Chapter 236: The Tenth Transformation
Shards of the shattered illusion still drifted through the corridor like falling snow. Kobe Hikaru had already retracted his blade stance, his massive Bone-Thunder Giant Body of the Asura Transformation anchored firmly to the cracked stone floor.
At the far end of the hall sat Master Hakushin. The rhythmic clicking of his prayer beads had ceased. His withered, mummified eyelids remained open, revealing cloudy, white eyes completely devoid of anger.
There was only anticipation.
He was waiting for Hikaru to finish his answer.
Yes, that dismissive phrase—what does it have to do with me—which sounded like a blatant refusal to engage, was actually an answer in itself. Hakushin had heard it, and naturally, he waited. He waited for a definitive resolution to the question that had trapped his soul in hesitation for hundreds of years.
Hikaru stared down at the withered figure.
He knew the old monk genuinely looked forward to his response. Hakushin was not like Abe no Seimei, an existence inherently split between two sides of the same coin. This high monk, who had exhausted his mortal life saving countless people, was a true saint in every sense of the word. It was only a single, fleeting stray thought of fear before his death that had caused him to fall into this wretched state.
In the original timeline, Kikyo had successfully persuaded Hakushin.
What had she said again?
A saint does not need to pursue perfection, because a saint is also a human—so-called right and wrong are merely trivial matters.
Do good deeds, and do not ask about the future.
That was the essence of what does it have to do with 'me'.
But unfortunately, he was not Kikyo.
Hakushin's withered eyes watched him. The mummified monk offered no verbal reaction. Instead, the wooden prayer beads draped over his skeletal fingers began to spin once more.
A heavy, suffocating wave of Dharma power surged from the end of the corridor, pressing down with far greater intensity than before.
Clearly, Hakushin did not accept his 'answer'.
Hikaru clicked his tongue. As expected.
He didn't possess Kikyo's natural charisma, nor did he harbor the priestess's deep empathy—an empathy forged through experiencing the bitter suffering of the world. He was a demon, an Oni Samurai. He simply wasn't wired for that kind of spiritual salvation. Even if the current Kikyo were standing here to deliver those exact lines, the result would likely be the same: outright rejection.
Besides, Hikaru would absolutely never allow Kikyo to endure the kind of agonizing life experiences required to naturally utter those words. As for the so-called 'gifts of suffering', he thought they were complete garbage.
Hakushin, possessing the wisdom of a living Buddha, naturally saw right through Hikaru's superficial act.
That left only one path forward.
Violence.
A Sokushinbutsu was terrifyingly strong. Even if Hakushin hadn't truly ascended to Buddhahood, he was a monk operating at the level of a contemporary Bodhisattva or Arhat. His massive spiritual will was not inferior to an ancient Great Yokai in terms of sheer quality and quantity. However, he was not a combat specialist.
This flaw was evident in the original lore. Hakushin's true strength manifested in his absolute Barrier and the vast Dharma power that blanketed the entire Mount Hakurei mountain range, not in direct, visceral combat. And right now, that Barrier was solely focused on suppressing Yao Qi.
It wasn't impossible to fight him.
Hakushin slowly raised his right hand.
The prayer beads levitated from his palm, suddenly shattering in mid-air into exactly one hundred and eight individual wooden spheres. Each bead was tightly wrapped in an extremely concentrated layer of golden Dharma power, shooting toward the Asura Transformation like a barrage of meteorites.
Hikaru's right arm swept Onikiri forward in a vicious arc.
A blade-light of blood and fire detonated thirty beads directly in front of him. Golden light shattered against dark red flames, sending a violent shockwave leaking to both sides that blasted two rows of fist-sized craters into the solid stone walls.
Simultaneously, his left arm drove Yomikiri upward. The eerie purple arc of the blade sliced cleanly through twenty beads attempting to flank him from the side.
But the remaining fifty-eight beads bypassed the twin blades entirely, bombarding the Asura Transformation from behind, above, and below in a synchronized strike.
Boom, boom, boom, boom—
A chain of deafening explosions rocked the corridor.
The massive skeleton of the Asura Transformation creaked violently under the kinetic impact. Hairline fractures spider-webbed across the surface of the bone armor.
It hurt.
But it didn't break.
Hikaru locked his jaw, grinding his teeth to stabilize his massive frame. Banryu, gripped tightly in his third arm, delivered a devastating vertical split. The pale giant sword smashed into the final cluster of beads, batting them away like flies. The deflected projectiles ricocheted into the Buddha statues lining the corridor, shattering the ancient stone effigies into clouds of dust.
Suddenly, Hakushin's figure vanished.
It wasn't a burst of speed. It was teleportation in the truest sense. As a Sokushinbutsu completely integrated with the mountain itself, his physical coordinates within the Barrier's range held no meaning.
He was the mountain, and every grain of dirt on the mountain was him.
The very next instant, Hakushin materialized directly above the Asura Transformation.
With his withered palm facing downward, the collective spiritual weight of the entire Mount Hakurei condensed into a blinding pillar of golden light. Its massive diameter swallowed the full width of the corridor as it crashed down from the ceiling.
The Asura Transformation snapped its head up.
The six-meter-tall Bone-Thunder Giant Body stared directly into the descending light—a force absolute enough to crush any non-phenomenal demon into atomic dust.
Ethereal Sanskrit chanting echoed through the air, accompanied by the grand, deafening toll of temple bells.
Hikaru instantly hoisted Banryu horizontally above his head.
Earth's Immovability—standing upon the ground with sword in hand, absolutely never retreating.
Courageous Strength—doubling physical power when holding a sword.
Under the blessing of his dual talents, a dull, devastating thud rang out as the flat of the pale giant sword caught the descending golden pillar.
The stone floor beneath the Asura Transformation immediately began to disintegrate. Deep fissures tore outward in all directions, and the stone steps collapsed layer by layer into the foundation.
The Asura Transformation did not take a single step back.
But it was violently trembling.
Dense, sickening cracking sounds echoed from the skeleton under the crushing pressure of the light pillar. The demonic physique, constructed entirely of compressed lightning, was pushed to its absolute limit. Violent purple-white electric arcs violently lashed out from the widening gaps in the bone armor.
Worse still, the internal circulation of his four organs was nearly pressed to a dead halt by the overwhelming Dharma power. The heart fire flickered and half-extinguished, the kidney water froze solid, the lung gold stalled, and the liver wood stiffened into petrification.
The Yao Qi leakage at the gaps increased exponentially.
Fire was supposed to generate Earth, but with no Earth element to receive the cycle, the volatile energy of the four organs bled uselessly out from the breaks in his form.
The Asura Transformation was on the verge of total collapse.
Hakushin's second strike followed without a microsecond of delay.
His withered figure teleported again, materializing point-blank in front of the giant.
A mummified hand pressed gently against the center of the Asura Transformation's chest.
Dharma power flooded in.
Purification. The accumulated spiritual might of a centuries-old Sokushinbutsu actively attempted to dismantle the Yao Qi structure of the Asura Transformation from the inside out, aiming to reduce the Bone-Thunder Giant Body to absolute nothingness.
The outer skeleton began to dissolve like sugar in boiling water. The lightning acting as the structural filler hissed and dissipated into thin air.
The colossal body of the Asura Transformation rapidly shrank—six meters, five and a half meters, five meters—
This was Hakushin's true, terrifying strength in this crossover world. It was a dual-layered manifestation of will: the holy merit accumulated from saving hundreds of thousands of mortals during his life, perfectly fused with the suffocating resentment that had lingered in these mountains for centuries after his death.
Wishes and resentment. Vows and curses. The two extremes had long since merged into a singular, devastating force.
A living Buddha. A Bodhisattva walking the mortal realm.
Even if he lacked martial arts or specialized exorcism techniques, his raw output was impossible.
Although Hikaru's strength in his base state was already comparable to the Eleventh Transformation, and his maximum output approached the absolute threshold just below a Great Yokai, he still could not fight an existence of this magnitude head-on.
He was still too lacking.
"Banryu," Hikaru's voice drifted out from the dissolving chest cavity of the Asura Transformation. His tone was eerily calm.
Without a trace of panic, he asked a simple question.
"Do you want to shake a Buddha?"
The system panel violently flickered.
[Banryu: favorability +5. Current favorability: 55.]
Banryu emitted a deep, resonant hum in response.
The broad blade of the pale greatsword trembled violently. A visible, blinding white light began to shimmer along its razor edge. It wasn't Yao Qi, nor was it the holy faith of the monks. It was the pure, unadulterated concept of weight—the Thousand Demon Slayer greatsword answering its master's call.
This was a Demonic Tool whose entire existence revolved around 'bearing weight'.
Bankotsu had slaughtered a hundred men and a thousand demons, forcibly forging it from a mundane slab of iron into a legendary Demonic Tool. After Hikaru's complete reforging process, which stripped away its old limitations, the conceptual weight it could bear had grown exponentially.
Hikaru had carried it all the way up the mountain, refusing to retreat a single inch despite the crushing Buddha Power, shattering holy statues with every step.
And now, standing directly before him was a centuries-old Living Buddha, focusing the spiritual gravity of an entire mountain range into a single palm strike.
The weak against the strong. A demon attempting to shake a Buddha.
It is said that shaking a mountain is easy.
Shaking a Buddha is hard.
Yet, Banryu absolutely loved this.
It was a brute. A Thousand Demon Slayer greatsword born and bred to smash head-first into impossible challenges.
Hikaru had known this from the start. In truth, even if Hakushin hadn't intervened, he had already planned to find a literal 'mountain' to carry on his back. He needed to apply maximum pressure to a greatsword that thrived exclusively on pressure.
Hakushin's arrival was perfectly timed, aligning flawlessly with Hikaru's underlying objective.
Thus, the roaring of the blade intensified, and the crushing pressure doubled.
The panel flickered in rapid succession.
[Banryu: favorability +8. Current favorability: 63.]
[Banryu: favorability +11. Current favorability: 74.]
[Banryu: favorability +13. Current favorability: 87.]
It was fast. It was approaching the absolute threshold at an extraordinarily rapid pace.
Meanwhile, the Asura Transformation continued to physically shrink under the relentless purification of the golden Dharma power.
Five meters. Four and a half meters.
Hakushin's purifying will poured in like a tidal wave, accelerating the melting of the lightning skeleton.
But Banryu's violent humming matched the destruction.
The blinding white light on the sword spread rapidly from the cutting edge to the thick spine, from the spine to the hilt, and from the hilt directly into the third arm of the Asura Transformation.
Then, traveling up the third arm, that conceptual weight poured straight into the chest cavity of the dying giant.
It poured directly into the broken cycle where four organs were desperately functioning, bleeding energy because one vital link was missing.
Fire generates Earth.
Earth had finally arrived.
A pale, absurdly heavy power erupted from Banryu's blade soul, surging into the exact center of the Asura Transformation's chest—anchoring itself below the Heart Fire, above the Kidney Water, to the left of the Lung Metal, and to the right of the Liver Wood.
That was the Spleen.
The Spleen belonging to the Earth element.
The panel flickered one last time.
[Banryu: favorability +13. Current favorability: 100.]
[Unlocked Third Talent—Earth Dragon: The earth beneath the wielder's feet within a certain range obeys their will. They can manipulate earth and stone, alter terrain, and condense the power of the earth for absolute offense and defense.]
[Banryu has reached maximum favorability. Fuse?]
There was no need for even a microsecond of hesitation, nor was there time to consider anything else.
Fuse.
A pale supernova exploded from Banryu's blade. The greatsword's physical form did not vanish—the max-favorability object remained perfectly intact—but the conceptual will of 'weight' contained within it, the raw power of the earth accumulated by the Thousand Demon Slayer over centuries of slaughter, poured directly into Hikaru's body.
The Earth Dragon Transformation merged smoothly with his spine, evolving into the grand transformation of the Dragon-Stone Bone Soul.
Then it was recast. It overflowed. It projected outward, reaching deep into the chest cavity of the Ninth Asura Transformation.
Right below the Heart Fire.
The pale energy condensed into a physical form.
Heavy, thick, and unyielding. Like a primordial boulder. Like the bedrock roots of a mountain.
The Spleen of the Asura.
The five internal organs.
Complete.
At that exact moment, Fire generated Earth, Earth generated Metal, Metal generated Water, Water generated Wood, and Wood generated Fire. The Five Elements connected head to tail, perfectly closing the cycle.
The Yao Qi leakage instantly ceased.
The Asura Transformation abruptly stopped shrinking.
Powered by the flawless infusion of the Five Elements cycle, the four-and-a-half-meter Bone-Thunder Giant Body violently expanded outward—five meters, five and a half meters, six meters—
It easily shattered its original limit.
Seven meters.
The withered hand Hakushin had pressed against the Asura Transformation's chest was violently repelled backward.
The overwhelming purifying Dharma power slammed into the fully operational Five Elements cycle and was instantly ground to microscopic dust, like a stream of water hitting a high-speed rotating millstone.
For the first time in centuries, a visible ripple of emotion appeared in Hakushin's cloudy, withered eyes.
There was... astonishment.
Absolute astonishment at the sudden completion of the five organs within the demon standing before him.
The Fire Heart pulsed with rhythmic heat. The Water Kidney descended with chilling calm. The Metal Lung purified every breath. The Wood Liver expanded with vitality. And the Earth Spleen stabilized the absolute center.
The Five Elements cycle operated silently and flawlessly within the Asura Transformation's chest. It no longer leaked. It was no longer broken. It was like five raging rivers finally flowing into the same endless sea. No, it was more accurate to say that five rivers had converged to become the sea.
A vast, unstoppable sea.
On this day.
The Tenth Demonic Transformation was achieved.
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