On the hilltop, the wind passed and the grass lay flat.
Kobe Hikaru sat cross-legged, the Muramasa laid across his knees.
His crimson demon eyes were shut, his awareness sunk deeper than it had ever gone.
Fragments of the sword from seventeen dojos turned in his mind, came apart, reassembled. Every technique among them he peeled open shell by shell, until the skeleton they all shared lay bare.
Conviction.
When a man's faith gathers at the edge of a blade, it becomes sword intent.
But Kamiizumi Nobutsuna had poured his faith out until nothing was left, emptied himself until the man was the sword. So his will was emptiness — utterly hollow, and that hollowness was itself a kind of faith.
He, though, meant to pour in.
To pour until it overflowed. To pour until he himself was the vessel that could hold everything.
The understanding welled up from the depths of his mind and spread outward along his thoughts, carrying with it something exceedingly faint — pure aura.
Yes. Pure aura.
On the body of a yokai, the clear and numinous breath that only humans could grasp had appeared.
Thin, almost weightless, drifting half an inch off his skin like morning mist. It had not merged with him. It did not touch the foul aura inside him, and neither did it reject it.
It was what seeped naturally out of the human spirit soul he had kept as a transmigrator, once the understanding of sword intent had roused it.
Foul aura as the body, pure aura as the function.
Two forces that should have driven each other out had found, in him, a delicate way to coexist.
The embryo of sword intent.
Still weak — weak enough that it might not cut through even a low-grade yokai.
But the direction was right.
And it had worked.
Then, as that pure aura spread, something detonated at his chest.
Dokuko's reverse scale.
The deep green scale pressed against the skin of his chest began to glow from its edges, a dark ink-green light.
The intensity went far past anything he had seen in any previous surge of favourability.
This was not a gradual change. It was a mutation.
Like a snake that had lain coiled and waiting for a very long time, finally catching the instant its prey opened its mouth — and biting.
The panel jumped up.
[Dokuko's reverse scale: favourability +4]
[Current favourability: 100 (Unity)]
[All talents unlocked — Detoxification, Miasma, Biological Hormone (can generate biological venom within the body; it is poison, and it is also medicine) — all talents may be merged into the self]
Kobe Hikaru's awareness was dragged back to the world.
One hundred.
Full.
He opened his eyes and looked down at his chest.
The reverse scale's dark green light was seeping inward, through skin, through muscle, running down along the blood vessels —
Toward his waist.
More precisely, toward the core region of the Spear-Waist Mutation.
Of his Six Mutations, the Spear-Waist Mutation was the quietest.
It was also the most critical.
The Archer Mutation gave him arm strength and control. The Razor-Body Mutation gave him speed and explosive force. The Bone Soul Mutation gave him bone spikes that were attack and defence in one. The Sharp-Eye Mutation gave him overwhelming vision across distance and motion. The Blood Mutation gave him perception and regeneration.
The Spear-Waist Mutation seemed to give nothing at all — which was exactly why it mattered most.
What it gave was support.
The waist is the pillar of the body.
The spear is the root of the thrust.
What the Spear-Waist Mutation granted was stability. Every ounce of force from every other mutation had to pass through the waist before reaching the limbs, the way force runs down a spear shaft.
The Spear-Waist Mutation was that conducting hub.
Power rises from the ground and issues from the waist.
It never showed itself, but without it none of the other five could bring out their full effect.
Even bone thrown outward like the Bone Soul Transformation's spikes owed its incomparable toughness to the Spear-Waist Mutation.
And now Dokuko's poison was soaking into that hub.
Merging.
Dokuko — of the water-serpent kind, born in the abyss, dwelling in miasmal marshes.
Its reverse scale was the hardest and the softest part of its body at once. Hard enough that blades could barely mark it. Soft enough to sense the finest shift in a current.
What that scale carried, in essence, was the poison of water — and the medicine of water.
Because every medicine is three parts poison, and every poison holds three parts that can heal.
This was water.
And among the five phases, the kidneys belong to water.
Kobe Hikaru's body reacted on instinct — or rather, the heart projected by the Asura Mutation reacted.
Deep in his chest, the heart of Asura forged by the Blood-Fire Mutation gave a single beat.
Dark red firelight surged out from it, flowed down along his spine, and at the lumbar vertebrae it collided with the ink-green poison seeping in.
Fire met water.
Neither annihilated the other.
The fire simply rose, the water simply sank, and each took its own place.
The heart of Asura sat in the chest and governed fire.
Which meant —
The kidneys of Asura belonged at the waist, and governed water.
Kobe Hikaru felt his lumbar spine begin to tremble.
The core of the Spear-Waist Mutation was being flooded with Dokuko's water-poison, and the hub that had only ever conducted force began to undergo transmutation —
No longer merely conducting. Now storing.
Like a deep well.
Dokuko's water nature condensed at the bottom of that well, forming a core of ink-green with a faint sheen to it.
The core pulsed, and with every pulse it produced poison and medicine both.
Very nearly a true kidney.
Its rhythm differed from the heart of Asura's — the heartbeat quick and fierce, the kidney's motion slow and heavy.
One fast, one slow. One above, one below.
The cadences of fire and water formed the first circuit inside his body.
The internal structure of the Asura Mutation went from a single heart to heart and kidney answering each other.
Water and fire in completion.
Kobe Hikaru did not try to steer any of it.
Instinct carried the whole thing.
The road he had already worked out back in Totosai's volcanic cavern, while forging his heart — the Ten Mutations casting the five viscera, the five phases filling them — had taken its second step on its own.
The first step was the iron hammer's fire returning to the heart.
The second was the reverse scale's water returning to the kidneys.
The Spear-Waist Mutation had been rewritten.
Poison and water sank into the lumbar core, and the Spear-Waist Mutation evolved from a pure conductor of force into a double core that both stored power and released poison and refined medicine —
This was the Poison-Dragon Spear-Waist Mutation.
Heaven, the number one, gives birth to water.
The phrase surfaced in Kobe Hikaru's mind out of nowhere.
Heaven, the number one, gives birth to water; Earth, the number six, brings it to completion.
The numbers of the He Tu and the Luo Shu, come from the continent across the sea.
He was using an extremely ancient philosophical system from another world to build the internal circulation of a yokai body.
Absurd.
And entirely reasonable.
He had come from over there, after all.
With the heart-kidney circuit established, the Asura Mutation's endurance had in theory climbed a step — the heart pumping, the kidney storing, fire rising and water descending. The crudest embryo of an internal cycle.
Three organs still missing. Three phases still missing.
But two beat one.
And in the middle of all this —
Another vibration came from his waist.
Sakasagami no Yura.
The comb rattled against his belt, clattering harder and faster than Dokuko's reverse scale had when its favourability maxed out.
That was not joy.
More precisely, it was humiliation curdled into rage.
The panel flickered.
[Sakasagami no Yura: no change in favourability]
[Current favourability: 90 (limit)]
[It is unhappy. Very unhappy. It feels it followed you long before that lousy scale did, and got overtaken anyway. But it has hit a certain bottleneck — not because you have given it too little, but because there is something it has yet to work out for itself.]
Ninety.
Stuck.
Just like at thirty, Sakasagami no Yura had come up against a threshold it had to cross on its own.
Last time he had brought in the Muramasa as a rival to needle it, and the favourability had shot from thirty to fifty, then to eighty-eight.
This time —
Competition was no longer enough.
But Kobe Hikaru had no spare attention for the problem just now.
The comb shook for about as long as it took to drink half a cup of tea before it finally, grudgingly, went still.
Like a bristling cat pinned by the scruff — furious, but willing to let it go for the moment.
Kobe Hikaru glanced down at the sulking comb at his waist, then at his chest, where the reverse scale had sunk completely into the skin and left only a small ink-green mark behind.
Two yokai weapons.
One full, one not.
A gap of only ten points.
But those ten might be harder than zero to ninety put together.
He did not dwell on it.
He stood.
The instant his legs took the strain, a fullness he had never felt before ran through his waist. The stored power of the Poison-Dragon Spear-Waist Mutation felt nothing like the old one — like a well brimming with water, ready to surge up at any moment.
This transformation had been an unexpected gift.
What was not unexpected...
Sword intent had taken its first form.
Kobe Hikaru drew the Muramasa from his waist. The blade hummed, and it too seemed to be passing through a metamorphosis of its own, exactly as he just had.
Shaped by his sword intent. Watered by it.
Its yokai soul was about to take form.
Good.
Very good. And very ambitious.
"From now on, I'll call you... Oboro, Onikiri."
Muramasa was only the blade's type, not its name.
For now, let Onikiri be its name.
Later, once its yokai soul takes shape, Oboro will be its yokai name.
But before that.
Raikiri was forged by cutting lightning; Onikiri, by cutting demons.
Now then — in one go, let's bring this to full completion!
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