Night.
On the mountain road at the border of Shinano Province and Kozuke Province, the moon had been swallowed by thick cloud, and heaven and earth lay pitch black.
A Demon was fleeing.
It had once been a man.
A farmer in his forties. The outline of his living face still clung to him.
But only the outline.
That face was no longer a human face.
The skin was grey-white as wax, the eyeballs bulged as if about to burst from their sockets, and the mouth had split open all the way to the ears, baring rows of jagged, overlapping teeth.
Its left arm had swollen to at least twice its original thickness, black-green veins crawling beneath the skin, the fingernails hardened into bony hooks.
Kibutsuji Muzan's blood — through what channel no one knew — had flowed into this mountain village and infected this farmer.
Three days since the change.
It had already eaten seven people from its own village.
Now it was running, because something was chasing it.
And that something had already caught up.
A blade punched through its back and out through its chest — no light on the edge, no spiritual power, not even a trace of yokai aura.
Just an ordinary uchigatana, driven in by some samurai who happened to be passing through.
The Demon looked down at the point jutting from its chest.
And smiled.
The mouth split to the ears curled into a hideous arc.
It reached up, gripped the blade, and yanked — the sword slid free of its body, the wound closed in an instant, and not a drop of blood spilled.
It was a trap!
Against an undying demon, ordinary attacks were utterly useless.
Before the samurai could even fall back, the Demon's hooked claws were already swinging at his face.
Then they stopped.
The claws halted three inches from the samurai's face.
Because the Demon's arm was gone.
From the elbow down, the entire forearm had vanished.
The cut was clean and smooth, the edges scorched black, fine white smoke curling off them — the mark of something seared away in an instant by extreme heat.
The Demon froze.
The wound began to squirm at once, flesh regrowing fast enough to watch, new bone pushing out of the stump.
But this time the regeneration only made it halfway.
The second cut arrived.
It came straight down from overhead, a vertical split.
The edge was wrapped in a dull red glow — not spiritual power, not sunlight.
Yokai fire.
Blood-Fire Mutation.
The edge touched the crown of the Demon's skull, and the dark red flame poured down along the blade into its body, splitting the whole frame in two from top to bottom.
The two halves still writhed, still tried to knit back together — the regeneration running like a machine gone mad.
Third cut. Horizontal.
The Muramasa's edge carved an arc, and the two halves became four.
Fourth cut, fifth cut, sixth cut.
The flashes of steel came so thick they merged into a single sheet of light.
Locked on by the Spirit-Chasing Bowman's Mutation, every strike landed exactly where the flesh was regenerating hardest, breaking the reassembly apart.
The heat of the Blood-Fire Mutation seared every cut surface, crushing the speed of regeneration down to nothing.
An instant. Less, even.
In under a single second.
Seven cuts, linked into one.
The vengeful Demon shrieked and crumbled into flying ash, leaving nothing on the ground but a smear of carbonizing cinders.
Even the cinders were shrivelling.
Cut apart again and again, burned again and again, the limit of its regeneration forced open by nothing but physical means.
Not the sunlight of a Sun Blade, and yet better than sunlight.
Kobe Hikaru, newly arrived, slid his sword back into its sheath.
Click.
The crimson demon eyes under the sedge hat swept once over the samurai sprawled on the ground — a young man, barely past twenty, the hand holding his sword still shaking.
"Go."
One word.
The young samurai scrambled away on hands and knees.
Kobe Hikaru didn't spare him a second glance.
That was the sixth Demon he had cut down in half a month.
His technique was getting cleaner every time.
Not the fastest possible, but for someone without a Sun Blade, this much was enough.
He raised his head.
A thread of moonlight leaked through a gap in the clouds, lighting the outline of the far side of the ridge ahead.
A castle.
The skyline of one of the Kanto's famous castles came into view.
The walls weren't tall, but they ran on and on, enclosing an entire mountain basin. The lamps of the castle town were scattered points of light in the dark, like fireflies strewn across black velvet.
He had already crossed Shinano Province, which the Takeda clan controlled.
This was land held by the Uesugi clan — a castle of Kozuke Province.
The castle's name did not interest him.
What interested him was the man inside it.
…
The next day. Early morning.
The market in the castle town had just opened.
Sellers and buyers both — pickles, charcoal, cloth, straw sandals. Common folk in an age of war still had to live, however hard the living was.
And under the Uesugi clan's banner with righteousness at its head, the people of Kozuke Province did well enough.
Not as well as under the benevolent rule of the Hojo, but at least they survived.
Kobe Hikaru walked through the market in his sedge hat.
A straw rain cape covered his grey robes, with the Muramasa hidden beneath it.
His pale face was mostly lost in the hat's shadow, only the jaw showing.
He walked slowly.
Like a ronin on the road.
"You hear about it? Lately every big school's main dojo across the Kanto has been challenged and beaten."
Beside him, two peddlers squatted behind their stall cracking melon seeds, voices neither loud nor quiet.
"Heard about it. Came all the way up from Totomi. Tenshin Shoden school, Kage-ryu, Chujo-ryu… a dozen-odd houses, all of them lost."
"That good, is he?"
"They say he settles it inside three moves — and he uses the other side's own techniques. Learns them and turns them right back on the spot. Tell me that's not frightening."
"What's he look like?"
"Nobody got a clear look. Sedge hat, straw cape, never gives his name, just leaves. Some say he's a young man, face white as a corpse's — maybe a noble out of Kyoto? I hear those nobles like to powder themselves."
In the silence that followed, Kobe Hikaru walked past them.
The brim of his hat swayed.
He had nothing to say to rumours like that, but he was used to them by now.
After the road he had walked, it would have been stranger if he'd stirred up nothing at all.
The two peddlers noticed nothing and went on cracking seeds.
"— The really uncanny part is, someone said this morning they saw the fellow come into the castle town. He might be going after Lord Kamiizumi."
"Kamiizumi Nobutsuna?!"
"That's right! If he really goes looking for the sword saint, there'll be a show worth watching."
The voices faded behind him.
Kobe Hikaru crossed the market and followed the main road of the castle town all the way to the foot of the mountain on the north side.
Kamiizumi Nobutsuna.
That was indeed why he had come to this castle.
Founder of the Shinkage-ryu.
One of the few men of this age who could be called a sword saint.
A name that would carry on into later ages as well.
Set against Sasaki Kojiro and Miyamoto Musashi, neither of whom had even been born yet, this was the man who truly deserved the title of master.
If the Tenshin Shoden school was the foundation of swordsmanship, and Kage-ryu was its variation, then the Shinkage-ryu that Kamiizumi Nobutsuna created was what came after foundation and variation had been fused into one — and then carried further up.
Its core idea was Katsujinken, the life-giving sword — the blade is not for killing men, but for letting them live.
The highest realm of his sword was not cutting everything down, but being able to leave uncut whatever he chose not to cut.
Which meant the reverse as well.
If he wished it, then apart from what he chose not to cut, everything else could be cut.
In an age of chaos overrun by demonic fiends, for a human swordsman to reach that realm —
Kobe Hikaru wanted to see it.
He wanted to see what that man carried inside his blade.
As said before.
In the half month that had slipped by, Kobe Hikaru had walked through seventeen dojo and seventeen schools.
He had met seventeen different people who understood this thing called the sword in seventeen different ways.
The Tenshin Shoden school's blade was an extension of the three powers — heaven, earth and man — its upper, middle and lower stances covering everything.
Kage-ryu's blade was the art of waiting: move second, arrive first.
Chujo-ryu's blade was distance — control the distance and you control life and death.
Jigen-ryu's blade had only one strike, and everything had to be poured into that one strike.
Each of them made sense. Each of them was only one face of the thing.
And him? What was his blade?
He hadn't found it yet.
But he was beginning to feel his way toward something.
The swordsmen of those dojo — what they carried in their blades looked different from one another, but at bottom it was all much the same.
A conviction about staying alive. A conviction about protecting. A conviction about choosing.
And more than that, faith in rising in the world, in carving out a place to stand.
Faith gathered on the edge of a blade becomes will.
And Kobe Hikaru — what did he believe in?
Since arriving in this world he had done nothing but swing a sword.
At first to keep himself alive, later to grow stronger, and after he met Kikyo, to protect.
But those were reasons. Not the process, and certainly not the result.
Will is why you draw the blade, and why you swing it, and why the cut lands.
And what runs through all of it is faith.
Belief.
And now what he believed in was growing clearer by the day.
His own will was beginning to show its first shoots.
One step short. One small step.
And so, here.
The Muramasa trembled faintly at his hip.
A dull red light flickered once along it.
As if urging him on. As if saying — hurry up and understand.
So, now.
"Let's go see the sword saint."
At that same moment.
At the end of the mountain road north of Yamashiro Castle stood a small compound.
A bamboo fence, a thatched roof, an old pine in the yard leaning out so far that half its branches blocked out most of the sky.
No plaque, no banner, not even the board announcing openings for new students that most dojo put up.
It looked like nothing more than an ordinary mountain dwelling.
But the packed earth before the gate was covered with footprints — straw sandals, geta, bare feet.
All of them left by visitors, and there had clearly been no shortage of them.
Kobe Hikaru stood outside the gate.
His sedge hat was off, his straw cape shed. His grey robes carried half a month of road dust, and his pale white hair was tied back loosely with a strip of black cloth.
The Muramasa hung at his waist.
He pushed open the bamboo gate.
It wasn't locked, and no one stopped him.
Seven or eight young men stood in the yard in assorted samurai dress, some with swords slung on their backs, some cradling wooden practice blades — the dojo's students, plainly.
Every one of them stopped what he was doing the moment they saw Kobe Hikaru.
Their eyes fell on his pale, cold face and those demon eyes, and several of them took half a step back without thinking.
Kobe Hikaru was long since used to it, and had come to regard himself simply as a somewhat unusual sort of person. He crossed the yard straight to the main house.
He paid them no attention at all.
The shoji door of the main house stood half open.
Inside, a man sat alone.
Past fifty, lean-faced, cheekbones high, jawline hard. Grey-white hair gathered in a topknot, temples gone entirely white, wearing a plain kosode faded from washing.
There was no sword at the old man's waist.
Only a wooden blade laid across his knees.
An ordinary bokken cut from white oak, with nothing special about it at all.
But the instant Kobe Hikaru crossed the threshold of the main house — he stopped.
His foot had barely cleared the sill when something invisible struck him head-on.
Not yokai aura, not spiritual power, not the power of the gods and buddhas, and certainly not dread.
It was faith.
Or rather, it was sword intent of the purest kind, condensed out of decades of training.
There was no aggression in it. It was almost gentle, like a light breeze across the face.
And yet the feeling it gave was of standing at the lip of a cliff and being nudged by the wind — one hair's breadth from going over.
Light, truly light. Dangerous, and truly dangerous.
So this was a sword saint?
Kobe Hikaru's step faltered for a fraction of a moment, and in that same moment he understood.
He knew the old man before him was Kamiizumi Nobutsuna, founder of the Shinkage-ryu.
The man every sword-bearer of this age called sword saint.
He had long since withdrawn from the world.
He took no new students, fought no more duels, served no daimyo. He only stayed in this little mountain compound and now and then gave a word of guidance to the young men who came seeking him out.
And now this sword saint suddenly raised his head.
There was the faintest surprise in his expression, but his eyes stayed calm.
As if he were looking at an ordinary caller.
"A guest has come. Please, sit," he said, as though he had been waiting for Kobe Hikaru all along.
The voice wasn't loud, but it rang clear.
Kobe Hikaru stepped through that invisible pressure, entered the room, and sat cross-legged three paces opposite him.
Between them lay nothing but bare wooden floor.
"You would be the one who's been challenging dojo all over the country of late, I take it?" Kamiizumi Nobutsuna said.
"Mm." Kobe Hikaru nodded. "I'm studying the sword."
Kamiizumi Nobutsuna went still again for a heartbeat — as though he had already guessed, and yet hearing it confirmed still surprised him.
"Then what have you learned?" he asked.
Direct and plain.
Kobe Hikaru was just as direct.
"I've learned a great deal of technique. But what I want — sword intent — is still a little out of reach."
The lines at the corners of the old man's eyes shifted.
Something like a smile, though not quite one.
"So that's why you've come to me as well?"
"To have a look."
"At what?"
"At what you carry inside your blade."
The old man looked down at the wooden sword on his knees, his withered fingers brushing lightly along it.
"There's nothing inside my blade," he said.
Kobe Hikaru said nothing.
"When I was young, what my blade carried was the will to kill. Whoever I met, I cut. If I won, I was happy."
"After that it carried the will to guard. To protect my family, my domain, the men who followed me."
"Later still it carried the will of the sword itself — I came to understand why the sword exists at all, and the difference between cutting and not cutting."
"And in the end, I poured all of it out."
"It's empty."
He lifted his head and looked at Kobe Hikaru.
In those clouded old eyes was something perfectly clear.
"An empty blade leaves the man free. I don't need anything inside my sword. I stand here, so the sword is here, and the will is here. And every last 'why' is simply gone."
"There's nothing to load into it."
"Because I am it, myself."
When he finished speaking, the room fell silent.
Kobe Hikaru stared at the gaunt old man across from him for a long while.
He could feel it.
That will — radiating from the man opposite, attached to no weapon at all, so pure it was transparent.
It didn't cling to the sword. It came out of the man himself.
The man was the sword; the sword was the man.
There was no boundary between them.
So there was no need to draw a blade.
So a wooden sword, an iron sword, empty hands — it made no difference.
This was a sword saint.
Beyond ordinary sword intent, beyond ordinary swordmasters. Emptiness.
Empty through and through.
Kobe Hikaru rose. He did not draw his sword the way he had at every human dojo he had visited, and he made no move to fight.
The collision of will against will that he had imagined never happened.
Because it was no longer necessary.
Because he had already seen it.
Seen where the gap between himself and this man lay — and seen the direction that gap pointed.
Kamiizumi Nobutsuna's will was emptiness.
The freedom that comes after pouring everything out.
But that was the human road, and what it looked like at the end of it.
His own road was different.
He was yokai, he was Demon, and he would become Devil.
He didn't need emptiness. He needed fullness.
Every mutation, every object, everything he had absorbed into himself — all of it packed in, packed in until nothing more would fit, and then he would become the vessel that could hold everything.
Not pouring out.
Filling up.
The far end of a different road to the same place.
"My thanks," he said, then turned and walked out of the main house.
Across the yard, out through the bamboo gate, without once looking back.
The students in the yard exchanged glances.
"That man… he has to be the one everyone's been talking about, the one who's challenged seventeen dojo in a row, right? And he just leaves?"
"They didn't fight?"
"They didn't. Maybe he decided he was no match for Master Kamiizumi?"
"From the way the master acted, that's not it at all!"
No one had an answer.
Inside the main house, Kamiizumi Nobutsuna watched that grey back pass the bamboo fence and disappear at the end of the mountain road.
His withered fingers stopped on the wooden sword.
A long moment passed.
"Interesting," he said.
His voice was soft, almost as if he were talking to himself.
"A yokai coming to me to learn the sword… this world of ours really does hold everything."
From the young man's very first step through the gate, Kamiizumi Nobutsuna had sensed that what flowed inside that body belonged to nothing human.
But he had not drawn his sword.
Because he knew he could not win. Never mind that he was old now — even in his prime he would have been no match.
That was no ordinary yokai.
Swordsmanship exists to make up for a shortfall in strength, but when the gap in strength is too vast, neither technique nor will means anything.
And beyond that — because the other man had not drawn either.
No killing intent. No malice.
A yokai comes before a sword saint, not to kill and not to fight.
Only to take one look at his sword.
And having looked, to leave.
That openness was more honourable than that of most human samurai he had met.
And that insight came near matching the only other one he had seen like it — that other young man, barely grown, whose swordsmanship had already surpassed his own. A genius among geniuses.
One a yokai who resembled a man.
The other a man who resembled a yokai almost exactly.
"Interesting…"
The old man murmured under his breath, "I imagine those two will meet, won't they?"
After all, the abnormal always draws the abnormal.
Elsewhere — outside the castle, west of the mountain road.
A nameless hill.
The view opened wide, out over layered ridges in the distance and the skyline farther still beyond them.
Kobe Hikaru walked to the top of the hill and abruptly stopped.
Then he sat down.
With no warning at all.
As though something had struck him mid-stride, his legs simply folded and he sat cross-legged in the grass.
He took the Muramasa from his waist and laid it across his knees.
He closed his eyes.
Fragments churned through his mind.
Seventeen dojo, seventeen swords.
Kamiizumi Nobutsuna's eyes, so clear they were transparent.
And —
Totosai's words.
"What are you thinking about when you swing your blade?"
What was he thinking about?
He was thinking.
Of everything he had made part of himself. Every object he had pursued to full favourability, every mutation stacked upon the last, every journey from zero to a hundred.
Stone, tree, wall, hoe, Hiraikotsu, Nekomata's Claw, Thunder Horn, iron hammer.
They weren't tools.
They were parts of him.
What was he thinking about when he swung his blade?
He was thinking about welding all of it into one.
About making himself the vessel that could hold everything.
Different roads to the same place — and truly, they were converging.
His will —
was taking shape.
____
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