The silence of Kuro Gorge was a phantom limb. Asuta felt its absence-of-sound clinging to him for days, a psychic tinnitus ringing in the vault of his mind. The act of dominion—of imposing his will as a cutting edge upon reality itself—had been a victory, but a pyrrhic one. The Unbroken Horizon Sword Art's Form Zero: Unmaking the Discordant Note had not drawn upon some external reservoir of power. It had used the raw, uncut substance of his own spirit as fuel, honing his intent into a blade that severed miasmic whispers from the air. He had won the battle for the gorge by spending his own soul's capital.
The aftermath was a slow, creeping deficit.
It manifested not as exhaustion, but as a pervasive thinness. The mental fortress he'd so carefully built, the wall of silent grey stone against the world's psychic noise, now felt like rice paper. Walking to school, the ambient emotional static of the city—the dull anxiety of commuters, the sparking frustration of a shopkeeper, the hollow loneliness from a window above—seeped through. He could taste Ruri's worry for him, a constant, bitter undertone beneath her usual sharp humor. It was overwhelming, like being naked in a sandstorm.
In his closet-lab, attempting the meticulous focus required for alchemy, he found his spiritual sense—usually a precise, laser-like tool—wavering and diffuse. He over-reduced a batch of capillary-strengthening tincture, the liquid boiling black because he couldn't hold the temperature steady in his mind's eye. The failure was minor, but the implication was catastrophic.
He was a warrior who had just discovered his gleaming, peerless armor had a fatal flaw: it was brittle, and every mighty blow it stopped weakened its internal structure. His body was being tempered into an unbreakable vessel by the Divine God Body Sutra, but his soul—the occupant of that vessel—remained a mortal, fragile thing, exposed and now damaged.
Soul cultivation. The concept was a glaring, terrifying blank spot in his otherwise impeccable preparatory plans.
In his first life, soul arts were the province of the mid-to-upper echelons. They were gentle, nurturing practices—Soul-Nurturing Incantations, Starlight Bathing Meditations, Dream-Walking Sutras. They required a stable foundation, a Qi Sea at the very least, to provide the gentle energy needed to coax the soul's growth. They treated the spirit as a delicate seedling. The idea of actively forging the soul in the Body Tempering Realm was considered not just impossible, but heretically reckless. The soul was connected to the body, yes, but to stress it directly without the cushioning, transformative layer of Qi was to risk shattering the very core of one's being. It was the quickest path to becoming a spiritual cripple, or a mindless beast.
Yet, he had just done exactly that. He had stressed it, wielded it, and now he was paying the price. The Unbroken Horizon Sword Art demanded a soul of adamantine resilience to wield its conceptual severing. Without it, he was a glass cannon in a war against titans—one mighty shot, then splinters.
The fear that crystallized in his gut was colder than any he'd felt since awakening. He had been preparing for an invasion of flesh and power, for armies of immortals and raging spirit beasts. But what if the first attack was subtler? The miasma in the gorge was a crude psychic toxin. What if the Elysian Foundation had devices that could induce spiritual paralysis? What if the Seekers returned with a weapon that broadcast despair? And the wounded Immortal from the Xi Kingdom… a being of that level wouldn't need to lift a finger. A fraction of his divine sense, a mere glance of his will from orbit, could reduce Asuta's mind to paste, leaving his perfectly tempered body an empty, breathing shell.
He needed a soul art. Not a gentle one. He needed a forge. A crucible. He needed to transform his fragile spirit into something that could not just withstand pressure, but grow stronger from it. He needed the spiritual equivalent of the Divine God Body Sutra.
But such a thing, by all the laws of heaven he knew, did not exist for mortals.
His research into Earth's anomalies, once a strategic cataloging of resources and threats, became a frantic, obsessive hunt for a cure. He scoured digital archives of parapsychology studies, accounts of medieval mystics, anthropological records of shamanic rituals. Everything was either fraudulent, tragically mundane, or described passive, receptive states—the soul as a cup waiting to be filled, not a sword to be quenched.
The breakthrough came from the most mundane of sources: a debt called in.
His burner phone buzzed with a message from Li Chen. It was not through the formal, encrypted Foundation channel, but a simpler, more direct line the old apothecary used for personal business. "A client of long standing has passed to the next silence. His heirs have no eye for true treasures. An estate liquidation is to be held. Among the mundane paintings and furniture are listed 'unreadable stone tablets' and 'ritual items of unknown origin.' The address is below. The sale is tomorrow. Bring physical currency, and the discretion of a tomb."
A thread. Faint, but the only one he had.
---
The estate was a monument to sterile wealth, a sprawling compound of angular glass and pale stone nestled in the wooded hills north of the city. The air itself felt moneyed and quiet. A discreet sign directed visitors to the "Liquidation of the Yamazaki Collection." The crowd was a mix of interior designers, art speculators, and bored heirs from other wealthy families, their voices a low, polite murmur that echoed in the vast, empty spaces.
Asuta moved among them like a ghost, his senses, though frayed, stretched to their limits. He ignored the minimalist sculptures and the tastefully abstract paintings. His focus was on resonance, on the whisper of age and forgotten purpose.
He found the relevant items in a climate-controlled lower gallery, ironically labeled "Curios & Antiquities: A Lifetime of Whimsy." The display was a sad pastiche of the genuinely old and the convincing fake. A pre-Columbian pot sat next to a Victorian spirit photography kit. A rusted Roman pilum head was mounted beside a prop from a 1950s samurai film.
And there, on a velvet-lined shelf, were the three items that made the breath catch in his throat.
The first was a Minoan Seal Stone, a disc of dark steatite about the size of his palm. Its surface was carved with an intricate, non-repeating labyrinth pattern. To the untrained eye, it was a beautiful artifact. To Asuta's spiritual sense, brushing against it, it emitted a faint, pleasing hum of geometric harmony. It was a primitive focusing tool, a stone-made mantra designed to calm and order the mind by tracing its endless, purposeful path. A spiritual balm.
The second was a Liangzhu Culture Jade Cong, a cylindrical tube encased in a square prism, made of a nephrite jade the color of thick cream and sea foam. Its surfaces were carved with subtle, mask-like faces and circular patterns. This one did not hum; it thrummed with a deep, earthy, resonant frequency. It was an anchor. A tool for grounding spiritual energy, for connecting the ethereal to the telluric, likely used in ancient rituals to commune with the spirits of the land itself.
The third was the tablet.
It was not stone. It was metal. A slab of a dull, grey-silver alloy that refused to reflect light cleanly, instead swallowing it and offering back only a matte, non-committal sheen. It was clearly a fragment, roughly the size of a large textbook, its edges sheared as if by a cosmic cleaver. On its surface were… not carvings. They were subtractions. Characters had been etched not by adding lines, but by removing material to create intricate, three-dimensional negative spaces. The script was utterly alien. It was not pictographic, nor alphabetic. Each glyph was a complex, interlocking puzzle of voids, looking less like language and more like the schematic for a machine that operated on principles of absence.
It sat on the velvet like a hole in the world.
Asuta's heart hammered against his ribs. The seal stone and the jade cong were treasures, potent low-tier spiritual tools he could use immediately to shore up his fraying senses. But the tablet… the tablet was an event horizon.
He forced himself to be calm. He inquired with the hawk-faced liquidator, a woman with a calculator for a soul. "The items on the lower shelf. The stone disc, the green tube, and the… unusual metal piece."
"From the late Mr. Yamazaki's 'Mystery Cabinet,'" she said, not looking up from her tablet. "Provenance is unclear. The experts called them 'ritual objects of indeterminable age and purpose.' We are selling as-is."
"I'll take them," Asuta said, his voice carefully flat.
The price she named was astronomical, a number that would have made him balk a month ago. It cleanly emptied the remainder of his gambling windfall. He paid in thick envelopes of cash, the bills still crisp from the bank. The liquidator's eyes flickered with a hint of curiosity, but the money silenced any questions. He left with his prizes wrapped in plain brown paper, feeling the weight of the metal tablet through the wrapping like a gravitational anomaly.
---
That night, the familiar sanctuary of his closet-lab felt different. The hum of the city outside seemed distant, muted. He placed the three artifacts on his scarred workbench under the cool LED light.
He began with the known quantities, needing stability before confronting the unknown. He held the Minoan seal stone in his left palm, its cool weight reassuring. Closing his eyes, he extended his ragged spiritual sense into the labyrinth. Not to solve it, but to follow it. His awareness traced the single, unbranching path carved into the stone, a path that wound inward in a perfect, non-repeating spiral. It was a cognitive circuit, a forced meditation. With each mental loop, the chaotic static bleeding into his mind from the world began to still. The psychic sandstorm abated to a manageable breeze. The stone was a Focus, applying gentle, inexorable pressure to his scattered consciousness, herding it back into coherent lines.
After an hour, he set the seal stone down, his mind clearer than it had been in days. A foundation of calm.
Next, the Jade Cong. He placed it upright before him, his hands hovering just above its squared shoulders. He tuned his breathing to the Divine God Body Sutra's foundational rhythm and sought to harmonize it with the deep, grounding resonance of the jade. The Cong's frequency was that of bedrock, of mountains sleeping for eons, of roots drinking from deep aquifers. As his own energy—the earthy, purified vitality of his Layer 4 blood and bones—began to vibrate in sympathy, a profound sense of solidity anchored him. It was as if spiritual gravity had increased, tethering his light, frayed soul-force to the unshakable mass of his own physical form. The Cong was an Anchor, preventing dissolution.
Now, fortified with Focus and grounded by an Anchor, he turned to the void.
He did not rush. He prepared a simple warding circle around his workspace using crushed sage and salt—a purely symbolic gesture, but one that helped frame his intent. He took three cleansing breaths. Then, and only then, did he place the tip of his index finger on the cool, unnerving surface of the metal tablet, directly on the edge of one of its three-dimensional glyphs.
He did not try to read. He opened a channel, the barest trickle of his newly stabilized spiritual awareness, and offered it to the void-script.
The tablet awoke.
It did not glow. It did not hum. The three-dimensional glyph under his finger seemed to deepen, the negative space within it receding into an impossible fractal infinity, a tunnel carved through reality itself. A pressure, vast and indifferent, flowed up that channel from the depths of the tablet. It was not hostile. It was algorithmic. It was the pressure of a truth so fundamental and severe it had mass.
And then, knowledge did not flood in. It was unveiled. It was a memory that had always been there, buried under the strata of his mortal life and his first immortal one, waiting for the key to turn.
A concept, conveyed in the pure language of meaning:
"The Self is the Prime Impurity. The Soul is a Flawed Crystal, Clouded by the Dross of Identity. Purification is Not a Cleansing, But a Dismantling. To Achieve the True State, One Must Become Both the Hammer and the Anvil, the Grinder and the Grain."
Accompanying this axiom was a visceral, immediate understanding of a process—a stark, brutal visualization of a Metaphysical Crucible. Not a vessel of fire, but of implacable, compressive will. Within it, a Grinding Wheel spun, its teeth made of the cultivator's own resolve. The technique was a directive: to place one's own sense of self, one's soul-awareness, into that crucible, to be broken down by the grinding wheel into its constituent parts—memory, emotion, identity, will—and then, using the very heat of that dissolution, to reforge it all into a new, denser, more radiant whole.
It was an endless cycle. Grind. Shatter. Reforge. Expand.
It was not cultivation. It was voluntary, iterative soul-suicide and resurrection.
The name of this heresy branded itself upon the core of his being:
The Soul Grinding Scripture of the Eternal Crucible.
Asuta gasped, wrenching his finger back as if from a white-hot brand. He stumbled away from the workbench, his back hitting the closet door. He was drenched in a cold sweat that had nothing to do with temperature. His hands trembled. His heart felt like a wild thing trying to escape its cage of bone.
This was not a soul-nurturing art. This was a soul-smithing art. It treated consciousness as raw material. Its very premise overturned the cosmic orthodoxy he had lived by for seven hundred years. This was knowledge that should have been locked in the highest vaults of the most paranoid immortal emperors, guarded by curses that spanned generations. It was a technique for forging Soul-Ingots, for creating spiritual foundations so dense they could bear the weight of divine ascension.
And a fragment of it was here. On Earth. In the "Mystery Cabinet" of a dead collector of curios.
The shock was immediately followed by a tidal wave of terrifying implications. The dragon scale from the Foundation's vault was a biological artifact, proof of a sleeping inhabitant. The miasma vent in Kuro Gorge was a symptom of the world's spiritual sickness. But this… this was knowledge. Deliberate, engineered, transcendent knowledge. You didn't just "find" this. It was placed. It was hidden.
What is this planet? The question echoed in his hollowed-out mind, more profound than any before. A graveyard for monsters? A prison for gods? Or… a library? A secret archive for truths too dangerous for the wider cosmos? Who built this library? And why did they abandon it here, in this Qi-desert?
He looked at the metal tablet, now inert once more, just a strange piece of slag. It was a single page from a universe-spanning grimoire. The full scripture—the methods to construct the crucible within one's soul sea, the precise grinding cycles, the cosmic catalysts required to progress from one stage to the next (a Spark of Dying Starlight for the first ignition, a Tear from the Void for the second tempering, and on and on into materials he could not even conceptualize)—was out there, scattered. This fragment contained only the foundational, horrifying principle and the first, most basic visualization exercise.
It was a key to infinite power, and a guarantee of infinite agony.
To even think of attempting it now, with his soul already weakened and firmly in the mortal realm, was madness. It would be like trying to forge a celestial weapon in a candle flame; the first spark of the grinding wheel would consume him utterly. He needed a vessel strong enough to contain the process. He needed his body to be a flawless, unified masterpiece of mortal potential. He needed to reach the Peak of the Body Tempering Realm, the 9th Layer—the Unified Flesh stage—where his physical form was so pure, so perfectly aligned, it could act as a spiritual pressure chamber.
The path was now horrifically, gloriously clear.
Temper the body to its absolute mortal limit. Unify the flesh.
Then, and only then, dare to light the forge within.
To grind his own soul into dust, and build it back, stronger.
He had come seeking a bandage for a spiritual scrape. He had been handed the blueprint for a soul capable of holding up the heavens.
Asuta slowly straightened, wiping the cold sweat from his brow. The fear was still there, a live wire in his chest. But beneath it, coiling like a awakening dragon, was a new, formidable emotion: a sense of cosmic, dreadful purpose.
Earth was not what it seemed. It was a puzzle box of apocalyptic scale. And he, Asuta Kirigaya, was the only one with both the past-life knowledge to recognize the pieces, and the present-life desperation to dare fitting them together.
He picked up the Minoan seal stone and the Jade Cong, their comforting energies now feeling like training wheels. He looked at the metal tablet, the Soul Grinding Scripture of the Eternal Crucible.
First, master the body. Become the perfect vessel.
Then, he would turn his gaze inward, and begin the endless work of the forge.