At the foot of the volcano, the lingering heat of the lava rock rose through the soles of his boots.
Shinji held Muramasa flat across his palms. The blade was just as it had been, a standard uchigatana. But the crack along its cutting edge had now extended from the tip to nearly a third of the blade's length.
Fine as a strand of silk, it continuously bled a faint, dark crimson glow as the yōki seeped through. The blade was trembling. A low-frequency, small-amplitude tremor, like someone turning over in their sleep.
Tōtōsai hefted his forging hammer onto his shoulder, tilted his head, and stared at the sword for three full breaths with those bulging eyes. He didn't take it. Didn't touch it. He simply observed, from an arm's length away, with eyes that had forged blades for centuries.
"Mn…" He grunted through his nose, the wrinkles of his face bunching into an inscrutable expression. Not disdain. Not surprise. The scrutiny of an old craftsman facing a material that intrigued him. "Young… ahem, my lord, please bring it closer."
Shinji extended Muramasa another half-shaku. Tōtōsai reached out a hand. A rough palm. Knuckles thick and gnarled. Embedded in the crevices of his nails were the remnants of iron rust and mineral ore, as though he had just finished hammering. But the instant his fingertip touched the sheath—
Hum. A sharp, brief tremor erupted. The dark crimson glow along the blade's edge doubled in brightness. The sword-body shuddered violently. The sheath jumped within Shinji's palm.
Tōtōsai yanked his finger back as though burned.
"Tch—?!" The old man shook his fingers, his bulging eyes rounding. "Did it just bite me?!" Tōtōsai hadn't recoiled from the blade's sharpness. He had recoiled from the sword-soul's rejection.
Pure. Unvarnished. Refusal.
"Interesting." Tōtōsai withdrew his hand, folded his arms, and studied it further. This time, his examination was even more meticulous. His bulging eyes swept from the blade tip to the hilt, from the cutting edge to the spine, and lingered for a long while on that crack.
On his shoulder, Myōga craned his tiny neck, his flat little face leaning closer. "Lord Tōtōsai, this sword—"
"Shut up. This old man is looking." Myōga retracted his neck, all six spindly legs clamping tight to Tōtōsai's collar. Silence stretched for perhaps another ten breaths. Then Tōtōsai spoke.
"Boy." He looked at Shinji. His tone had shifted, from the panic of being chased to calm, and now it carried the gravity he reserved only for discussing his craft. "This sword, I can't reforge it."
Shinji didn't immediately ask why. He waited.
"It doesn't need this old man's reforge anyway." Tōtōsai unshouldered his hammer, letting its head thud against the ground and dent a shallow crater. Trails of flame spread across the hammer's face.
"You said the blade body has cracked, that it can't bear the burden. That's correct. Truly, it can't bear it. The original material of this blade is mundane iron. Mundane iron cannot contain a demon-artifact-level sword-soul. Like trying to hold river water in a teacup, the cup will eventually crack. But the problem, in truth, doesn't lie with the cup at all."
He patted the hammer's handle, his bulging eyes fixed on the dark crimson light bleeding from the crack. "The problem lies with the water. This blade's soul, has actually already formed."
Shinji's pupils contracted faintly. Muramasa's awakening progress on the System panel was still stuck at 47%. But Tōtōsai said it had "already formed."
"Formed but incomplete." Tōtōsai seemed to read his confusion and added another sentence. "The reason you feel it 'hasn't awakened' isn't because it's weak. It's because a piece of it was missing from the start. The skeleton of the sword-soul is there. The flesh and blood are there. But its 'heart' hasn't fully grown."
Myōga couldn't help but interject. "What do you mean, its heart hasn't fully grown?"
"Idiot. Exactly what it sounds like." Tōtōsai flicked a finger at Myōga, nearly sending the flea flying.
"A sword's soul never grows on its own. When an object becomes a yōkai, it either relies on time, centuries, millennia, slowly maturing, or it relies on external force. Fed bit by bit by its master's yōki, thoughts, and will."
He looked at Shinji. "This sword's soul, was fed by you. You poured your yōki into it. Your will. Your obsession. Your perception of it. These things coalesced into its sword-soul. In other words, its soul is, in truth, a part of you."
"But—" Tōtōsai's tone shifted. "What you gave it… wasn't enough. Not in quantity. It's that you yourself haven't yet figured out what you are. Your 'will' hasn't taken shape. What the sword-soul has fed on from you is only a half-finished product. To put it plainly, when you swing your blade, you haven't truly grasped why you swing it. It's the simplest question. Yet many in this world can never think it through. It's waiting. Waiting for you to figure yourself out. When your will is complete, and you pour it in, it will shatter its own shell on its own. Mundane iron or demon bone, the shell doesn't matter. What matters is the heart within. So, it doesn't need this old man to reforge it. What it needs… is you."
Shinji fell silent. He looked down at the Muramasa in his palm. The crack was still there. The dark crimson light still bled from it. The blade trembled faintly. As though responding to Tōtōsai's words. As though urging him on.
"If that's the case…" He didn't continue dwelling on the question of "will." Because this, though not identical to his own conclusions or to Taigen Sessai's words about "the myriad dharmas returning to one", her words were unquestionably more fundamental, of a higher conceptual level, was, in a sense, connected.
One was about embodying one's own truth. The other was solely about the "vessel" in one's hand. And neither could be resolved with just a few words. He shifted direction. His "will," after all, had never been borne by Muramasa alone.
He drew several objects from within his robes. Metal fragments. Varied in size. Irregular in shape. Some were blade tips. Some were broken shards of cutting edges. Some were merely tiny pieces of shattered iron. Their material was unremarkable, indistinguishable from the scrap in any roadside junk pile. But each fragment still carried an exceedingly faint trace of, Affection. Max value. 100.
These fragments came from many different sources. Some were the remnants of nameless katana he had scavenged from the battlefield corpse-pile at the very beginning of his transmigration.
In those earliest days, he had infused them with his yōki and painstakingly cultivated them to max Affection, their abilities returning to him before they shattered in battle.
Some were fragments of a rusted naginata that had been enshrined in an abandoned temple, which he had cultivated to max Affection on some idle afternoon. Though they were all unusable now, he had kept them all. Out of nostalgia. And out of a feeling that one day, they might prove useful. And now…
The fragments lay across his palm, gleaming with a dull metallic luster under the orange glow of the volcano.
Myōga poked his head out from Tōtōsai's shoulder and glanced at the pile of scrap metal. "These all look quite ordinary… just a bunch of broken iron. What could they possibly—"
Smack.
Before the old flea could finish, Tōtōsai swatted him. Myōga was sent flying three shaku away, flipping twice through the air before crashing to the ground, all six legs flailing skyward.
"What do you know?!" Tōtōsai's bulging eyes rounded to the size of bronze bells. He crouched down, his face practically pressed against the heap of fragments.
His rough fingers didn't touch them, the lesson from before was still fresh, but his eyes lingered on each piece for at least three full seconds.
"The material is indeed scrap iron," he said. But his voice was utterly different from before. Deep. Grave. Even carrying an undisguised excitement. "But what's on them, is not something scrap iron can possess."
He straightened up and looked at Shinji, the faint, barely perceptible gleam on the fragments reflected in his bulging eyes. "Heart. Every single piece is imbued with heart. What is Tessaiga, after all? At its root, it's nothing more than a single fang of Lord Tōga. What value does a fang hold on its own? It's neither gold nor jade. Yōkai teeth litter the ground everywhere. Even a daiyōkai's tooth is, at most, just a bit harder than the rest. But Lord Tōga poured his will into it. That tooth was no longer a tooth. It was a heart. In essence, Tessaiga was a demon blade Lord Tōga himself nurtured into being. It merely took its final forged form through my hands."
Tōtōsai shouldered his hammer, the handle rotating half a turn. "Your fragments are the same. The material is garbage. But the will they carry, is real. The finest vessels in this world have never been judged by their material. They are judged by the heart within them." He paused, sucked at his teeth, and his expression shifted again. From grave intensity back to troubled difficulty.
"However—" He shook his head. "This old man cannot help you perfect this blade. It won't let me touch it." He jutted his chin toward Muramasa. "You saw for yourself. This old man's fingers are still smarting. This blade acknowledges only you. Anyone else so much as touches it and they get bitten. No matter how good this old man's skill, I can't hammer iron from across the room. So you'll have to do it yourself. You'll forge it yourself. You'll temper the heart within these fragments together, with your own hands. Then, perhaps, your will can draw closer to completion."
Closer. Not achieving it. But it was enough. This had been Shinji's objective from the start, to allow Muramasa to continue its "awakening."
Shinji looked at him. "I don't know how to forge a blade."
"This old man knows." Tōtōsai bared his teeth in what barely passed for a grin, the wrinkles of his face compressing into something resembling a smile. "So, this old man can teach you."