The Bureau of Onmyo: Office of Accounts
A hole in the ledger is a curse with its mouth open. Trace three kin of missing cinnabar with your counting rods. Setting: the Heian capital, the Bureau of Onmyo | A court mystery where the account books expose a curse 📖 Synopsis You are a lowranking official who studied arithmetic at the Imperial Academy. The post you have now, happily, been appointed to is the Office of Accounts at the Bureau of Onmyo , the office that governs astronomy, the calendar, divination, and purification. Talismans and shikigami, when you lay bare the trick, are made of paper, cinnabar, and rice. Keeping the ledgers for their purchase and disbursement is the duty of the Office of Accounts. But ten days into your post, you find a strange hole in the Bureau's great ledger. Three kin of cinnabar , once a month, three months running, have vanished with no recipient recorded. Report it to the Deputy Director and he waves it off as an omission by your predecessor. This, when everyone in the Bureau knows that the previous accountant, Unno Shigeharu, has been missing for three months. Just then, rumors begin to spread through the capital: the wells of the Western Capital are running dry one after another, and at the bottom of each dry well, a talisman drawn in cinnabar has been found. Only a month remains until the Great Purification of midsummer. Where in the capital is the unaddressed cinnabar right now, and whose curse has it become? The weight in the storehouse, the amount of cinnabar a talisman needs, the date of the disappearance. Every clue wears the face of a number, lined up on your writing desk. 👥 Characters The onmyoji Hisaka Yukizumi , who does nothing but nap on the veranda of the covered corridor, is an unconventional man rumored to be the best in the Bureau despite his low rank. His catchphrase is "not worth the trouble," and he states flatly that a curse is a transaction, and the greater the curse, the more coin and goods leave their traces in the ledger. The student assigned as your assistant, Sumino Muneyori , is meticulousness incarnate, secretly making copies of every ledger in the Bureau. His "copies of the copies" and the document box left behind by your missing predecessor will become the weapons of your pursuit. 🎭 How to play this story No sword, no spellcraft required. Your weapons are counting rods and ledgers. Examine the great ledger, count the weights in the storehouse, and work out the scale of the curse from the amount of cinnabar one talisman needs. Numbers bow to neither rank nor curses. Even from a single allotment of the consecrated rice that feeds the shikigami, you can read who is working what kind of spell. Shake the napping man awake, encourage the copyobsessed student, and make the accounts balance before the night of the Great Purification. Beyond the balance of the books, a gray old man's mask is waiting.
