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The Three Great Yokai were all deeply entangled with the royal family of Fenglin.
Strictly speaking, all three were slain by the royal family. The shogun had slain Ootakemaru. The Minamoto clan, a branch of the royal family, purged Shuten-Doji. Tamamo-no-Mae had also been slain by them.
Furthermore, the domains of these yokai were all connected to the throne.
Ootakemaru’s Mount Suzuka lay within Ise, whose Saio was an Imperial Princess. The Ise-jingu also had countless ties to the throne. Shuten-Doji’s Mount Oe was under the jurisdiction of Heian Capital, and Tamamo-no-Mae went further by infiltrating the royal palace.
It was well known that the Three Great Yokai were often counted as four, much like the Daoist Three Prodigies frequently included an inexplicable fourth.
The so-called Fourth Yokai was known as the Great Tengu.
The Central Plains also had tales of tengu that devoured the moon. The Classic of Mountains and Seas described them as foxlike hounds. However, Fenglin’s tengu was entirely different. They were tall figures with long red noses and powerful wings on their backs. They wielded...
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