The story
Fiction and adapted settings written by Akitsora Gaming for this title, including invented dialogue and events. This is not a historical or folklore reference. The rules and specification tables define the gameplay and math.
The paper door slides open on an Edo studio scented with animal glue and pine-soot ink.
Across the tatami lies a folding screen—a painting from afar, a thousand tiny squares up close.
I. The Art of Painting by Squares
Among the playful masterworks of Edo-period painting is the technique known as masume-gaki, or grid painting. The artist first rules a blank folding screen into a fine lattice of tiny squares, then prepares eight mineral pigments—vermilion, ochre, young-leaf green, ultramarine, purple, peach, brown, and ink—filling the lattice one square at a time.
Seen from across the tatami room, plumage and crest blend into a living creature; seen nose-to-paper, every feather is a mosaic of distinct colour blocks. Whenever matching squares join up, down, left, or right into a cluster on the grid, they clear away to reveal the hidden underdrawing beneath that cell.
II. A Stroke of the Painter's Brush
Cross-legged beside the folding screen, the painter studies the lattice and touches the paper with a loaded brush. In a single fluid stroke, all the neighbouring squares around the tip take on whichever pigment is most common among them, binding scattered blocks into a sweeping cluster that cascades across the screen.
Out on the sunlit wooden veranda, tame roosters and hens wander past the open shoji doors, tilting their heads to peer at the emerging artwork on the floor before returning to peck at spilled grain in the courtyard. Only the soft whisper of bristles on paper breaks the stillness of the afternoon.
III. Living Birds Step from the Screen
Paint enough cells of the screen within a single base-game spin, or gather the artist's red seals once the cascades settle, and the studio enters Screen Complete. Throughout these free spins, every cell of the underdrawing that has been uncovered stays visible on the folding screen from round to round.
Hidden within the lattice are three birds of ascending splendour: the proud rooster, the iridescent peacock, and the mythic phoenix. The moment every square belonging to one of these creatures is painted in, it ruffles its feathers and steps right out of the screen to multiply every cascade that follows.
IV. The Final Vermilion Seal
When two or all three birds have stepped out onto the studio floor together, their multipliers multiply one another, turning every cluster of pigment on the screen into a radiant finale. At last the master presses his vermilion seal in the corner, signing the finished folding screen.
From humble mineral colour squares to living birds stepping off gold leaf, the studio's mosaic is the artistic heart of the game rather than a promise: every cascade, brush stroke, and symbol drop is governed solely by the server's random number generator.