At the foot of the volcano, the leftover heat of the lava ground seeped up through the soles of his boots.
Kobe Hikaru laid Muramasa flat across his palms.
The sword looked no different than before — standard-issue uchigatana dimensions — but the crack along its edge had spread from the tip down to a third of the blade's length, fine as a strand of hair, and under the seeping pressure of the yokai aura it kept breathing out a faint dark-red glow.
The blade was trembling.
Low in frequency, small in amplitude. Like a man turning over in his sleep.
Totosai stood with the hammer over his shoulder, head tilted, bulging eyes fixed on the sword for the space of three breaths.
He didn't take it.
He didn't touch it.
He only stood an arm's length away and looked — with eyes that had forged blades for several hundred years.
"Hmm…"
A snort came out of his nose, and every wrinkle on his face bunched into a peculiar arrangement.
Not distaste. Not surprise. The scrutiny of an old craftsman confronted with an interesting material.
"Boy — ahem. Sir. Bring it closer, if you would."
Kobe Hikaru extended Muramasa another half a foot.
Totosai reached out a hand.
A rough palm, thick knuckles, rust and ore grit still packed under the nails as though he'd only just stepped away from the iron.
But the instant his fingertips brushed the scabbard —
A hum.
The short, sharp ring of it rose all at once.
The dark-red glow along the edge doubled in brightness, the blade shuddered violently, and the scabbard jumped in Kobe Hikaru's hands.
Totosai's fingers snapped back as if scalded.
"Ssst — !?"
The old man shook out his hand, bulging eyes gone perfectly round. "It bit me?!"
It wasn't the sharpness that had made him pull back.
It was the rejection from the blade soul itself — pure, undisguised, absolute refusal.
"Interesting."
Totosai drew his hand in, folded his arms, and studied the sword a while longer.
This time he looked far more carefully.
Those big protruding eyes swept from the point to the hilt, from the cutting edge to the ridgeline, and lingered a long while on the crack.
Myoga, on his shoulder, craned his neck too, pushing his flat little face forward.
"Lord Totosai, this sword—"
"Quiet. I'm looking."
Myoga pulled his neck back in and gripped Totosai's collar tight with all six thin legs.
Another ten breaths or so of silence.
Then Totosai spoke.
"Boy."
He looked at Kobe Hikaru. The panic of the chase earlier had drained out of his voice, leaving something calm — and now, the particular seriousness a man only brings to his own trade.
"This sword, I can't Recast."
Kobe Hikaru didn't rush to ask why.
He waited.
"And it doesn't need my Recasting either."
Totosai swung the hammer down off his shoulder and set the head against the ground. It punched a shallow crater into the rock.
Firelight crawled across the hammer's face.
"You said the body of the blade has cracked, that it can't hold what's inside — true enough, it can't. The original material of this sword is common iron, and common iron can't contain a blade soul at the level of a yokai weapon. Like pouring a river into a teacup. Sooner or later the cup splits.
"But the problem isn't the cup at all."
He patted the hammer's haft, bulging eyes fixed on the dark-red light bleeding out of the crack.
"The problem is the water."
"The soul of this sword — it's already finished forming."
Kobe Hikaru's pupils contracted a fraction.
On his panel, Muramasa's awakening progress was still stuck at 47%. Yet Totosai said it was already 'finished.'
"Finished, but incomplete."
Totosai seemed to read the confusion off him, and added, "What you feel as 'not awake' isn't weakness. It's that a piece was missing from the start — the frame of the blade soul is there, the flesh is there, but the heart hasn't grown in all the way."
Myoga couldn't keep quiet. "What does that mean, the heart hasn't grown in?"
"Fool. Exactly what it sounds like."
Totosai flicked a finger at Myoga and very nearly sent the flea sailing off into the air.
"A sword's soul never grows on its own. For an object to become a yokai, it takes one of two things — years, a century or a thousand years of slow growing, or an outside force, being fed bit by bit on its master's yokai aura, his thoughts, his will."
He looked at Kobe Hikaru.
"This sword's soul, you fed into being."
"You poured yokai power into it. Your will, your obsession, your understanding of it — those things congealed into its blade soul. Which is to say, its soul is a piece of you."
"But—"
Totosai's tone shifted.
"What you gave it isn't enough."
"Not a matter of quantity. You haven't worked out what you yourself are. Your 'will' hasn't taken shape, so what the blade soul ate off you was only half-made goods."
"Put plainly — when you swing that sword, you haven't settled why you're swinging it. It's the simplest question there is, and most men in this world never manage to answer it."
"It's waiting. Waiting for you to understand yourself."
"When your will is whole and you pour it in, it'll split the shell open by itself. Common iron, yokai bone — the shell doesn't matter. What matters is the heart inside."
"So — it doesn't need me to recast it. What it needs is you."
Kobe Hikaru said nothing.
He looked down at the Muramasa in his hands.
The crack was still there. The faint dark-red light still seeped out of it.
The blade trembled softly.
As if answering Totosai's words.
And as if urging him on.
"Then what if…"
He let go of the question of 'will' for now. It wasn't quite the same thing as what he had worked out for himself, nor as the "all methods return to one" Taigen Sessai had spoken of — Sessai's words pointed far closer to the essence, and stood on a higher plane.
But to a degree, the two ran along the same channel.
One carried through the self; the other concerned only the weapon in the hand.
And neither was a thing a few sentences could settle.
So he changed direction.
His will, after all, had never been carried by Muramasa alone.
He drew several objects out of his robes.
Metal fragments.
Different sizes, different shapes.
One was a sword tip. One a splinter off a cutting edge. One only a small broken lump of iron.
Unremarkable material, indistinguishable from the offcuts in a roadside scrap shop.
But every single piece carried a faint residue of — favourability.
Full value.
100.
The fragments had all come from different places.
One was the wreck of a nameless samurai's blade, picked out of a heap of corpses on a battlefield in his first days in this world. In those earliest days he had poured yokai power into it and pursued its conquest to full value, absorbing its ability into himself; later it had shattered in combat.
Another was a piece of a rusted sword enshrined in an abandoned little shrine, conquered to full value on some idle afternoon.
None of them could be used again, but he had kept them all.
Out of sentiment — and because he had thought that one day they might be of use.
And now…
The fragments lay spread across his palm, dull metal catching the orange light of the crater.
Myoga poked his head out from Totosai's shoulder and looked over the little pile of broken iron.
"These all look perfectly ordinary… just scrap metal. What could they possibly—"
Smack.
The old flea never finished.
Totosai's palm came down on him.
Myoga went flying three feet, turned two somersaults in the air, and landed on his back with all six thin legs pointing at the sky.
"What would you know!"
Totosai's bulging eyes had swelled to the size of temple bells.
He crouched down until his face nearly touched the pile of fragments.
His rough fingers stayed clear — the lesson from a moment ago was still fresh — but his eyes rested on each fragment for a good three seconds or more.
"The material really is scrap iron," he said, and yet his voice was nothing like it had been.
Low.
Serious.
With an excitement he couldn't quite hide.
"But what's on them — scrap iron doesn't come by that."
He straightened, looking at Kobe Hikaru, the barely visible sheen from the fragments reflected in those protruding eyes.
"Heart. Intent."
"Every one of them is steeped in it."
"What is Tessaiga, in the end? Nothing more than one of Lord Toga's fangs. And what is a fang worth on its own? It's not gold, it's not jade. Yokai teeth litter the ground everywhere, and even a great yokai's tooth is only a little harder than the rest."
"But Lord Toga poured his will into it."
"And then that tooth stopped being a tooth. It became a heart."
"In essence, Tessaiga is a demon blade Lord Toga gestated himself. My hands only gave it its final shape."
Totosai hauled the hammer back onto his shoulder and rolled the haft half a turn. "These fragments of yours are the same. The material is rubbish, but the intent they carry is real."
"The finest weapons in this world are never judged by their material. They're judged by the heart in them."
He stopped there, sucked at his gums, and his face changed again.
From serious back to troubled.
"Even so—"
He shook his head.
"Completing this sword is something I can't do for you."
"It won't let me touch it."
He jerked his chin toward Muramasa. "You saw it yourself. My finger still smarts. This blade acknowledges only you — anyone else lays a hand on it and gets bitten."
"However good my craft, I can't hammer iron from across a room."
"So it has to be you."
"You forge it yourself."
"You temper the intent in these fragments together into one."
"And then perhaps your will can come nearer to whole."
Only nearer. Not all the way.
But that was enough.
That had been Kobe Hikaru's goal from the start — to let Muramasa keep awakening.
Kobe Hikaru looked at him.
"I don't know how to forge a sword."
"I know that."
Totosai's mouth stretched sideways, every wrinkle on his face bunching into an expression that just barely qualified as a smile.
"Which is why — I can teach you."
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