>>5822462“Crab realm though? From what I’ve learned, there’s real life, what we call the Impure World. And then parallel or underneath there are, like, tons of layers of spirit realms. Everyone has a different idea of what the construction of the universe is really supposed to look like. Um… Like, if the spirit realms are reflections of really specific aspects of things in the Impure World with all the extras shaved off, or if the Impure World is just a reflection of all the spirit realms superimposed on the same mirror all at the same time, all mixed together and layered on top until they show only one thing. The plane of crabs is just the crab reality. It’s like our world, but only the aspects relevant to crabs. There’s a frog realm, a dog realm, pretty much everything… Probably. Though most don’t have a tangible enough connection with us to visit. To access another plane there needs to be a bridge, anchored on both sides. Normally a human or something that wants to visit, and a denizen of the other place that wants to let them in. Though there could be other, weirder connections, like a tree kami that wants to access the plane of water, and a kami of water that wants to be soaked into a tree. Sometimes weird things like that can happen… There are specific planes. Like, Naoki probably has a plane that he visits when he sleeps, the Naoki realm. Broad planes, like maybe a plane of Konoha that touches all of us… But most planes don’t have denizens that are capable of making intelligent choices, so there are no bridges unless there are weird accidental touches that only happen extremely rarely and on accident. Some people think there’s a plane of Humans too, which touches a lot of other planes because we’re the dominant force in the Impure Land. Our spiritual plane touching others is what probably gives spirit beings like crabs and frogs the ability to think or talk. Most spirits that can think and talk apparently don’t like us much, because we’re considered aggressive at best or power-hungry conquerors at worst… Everything is really interconnected… I think that the rice demon was probably just a rice kami who formed a bridge between itself and a plane like the realm of blood, and through some bizarre union spawned something completely new that was insane and couldn’t cope with its existence. That’s what separates a demon from other types of spirits. Them being broken, confused, and not fitting in anywhere in the rest of reality without destroying everything they touch to make room for themselves to grow… Though the great crab sage told me that while demons are universally bad at the start because they break the natural order merely by existing as new things that shouldn’t be, that’s just what happens when new concepts are born. Like, if the rice demon were left alone for another few hundred years of destroying and killing it would have learned enough about itself to figure out what it was and relax as it became a new concept.”
