly unique?

He designed a control:

• Loquats harvested at the full moon, carefully preserved
• Loquats harvested on a normal morning

All other conditions identical—
the microbes, the climate, the process, the equipment.
Only the timing of harvest differed.

The results:
The fermentation from full-moon loquats showed 1.35 times the efficacy of the ordinary harvest.

Not a number alone.
It reflected difference in vital force.

The fruit had endured Okinawa’s contrasts of heat and chill,
accepted the microbiota from its own leaves,
and was already prepared to ferment.

That strength—the readiness to endure fermentation—
determined the depth of the result.

Ordinary fruit could not withstand such a trial.

Only that which grew in nature,
received the moon’s fullness,
and was taken at its destined moment
bore fermentation’s resolve.

Science, at last, had measured what nature ordained.

“…I see.”

Takano pressed a hand gently over the vial of Shisui.

Nature had aligned all things,
and revealed them.
When the material awakens.
Where fermentation begins.

And whether one can perceive it.
That, he now knew,
was the question for a Kewaishi.

—The spirits never stay silent.
You only need to listen.