Will.
In the days he had spent inside this mine shaft, Kobe Hikaru had in fact worked out what that actually was.
Just as he had said before.
The Law Taigen Sessai spoke of was the foundation of existence itself — what you are, why you are, why you exist in this form and not another.
That was the threshold of the great yokai, the key to Gasification, the precondition for letting your own power spread outward until it became a "phenomenon."
The will Totosai spoke of was more concrete, and far narrower — why you swing the blade, what is in your head when you swing it, where each strike is aimed.
The first was why you exist.
The second was why you swing.
One turned inward. One turned outward.
Different roads to the same destination — and yet, in truth, not the same road at all.
Kobe Hikaru had walked neither of them through to the end, but the second — will — felt closer to his reach.
Because in the human world, he had once heard a certain word.
Sword intent.
In the chaos of the Sengoku era, with demonic fiends everywhere, human bodies were on the whole nowhere near as tough as a yokai's, and spiritual power was not something everyone could wield.
For the overwhelming majority of samurai, facing a yokai meant one thing only: death.
But there were a very few exceptions.
The ones called swordmasters, and even sword saints.
They had no shrine maiden's spiritual power, no onmyoji's spellcraft, no blessing from the power of a divine artifact — only a blade and a body of flesh and blood.
And still they could cut down yokai.
Some could even meet high-tier yokai head-on.
In the traditions of the warrior houses, the source of that power was called sword intent.
Understanding of the sword, conviction in the martial way, awareness of one's own path — all of it condensed into a formless force and laid along the edge of a blade.
Kobe Hikaru's guess was that it amounted to a power of faith.
Only, unlike Momentum, which required tens of thousands of people gathered together — that collective field of faith that crushed by sheer numbers — sword intent was the faith of a single person.
Tiny in scale.
And pure to the absolute limit.
Pure enough to cut through yokai aura.
The interesting part was that this thing resembled the Law Taigen Sessai spoke of, yet pointed in exactly the opposite direction.
A great yokai's Law was the condensation of foul aura — the yokai finds its own essence, expands its existence without limit, and becomes a phenomenon that rewrites heaven and earth.
Downward, deeper, toward the extreme of foul aura.
Sword intent was the condensation of pure aura — the human finds his own conviction, draws his will tighter and tighter together, and becomes a force that surpasses flesh.
Upward, purer, toward the extreme of pure aura.
One was the road of the yokai.
One was the road of man.
Kobe Hikaru was a yokai.
By rights, he should have no sword intent at all.
A body condensed from foul aura chasing the conviction of pure aura was like asking fire to learn from water — wrong direction, contradictory in essence.
But Kobe Hikaru was hardly an ordinary yokai either.
He had a human spirit — a dead one, admittedly.
More than that, it was a spirit soul that had crossed over from another world, retaining a complete set of human cognition and memory.
If he could take that human spirit soul as his core and condense a will of his own — even a half-finished one — then that will could become a bridge.
A bridge joining the pure and the foul.
A bridge joining the human soul and the yokai soul.
By then, once his Ten Mutations were complete and he entered the Eleven Mutations, using the Shikon Jewel to fill out the Heaven Soul and afterward grasping the human soul to finish the Three Souls structure of the Asura Mutation — all of it would follow far more naturally.
And the Muramasa — that demon blade which had waited so long for him — could, under the infusion of that will, have its last shortfall made whole.
Besides, a yokai mastering sword intent was hardly unheard of.
By Totosai's account, Toga had certainly possessed it; otherwise his fangs could never have produced Tetsusaiga and Tenseiga, that unmatched pair of demon blades, one that kills and one that gives life.
Even Sesshomaru — in Kobe Hikaru's memory, having failed to obtain Tessaiga, he had in the end relied on himself and nurtured within his own body a peerless demon blade no lesser than Tessaiga.
Kobe Hikaru suspected that the essence of that demon blade was likewise a manifestation of will.
Extending the logic, those great yokai who carried powerful demon blades and yokai weapons of their own forging must all have grasped some measure of it.
Few did not mean none.
And those who could become great yokai were rare to begin with.
It even offered a further explanation for why most great yokai pursued a human form.
The trouble was, a thing like that could never be realized while sitting in a volcanic cavern beating iron.
His swordsmanship, up to now, was called practical-combat style if you were being polite, and brute-force brick-swinging if you were not.
Strength, speed, overwhelming control.
At the start it rested on the plain Archer Transformation; now it rested on the extraordinary arm strength, control and target-lock of the Transformation of the Spirit-Chasing Archer, plus the explosive speed of the Thunder-Sinew Razor-Body.
Fast, accurate, vicious, with an aimbot bolted on.
Pure crushing by raw numbers.
No will. No conviction. Certainly no sword intent.
So he needed to go and look, and learn, and fight.
To cross blades with real swordsmen.
To feel out what was really packed inside the blades of men who spent a whole lifetime grinding a single edge.
And then to sum it up, work it through, and find the portion that belonged to him.
At that thought, Kobe Hikaru slid the Muramasa back into its sheath and stood.
Time to go.
People came, people went. Nothing worth hesitating over.
"Looks like you're heading out, kid?" Totosai squatted beside the half-collapsed forge platform, bulging eyeballs fixed on Kobe Hikaru as he packed up.
"Mm."
"And the blade?"
"Coming with me."
"It isn't perfect yet."
"I know. I'll finish it on the road."
The old yokai sucked at his gums, every wrinkle on his face twisting into something between annoyance and resignation.
"Idiot… hmph. Finally got the thing started, and now you quit halfway."
He grumbled, but his hands were already hoisting the iron hammer onto his shoulder as he headed for the depths of the cavern.
Two steps in, he stopped.
"When you're done with my hammer you bring it back, and don't lose it — that hammer took me three hundred years."
"Already returned. It's by the forge."
Totosai glanced back. The iron hammer was indeed leaning against the forge, perfectly fine.
He snorted and turned away again.
A few steps, and he stopped once more.
"Kid."
"Yes?"
"…Watch yourself out there."
Coming out of that cantankerous old mouth, the words sounded like they'd been squeezed one at a time through clenched teeth.
Kobe Hikaru looked at him, said nothing by way of thanks, only nodded.
He turned to leave, then remembered something.
"Totosai."
"What?"
"Do you know of the Demon Slayer Corps?"
The cavern went quiet for a moment.
Totosai's bulging eyes rolled around twice, as though he were thinking.
"Demon slaying… what?"
"The Demon Slayer Corps. An organization devoted to killing a kind of undying demon that isn't a yokai. They use a weapon called a Nichirin Sword — forged from Scarlet Crimson Iron Sand and Scarlet Crimson Ore. The blade absorbs the power of sunlight and can sever a Demon's immortality."
Totosai's face turned thoughtful.
Blankness gave way to recollection — his wrinkles worked back and forth, and those bulging eyes rolled toward the ceiling for a good long while.
"An undying demon that isn't a yokai… Sun Blade… Scarlet Crimson Ore…"
He muttered to himself for a long while.
"Ah!"
He slapped his thigh.
"I remember! I had a human apprentice — no, not an apprentice, just some human brat who came sneaking around to steal my techniques, and once I caught him he refused to leave. Eventually he got on my nerves, so I taught him a little surface knowledge and chased him off."
"That brat was forging 'sun swords' for somebody, I think. Kept saying the blades had to be filled with sunlight, that the ore had to bake under the sun for a few hundred years — moronic. Sunlight isn't yokai aura, what good does pouring it into iron do? Still, this old man pointed him down a road, told him how to do it better—"
He cursed a couple more times, then stopped.
"That brat's craft wasn't bad, though. At the very least he never shamed me."
"Where is he?"
"Last time we were in contact was… thirty, forty years back? Said he was in some mountain north of the Kanto, I think. Which one exactly, I can't recall."
Totosai dug a charred scrap of cloth out of his robe, then produced a stick of charcoal picked up from who knew where, and scratched a few crooked lines onto the cloth.
"Roughly in this direction. Take this and go look for him. When you meet, show him the cloth — he knows my handwriting. And if the brat's dead… show it to whoever's around him. The people around that brat will know me for certain."
He handed the scrap to Kobe Hikaru.
On it was an extremely abstract outline of a mountain, with two lines of writing beside it, the strokes so sloppy they were nearly illegible.
Kobe Hikaru tucked it into his robe.
"My thanks."
"Save it — go on, get out, quit cluttering up my view."
Totosai waved a hand and ducked away into the depths of the cavern.
The ring of hammer on iron soon came from inside — he had already started moving house.
Myoga hopped out of a crack in the rock and stood on a stone at the cave mouth, six thin legs pressed together, his flat little body watching the direction Kobe Hikaru had gone for a while.
"Truly the one who brought 'change' to Young Master Inuyasha…" The flea yokai's voice was very small, almost talking to himself. "That burst of yokai aura just now, really was—"
Clang.
A small iron hammer came flying out of the depths of the cavern and struck Myoga square in the back of the head.
The flat little body was knocked spinning, turned seven or eight somersaults in midair, and landed ten paces away.
"Less yapping, more packing — and you're always crowing about how you came over from the continent and lived in Zhuge Liang's household! Not so sharp now, are you… don't get us found by them again!" Totosai's roar rolled out of the cavern.
Myoga lay with all six thin legs in the air, twitching a long while before he managed to flip himself over.
"Yes, yes, yes… moving right now…"
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