The graze from the rifle bullet was a shallow line of fire along Asuta's deltoid. In his past life, such a wound would have been sealed with a thought, the flesh knitting itself under a surge of Qi. Now, he sat in his closet-lab, jaw clenched, using a sterilized needle and silk thread from a first-aid kit to suture his own skin. The pain was a sharp, grounding counterpoint to the cold fury humming in his veins. Each pull of the thread was a reminder: You are mortal. You bleed. You can die. Again.
He dressed the wound, swallowing two of his remaining Basic Tempering Pills to accelerate healing. The flesh would knit stronger, the scar a permanent seam of fused, tempered tissue. A badge of his new reality.
The encounter in the park changed everything. The Seekers had moved from acquisition to elimination. They were a clear and present danger, a cancer that needed to be excised before it metastasized. But to fight an organization, he needed intelligence. He needed to know their heart, their purpose, their resources.
The Elysian Foundation had archives. The Seekers, he suspected, had something more visceral: a source.
His mind, a strategist's mind, began to weave a plan. It was reckless. It was borderline suicidal. It was also the only move that made sense. To draw out a predator, you didn't hide. You offered poisoned bait.
He spent the next two days in a state of intense, focused preparation. His cultivation sessions were shorter, more brutal, aimed not at breakthrough but at reinforcing the gains of Layer 4. He practiced the Unbroken Horizon stances until his muscles trembled with a fine, wire-like fatigue, his consciousness narrowing to the singular line of the cut, the perfect division of space. He needed the principles to be bone-deep, instinctual.
He also needed a new tool. The iaito was for discipline. For what he planned, he needed a weapon that could bite.
He returned to the traditional martial arts supplier, but this time, he went to the back, to the owner—a grizzled old man named Haruto who had once been a bladesmith's apprentice. Asuta didn't speak of swords. He spoke of steel. He requested a specific type of high-carbon tool steel, a length of dense, seasoned oak for the handle, and the use of the shop's small, gas-powered forge and grinding wheel after hours. He paid in cash, a significant stack of it.
Haruto looked at him, at the ancient eyes in the young face, at the new, quiet solidity of his frame. He didn't ask questions. He simply nodded. "The forge is yours from ten till two. Don't burn my place down."
For four nights, Asuta became a smith. He had no divine flames, no spirit-hammers. He had propane, a worn anvil, and his own two hands, guided by memories of watching masters craft soul-bound artifacts. This would be nothing so grand. This would be a tool of simple, brutal purpose.
He heated the steel to a cherry red, hammering it on the anvil. Each strike was not random; it was an extension of the Unbroken Horizon's First Motion. He wasn't shaping metal; he was drawing a line in steel. He folded and hammered, fold and hammer, driving out impurities, aligning the grain. He wasn't creating a pattern-welded masterpiece. He was creating a monofilament of intent.
He shaped it into a jian—a straight, double-edged sword, simpler and more brutally functional than a curved katana. It was unadorned, its lines severe. He quenched it in a bath of specially prepared brine (water charged with his own will under a new moon, salt for preservation, a drop of his own blood for connection). The steel screamed as it hardened.
The final step was the sharpening. He spent six hours at the grinding wheel, then with progressively finer whetstones, his entire being focused on the edge. He wasn't just creating sharpness. He was creating a separation. He visualized the edge not as a line of metal, but as the conceptual boundary between what is and what is not. When he was done, the blade could split a falling hair. It had no name. It was simply The Edge.
Flashback: The Sun-Devouring Canyon, Year 498.
He knelt before the withered form of Master Kuo, the last living smith of the Star-Forging Sect. The old man's breath was a dry wind. "A weapon is a question," Kuo wheezed, his blind eyes fixed on the heavens. "The metal asks: 'What will you cut?' The edge asks: 'How deep will you go?' The hilt asks: 'Can you bear the answer?' You forge the answer in the fire of your will, boy. Not with Qi. With wanting. What do you want to cut so badly it must be made separate from the world?" Asuta, then a wanderer seeking power to end his own loneliness, had no answer. The sword he'd commissioned, the beautiful, peerless Moon-Drinker, had shattered in his first true battle against a Heaven-Spanning Beast. It had been a question he was not strong enough to answer.
Now, holding the newly forged jian, he had his answer. I want to cut the thread of fate that leads to Ruri's death. I want to cut the sky open if it tries to fall on her. I want to cut the past from the present, and the future from despair.
The blade, still warm from the final honing, seemed to hum in approval, a faint vibration against his palm. It was just steel. But it was steel that knew its purpose.
---
The bait was set with a single, carefully leaked piece of information. Using the anonymous, encrypted channel Mr. Li had provided for "consultations," Asuta sent a brief, urgent message. It contained a set of GPS coordinates (for a remote, coastal cave system) and a single line of analysis, purposely provocative: "Site of dormant spiritual ley-line confluence. Contains unsecured Earth-Heart Node. Energy signature ripe for harvest. Risk of awakening territorial guardian entity: high. – K."
He signed it with the initial he'd used before. The information was true. He'd identified the site during his geological research—a place where several weak, sleeping ley lines intersected. An "Earth-Heart Node" was a primitive, planetary energy nexus. To an organization like the Seekers, hoarders of power, it would be irresistible. And the warning about a "guardian entity" would either scare them off (unlikely) or make them come in overwhelming force, which is what he needed.
He gave them forty-eight hours. Then, he went to the cave himself a day early.
The coast was rugged, cliffs of crumbling shale facing a cold, grey sea. The cave was not a single chamber, but a labyrinthine system carved by ancient water, now dry. It smelled of salt, damp stone, and a deep, mineral silence. His spiritual sense, pushed to its limit, could feel the faint, slumbering pulse of the Earth-Heart Node deep within, a slow, rhythmic thrum like a sleeping giant's heartbeat.
He found his position: a high ledge overlooking the main confluence chamber, shrouded in darkness. He settled into a modified Unbroken Horizon stance, one that blended into the rock itself—The Stone Awaits the Wind. He became a part of the cave, his breath slowing to match the millennia-long exhalations of the stone. The newly forged jian lay across his knees, its dull grey blade drinking the faint light.
He waited. For hours. There was only the drip of water and the deep-earth pulse.
Then, the silence changed.
It wasn't broken by sound, but by a violation. The sterile, null-signature of advanced technology, multiplied. He felt them before he saw them: a team of eight, maybe ten, moving with disciplined quiet through the outer tunnels. Their equipment dampened sound, masked thermal signatures. But to his spiritual sense, they were black holes moving through the world's ambient energy, sucking it into their devices.
They entered the confluence chamber. He counted nine. All armed with compact, menacing-looking rifles that likely fired something worse than bullets. They had scanning gear, extraction tools—crystalline drills and vacuum-sealed containment units. They moved with the efficiency of a surgical team, setting up around the central node, a natural stone plinth that glowed with a faint, earthy bioluminescence from lichen.
Perfect.
He watched as their leader, a woman with severe features and hair tied in a tight bun, directed the setup. "Drill node perimeter. Containment field at maximum. I want the core extracted in under three minutes. Sensors on full alert for the 'guardian.' It's probably nonsense, but don't get sloppy."
They were professionals. They were good. But they were thieves in a cathedral, and they had no idea the cathedral was not empty.
Asuta stood up on the ledge. The movement was silent, but the change in presence was not. The woman's head snapped up, her enhanced goggles swiveling toward his perch.
"Contact! Upper ledge!"
Rifles swung as one. No panic. Just lethal coordination.
Asuta didn't give them the shot. He stepped off the ledge.
He didn't fall. He descended, his body a controlled plummet, his feet touching the wall halfway down to pivot, then landing in the center of their formation with a sound like a bag of grain hitting the floor. The Unbroken Horizon footwork—Descending Sky-Step—turned potential energy into a seismic arrival. The stone beneath his feet cracked in a web of fissures.
Shock froze them for a half-second. It was all he needed.
He moved. The Edge left its sheath with a whisper like a parting sigh.
He did not use the sword forms of his past life. He used the nascent, physical grammar of the Unbroken Horizon.
First Motion: Drawing the Line. His blade flicked out, a perfect horizontal line. It didn't aim for bodies. It aimed for the crystalline drill tips of two extraction tools. The monofilament edge met the super-hardened mineral. There was a ping, a spark in the dark, and both drill heads sheared off, clattering to the ground as useless stones.
Second Motion: Dividing the Stream. He pivoted, the sword a vertical blur. A Seeker fired, the muzzle flash blinding. Asuta's cut intersected the barrel of the rifle not to break it, but to deflect it by a precise millimeter. The high-velocity round meant for his heart screamed past his ribs and shattered a stalactite across the chamber. His return motion, the follow-through of the division, was the pommel of his jian driven into the man's solar plexus. The air left his lungs in a whoosh, and he folded.
Chaos erupted. Suppressed gunfire filled the cavern, phut-phut-phut, rounds ricocheting wildly. Asuta was a phantom in the strobe-light of muzzle flashes. His enhanced nerves turned the chaos into a series of still frames. He saw the flex of a trigger finger, the shift of a weight, the trajectory of each round.
Third Motion: Shattering the Cage. He didn't try to block the bullets. He moved through the cage of their crossfire, his body a blade slipping through the bars. He used the Seekers themselves as shields, his movements herding their fire into their own lines. A man cried out as a round from his comrade tore through his thigh.
The leader, the woman, had fallen back. She wasn't shooting. She was barking orders into a comms unit. "He's here! The asset is here! He's not a guardian, he's the source! Deploy neural-static! Now!"
A Seeker threw a cylindrical device. It hit the ground and erupted not in flame, but in a piercing, subsonic shriek that vibrated the very bones in Asuta's skull. It was designed to overload the nervous system, to induce seizure.
Agony lanced through his head. His enhanced senses became a liability, amplifying the torture. He stumbled, his perfect alignment breaking.
The woman smiled, a cold, victorious thing. "Take him. Alive if you can. The core wants him intact."
Three Seekers converged on him, stun batons crackling with blue electricity.
Through the pain, Asuta's will, a mountain forged across lifetimes, ground the neural static into powder. He remembered the purpose of the sword. The question it asked.
What do you want to cut?
I want to cut this noise from the world.
He roared, a sound of pure defiance that echoed the cave's own deep pulse. He planted his feet, ignored the screaming in his nerves, and executed the first true, intentional technique of the Unbroken Horizon Sword Art he had yet attempted.
It had no Qi. It had only his tempered body, his unbending will, and the perfect edge of a blade that knew its purpose.
Form Zero: Unmaking the Discordant Note.
It was not a slash. It was a placement of the blade. He held The Edge before him, point down, and simply pushed it forward, not through air, but through the concept of the invasive sound wave.
The blade hummed, a note deeper than the static. The cacophonous shriek… fractured. It didn't fade; it shattered, like glass hitting a resonant frequency. The static device exploded in a shower of silent sparks.
In the sudden, ringing silence, the three advancing Seekers froze.
Asuta looked past them, at the female leader. Blood trickled from his nose from the neural strain. His grip on the jian was unshakeable.
"You came for a resource," he said, his voice raw but clear in the quiet cave. "You found a reckoning."
He took a step forward. The Seekers, their will broken by the impossible display, fell back.
The woman met his gaze, and for the first time, he saw not cold professionalism, but primal fear. She saw not a teenager, not an asset. She saw the thing that lived in the dark places of the world, the thing her organization had been skimming the surface of for decades. She saw the guardian.
"Retreat," she whispered into her comms. Then, louder, a scream: "RETREAT!"
They fled, dragging their wounded, abandoning their precious equipment, scrambling back into the tunnels like insects from a lifted stone.
Asuta let them go. He wasn't here to kill them all. He was here to send a message, to sever their interest in him at the root. To make the cost of hunting him catastrophic.
He stood alone in the chamber, the Earth-Heart Node pulsing gently beside him. The air smelled of ozone, blood, and fear.
He wiped the blood from his nose and sheathed The Edge. The blade was unmarked. It had asked its question, and he had given it an answer.
He had drawn a line in the stone of the world. The Seekers had crossed it, and had been cut.
Now, he had to see what else his new strength could cut. The deeper sleepers were stirring. And he would need a much sharper edge.