The aftershock of the Blood-Fire Mutation's forming had not yet faded.
The temperature inside the cavern was still climbing. Cracks spread across the rock walls in every direction, and orange-red magma seeped out of the fissures to crawl slowly down the stone.
Totosai braced himself on the forge platform, his bulging eyes locked on Kobe Hikaru. Only once he was certain there would be no second eruption did he dare let out his breath.
Then he realized he had let it out too soon.
The yokai aura spilling off Kobe Hikaru's body was not drawing back in.
It was still changing.
The Blood-Fire Mutation sinking into his bloodline was like dropping a bar of red-hot iron into a pool of stagnant water. The water boiled — but it did not boil inward.
It boiled outward.
Bone spikes tore up all at once from his elbows, his shoulder blades, the nodes along his spine where the Eight Mutations overflowed. A white skeleton extended, wove itself together and took shape outside his body, fast enough for the eye to follow.
Thunder burst out of the gaps between the bones, filling the spaces in the frame, congealing into substantiated muscle of violet light.
A membrane of yokai aura expanded outward from his skin and wrapped the whole growing structure of bone and lightning.
This was his Nine Mutations. Asura.
And it had manifested with no battle at all.
"Back-back-back-back-back!"
Totosai, who had already seen firsthand what this trick of Kobe Hikaru's could do, hugged his iron hammer to his chest and bolted for the depths of the cavern. His short body ricocheted twice off the rock walls, at a speed that could rival his earlier flight on the fire ox.
As for Myoga, the flea simply vanished into the deepest crack in the stone. Not even his mung-bean eyes were visible.
The six-metre titan of bone and thunder rose from the floor of the volcanic cavern.
The ceiling, never high to begin with, split open under it.
Broken rock rained down, struck the Asura Mutation's frame and bounced away, punching a string of dents into the walls.
But Kobe Hikaru's attention was not on anything outside.
He was looking at the interior of the Asura Mutation.
More precisely, he was looking at its chest.
That place had been empty in every previous Asura Mutation.
The skeleton built out the structure of ribs, the thunder filled the volume of the chest cavity — but that was form only, with no substance behind it.
Like an empty house.
Walls, a roof, a door.
And nothing at all inside.
But now.
In that hollow, there was a ball of light.
Dark red and orange braided together, fist-sized, hovering at the exact centre of the ribcage the bones had built.
Beating.
Steady in rhythm, constant in frequency.
Like a heart.
Or rather — it was a heart.
The yokai fire that had surged out of his blood vessels when the Blood-Fire Mutation was born had not all remained in his own body. Some of it had followed the channels opened by the Eight Mutations, flowed out into the Asura structure beyond his skin, and gathered itself, unbidden, into this single mass inside the Asura Mutation's chest.
A heart.
The Asura Mutation had a heart.
Kobe Hikaru stared at that beating flame. In his crimson demon eyes the violet veining and the orange currents lit at the same moment.
He was not surprised. He was only thoughtful, then struck through with clarity, then sure.
He had grasped that this road was walkable.
Before this, he had in fact been chewing on a single problem: the Nine Mutations were complete, so how was he supposed to walk the Ten Mutations, the Eleven Mutations, the Twelve Mutations that came after?
He had already confirmed that piling up quantitative change to force transmutation still worked.
But he could not keep doing what he had done before, leaning on the threat of death to squeeze it out of himself.
He understood that a man who courts danger dies in danger sooner or later.
What was more, Recasting and the overflow's Qualitative Transformation were needed only once. There would only ever be one projection, and it could only be cast once.
So how was he to go further?
Further meant... turning the shadow into substance.
That was the reason for what he was doing now, and the source of the thought behind it.
He had a talent for drawing conclusions, and he had worked out long ago that the Nine Mutations, the Asura Mutation, built a second body outside his own — a projection, an enlargement.
But a projection, in the end, was only a projection.
No matter how solid the Asura frame, it was only bone. No matter how thick the muscle the thunder filled in, it was only lightning. No matter how sensitive the membrane of yokai aura, it was still only a skin.
Bone, flesh, skin.
But no organs, no blood, no heart.
Exactly like his own body, which had slowly been coming back to life without ever fully arriving there.
An empty shell.
An enormously wasteful shell that could only be sustained by a constant outflow of yokai power from the body proper.
That was the root reason the Asura Mutation could not last.
It had no internal circulation of its own. Every scrap of energy was poured in one-way from his true body; what was spent was simply gone, an hourglass that only ran out and never refilled.
But what if the Asura Mutation had a heart?
With a heart, there was a starting point for circulation.
With circulation, it could draw yokai aura from the outside world to replace what it burned.
With the ability to sustain itself, the Asura Mutation would no longer be armour to be put on and taken off. It would be a genuine second body.
He should forge the Asura Mutation a heart.
Kobe Hikaru watched the beating fire, and the reasoning that had been faintly blurred a moment ago turned clearer than it had ever been.
After the heart, naturally, came the rest of the organs.
Five viscera and six bowels, matched to the five phases.
The heart belonged to fire — that one he had.
The liver belonged to wood, the spleen to earth, the lungs to metal, the kidneys to water.
At present he possessed only two elemental mutations: thunder and fire.
Fire had gone to the heart.
Thunder could be assigned to wood — thunder is born in the heavens, falls upon trees, splits the wood and fire is born of it.
But not completely.
Add earth, metal and water on top of that, and he was still four short.
Still, the direction was set.
And this was precisely the Ten Mutations that Kobe Hikaru had now stepped into.
To forge the five viscera one by one inside the Asura Mutation's chest, filling them with the five phases.
With each organ forged, the Asura Mutation gained another layer of independent circulation, another element to command — the equivalent, for an ordinary yokai, of another transformation entirely.
When the five viscera were whole and the five phases complete, the internal circulation would be forged.
And that would be the Ten Mutations, finished.
As for the Eleven Mutations that followed, Kobe Hikaru felt they ought to be a further perfecting of this Asura body.
And he honestly believed that five viscera and six bowels, complete as they were, still did not amount to true perfection.
There should also be heaven, earth and man — three bridges.
Or perhaps they ought to be called the Three Souls.
Not the Three Souls handed down from the continent across the sea, but a version Kobe Hikaru had deduced himself, combining what he had learned with the knowledge of this world Kikyo had passed on to him.
The Heaven Soul governed the pure. It could be called the spirit soul.
The Earth Soul governed the turbid and the flesh. It could also be called the yokai soul.
The human soul governed life and death.
On this step, in fact, Kobe Hikaru's understanding was clearer than it was for the Ten Mutations, because he was a yokai to begin with. His Earth Soul was already full, and he could sense the foul aura that hung between heaven and earth. And because the Shikon Jewel had granted him Spiritual Sight and Spiritual Intuition, he could feel what lay within it that was anything but ordinary.
And more than that, because he had a premonition.
The Heaven Soul, in all likelihood, was exactly the power the Shikon Jewel would grant him once its favourability was full.
In other words: as long as he thoroughly perfected the Ten Mutations and forged the Asura's five viscera, then farmed enough favourability from the Shikon Jewel —
— he could project his own brimming Earth Soul straight onto the Asura Mutation, and build atop it the Heaven Soul the Shikon Jewel bestowed, forming the meeting of heaven and earth.
After that he would only need to comprehend the human soul directly, and this projected Asura body of his would be utterly complete, inside and out.
That was the Eleven Mutations.
And then, after that.
That is to say...
He would fuse this Asura Mutation, with its five viscera and Three Souls, back into himself.
Yes. Not stacking more on, not enlarging it, not collapsing the exoskeleton and reclaiming the energy.
True fusion.
Taking that second body outside his own — with complete bones, muscle, skin, organs, blood vessels, a heartbeat, and three whole souls — and pressing it back inside himself, so that the two became one.
Making his body truly alive, instead of driven by yokai power, instead of simulating the flow and function of a heartbeat through blood and bone and thunder and all the rest of his mutations.
By then, his body would no longer be the corpse of an oni warrior.
It would be a living body with a complete cycle of life, a wholly new body remade from the inside out by yokai aura.
The heart, liver, spleen, lungs and kidneys that had once been driven by yokai aura, made to imitate function, kept from rotting — all of them would live again.
From death to life.
From Demon to Devil.
Reaching the theoretical extreme of transmutation. Perfect quality.
The Twelve Mutations.
With that came the foundation to touch Gasification, which was to say the threshold of Phenomenalization.
He could go looking for his own Law.
Advancing this way, one step at a time, in proper order, the achievement waiting at the end would be nothing small. Forget the Eleven and the Twelve — a Kobe Hikaru who had merely completed the Ten Mutations would be no weaker than any being short of a great yokai.
With the Eleven and the Twelve, he was confident he could wrestle a great yokai in its ordinary humanoid form.
That alone was astonishing enough.
After all, in theory, every mutation Kobe Hikaru had gained by fusing with objects fell under Corporeal Transformation and nothing else.
Converted into plain terms, it was like eating five boiled eggs and then going toe-to-toe with a Nascent Soul heavyweight.
Terrifying, that was the word for it.
As for why he did not simply forge the five viscera and Three Souls into his own body directly, instead of adding an extra fusion step — the reason was the same as before.
Because Kobe Hikaru's own body could only fuse Six Mutations' worth of Corporeal Transformation.
Only by performing addition on the projection now could he ultimately perform multiplication on himself.
Of course, that all assumed the five phases could be completed.
At the moment he had only fire.
Thunder counted, generously, as half of wood. Once Sakasagami no Yura's favourability was full, wind also belonged to wood, and perhaps that would make wood whole.
Which meant, obviously, that Kobe Hikaru would need to hunt down at least three more suitable yokai artifacts to fuse with.
He was still a long way off.
But at least he had found the road.
And that mattered more than anything.
The Asura Mutation drew slowly inward.
The skeleton disintegrated from the outer layers first, the thunder scattering into fine motes of light. The six-metre exoskeleton came apart entirely in the space of a dozen breaths.
But that ball of fire — the Asura's heart — in the last instant of the collapse, flowed back along the channels of yokai aura and into Kobe Hikaru's body.
Back to the place where his true heart sat.
Sinking. Falling still.
Waiting to be woken again.
Kobe Hikaru opened his eyes.
A wide rift had split the roof of the cavern, and daylight poured through it, laying alternating bands of light and shadow across his pale face.
He lowered his head.
He looked at the Muramasa in his hand.
The cracks were still there. Dark red light still seeped and shifted along the blade. The blade soul was trembling, breathing, waiting.
A little more. Just the last little bit.
That last bit was called "will."
The heart-intent behind the swing of a blade.
His own truth.
Kobe Hikaru tightened his grip on Muramasa's hilt.
And then he returned the blade to its sheath.
It seated home with a crisp click.
The clean sound of it rang through the silent cavern.
He knew what came next.
Go and gather will.
Go and find the reason he swung a blade, the ground on which he would stand his life.
For this sword, for the Asura, for himself —
— lay down the final stroke.
____
Gift for Everyone: Once we hit 50 Powerstones, I'll release +1 bonus chapter
________________________________________
If you want more chapters, please consider supporting my page on (P). with 50 advanced chapters available on (P)
👻 Join the crew by searching Leanzin on (P). You know the spot! 😉