Kyuden Shika

"In the desert, all life is scarce, even spiritual ones. It's a law of average thing. On average, the desert is lifeless and spiritually dead. In practice, there are some spots with huge density of people and powerful magic. The later being among the secrets of the desert I myself do not know.

But indeed, when going through the desert, bad spiritual encounters are very low on my list of things to worry about, far beyond earthly concerns like water and tempests. So, from that point of view, it's the Ningen-doest of place."

"So... that doesn't sound too different from the description of the Kuni wastes that I got from Kuni Yasu. A spiritually and physically dead place where next to nothing grows or lives," he says. "I wonder if they look much the same too?"

"Oh, I didn't tell you that one legend?

Well, this one is as close to actual history as possible, from the ruins and dried-up riverbeds and basins that one can find through the desert if they look for them. Centuries and centuries ago, the Burning Sands were a far more hospitable place.

Then, something happened. Something extremely quick and destructive. The stories of the survivors tell it only lasted for one day, but by the end of it, the Sands were as we know them now.

There are many theories on what happened on that Day of Wrath. And no way to be sure about any of them.

One of them is that Amaterasu unleashed her full strength on an evil walking through what was before, destroying it at the cost of the land itself.

So the comparison with the Kuni wastes is... very much appropriate."

"Interesting. If that's the case, I'm curious if the Kuni have considered visiting there for research. They apparently do a lot of work to make the Kuni wastes livable and navigable," he says, apparently with a similar level of curiosity as Yasu herself.

"... Didn't even think about it. Kind of took for granted they already knew about it. The Unicorn and the Crab always had a good relationship, and that's very much the kind of information that is likely to have been shared freely between our clans since centuries.

I'm wondering the other way around actually, if the spells that created the Kuni wastelands are not inspired by things the Kuni found in the Sands even before the return of the Unicorn. History has proven that it's very much possible to join the Sands directly from the Crab lands after all, and the Kuni are curious and obstinate people.

Or maybe it was the other way around, with some traveler from the Sands ending up somehow in Rokugan. Lots of possibilities here. Maybe all true, maybe all false."

"I suspect that folks from outside the empire would fund a much colder reception than the other way around. We don't even like the yobanjin and they jave been neighbors as long as there has been an empire." He seems a bit annoyed by that.

"I know that it's probably not the popular opinion in the empire, but I think it's just a waste of life to be fighting ove a few miles difference in where two people grew up."