>Shrug slightly with our left arm.
>Can we be exorcised like ghosts can? Because that would be bad. More specifically, do ghosts and youkai have any commonalities in that regard, that we are aware of?
>You give a little shrug with your free arm. Murasa continues to watch the pair of you with a wary expression, but doesn't immediately say anything else.
>You don't...
think so. At least not in quite the same way - your connection to the physical world is much more concrete than theirs. But youkai do share with ghosts a susceptibility to spiritual attacks and can sustain great damage from them, even where a human would shrug off the very same thing. Of course, you're a lot more resilient against mundane injuries, and those tend to be far more common.... But now that you think on it, you wouldn't be at all surprised if Karu had some anti-youkai techniques in her repertoire, but your life has already been effectively in these pirates' hands for a while, so you suppose this isn't really any worse.
>The look of focus on Karu's face deepens. She holds her free hand up to her face and makes a seal with it, and then another. She seems to be chanting something under her breath, but the sounds don't mean anything to you - a mantra of some sort, maybe? You feel your head start to tingle oddly where the paper touches it. It isn't really an
unpleasant sensation, though you find yourself feeling just a little bit guarded after your last train of thought. But nothing worse seems to happen; the tingling intensifies a but, but never becomes painful, and the rest of you feels the same as before.
>"Well,
that's interesting..." Karu eventually says, then pauses a moment. "Try letting go of the sword. Just a little."
