People say cursed when they do not know who. They say hexed when they do.
My name is Ren Kagetsuki. The words mean the same thing in English, but that difference in how people use them is real, and it tells me what I am looking at before anybody explains anything.
Something aimed at a person has to be removed differently from something sitting on a house, and the reason is the anchor.
How to tell it was aimed at you
Two tests, and both take a night.
The travel test. Sleep somewhere else. If it comes with you, it is on you. If the night is clear and the trouble is waiting at home, the house is the subject.
The brief test. Write down which part of your life is failing. Then write down which parts are fine.
Something aimed has a brief. One area is taken apart with unusual precision while the rest holds together.
People apologise for that when they write to me. They say it cannot be a hex because their friends are fine and they still like their job.
Precision is not evidence against. It is evidence that somebody was asked for something specific.
The anchor
Anything aimed at a specific person has to be tied to that person somehow. In Japanese the stand-in is called katashiro.
There are four, and which one was used changes almost nothing about the removal, which is the point of this section.
- A full name and a date of birth. The commonest by a wide margin. Enough on its own and it always has been.
- A photograph. Taken from an album, or asked for in a conversation that had no reason to need one.
- Something physical. Hair, a garment worn against the skin, an object you handled often.
- Nothing at all. Sustained attention, held long enough and precisely enough, with no material involved.
That last one surprises people and it is a large share of what I see.
Why you cannot get the anchor back
This is the fear people write to me with at two in the morning. They have my hair. They have a photograph.
You are not getting it back, and you do not need it back.
Your name and birth date cannot be retrieved either, and they are the commonest anchor of all. If retrieval were necessary, nothing could ever be removed from anybody.
The work is not done on the anchor. It is done on the line running from it to you.
Cut that, and the object in their drawer becomes an object in a drawer.
Going to retrieve it means going near the person, which is the one thing I would ask you not to do, and it also tells them the work landed.
Removal that accounts for the aim
Four stages, and the difference from a house clearing is entirely in the third and fourth.
- Clear. Coarse salt in a hot bath, fifteen to twenty minutes, rinsed off from the head down. No bath is not a problem, and most of the world does not have one. Salt in a bowl of hot water over the shoulders, or worked in wet palms over the neck and wrists, rinsed downward.
- Guard. Coarse salt dry-fried five minutes until it stops crackling, carried in cloth. Cones at the door, changed each morning.
- Cut the line. Three consecutive nights, no name on anything.
- Seal the route, so that the same anchor cannot be used again. This is the stage a house clearing has no equivalent of.
Without the fourth stage the anchor is still in their possession and still usable, which is why aimed work comes back where house work does not.
A fortnight of quiet and then a return is that exact situation.
What not to do about the person
- Do not confront them. It reopens the channel and confirms the work is landing.
- Do not send anything back yourself while angry. A return with a wish in it stops being a return.
- Do not tell mutual friends. It arrives as gossip and gossip completes the circuit.
- Do not go looking for the object. In their house, in their bin, in their car.
Every one of those is an attempt to act on the anchor, and the anchor is the one part of this that is genuinely out of reach.
If you already know who
Then you have most of what I need, and none of it goes into the working.
Tell me the name and what happened between you, when it started, and which single part of your life is taking the weight.
The name is information for the reading. It is never written down and it is never held during the work: the three questions that decide the method.
It is carried out from here, with nothing required of you and no contact with anybody: what the work involves.
And whatever they are holding, they can keep it. It stops being connected to you.
