Upon the hill, the wind swept through, flattening the grass. Shinji sat cross-legged, Muramasa laid across his knees. His crimson demon eyes were closed, his consciousness sunk into depths deeper than ever before.
The sword-fragments of the seventeen dojos spun, dismantled, and reassembled themselves within his mind. All the techniques, layer by layer, were stripped of their outer shells, revealing the shared skeleton beneath.
Conviction.
Human conviction condensed upon the cutting edge, that became Sword Will. But Kamiizumi Nobutsuna had emptied his conviction out. Emptied it until the man himself was the blade. Thus his Will was emptiness. Yet emptiness itself, was also a conviction.
But Shinji, he would fill it instead. Fill it until it overflowed. Fill it until he himself became the vessel that could contain everything.
This realization surged up from the depths of his mind and spread outward along his thoughts, carrying with it an exceedingly faint, pure energy.
Yes. Pure energy.
Upon the body of a yōkai, there now appeared the pure spiritual energy that only humans should have been able to comprehend. Faint. Thin. Drifting five cm above his skin like morning mist. But it did not merge within him.
It made no contact with the impure energies inside, and naturally, there was no rejection. It was the residue that seeped out when his human soul, preserved as a transmigrator, was stirred by the perception of Sword Will.
Impure energy as the body. Pure energy as the function. Two forces that should have repelled each other utterly had found, within him, a subtle form of coexistence.
This was the embryonic form of Sword Will. Still terribly weak, so weak it likely couldn't even scratch a low-level yōkai. But the direction was correct. And, it had formed.
And as this pure energy spread, at his chest, something detonated. The venomous dragon's reverse scale. The deep green scale pressed against the skin of his chest, from its edges, a dark, ink-green light began to blaze.
The intensity of this light far surpassed any reaction from its previous Affection increases. Not gradual. A sudden, explosive shift. As though a snake that had lain coiled in ambush for an eternity had finally seized the instant its prey opened its mouth, and struck.
The System panel flickered.
[Venomous Dragon Reverse Scale: Affection +4]
[Current Affection: 100 (Returned to One)]
[All Talents Unlocked—Detoxification. Miasma. Biological Hormones (can internally generate biological toxins; toxins that are also medicine). All Talents available for fusion into the self.]
Shinji's consciousness was yanked back to reality. One hundred. Maxed out. He opened his eyes and looked down at his chest.
The reverse scale's ink-green light was seeping inward, through the skin, through the muscle, following the blood vessels downward. Toward his waist. Specifically, toward the core region of the Spear-Waist Transformation.
The Spear-Waist Transformation was the most silent of his six Changes. Yet it was a critically vital existence.
The Archer Transformation had given him arm strength and control. The Strengthened Body Transformation had given him speed and explosive power. The Bone-Essence Transformation had given him bone spurs for attack and defense in one. The Keen-Eye Transformation had given him powerful vision across all distances, in motion and stillness. The Blood Transformation had given him perception and regeneration.
The Spear-Waist Transformation seemed to have given nothing, yet in truth, it was the most essential of all. What it granted was support. The waist was the pillar of the body. The spear was the root of the thrust. The Spear-Waist Transformation granted stability.
The force of all transformations ultimately had to be transmitted through the waist to the four limbs, just like the shaft of a spear.
The Spear-Waist Transformation was that transmission hub. Force rose from the earth and was issued from the waist. In ordinary times, it never showed itself. But without it, the other five transformations could never fully express their power.
Even the externalized bones of the Bone-Essence Transformation possessed unparalleled tensile strength because of the Spear-Waist Transformation.
And now, the poison of the venomous dragon's reverse scale was seeping into this very hub. Fusing.
The venomous dragon was of the water-dragon species. Born in the abyss. Dwelling in miasmic marshes. Its reverse scale was the hardest yet softest part of its body, hard enough to turn aside blade and spear, soft enough to sense the subtlest shifts in water currents.
What this reverse scale carried at its essence was the "poison within water." And the "medicine within water." For every three parts of medicine, there was poison.
Yet every three parts of poison could also enter medicine. This was water. And among the Five Elements, the kidneys belonged to Water.
Shinji's body reacted on pure instinct. Or rather, the heart forged by the Shura Form projection reacted. Deep within his thoracic cavity, the Shura Heart born of the Blood-Fire Transformation pulsed once.
Dark crimson firelight surged from the heart's position, flowing downward along his spine. At his lumbar vertebrae, it collided with the ink-green poison gas that was even now seeping in. Fire and water met.
Yet they did not annihilate each other.
Fire rose upward. Water sank downward. Each took its proper place. The Shura Heart dwelt in the chest, governing Fire. Then, the Shura Kidneys would dwell at the waist, governing Water.
Shinji felt his lumbar vertebrae tremble. The core of the Spear-Waist Transformation, infused by the water-poison of the venomous dragon's reverse scale, the hub that had once only transmitted force began to undergo an Essence Shift.
It no longer merely transmitted. It accumulated. Like a deep well. The water-nature of the venomous dragon coalesced at the bottom of that well, forming an ink-green nucleus that glowed with faint luminescence.
That nucleus pulsed, It generated poison and medicine in a constant rhythm. Like a true kidney. Its frequency was different from the Shura Heart's. The heart pulsed fast and fierce.
The kidneys pulsed slow and deep. One fast, one slow. One above, one below. The rhythm of fire and water formed the first paired cycle within his body.
The internal structure of the Shura Form had gone from possessing only a heart, to the intersection of heart and kidneys. Fire and water, now in balance.
Shinji did not deliberately guide this process. It was all instinct. The path he had already thought through so clearly in Tōtōsai's volcanic cavern, the Tenth Transformation to forge the five viscera, filled by the Five Elements, now naturally took its second step.
The first step: the iron hammer's fire returned to the heart. The second step: the reverse scale's water returned to the kidneys.
The Spear-Waist Transformation had been rewritten. Poison and water seeped into the lumbar core. The Spear-Waist Transformation evolved from a simple force-transmission hub into a dual core capable of both storing power and releasing poison and medicine. This was now, the Venom-Dragon Spear-Waist Transformation.
Heaven One generates Water. These four characters inexplicably surfaced in Shinji's mind. Heaven One generates Water. Earth Six completes it.
The numerology of the River Diagram transmitted from the continent across the sea. He was using an exceedingly ancient philosophical system from another world to construct the internal circulation of his yōkai body. Absurd. And yet, entirely logical. Who said he hadn't come from that other world himself?
After the cycling of heart and kidneys was established, the Shura Form's endurance capacity had theoretically risen by a significant margin. The heart governed pumping.
The kidneys governed storage. Fire rose. Water descended. The most basic embryonic form of internal circulation now existed. Three viscera were still missing. Three elements still missing. But two were better than one.
Amidst all this, another vibration came from his waist. Yura's comb. The comb rattled furiously against his sash, its frequency even more violent than the reverse scale's reaction when it had reached max Affection moments ago. But this was not joy. This was gnashing fury. To be precise, it was humiliated rage.
The System panel flickered.
[Sakasagami no Yura: Affection Unchanged]
[Current Affection: 90 (Limit)]
[She is extremely displeased. Profoundly displeased. She feels that she, who clearly followed you long before that wretched scale, has been overtaken. But she has reached a certain bottleneck. It is not that you have given too little. It is that she herself has yet to figure something out.]
Reached ninety. Stuck. Just like when she had reached thirty before, Yura had once again arrived at a barrier she needed to cross on her own. Last time, introducing Muramasa as a rival had spurred her on, and her Affection had rocketed from thirty to fifty, then all the way to eighty-eight.
This time, competition was no longer enough. But Shinji, at this moment, had no spare energy to ponder this. The comb's trembling continued for roughly the time it took for half a cup of tea to cool before, at last, reluctantly quieting down.
Like a bristling cat whose scruff had been grabbed. Furious. But, for now, accepting.
Shinji looked down at the comb hanging silently at his waist, then at the mark on his chest where the reverse scale had completely fused into his skin, leaving behind only a small patch of dark green.
Two demon artifacts. One maxed. One not. A gap of only ten points. But those ten points might well be harder than the entire journey from zero to ninety combined. He didn't dwell on it.
He rose to his feet. The instant his legs exerted force, his waist surged with an unprecedented sense of fullness.
The stored-power sensation of the Venom-Dragon Spear-Waist Transformation was utterly different from the old Spear-Waist Transformation.
Like a well filled to the brim with water, ready to gush forth at any moment. The completion of this transformation was an unexpected joy.
And as expected,
"Sword Will has taken its first form."
Shinji drew Muramasa from his waist. The blade hummed. It, too, seemed to be undergoing some kind of metamorphosis, just as he himself had moments ago. Nourished and watered by his Sword Will. Its demon soul was on the verge of completion.
Good. Excellent. Full of spirit.
"From now on… you shall be called Oboro · Onikiri."
Muramasa was merely the type of blade, not its true name. First, let Onikiri, Demon Cutter, be the name of the sword. Then, later… let Oboro, Hazy Moon, be its demon name.
But before that,
Raikiri was born of cutting thunder. Onikiri shall be forged through cutting demons. Now, without pause, let it all be brought to completion in a single stroke.
To fullness.
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