After the conversation at the foot of the volcano ended, matters moved faster than expected.
Totosai agreed to teach him to forge blades, but on one condition — he learned here, in the volcanic cavern, at his forge, with his fire.
"I don't leave the mountain."
The squat old yokai shouldered his iron hammer, his tone leaving no room to argue. "If you've decided to learn, you stay. I'm not going traipsing off outside for anybody. Hunted for centuries, I finally found myself a quiet spot — temporary or not, I'm not setting foot out the door."
That was reasonable enough.
Kobe Hikaru neither pressed him nor refused. Having finally found Totosai, he had to get everything he wanted done in one go. Miss this chance, and finding the old man again would be no easy thing.
Even setting aside the knowledge of the original story he had carried over with him — knowledge that had already been altered in a great many places —
the scene just now was enough to tell him this: as a master yokai smith who ranked among the best in the Western Provinces, in all the Eastern Isles, the old man had yokai and humans alike hunting for him everywhere. And so he ran everywhere, and hid everywhere.
Having no fixed address was his normal state. Even settling in one place, he would never settle for long.
Hikaru could not afford to miss him.
But before any of that, he had to send Imagawa Yoshimoto's party back.
Three or four days in the open was the absolute limit for the ruler of a province.
Suruga's administrative work was piling up mountain-high, Totomi had already been seized and locked down by Imagawa Yoshimoto while the moment held, and the lands of Mikawa were gradually submitting as well — three regions that, in name and in fact, belonged to the Imagawa clan. Against the whole of the Eastern Isles it was not vast, but it was hardly small either.
The equivalent of three provinces of the Celestial Empire.
Taigen Sessai could handle affairs in her stead, but the Black-Robed Chancellor's health — his mandate of heaven ran to half a year at most, perhaps less — meant every extra day of labour was borrowed against what little remained.
That same night, Hikaru escorted Yoshimoto's column to the highway in eastern Totomi.
From there back to the Imagawa main castle, the whole route lay in Imagawa territory, with post stations and garrisons along the way. Forty ashigaru and six mounted samurai were more than enough to guarantee her safety.
At the parting, Yoshimoto sat inside the palanquin, one corner of the curtain lifted to show half her face.
The collar of her deep blue kosode stirred faintly in the night wind, and lantern light lay along the pale line of her throat.
"You're not coming?"
"Not yet. I'll stay a few days. Learn something."
"Learn what?"
"Blacksmithing."
Yoshimoto's expression froze for the space of a breath. Then her folding fan snapped shut and covered half her face.
"Is there anything you don't learn?"
"How to behave like a decent human being."
The curtain dropped.
The palanquin receded down the highway in its escort of ashigaru, the long snake of torches shrinking away until it vanished into the far end of the night.
Motoyasu walked beside the palanquin. Before he left he glanced back once at the grey figure standing at the roadside seeing them off, pushed the round spectacles up the bridge of his nose, and muttered something under his breath.
Inaudible. Completely inaudible.
Probably nothing flattering.
After sending Yoshimoto off, Kobe Hikaru did one more thing.
Through the field of his dread he reached the tanuki spirit over in Suruga, and had the creature — already risen to its fourth transformation — carry a letter back to Kaede Village and deliver it to Kikyo.
The letter was very short.
Found Totosai. Need to stay a few days to learn blade-forging. I leave things at the rear to you.
And also —
I miss you.
Those last three words he added after a full second's hesitation.
Candour was an indispensable quality in a yokai's life.
The great tanuki took the letter in its teeth and ran.
Its tail puffed into a ball, and the speed lent by four transformations' worth of accumulated yokai aura counted as swift even through the dark. From Suruga to Kaede Village was one night's run.
That letter also carried a trace of Kobe Hikaru's dread.
Afterwards, he could speak with her face to face straight through it.
Everything arranged.
Kobe Hikaru turned back for the volcano.
…
In the days that followed, he began to learn the forging of blades.
Though in truth Kobe Hikaru had no idea whether he possessed anything resembling a talent for smithing — and he had another purpose besides.
Totosai's volcanic cavern was far larger inside than it looked from without.
Entering by the crater and descending along the lava conduit some three hundred paces brought you to a natural smithy.
The rock of all four walls had been baked by centuries of heat until it glowed a dull red, and orange-red magma crept through the fissures in the floor.
In the very centre stood a forge of fitted stone.
Its chamber was enormous, and the colour of the fire in it was not the red of ordinary flame but a searing, plasma-like blaze with a blue-white core —
That was yokai fire, sustained by Totosai's own yokai power, of a kind no natural world could produce.
It was also the core of Totosai's transmutation as a yokai: a Fire Mutation beyond the ordinary state.
Beyond that.
Beside the forge sat an array of smithing tools.
And Totosai's iron hammer.
The head was bigger than Totosai's own skull, black through and through, its surface filmed with the blue-grey left by countless quenchings.
The haft was some unnameable hardwood, wrapped in coarse hemp cord.
The whole hammer gave off a settled, heavy yokai aura.
Unshowy, unradiating, like earth packed hard by long pressure — centuries of accumulated smithing had all sunk down into this one tool.
The panel sprang up in Kobe Hikaru's field of vision.
[Iron Hammer Used by Totosai]
[Quality: yokai weapon]
[Description: The smithing hammer Totosai has used for centuries. Its body has absorbed tens of thousands of its master's hammer-strokes of will and the lifeblood of his craft, and has naturally formed a nascent vessel soul. It knows nothing of battle; it knows only smithing. Every mark on its face is the memory of one more tempering.]
[Current favourability: 0 (Unmoved)]
[Note: It reacts only to the act of smithing. Simply pouring yokai power into it means nothing to it—]
There it was.
A yokai weapon.
And the kind that had become a yokai naturally, through sheer accumulation of years — unlike Muramasa, force-catalysed by the favourability system. This hammer's soul was entirely home-grown.
Like old wine.
Wine brewed for centuries.
Yes. This was Kobe Hikaru's real purpose.
He stared at the note on the panel, and already knew where he stood.
This hammer didn't feed on yokai power. It didn't feed on dread. It didn't feed on clever talk. It fed on exactly one thing.
Smithing.
You had to actually work iron before it would pay you any attention.
Which was refreshingly straightforward, at least.
So he had to learn.
But learning was only the process.
Using this hammer while he learned, letting it watch him smith in earnest —
that was the point.
Once favourability reached 30, the first talent unlocked.
And if that talent had anything to do with forging —
then with this hammer in his grip he would go straight from rank outsider to an expert heir to centuries of a master smith's experience.
He didn't need to truly master the craft.
He only needed the conquest completed.
With the system in hand, the world was his.
"Totosai."
"What?"
"Lend me that hammer of yours for a few days."
The squat old yokai lifted his wrinkle-heaped face, bulging eyeballs glaring at him.
"You, use my hammer? Do you even know how? Smash your own foot and don't come crying to me — you idi— ahem. Fine, take it. Hold on tight, boy!"
The hammer came flying at him.
The head weighed over a hundred catties, and it turned twice in the air.
Kobe Hikaru caught it one-handed. The instant his palm met the haft, that settled yokai aura rippled, faintly.
It shivered, once.
Very briefly.
Like a sleeper turning over.
But that single shiver made the panel jump.
[Totosai's Hammer: favourability +1]
[Current favourability: 1 (Aware)]
From 0 to 1.
Kobe Hikaru tightened his grip on the haft and walked to the forge.
He crouched down.
Picked up a piece of scrap iron.
And began to work the metal.
…
The next seven days went by in a blink.
In the volcanic cavern there was no day and no night, only the never-dying light of the forge fire.
In those seven days Kobe Hikaru barely left that stone forge.
What he did was simple. He beat iron.
Totosai taught brutally.
"Don't let your wrist die on the hammer — keep it alive, let it turn! You're forging iron, not cutting a man down!"
"Watch the colour when you quench! Cherry-blossom red is too soft, loquat yellow is brittle, orange-peel is the one you want — are you colour-blind?!"
"Your rhythm on the folding is off! What are you hitting? Are you pounding mochi?!"
The squat old yokai hunkered by the forge, bulging eyes stretched perfectly round, every wrinkle in his face rising and falling in time with his cursing.
The great hammer was in Kobe Hikaru's hands, but the old man kept a smaller spare of his own and rapped it against the back of Hikaru's hand from time to time to correct his stance.
Kobe Hikaru never talked back.
He was learning, in earnest.
The aim might be to conquer the hammer's favourability, but the learning had value in itself. The fundamentals of forging, an understanding of how metals behaved, the marriage of heat and force — even if a talent later handed him a shortcut, a foundation underneath would never go to waste.
And he wasn't a slow study, either.
After all…
[The iron block of outstanding quality tells you that striking here feels very comfortable.]
[Totosai's iron hammer tells you to put your back into it — that force is nowhere near enough!]
[The makeshift volcanic furnace tells you that a burn like this can melt the iron sitting on it — it's had it in for that guy for ages!]
Myoga huddled in a crack in the rock at the corner of the forge platform, only two mung-bean eyes showing, watching from a distance.
"Remarkable… Lord Totosai actually teaching someone to forge. First time in centuries!"
"Shut up, Myoga! One more word and I throw you in the furnace."
Myoga withdrew.
The hammer's favourability climbed slowly through those seven days.
From 1 to 5 took two days.
From 5 to 10 took another two.
From 10 to 20 took a day and a half.
Not fast.
But accelerating.
Because the hammer's temperament was unlike any other object's — it genuinely would not take yokai power, would not take clever words, would not take emotion.
It took one thing only: the act of smithing itself.
The harder you worked, the happier it got.
The better your work looked, the more excited it got.
Kobe Hikaru's technique went from smashing his own foot on day one to hammering a lump of scrap into the rough shape of a blade blank by day seven — an astonishing rate of progress, and his attitude was sincere enough.
The hammer could feel it.
The seventh day.
Forge fire lit the cavern from wall to wall.
Kobe Hikaru held the hammer, and the last stroke fell on the billet before him, folded and beaten over and over —
Force neither too great nor too small, the angle exact, the rhythm linking perfectly with the forty-odd strokes before it.
The instant the hammer face met the iron, a tremor ran up through his palm.
Different from every time before.
The tremor travelled from the haft up his arm, surged into his chest, and finally poured into his mind.
The panel jumped.
[Totosai's Hammer: favourability 30 — first talent unlocked]
[First Talent: Hammer Sense]
[Effect: by swinging the hammer, the wielder can perceive the internal structure of an object, as though looking upon the sinew and bone of the iron with his naked eye.]
Just as he had hoped.
Related to forging.
And the effect was terrifying. It granted no experience directly, but in this craft the hardest thing had never been strength or technique — it was whether you saw clearly into the interior of your material.
That part was difficult to achieve even for someone who could speak with the material.
People rarely know themselves. Materials are the same.
This was what men called the feel of the work, the thing a man without talent had to trade decades — centuries, even — of accumulation to obtain.
And now Kobe Hikaru had talent too.
He shut his eyes, tightened his grip on the hammer, and brought it down on the billet once more.
The moment that stroke landed —
"Hm?"
Totosai, crouched beside him, let out a low grunt.
Those bulging eyeballs fixed on the spot where the hammer in Kobe Hikaru's hands had struck.
"That stroke…"
The old man's wrinkles drew tight.
He had seen it.
This oni warrior, seven days into learning the craft, had just laid down a stroke better than the great majority of human smiths with decades behind them.
"You brat…"
He never finished. Kobe Hikaru had already moved.
He knew the moment was ripe.
Cutting it clean, he pushed the billet aside and drew the fragments from inside his robe.
The remains of weapons at full favourability.
The broken tip of a nameless samurai's blade, the shards of a rusted sword, the scrap offering-iron from the abandoned little shrine in Kaede Village — different sizes, different materials, but every single piece still carrying favourability at a full hundred.
He fed them all into the forge.
Yokai fire swallowed the metal.
The hammer rose.
Fell.
This stroke carried the feel his talent had given him — and the fragments, too, were cooperating.
They longed to be tempered, to be fused. They longed to walk onto a battlefield again.
A faint light bled out from inside the metal.
Not yokai aura. Not spiritual power.
It was heart-intent.
The heart-intent Totosai had spoken of.
The recognition and will that each fragment carried, poured into them a little at a time through those earliest days of his.
The hammer fell again.
In the forge fire, the fragments began to merge.
Metals of different natures melted into one another at that heat and recombined, the residue of favourability acting like a peculiar adhesive, binding iron, steel and corroded scrap that should never have mixed into a single whole.
Purple veining surfaced in Kobe Hikaru's eyes, thunder pouring itself into the mould.
Yokai power welled out of his bones, ran down his arms into the hammer, and passed from the hammer face into the molten metal.
The strokes fell like rain.
One, two, three.
Ten.
Thirty.
Every stroke with its own force, angle, rhythm — all of it guided by the instinctive perception of the Forge-Heart Art.
The hammer began to hum in his hands.
A hum utterly unlike before.
Before it had been a dull, passive vibration. Now it was an active, eager trembling.
Like a dog starved for a long time finally catching the smell of meat.
The panel was leaping.
[Totosai's Hammer: favourability +5]
[+8] [+12]
The numbers climbed.
Climbed fast.
Because the hammer could feel it —
a demon blade being born.
The materials were mediocre, but the concentration of heart-intent held inside surpassed the great majority of works that had ever passed through its face.
Totosai had said it: the finest vessels are never judged by material, but by heart-intent.
And the hammer that had worked at his side for centuries thought so too.
[Favourability 50 — second talent unlocked]
[Second Talent: Will-Reading]
[Effect: while smithing, the bearer can clearly sense the purity and completeness of an object's heart-intent, and judge the progress and deficiencies in the coalescence of its blade soul.]
The favourability did not stop.
Because Kobe Hikaru did not stop.
In the forge fire the fragments fused completely into a single billet, dark red throughout, giving off a faint glow.
He drew it from the fire, laid it on the anvil, and went on folding and beating.
The hammer fell, sparks flew.
Every stroke packed the heart-intent tighter, forged it denser.
Muramasa's blade soul woke in the shock of the folding, dark red light seeping from the scabbard at Kobe Hikaru's waist — it was answering.
It could feel the heart-intent within those fragments being forged into a new shape.
It was waiting.
Waiting for that intent to flow into itself.
[Favourability 80]
The hammer's trembling reached its peak.
The whole cavern shook faintly, and orange-red liquid light bled out of the lava veins in the walls as they shuddered.
Totosai backed up two steps.
Those bulging eyeballs stretched to their limit.
He could feel it.
He needed no favourability system such as Kobe Hikaru had, needed no panel — as a yokai smith who had forged blades for centuries, he understood that hammer of his better than anyone alive.
The hammer was excited.
Excited as it had never been.
More excited than when he forged Tessaiga.
"This brat…"
The old man's voice shook.
He had seen it.
On the billet fused from those fragments, an extremely faint pattern, all but invisible to the naked eye, was surfacing of its own accord — the mark of a blade soul coalescing.
Ordinarily, a demon blade's blade soul needed years, even decades, to take shape on its own.
And this oni warrior in front of him —
"It's going to form?!"
Myoga shot out of the rock crevice, his flat little body turning twice in the air.
"In this little time?!"
[Favourability 100 — third talent unlocked, Self-Kindled Forge Fire]
[All talents unlocked. May be absorbed into the self.]
The panel gave its final jump.
But Kobe Hikaru was in no hurry to absorb them.
He was still hammering.
Every mark on the hammer face was burning, the weight of centuries of smithing memory pouring from the haft into his palm — and now, it was willing to hand him everything it had.
"Lord Totosai!"
Myoga hopped onto the old man's shoulder, six thin legs shaking like a sieve. "That hammer of yours — it's never gotten this worked up over you, has it?!"
Totosai ignored the flea.
He was staring at the billet in Kobe Hikaru's hands, dark red light reflected in his old eyes.
That pattern rising on the billet — he knew it.
It was the sign that appeared only when a demon blade's blade soul was on the verge of birth.
And the concentration, the purity of the heart-intent this demon blade carried —
"It's possible."
The old man said it under his breath.
"In terms of potential, this demon blade about to be born… won't lose to the long-famous demon blades."
Tessaiga included.
____
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