Aunt Setsuko had once whispered that his mother could use the Blood Needle—a Tsusano bloodline technique wherein the jijaka put a finger to their enemy’s body and froze a drop of the victim’s blood into a needle thin and sharp enough to pierce major blood vessels and lethal pressure points. Mamoru’s jovial aunt could easily have been joking just to scare him; she liked to do that, and local lore had no shortage of horror stories about Tsusano blood manipulation.

