West of Kyoto, within Tanba Province.
The mountain ranges lay split apart.
Across the rolling peaks, ridges had cracked open, their exposed faces smooth as mirrors, as if sliced clean through by a longsword.
Steam still rose from those cut faces; the rock at their edges glowed a dark red—plainly the color of heat left behind after an instant of searing.
The valley floor had been gouged into ravines each at least twenty zhang wide and bottomless in their depth, the earth on both sides frozen mid-churn.
Spider silk was everywhere.
Gray-white threads draped the sheared cliffs, tangled among fallen giant trees, and blanketed the ground.
Everything the silk touched had petrified—grass, trees, and soil turned to gray-white sculpture.
And at the center of this wasteland.
The Tsuchigumo crouched there.
Of its five arms, the severed stump of the upper-left still oozed dark-gray yōkai blood—the wound Kōbe Hikaru and Kikyō had cut off together in Musashi Province.
The cracks on its bone-face remained too.
Ghostly green light flickered behind the seams, charged with an excitement it had never known before.
"Ha—hahaha—"
Coarse laughter forced its way out from behind the bone-face, rattling the loose stones underfoot until they bounced.
"What a rush! So damn satisfying!"
"What lucky days these are—twice in a row I've run into someone worth fighting!"
Thirty paces across from it stood a man.
Or rather, a yōkai.
Tall and slender, his white robes without a speck of dust, as though this ravaged battlefield had nothing to do with him.
Silver-white hair fell to his waist, each strand giving off a cold sheen in the dying sun, not a single mote of the dust kicked up by the battle's shockwaves clinging to it.
On the brow of his handsome face lay a crescent of purple; two crimson stripes marked each cheek; his golden slit-pupiled eyes were half-closed, cool with condescension.
Over his left shoulder draped a fluffy white pelt, soft as cloud.
At his waist hung a sword.
Its scabbard plain and ancient, its blade-aura withdrawn—more scepter than sword, without an edge to speak of.
His name was Sesshomaru.
Son of the dog-yōkai clan of the Western Provinces, offspring of the late Tōga-Ō, once the foremost great yōkai of the Western Lands.
What had happened was not complicated.
After leaping away from Musashi Province, the Tsuchigumo had traveled west, its return route pointed roughly toward Kyoto.
Its mood was excellent.
For the first time in four hundred years someone had struck off one of its arms—it hurt, but the long-lost, visceral feeling of bone being smashed had every cell of it screaming with excitement.
The shrine maiden, well, never mind her.
But that little brat called Kōbe Hikaru was a fine opponent.
Worth waiting for.
Waiting for him to grow strong—strong enough to give it a real, all-out fight.
But it hadn't expected that, before that day came, it would run into another on the way home.
A vast yōkai aura came drifting from the mountains to the west.
Thick, pure, proud.
It carried a scent utterly unlike an ordinary yōkai's—not the acquired kind formed of murky vapors churned together with grievance, but the aura of one born a yōkai, a great yōkai by birth.
The Tsuchigumo's five arms all halted at once.
The green light behind its bone-face flared bright.
It knew this scent.
Not the young silver-haired yōkai it now saw, but the older, more ancient undertone lingering within this yōkai aura.
"Tōga-Ō's whelp?"
So without so much as a greeting, it lunged straight at him.
They fought for an hour.
With their power fully unleashed, three peaks were shorn flat, a valley plowed open, the land for dozens of li around turned to scorched earth.
Sesshomaru too had revealed his true form as a great yōkai in the fight—a massive dog-shape of pure silver-white, no smaller than the Tsuchigumo, fangs and claws sheathed in deadly-poisonous yōkai aura, every bite grinding mountain rock to powder.
But the Tsuchigumo was no pushover either.
Down one arm and far from its peak, six arms reduced to five, it only fought more savagely the longer it went, spider silk blotting out the sky, its petrification domain spreading across a hundred li in every direction.
In the end, Sesshomaru drew back from his giant-dog form to human shape.
The Tsuchigumo stopped too.
Not because a victor had emerged—it simply didn't want to settle things in such a half-baked state.
Now.
Sesshomaru stood at the cliff's edge, his silver-white hair not a strand out of place in the dying sun, his handsome face marred only by a faint furrow of the brow, thick with distaste.
"Tedious."
His voice came low and flat, yet laced with a pride that looked down on all things: "You've got the wrong man. I have no interest in you."
"Ha? Your old man was a lot more fun than you back in the day!"
The Tsuchigumo slapped its knee with its one remaining sound upper-right arm, its tone brimming with complaint: "That bastard Tōga-Ō—back then he and I ran the Western Lands together, fought three days and three nights, till in the end neither of us could stand. I broke two of his fangs and seven of his claws, and that fellow snapped a full eighteen of my arms! And you? You're clearly no weaker than he was in his youth, yet after just an hour you're pulling a sour face on me."
"That was his business."
Sesshomaru's golden slit-pupiled eyes swept over the Tsuchigumo, cold and indifferent.
Tōga-Ō—foremost great yōkai of the Western Provinces, lord of the dog-yōkai clan.
Over a century ago he had perished for the sake of a human woman, leaving behind two famed swords and two sons.
Sesshomaru was the elder.
He had inherited the greater part of his father's yōkai power and bloodline, and grown into a great yōkai—yet he had not inherited the strongest of the relics, the Tessaiga.
That was the legendary blade that could destroy a hundred yōkai in a single swing.
Yet Tōga-Ō had left it to his second son, a half-yōkai, rather than to the elder born a great yōkai.
It was a knot in him still untied, but one he would never speak of to anyone.
"Do not bring up what has nothing to do with me."
Sesshomaru turned to go.
"Wait."
For once the Tsuchigumo didn't fly into a rage; instead its tone shifted—colored with a savoring sort of relish: "Over in Musashi Province today, I ran into an interesting little brat."
Sesshomaru didn't stop.
"An oni warrior—probably some dead man off a battlefield turned into a small yōkai. After I'd hit him a few times, he just grew stronger right there on the field—even conjured up a skeleton frame to trade blows with me."
Still Sesshomaru's steps didn't stop.
"He had a shrine maiden with him too, spiritual power to rival Midoriko's in her day. Working together, the two of them cut off one of my arms."
His steps still didn't stop.
"And that brat has the Shikon Jewel."
He stopped for an instant.
Then walked on.
The Shikon Jewel—he knew of it, the thing formed centuries ago when the shrine maiden Midoriko and hundreds of yōkai destroyed one another, said to grant any wish.
But it was nothing to him.
He had no interest in human relics, and no wish that required outside power to fulfill.
"Oh, that's right—"
The Tsuchigumo tossed out one more line at his back, as casually as if remarking on the weather: "That brat has a rather interesting ability."
"He can anchor souls."
"Seems he can even drag back the spirits of the dead that have already scattered—and make them speak."
"Just heard that little yōkai retainer of yours say it—this is what you're looking for, isn't it?"
This time, Sesshomaru's steps truly halted.
His silver-white hair swayed gently in the wind.
He did not look back.
But the pupils of those golden slit eyes contracted for a heartbeat.
To summon the dead, to make the dead speak.
The silence held for several breaths.
Then Sesshomaru walked on, his pace neither fast nor slow.
Just as when he'd come.
Only his direction had shifted, ever so slightly.
And behind him, a short little figure sprang out of a shattered crater and chased frantically after him.
"Master Sesshomaru, wait for me!"
Rooted in place, the Tsuchigumo watched the direction Sesshomaru had gone and simply laughed.
Hope that kid grows up a little faster!
Elsewhere.
Musashi Province, Kaede Village.
The main hall of the Shrine.
Morning light seeped through the gaps in the paper doors, thin ribbons of it falling across the wooden floor.
The air carried the crisp dryness peculiar to autumn and the clean scent of fallen leaves.
Kōbe Hikaru sat cross-legged in the center of the hall, eyes closed.
The crimson oni mask rested on the floor before his knees, his pale long hair loose across his shoulders and back, his gray robe draped loosely about him.
Two days now.
Since the Tsuchigumo left and Uesugi Kenshin withdrew his troops, apart from the daily hours spent nestled close with Kikyō, he'd passed most of his time here with his eyes shut, feeling.
Digesting.
The changes wrought by that qualitative shift ran far deeper than he'd imagined.
Not just the surge in yōkai power—though that surge was obvious enough; he could clearly feel the yōkai aura within him far thicker than it had been two days ago.
More important was the change in quality.
From Six Mutations to Nine, Corporeal Transformation crossing into Qualitative Transformation.
Before, his yōkai aura had been like water held in a bottle—the bottle his body, the water his power; however large the bottle, that was how much water there was.
Now it was different.
The water had begun to seep out of the bottle.
Recasting, overflowing, permeating.
The yōkai aura spread slowly outward from the pores of his skin, the seams of his bones, the walls of his veins, beginning to fuse thoroughly with his very self.
That was another mark of Qualitative Transformation—yōkai aura no longer wholly bound to one place.
Compared with the Tsuchigumo's Phenomenalized Gasification, this yōkai aura was laughably tiny—but the direction was right.
After all, Qualitative Transformation was, in essence, the ceaseless changing of one's own nature.
By the twelve-mutation stage, once Qualitative Transformation was fully complete.
By then he would attain perfect substance, no longer merely a Demon.
The essence of an oni warrior was the dead—a corpse that moved again after absorbing yōkai aura, a departed spirit—and for Kōbe Hikaru, the yōkai transformation of the oni warrior was, step by step, a coming back to life.
But not as a human.
Rather, as a… Devil.
Kōbe Hikaru felt that was a fitting name for the ideal state he envisioned.
Dead and risen again, both dead and alive.
When he reached that step, what drove his body would no longer be the obsession left after death, but a wholly new life granted by yōkai aura itself.
From Demon to Devil.
From death to life.
This was one great goal of his.
It was also the path the favourability system had shown him—every fusion, every change pulling him bit by bit out of the state of a dead thing and back toward the realm of the living.
Nine Mutations now.
Three mutations to go.
At the twelve-mutation stage…
He would truly come back to life.
By then he could glimpse the realm of a true great yōkai.
By then, too, he could go further with Kikyō—no longer stopping short at the very end, as he did every night.
Kōbe Hikaru opened his eyes; the purple veining within his crimson oni pupils showed faintly in the morning light.
After the Asura Mutation faded, those purple veins hadn't entirely receded—they had settled into the deep layers of his irises, surfacing only when his yōkai power flowed.
He looked down at his palm.
The bony extensions at his fingertips had drawn back inside, but he knew that whenever he wished, he could grow them out again—faster, harder, longer than two days ago.
The soul-hunting force of the Transformation of the Spirit-Chasing Archer had likewise evolved after the qualitative shift.
As noted earlier.
His old guaranteed-hit had required him first to lock onto the target's soul—there was a process of sensing and locking on.
Now that process had shrunk to something almost negligible—the moment a target entered the range of his yōkai aura sense, the soul's position surfaced automatically in his awareness.
Like instinct.
And the Thunder-Sinew Razor-Body needed no saying.
After the qualitative shift, the thunder had soaked into his marrow; his baseline speed now approached the level of his all-out bursts from before.
If he went all out—
He reckoned that at his utmost, his speed for a single instant could just barely match Kibōmaru's.
Though he couldn't sustain it long enough.
A single moment, not an eternity.
But for a nine-mutation body to chase an old demon nearing twelve mutations—that could well be called strength.
"Nine Mutations."
He silently repeated the number to himself.
From the Tsuchigumo's level, he was still far off.
Kōbe Hikaru didn't know exactly where the Tsuchigumo stood—barely thirteen mutations, or fourteen, fifteen, even sixteen or seventeen—but he knew well that that thing's power was utterly beyond his present reach.
But at least it was no longer the gulf of an ant gazing up at the sky.
He could see a little of it now.
Just then.
A voice came from the side.
"Hey."
It came low and hoarse, a voice that seemed long suppressed.
Kōbe Hikaru turned his head.
Naoe Kanetsugu was still bound to the pillar.
Counting from before until now, a full seven days.
Uesugi Kenshin had led his army away; Momiji and Botan had brought her meals, brought her water, even loosened the tension of the ropes a little—but never untied them.
No one untied them.
Because no one had given the order to.
It was as if Kōbe Hikaru had left her there on purpose.
Kikyō paid it no mind.
Momiji and Botan didn't dare act on their own.
Kokaede, at least, had come to see her a few times, and even fed her half a piece of fruit.
Naoe Kanetsugu's deep-blue light armor was creased beyond recognition, her white jinbaori caked with dust, her dark-brown high ponytail come completely undone, loose strands plastered to her face and neck.
She looked terrible.
Not physically—being tied up so many days was uncomfortable, true, but Momiji and Botan had tended her well enough; she wouldn't starve or die of thirst.
It was mental.
Naoe Kanetsugu looked at Kōbe Hikaru, an inexplicable helplessness in her eyes.
Not hatred.
Nor humiliation.
But—
"Kill me."
she said.
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