Night. On the mountain road at the border of Shinano and Kōzuke Provinces, the moonlight was swallowed by thick clouds. Darkness stretched unbroken between heaven and earth.
A demon was fleeing. It had once been human. A farmer in his forties, his face still bearing the contours of his former life, but only the contours remained.
Now that face was no longer a human face. The skin was waxen and gray. The eyeballs bulged, nearly bursting from their sockets. The mouth had split open to the roots of the ears, revealing a jagged tangle of fangs. Its left arm had swollen to at least twice its original thickness, bluish-black veins writhing beneath the skin, its nails transformed into bony hooked claws.
Kibutsuji Muzan's blood, by what channel, no one knew, had seeped into this mountain village and infected this farmer. Barely three days since his mutation. He had already devoured seven people from his own village.
Now he was running. Because something was chasing him from behind. And it had already caught up. A blade pierced through his back and erupted from his chest.
No glow on the cutting edge. No reiryoku. Not even yōki. Just an ordinary katana, thrust in by some passing samurai. The demon looked down at the blade tip protruding from his chest. He grinned. The mouth split to his ears stretched into a hideous arc.
He reached up, gripped the blade, and yanked it forward, the sword pulled free from his body, the wound sealing shut in an instant. Not even a drop of blood spilled. A trap. Against an immortal demon, ordinary attacks were utterly meaningless. Before the samurai could retreat, the demon's hooked claw was already lunging toward his face—
Then it stopped. The claw halted ten cm from the samurai's face. Because the demon's arm was gone. From the elbow down, the entire forearm had vanished. The cut surface was clean and smooth. The edges were scorched black, thin white smoke rising from them, the marks of being flash-burned by extreme heat.
The demon froze. Though the wound immediately began to writhe, flesh and blood visibly regenerating, new bone pushing out from the stump, this time, the regeneration only made it halfway.
The second blade had already arrived. This strike descended from above. A vertical cleave. The cutting edge was wreathed in dark crimson light, no reiryoku. Not sunlight. Yōkai-fire. The Blood-Fire Transformation.
The blade touched the crown of the demon's skull. Dark crimson flames poured along the edge and plunged into its body. From top to bottom, the entire body was split in two. The two halves of flesh still writhed. Still tried to pull themselves back together, the regeneration working in mad overdrive.
The third blade. A horizontal slash. Muramasa's cutting edge traced an arc, splitting the two halves into four.
The fourth blade. The fifth. The sixth. The blade-light became so dense it merged into a single continuous sheet. Under the lock-on of the Soul-Chasing BowArm Transformation, each strike landed precisely upon the flesh where regeneration was most active, disrupting its reassembly.
The searing heat of the Blood-Fire Transformation scorched every cut surface, crushing the speed of regeneration to its absolute limit. In a single instant. Less than a second. Seven linked cuts. The demon howled, collapsing into ash.
All that remained on the ground was a heap of smoldering cinders, still shrinking. Cut again and again. Burned again and again. The limit of its regeneration had been forcibly breached through physical means alone. Not the sunlight of a Nichirin Blade, yet surpassing it.
Shinji sheathed his sword. Click. Beneath his bamboo hat, his crimson demon eyes swept over the young samurai collapsed on the ground, early twenties, the hand gripping his sword still trembling. "Go." One word. The young samurai scrambled to his feet and fled without looking back.
Shinji spared him no further glance. This was the sixth demon he had cut down in half a month. His technique had grown increasingly sharp and efficient. Not the fastest possible. But without a Nichirin Blade, to achieve this degree, it was enough.
He lifted his head. A sliver of moonlight slipped through the gaps in the clouds, illuminating the silhouette of the far ridge on the other side of the mountain road.
A castle.
The skyline of one of the Kantō's famed fortresses emerged in his field of vision. Its walls were not high, but stretched endlessly long, encircling the entire mountain basin.
The lights of the castle town below flickered in the night like fireflies scattered across black velvet. He had already crossed through Shinano, the land controlled by the Takeda.
This was territory under the Uesugi clan's dominion, a castle in Kōzuke Province. Its name was of no concern to him. What mattered was the person within it.
The next day. Early morning. The marketplace of the castle town had just opened. Buyers and sellers alike were already out, pickled vegetables, charcoal, cloth, straw sandals.
In this chaotic age, no matter how hard life was, people still had to live. And under the banner of righteousness raised by the Uesugi clan, the inhabitants of Kōzuke could at least scrape by. Not as prosperous as under the benevolent rule of the Hōjō, but they could survive.
Shinji walked through the marketplace, his bamboo hat pulled low. The straw rain cape draped over his gray robes. Muramasa was hidden beneath the cape. His pale face was mostly obscured by the hat's shadow, only his jaw visible. He walked slowly. Like a wandering rōnin on the road.
"—Did you hear? The core dojos of all the famous schools across the Kantō have been getting taken down lately." Nearby, two merchants crouched behind their stall, cracking melon seeds and talking in voices neither loud nor soft.
"I heard. Started all the way from Tōtōmi and got challenged one after another. Tenshin Shōden-ryū. Kage-ryū. Chūjō-ryū… over a dozen schools, all defeated."
"That good?"
"They say every match was settled within three moves, and he used the opponent's own techniques. Learns them on the spot and hits them right back with it. Creepy or what?"
"What does he look like?"
"No one's gotten a clear look. Wears a bamboo hat and a straw cape. Leaves without giving a name. Some say he's a young man, face as pale as a corpse. Could be some noble from Kyōto? You know how those nobles like to powder their faces."
"..."
In the midst of their silence, Shinji walked past them. The brim of his bamboo hat swayed slightly. He was somewhat exasperated by these rumors, but had grown used to them.
Having traveled this far, it was impossible he wouldn't have stirred some ripples. The two merchants, oblivious, continued cracking their seeds.
"—The creepiest part is, someone said they saw that guy enter the city this morning. Might be looking for Lord Kamiizumi."
"Kamiizumi Nobutsuna?!"
"Who else! If he really goes looking for the Sword Saint, it's gonna be quite a show—"
The voices faded into the distance. Shinji passed through the marketplace and followed the main road of the castle town all the way to the northern foothills. Kamiizumi Nobutsuna. That was indeed his objective in coming to this city.
The founder of Shinkage-ryū. A man recognized by this era as one of the rare few worthy of the title Kensei, Sword Saint. Even in later ages, his name would echo through history.
Compared to Sasaki Kojirō and Miyamoto Musashi, who had yet to even be born, Nobutsuna was the true master. If Tenshin Shōden-ryū was the foundation of swordsmanship, and Kage-ryū its variations, then the Shinkage-ryū created by Kamiizumi Nobutsuna was what lay beyond, after foundation and variation had been unified and raised to a higher plane.
Its core philosophy was the Katsujin-ken, the Life-Giving Sword. The sword was not meant to kill. It was meant to give life. The highest realm of his blade was not the ability to cut through anything, but the ability to not cut whatever one chose not to cut. And conversely, if he so willed, he could cut everything else.
In this chaotic age overrun by demons and monsters, for a human swordsman to have reached such a state of understanding, Shinji wanted to see.
He wanted to see what that man's blade truly carried within it. As he had noted before, over the fleeting half-month that had passed, he had walked through seventeen dojos. Seventeen schools. He had seen seventeen different people, each understanding the blade in seventeen different ways.
The blade of Tenshin Shōden-ryū was an extension of the Trinity of Heaven, Earth, and Man, the three levels of high, middle, and low encompassing everything.
The blade of Kage-ryū was the art of waiting, striking second, arriving first.
The blade of Chūjō-ryū was distance, control the distance, and you controlled life and death.
The blade of Jigen-ryū was a single strike, into that one strike, everything must be poured. Every school held its truth. Every truth was but a single facet.
And him? What was his blade? He had yet to find it. But he had begun to faintly grasp something. The swordsmen of those dojos, what their blades carried, though seemingly different on the surface, held something similar at their core.
It was faith in survival. Faith in protection. Faith in choice. And beyond that, faith in rising above, in establishing one's place in the world. Faith, condensed upon the cutting edge, that became Will.
And Shinji, what did he believe in? After crossing over, he had swung his blade without pause. At first, it was for self-preservation. Then, to grow stronger.
After that, meeting Kikyō, it was for protection. But those were only reasons. Not the process. Not the outcome.
Will was why he drew his blade. It was also why he swung it. And more than that, it was why it could land. And what threaded through all of these, was faith. Belief. And now, the things he believed in were becoming clearer. His Will had gradually begun to sprout. Only a single step remained.
And so, Muramasa trembled faintly at his waist. The dark crimson light flared for a single instant. As though urging him. As though saying: Hurry. Understand.
So now, Go meet the Sword Saint.
At the end of the mountain road north of the castle town, a small, unassuming courtyard. Bamboo fence walls. A thatched roof. Within the yard, an old pine leaned crookedly, half its branches stretching out to blot the sky.
No plaque. No banner. Not even the student recruitment signs common to most dojos. It looked like nothing more than an ordinary mountain dwelling.
But the dirt before the gate was stamped with a dense crisscross of footprints, straw sandals, wooden clogs, bare feet. All left behind by those who had come to visit. An unending stream of seekers.
Shinji stood outside the gate. He had removed his bamboo hat and straw cape. His gray robes were coated in the dust of half a month's travel. His white, flowing hair was tied loosely behind his head with a strip of black cloth.
Muramasa hung at his waist. He pushed open the bamboo gate. It was not locked. No one stopped him. In the yard stood seven or eight young men in various styles of warrior attire. Some carried swords on their backs. Others clutched wooden blades. Clearly disciples of this dojo.
The moment they saw Shinji, all of them froze mid-motion. Their gazes fell upon his pale, cold face and those demonic eyes. A few of them instinctively stepped back half a pace.
But Shinji had long grown accustomed to this. He simply treated himself as a somewhat unusual person. He walked straight through the yard, paying them no mind, heading directly for the main house.
The shōji door of the main house was half-open. Inside sat a single figure. Past fifty years of age. His face was lean, his cheekbones high and prominent. The line of his jaw was hard and sharp. His graying hair was bound into a topknot, the temples already pure white.
He wore a plain, faded kosode. There was no sword at the old man's waist. Only a wooden blade laid across his knees. A simple bokken carved from ordinary white oak. Nothing special about it whatsoever. But the moment Shinji stepped across the threshold into the main house, he stopped.
The instant his foot crossed the sill, something intangible struck him head-on. Not yōki. Not reiryoku. Not the power of gods or buddhas. And certainly not osore. It was faith. Or rather, it was an extraordinarily pure Sword Will, condensed over decades of training. It held no aggression. It was even somewhat gentle, like a faint breeze brushing the face.
And yet, the sensation was akin to standing at the edge of a cliff and being nudged by the wind. A hair's breadth from plummeting into the abyss. Light, truly light. Yet dangerous. Truly dangerous. So this was a Sword Saint?
Shinji's steps faltered for only an instant, and in that instant, he understood. He knew the old man before him was Kamiizumi Nobutsuna, the founder of Shinkage-ryū.
The man whom all who held a blade in this era revered as Kensei. He had long since retired into seclusion. He no longer took disciples. No longer competed. No longer served any daimyō. He merely remained in this small mountain courtyard, occasionally offering guidance to the young men who sought him out.
And now, this Sword Saint suddenly lifted his head. His expression was slightly taken aback. But his gaze was utterly calm. As though he were looking at an ordinary visitor.
"A guest has arrived. Please, sit." The old man spoke, as though he had been waiting for Shinji all along. His voice was soft, yet remarkably clear.
Shinji stepped across that intangible pressure and entered the main house. He sat down cross-legged, three paces across from him. Between them lay an empty stretch of wooden floor.
"It seems you are the one who has been challenging dojos across the land of late?" Kamiizumi Nobutsuna spoke.
"Mn." Shinji nodded. "I am learning the sword."
Kamiizumi Nobutsuna's movements paused again, faintly, as though, though he had already known, confirming it still came as something of a surprise. "Then what have you learned?" he asked. Direct. Straightforward.
Shinji was equally direct. "I have learned much in technique. But what I seek, Sword Will, still lacks a single step."
The old man's crow's feet shifted. Not quite a smile. Not quite not. "So you have come to me for this as well?"
"To see."
"See what?"
"To see what your blade carries within it."
The old man looked down at the wooden sword across his knees. His withered fingers brushed lightly over its surface. "My blade carries nothing," he said.
Shinji did not respond.
"When I was young, my blade carried the Will of slaying. I cut down anyone I faced. Winning was joy. Later, it carried the Will of protection. To protect my family. My domain. Those who followed me. Still later, it carried the Will of the blade itself, I came to understand why the blade itself existed. I understood the difference between cutting and not cutting. And at the very end, I poured everything out. It became empty."
He lifted his head and looked at Shinji. Within those clouded old eyes lay something startlingly clear.
"When the blade is empty, the man is at ease. I do not need my blade to carry anything. I stand here. The blade is here. The Will is here. All the whys, utterly gone. No need to carry anything. Because I myself am that."
His words fell. Silence filled the main house. Shinji stared at the gaunt old man across from him for a long, long time. He felt it. That Will, radiating from the person before him, unattached to any weapon. Pure to the point of transparency. Not adhered to the blade. Emanating from the man himself.
The man was the blade. The blade was the man. There was no boundary between them. Thus, there was no need to draw the sword. Thus, a wooden blade, an iron blade, bare hands, all were the same. This was a Sword Saint. The emptiness that transcended ordinary Sword Will, ordinary master swordsmen. True emptiness.
Shinji rose to his feet. He did not, as he had at every human dojo before, draw his blade. He did not strike. The clash of Will against Will he had envisioned, never happened.
Because it was no longer necessary. Because he had already seen. He had seen the gap between himself and his opponent, and he had seen the direction that gap pointed.
Kamiizumi Nobutsuna's Will was emptiness. The ease that came after emptying everything out. But that was the road of man, the shape it took at its very end. His own road was different.
He was a yōkai. A demon. And he would become a ma. He did not need emptiness. He needed fullness. To take all his transformations, all his artifacts, everything that had fused into his being, and pour them all in.
Fill it until it could hold no more. And then become the vessel that could contain everything. Not emptying out. Filling to the brim. The other end of the same road, returning by a different path.
"My thanks," he said. He turned. Walked out of the main house. Crossed the courtyard. Pushed open the bamboo gate. Never looking back.
The disciples in the yard exchanged bewildered glances. "That person… he's the one everyone's been talking about, isn't he? The one who challenged seventeen dojos in a row? He's just… leaving?"
"No fight?"
"No fight. Maybe he realized he's no match for Master Kamiizumi?"
"From the Master's attitude, it didn't seem like that!" No one could answer.
Inside the main house, Kamiizumi Nobutsuna watched that gray figure pass through the bamboo fence and disappear at the end of the mountain road. His withered fingers came to rest upon the wooden blade. A long moment passed.
"Interesting," he murmured. His voice was very soft, as though speaking to himself. "A yōkai, come to learn the sword from me… in times like these, truly, anything can happen."
From the very first step that young man had taken into the courtyard, Kamiizumi Nobutsuna had sensed it, what flowed within that body was by no means human. But he had not drawn his blade. Because he knew he could not defeat this opponent. Not now, in his old age, and even in his youth, he would never have been a match.
This was no ordinary yōkai. Swordsmanship was meant to compensate for a lack of strength. But if the gap in strength was too vast, then technique, even Will itself, held little meaning. And beyond that, the other had not drawn his blade, either. No killing intent. No malice.
A yōkai, come before a Sword Saint, not to kill. Not to battle. Only to glimpse his blade. And then leave. Such forthrightness was more open and honorable than most human samurai he had ever met.
And such insight, it nearly matched the other young prodigy he had once seen.
The one whose skill, though so young, had already surpassed his own.
One was a yōkai who resembled a man. One was a man who resembled a yōkai. "Interesting…" the old man murmured. "They will likely meet, won't they?"
After all, anomalies were always drawn to one another.
Beyond the city. West of the mountain road. A nameless hill. The view was open. One could see the layered ridges in the distance, and beyond them, the far-off skyline.
Shinji walked to the summit of the hill, and abruptly stopped. Then, he sat down. No warning whatsoever. As if, as he walked, something had suddenly struck him. His legs folded and he sat cross-legged upon the grass. He lifted Muramasa from his waist and laid it across his knees. He closed his eyes.
Fragments swirled through his mind. The seventeen blades of the seventeen dojos. Kamiizumi Nobutsuna's eyes, clear to the point of transparency. And Tōtōsai's words. What do you think of when you swing your blade?
What did he think of? He thought. Everything that had fused into him. Every artifact cultivated to max Affection. Every stacked transformation. Every process, from zero to one hundred. The stones. The trees. The walls. The hoe. The throwing blade. The cat-demon's claw. The thunder horn. The iron hammer. They were not tools. They were parts of him.
What did he think of when he swung his blade? He thought of, taking all of them. Unifying them into one. Making himself the vessel that could contain everything. Returning by a different road, truly, a different road returning to the same destination.
His Will was condensing.