Gabrielle: "You know, Xena, I still don't understand. You taught Akemi the pinch. Did she ever use it?"
Xena: "Yes, unfortunately, she did … After a many days' walk, we reached her father's fortress …"
[Inside her father's home, Akemi enters with a mask of death hiding her face.]Gabrielle: "How will you feel when you come face-to-face with Akemi's ghost?"Yodoshi: "Akemi?"
Xena: "Akemi, what are you doing?"Akemi: [placing the pinch on her father] … "You have 30 seconds to live. My brothers, my sisters, my mother, my gentle grandparents, I avenge all your deaths at the hands of this monster. Father …"
Xena: "Father?"
Akemi: "… I pray you suffer in death the way your family suffered in life."Akemi: "It was my duty. He had to die."
Xena: "I don't care about that. What about the ransom? Where's my money?!"
Xena: "I don't suppose there's any inheritance in this!"Akemi: "I have one last thing to ask of you. Restore my honor. The sacred katana."
Xena: "You want me to cut off … that's why you wanted me to take the katana."
Akemi: "After that is done, take my ashes and place them in the family shrine in the town of Higuchi."Xena: "No, no. No, I'm not going to! ... [Akemi skewers herself] ... Akemi …"
Akemi: "I pray you will. 'The snow melts. Flowers fade. And I pass, as all things do.'"
Xena: "You …"
Akemi: "'But time and love, they go on.' Restore my honor, Xena." … [Xena does so]
Harukata: "Better question is how will Xena feel face-to-face with the ghosts of the people she killed at Higuchi?"
Xena: "What?"
Gabrielle: "Who are you?"
Harukata: "My family name is Harukata."
Kenji: "But he's know as the Killer of Ghosts."
Gabrielle: "Xena saved your city."
Harukata: "This time. But that does nothing to atone for what happened when last she was here."
Gabrielle: "What's he talking about?"
Xena: "I was fulfilling Akemi's dying wish to place her ashes at the family shrine here in Higuchi. Word got out that I was honoring the ashes of a girl who had killed her father. The townsfolk felt that I would be defiling her graveyard. They banded together to stop me. I tried to ignore them, but they came after me."
[A very drunk Xena stumbles through the city clutching an urn closely to her. The town folk begin to beat her with sticks, and the urn holding Akemi's ashes is obliterated. As the ashes are carried away by the wind, Xena sobers up enough to set a few guys afire.]Harukata: "The wind took the fire from house to house. Forty Thousand of my townsfolk perished in the flames!"
Xena: "No, it's not possible."
Harukata: "That is only the beginning!"
Kenji: "Akemi told me that after she killed her father, Yodoshi's spirit was so full of evil even the underworld would not allow him to enter. He became Lord Yodoshi, the Eater of Souls. The forty thousand lost spirits were at his mercy. Now he holds them inside him, enslaved."
Xena: "Then I am guilty of a greater evil than I ever thought possible."
Gabrielle: "Xena, it was a horrible accident."
Xena: "No. No, I must put things right."
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