I told myself it was a fluke. A trick of the light. Smoke lingering in my eyes long after it should have cleared. For the first forty-eight hours, I waited for the walls to crack open—for the roar of my father's fire to split this cold, silent dark into ash and bring daylight screaming back into my life.
I told myself it was a hoax. A nightmare too detailed, too cruel, stitched together by a mind that simply couldn't find the exit. But as the shadows here began to breathe—slow, patient, alive—the hope rotted away. Absolutely no one was coming to save me. Not now. Maybe not ever.
It's been three—no, four days. I stopped counting hours after the second cycle of sleep that wasn't really sleep. I only count the heartbeats that don't belong to me. The ones that echo through the glass walls. The ones that hum through the floor beneath my dangling feet.
I've been spending my days writing in the journal Father gave me years ago. He said it was for "important thoughts." For reflections. For plans. I renamed it myself.
Tokochi's Epilogues.
Cool name, right?
I figured that if I was going to starve to death—or whatever came after—then at least I'd leave proof that I existed. That I thought. That I was here.
Sometimes demons patrol the room. Disgusting things. Huge, one-eyed freaks. Mutated shapes that look like they were designed by something that hates symmetry. They never feed me. Never speak unless they want to. Just watch.
The first day I panicked. Screamed until my throat burned raw. The second day I cried quietly and waited to die. By the third day, I started noticing things.
The smells, for one. They aren't always awful. Sometimes the air carries hints of funnel cake. Sometimes copper. Sometimes—somehow—ramen noodles.
I love ramen.
I don't know why it smells like that. Maybe my brain is filling in blanks where food should be. Maybe hunger is turning memory into hallucination. Still… It helps.
This place isn't as bad as I thought it would be.
That realization scares me more than the demons.
I remember being captured. Sort of. One moment I was running through smoke, Father's fire lighting the forest like a dying sun. The next, something grabbed me—and then it didn't. The monster just vanished with me. Teleported. Folded space like paper.
Now I'm here. Suspended inside a column of pressurized glass. My feet dangle over a void that has no bottom. The air is heavy. Recycled. Stripped of pine and ash and everything real.
This feels like the edge of the map. A pocket of existence where the sun was never invited.
This is where I'll die, I thought.
But then something strange happened.
On my first patrol day, a demon stopped in front of my cell. It had an enormous mouth, stretched wide like an angler fish. Rows of translucent teeth glowed faintly as it tilted its head.
It stared at me for a long time.
Then it tore off its own right fin and shoved it through the feeding slot.
"It grows back," it said, voice wet and distant.
Then it left.
I named him Gerald. Gerald the Demon Angler.
Peaceful. Deadly. Kind, in a way only monsters can be.
I don't know how long I've been here when the feeling returns.
The wrongness.
The same pressure I felt the day I was taken. The day Father died. A cold pull behind my ribs. A tightening string tied somewhere deep in my chest.
Father always treated me differently.
He loved Shujinko—of course he did—but with me, there was something else. Expectation. Weight. Like I was being measured against a future that hadn't happened yet.
He gave me more lessons. Harder ones. He spoke to me like I was older than I was.
Like I was next.
I was supposed to carry the Ryomen legacy. The next legendary Elemental Swordsman. The one who would surpass him.
Shujinko loved training. He really did. I liked it too—but I wanted to wait. Wait until it mattered. Until it was real.
Maybe if Father had taught us more sooner, I could have helped him that night.
"I'm sorry, Father," I whisper.
The hum began quietly.
At first, I thought it was the glass again—the constant pressure of the pod adjusting, breathing the way this place always did. But this was different. This vibration crawled inward, threading itself through the tubes fused along my spine, sinking into bone and nerve alike. It wasn't sound. It was recognition.
The image of Shujinko surfaced without warning.
His hair was the same bright, fluffy red I remembered, matted now with ash and tears. His face was scrunched tight, lips trembling as he cried into Mama's side, small hands clutching at fabric like it might disappear too. He looked… so small. Smaller than he ever had when we trained together. Smaller than the brother I left behind.
The image stuttered.
Color drained from it, leaching away as if someone were turning a dial I couldn't see. Reds dulled to gray. Warmth collapsed into static. The edges of his form blurred, then sharpened again—wrong this time, flattened and thin.
A symbol burned across the memory, not written but imposed.
[IMPEDIMENT.]
The word didn't echo. It didn't need to. It settled.
I couldn't see the Presence when it spoke, but the chamber acknowledged it. The obsidian floor vibrated. The glass behind me tightened. My lungs instinctively emptied, like my body was bowing before my mind understood why.
Power.
Not loud. Not cruel. Just absolute.
The kind that doesn't ask.
"A variable," it hissed softly, the sound slithering through my marrow like tectonic plates grinding past one another. Each syllable carried weight, pressure, inevitability. "A tether to a draft that has already been discarded."
The memory of Shujinko flickered again, weaker now, as if it were being held underwater.
"You are reaching for a hearth that has gone cold, Tokochi," the Presence continued. "You are reaching for a brother who is already learning to survive without you."
The pod hissed.
Glass slid upward in a smooth, seamless motion, releasing me.
I didn't fall.
My feet touched the obsidian floor as if they had always belonged there. My legs felt… different. Longer. Aligned. The subtle tremor that had lived in my muscles since childhood—since training, since fear—was gone. My balance was perfect, centered in a way it had never been in the forest above.
I straightened slowly and caught my reflection in the polished wall.
For a moment, I didn't recognize myself.
My hair still bore Mother's pale white color—but threaded through it now was something else. A faint, unnatural violet glow pulsed beneath the strands, like light trapped under ice. My eyes looked sharper. Colder. When I raised my hands, I noticed something unsettling.
They were clean.
Not just free of dirt, but free of imperfection. No scars. No callouses. No signs of hunger or fear. They looked sculpted. Corrected.
There was no place left for anything messy.
No room for grief. No room for doubt.
"Your father chose to stand where it hurt the most," the Presence murmured, its tone almost indulgent now, almost amused. It repeated the sentiment Mama had spoken to Shujinko miles above—twisting it, sharpening it. "And he fell."
The air thickened as the words settled.
"He was one of the strongest of the old world," it went on. "And the old world is a failure."
Something shifted in the space before me. Lines folded inward. Angles that shouldn't exist aligned with surgical precision. A shape manifested—not summoned, but revealed.
It was not a sword of wood.
Not a blade of steel.
It was a shard of the void itself. Geometric. Perfect. Its edges were so sharp they distorted the air around them, bending light into thin violet fractures.
"I do not want you to be strong, Tokochi," the Presence said quietly. "Strength breaks. Burns out. Perishes."
The shard drifted closer.
"I want you to be inevitable."
A pulse rippled through my chest.
"This is the Legacy of the Masterpiece," it whispered. "Take it. And let the string break."
Before I could answer—before I could even breathe—the Presence reached into me.
Not my body.
My memories.
They peeled back like wet paper.
The chamber dissolved, replaced by a kaleidoscope of warped visions. I saw the cabin again—but not as it was. The warmth was gone, replaced by a jagged, sickly green light that bled through the walls. Shadows stretched wrong across the floor.
Father stood there.
But he wasn't the man who had shielded us with fire until his last breath.
This version of Tujin loomed over me, face twisted into a cold, calculating sneer. His eyes held no pride. No love.
"Stand still," he said, voice stripped of warmth. "You are the shield."
I watched him place me between danger and Shujinko, over and over again, each time more deliberate. More cruel.
"You were always meant to burn out," he whispered. "So the true heir could live."
The vision shattered.
Smoke swallowed everything, reforming into my mother's silhouette. My mother stood with her back to me, face pale and distant. Her hands rested on Shujinko's shoulders, guiding him toward a bright, distant Tokyo that glowed like a promise.
She didn't look back.
Her lips moved through the haze.
"Finally. The burden is gone."
The Presence's voice coiled around the image, tightening, poisoning every memory I'd ever cherished.
Then I saw Shujinko again—older this time. Laughing. Training with a sword that wasn't mine. His eyes were bright, unburdened, joyful in a way that only made sense if I was no longer there to eclipse him.
"They didn't hide you to keep you safe, Tokochi," the Presence hissed, the vibrations rattling my teeth. "They hid you because they feared what you were."
The cold string behind my ribs pulled tight.
"They traded you for peace."
Grief twisted inside me, sharpening into something precise. Focused. I looked back at the void-shard floating patiently before me.
The distorted visions settled.
Hardened.
They stopped feeling like lies.
They became truth.
I was no longer the boy who wrote epilogues.
I was the prologue to something darker.
The violet energy pulsing from the shard synchronized with the tubes in my spine, forming a rhythmic, suffocating heartbeat that finally—finally—felt right.
I reached out.
My hands didn't shake.
The cold tug behind my ribs snapped cleanly, like a severed wire. The silence of the lair pressed in, heavy and absolute, and for the first time, it felt better than the memory of laughter.
My fingers brushed the surface of the shard.
The world didn't go quiet.
It went extinct.
A predatory cold surged up my arm, racing through my veins like liquid mercury. It didn't burn.
It erased.
The warmth of Father's hand on my shoulder vanished. Mother's kiss faded into nothing. Shujinko's laughter dissolved into static.
My Spirit Core—once a flickering ember of my father's fire—was dismantled, unmade, and reassembled into something hollow, geometric, and vast.
As the hilt solidified in my grasp, I felt the weight of the mountain above me.
For the first time, it didn't crush me.
It bowed.
The blade drank light, casting a warped violet glow across the obsidian floor. When I swung it, the air didn't whistle.
It screamed.
I looked back at the Epilogue journal.
The handwriting looked foreign. Weak.
With a flick of my wrist, violet Malice touched the pages. They blackened instantly, crumbling to ash as my name disappeared into the void.
"The draft is finished," I said, my voice layered with the same authority that had remade me.
"The boy who was loved is dead," the Presence echoed.
I closed my hand around the hilt.
"I am the Masterpiece."