A 100% run in Shadows is mostly a routing problem. The map is large, the provinces are dense, and half the mistakes are doing a region with one character and having to return with the other.
Route a province once
- Decide before you enter a region whether you are clearing it fully — that means both characters, in one trip.
- Do Naoe's Kuji-kiri and Hidden Trails and Yasuke's Katas and Horse Archery on the same pass, swapping rather than travelling twice.
- Viewpoints first: they are the cheapest way to reveal what the province actually contains.
- Leave Legendary Chests until you have the traversal upgrades that make the awkward ones reachable.
- Yamashiro (48) and Kii (45) are the two heaviest provinces — do them late, when both characters are built.
The Kuji-kiri, specifically
It is a memory test, not a reflex test
The prompts fade as the sequence repeats, so the skill is holding the pattern rather than reacting quickly.
Naoe only
There is no Yasuke equivalent at the same spot. If a meditation point will not activate, you are the wrong character.
Twenty-two, across all nine provinces
They are spread rather than clustered, so they are best picked up as you route a region rather than hunted separately.
Each is a Knowledge Point
Which is the actual reason to do them: Knowledge Points gate abilities, so the meditation spots feed your build.
Common time-wasters
- Exploring a whole province as one character and returning later for the other's four types.
- Chasing Legendary Chests before the traversal tools that make them trivial.
- Treating castles as one activity — they are two, and each character's route through them is different.
- Ignoring the merchant types (gear, port, ornament, food) that count toward completion just like the rest.
Cross-checked
Cross-checked on 7 September 2026 against PowerPyx's collectibles guide and its Kii and Yamashiro region pages, which agree on the collectible categories, on which four are character-locked, and on the per-region composition used above. Exact per-region totals for every province were not available from a single source, so this page names only the two it could confirm. What is still unverified is the only thing reading cannot settle — nobody here has played it.