*nods* It's kind of telling that Kou is literally a character out of his own time in some ways, isn't he? I need to go poke through the earlier volumes again, but my memory (blurred by time and lots of cold medication at the moment) wants to say that the rest of the Houtou-jo royals were sealed away somehow at the same time Gyuma-oh was defeated 500 years ago, and have only fairly recently been unsealed/revived/etc. themselves?