'A katana with a long single-edged curved blade. A unique weapon wielded by the samurai from the Land of Reeds. The blade, with its undulating design, boasts extraordinary sharpness, and its slash attacks cause blood loss.' The Samurai you can begin the game as is introduced as 'a capable fighter from the distant Land of Reeds. Handy with katana and longbows.' Distant is the word the game chooses; it does not say in which direction the country lies. What it gives instead is a craft and a discipline: the uchigatana, the great katana 'unique to warriors of the Land of Reeds', the longbow, and skills named for its swordsmen, Unsheathe and Seppuku. Its higher register, where the gear has one, is mastery and a good death. Okina's mask: 'The more he sharpened his mind, the more the absurdities of the world came into stark relief. And so Okina renounced it all, and rose to a higher plane. There was only himself. His katana. And its mastery.' The White Reed armor, worn by 'the Inaba, head disciples of the great swordsman Okina,' who 'traveled in pursuit of not only the master who abandoned them, but also proper deaths, won honorably through hard-fought combat. To be a White Reed is to seek death.'

'This Ash of War grants an armament the Blood affinity and the following skill: Seppuku: A forbidden technique used by swordsmen from the Land of Reeds. Plunge the blade into your stomach to stain it with blood. Increases attack power and improves ability to inflict blood loss.' Forbidden, and paid for out of the wielder's own body: power bought with a wound is how the country's fighting arrives here, and blood keeps returning in the objects around it. Eleonora's Poleblade is 'twinned naginata forged in the Land of Reeds. Chosen weapon of Eleonora, Violet Bloody Finger... … but now her legacy is stained by accursed blood.' The country is attached there to the weapon, not to the woman; the game does not say where Eleonora was born, and a line of dialogue holds her contradiction instead: 'But in spite of her cessblood zealotry, Eleonora is a proud knight.' Okina the text does place there, 'swordsman from the Land of Reeds', and Rivers of Blood records the offer his blade drew: 'When Mohg, the Lord of Blood, first felt Okina's sword, and madness, upon his flesh, he had a proposal, to offer Okina the life of a demon, whose thirst would never go unsated.' The helm and the altered armor carry the country's own report of itself: 'The Land of Reeds has long been locked in a miserable civil war, during which time it has remained alienated from the cultures of its neighbors. Little wonder that the entire nation has succumbed to blood-soaked madness, or so it is said.' Home, in this gear, is a mantle of 'withered reeds from the warrior's birthplace. Perhaps its comforts extend to nostalgic thoughts of home.'