The wild, open country.
A mountain cave.
The woman called Onigumo rose to her feet in a daze.
The wound on her left leg had healed, though not the way an ordinary person's wound healed. New muscle had grown straight out of the severed flesh, and the skin was as smooth as if it had never been hurt.
The blade wound running from her left shoulder to her right flank was gone too, without even a scar.
She looked down at her own hands.
The nails had grown long, sharp as claws.
The skin had gone pale, pale to the point of translucence, so that the blue-violet veins beneath showed faintly through.
The pupils had changed.
No longer the round pupils of a human, but slitted ones, blood-red slitted pupils, exactly like those of the one who had granted her that blood.
Yes. Muddled though she was, Onigumo remembered clearly that woman, the woman who had appeared so strangely out in the wilds, and the single drop of blood she had bestowed after hearing Onigumo's words.
It was that drop of blood that had snatched her back from death and turned her into what she was now.
A form that was not human.
And yet, as never before, it felt good.
But she was not looking at her own eyes.
She was looking at something else.
From the moment she became a Demon, her senses had changed.
She could see far, far away.
Ten times, a hundred times farther than any human.
She gazed toward the east, through mountain ranges, across plains, past countless villages.
And in a place unimaginably distant, she saw something.
A jewel, once again.
The very thing she had seen in her dreams.
And beside that jewel, a singular yokai aura.
Pale, ice-cold, carrying the scent of thunder and bone.
Exactly like the one from the vision she had seen on the brink of death.
It was real.
That person truly existed.
The corners of Onigumo's mouth split to her ears, the inhuman smile that belongs only to an evil demon.
But her eyes held none of the hollowness and hunger such a demon should have.
There was something in them, a scalding, twisted obsession that came close to faith.
"Found you."
She murmured, "I've found you."
"But what a pity. Now is not yet the time to meet you."
After all…
"Awake?"
From outside the cave came the cold, indifferent voice of Kibutsuji Muzan in that feminine form.
Three more days passed.
Over those three days, Kobe Hikaru's life went on as before, only now, compared with earlier, there was a little more seasoning to it.
"…Say."
On the night of yet another day, the voice of Naoe Kanetsugu, still bound to the pillar, spoke up.
"What?"
"You're a yokai, and here you are coaxing and wheedling at a sword, a comb, and a scrap of scale… don't you think the whole picture is bizarre?"
Kobe Hikaru turned his head to look at her.
Naoe Kanetsugu leaned against the pillar, loose strands of hair plastered to her cheeks, her expression the numbed blankness of someone who has watched a play go on far too long.
But.
"You've been tied to a pillar watching for ten days now. Don't you think your picture is even more bizarre?"
Naoe Kanetsugu shut her mouth, the corner of her eye twitching.
On the third day, however, Muramasa's awakening progress stopped.
It jammed, utterly and completely.
Sunlight lay thick and green, shadows swaying in a lazy dance.
Kobe Hikaru sat beneath the pine in the Shrine's rear courtyard, Muramasa laid across his knees, dark red power of dread pouring from his fingertips into the blade.
The blade trembled.
But it was not the satisfied, greedily-swallowing tremor from before.
This was more like a cry of pain.
If he had to describe it, the feeling this yokai blade gave him now was like a stomach already stuffed past bursting, still being force-fed more.
A crack, thin as a strand of hair, appeared along the blade's spine.
Kobe Hikaru's hand stopped at once.
The panel sprang up.
[Yokai Blade, Muramasa: Awakening Progress — 47%]
[Warning: The blade material has reached its load limit. The current blade body was forged from mortal iron. Though steeped in yokai power and greatly improved in quality after fusion at full favourability, it remains in essence a thing smelted in the human world. The infusion of the power of dread is tearing the blade's inner steel structure apart from within. Continued infusion will lead to irreversible collapse.]
[Recommendation: Replace or recast the blade body. A special material capable of bearing the awakening of a yokai weapon is required.]
Kobe Hikaru stared at that crack.
So fine it was almost invisible, yet he could feel it, the blade's not-yet-fully-formed soul, struggling inside.
In this world, all things possess a spirit, but for the myriad spirits to move, to hold consciousness, to think, they need a soul.
The spirit governs Heaven; the soul governs Earth.
Every yokai that becomes a yokai must have a soul as well.
So it is with a Tsukumogami.
And yet, this blade soul was not fully forged and had already run into trouble.
It was struggling, as if trapped in too small a shell, wanting to stretch out but unable to force it open.
Like a dragon crammed into a snake's skin.
The skin was about to split, and the dragon was about to suffocate.
It was a snake trying to swallow an elephant; carry on and the outcome was not hard to imagine.
"The material isn't enough."
He said in a low voice.
Muramasa's own body was a famed blade forged by humans, mass-produced yet of no low quality.
In the mortal world it was already a keen and cutting weapon, but at the level of yokai, especially to bear an awakening blade soul, ordinary steel was like paper.
Above all, the dread Kobe Hikaru was pouring in now was the sediment of the hearts of well over a hundred thousand people across three provinces.
Under power of that order, what was needed was not better steel.
It was material of the same order.
Best of all, something special forged from the bone, fangs, or shell of a yokai, those high-concentration vessels of yokai power.
Kobe Hikaru slid Muramasa back into its sheath, his fingers stroking gently over the scabbard.
The blade gave off a faint hum inside the sheath, like a wronged, whimpering sob.
[Muramasa says it does not want to be replaced. It wants to keep following you. It only needs a better body.]
"I won't replace you."
Kobe Hikaru patted the scabbard. "I'm only giving you a new shell."
The hum went quiet. But that faint tremor still went on.
Recasting.
It needed material, and it needed a smith capable of forging material of this order.
That was something no ordinary human could do.
Simply to smelt down and recast a yokai weapon was beyond the reach of an ordinary person.
A yokai weapon, moreover, often harbors the terrible lingering grudge left behind when the yokai was slain.
Only a powerful sorcerer.
Or a powerful yokai, could possibly do it.
And in this world, the being who could accomplish such a thing—
A name surfaced in Kobe Hikaru's mind.
A name he had known well even before he crossed over.
Totosai.
The personal smith of Toga, ruler of the Western Provinces, who had once been reckoned the mightiest yokai under heaven.
He was said to be a yokai who made his living by the forge, living in seclusion in the cavern of some volcano, eccentric in temper, quick to rage, but with smithing skill unrivaled in all the world.
So long as the material met the mark, the blades he forged could perfectly bear yokai power of the great yokai class. He could even use Toga's own canine fangs as raw material to craft a supreme, peerless yokai blade that slew hundreds and thousands of yokai in a single sweep, scarcely inferior to any divine artifact.
That was the blade called Tessaiga.
Kobe Hikaru remembered that after Toga's death, this blade had been inherited by his second son, Inuyasha, not granted directly, but with the key to the passage where Tessaiga was kept sealed inside Inuyasha's own body, hidden in the place his eyes could reach.
Later Inuyasha had succeeded in unsealing it and claimed Tessaiga.
That, too, was the opening of the so-called original story as Kobe Hikaru knew it. From then on Inuyasha had hacked his way through every obstacle with that blade, defeating many a great yokai.
And to forge a peerless yokai blade like that, Totosai was beyond doubt the foremost yokai-blade smith of this age, without a single rival.
If anyone could help recast Muramasa's body, then Totosai was absolutely the ideal candidate.
And besides.
If Kobe Hikaru wanted Tessaiga as well… then now was indeed the best moment to seek out Totosai.
Find Totosai, and he was sure to find Inuyasha.
Holding a favourability system as he did, it was hardly possible that he had no designs on Tessaiga.
It was only that his strength had fallen short before. In the Six Mutations state, even though he was in substance no weaker than an ordinary Seven Mutations yokai, against Inuyasha, who carried the bloodline power of a great yokai, he had little confidence of winning, and so he had never made a move.
Now that the Nine Mutations were complete, things were different.
And if the matter came to nothing, there was still time to give it up at once.
The problem was.
Where was Totosai?
In the original story's timeline, Totosai's hermitage lay in an exceedingly remote spot. Even Sesshomaru, the eldest son of his lord Toga and the young great yokai of the Western Provinces, had to go to some trouble to find him.
And in this blended world now, Totosai's whereabouts were even less possible to know.
Fortunately.
He was no longer alone now.
He had subordinates.
He had an intelligence network to rely on.
"Tanuki Juzaburo."
Kobe Hikaru called softly.
This was the name of the great tanuki who led his twenty-three Demons.
What was the use of a faction, if not for a moment like this?
As his words fell, blood mist spread out before Kobe Hikaru, and a round, rolling face took shape within it.
Mung-bean eyes, a big fluffy tail—
The tanuki spirit's true body was dozing in a shrine somewhere in Suruga. Startled awake by the summons carried through the dread, it scrambled in a fluster to the water basin.
"M-Master! What are your orders?"
"Look into someone for me."
"Yes! Who?"
"Totosai."
"To… tosai?"
The tanuki spirit cocked its head, a look of strenuous thought coming over that catlike face.
Kobe Hikaru went on, "A yokai smith. He's said to live hidden in a volcano, and to have forged blades for the great yokai of the Western Provinces."
"The great yokai of the Western Provinces… does Master mean the Inu no Taisho? Toga?"
Kobe Hikaru nodded.
The tanuki spirit's face changed, turning both excited and nervous.
"Toga! Now that's the foremost great yokai of the Western Provinces! He may be dead now… but who in yokai circles doesn't know his name? When I was small my father told me that Toga owned three peerless yokai blades without equal under heaven. Two of them all the world knows, one called Tessaiga, one called Tenseiga—"
"Good that you know. The one who forged those two blades for Toga is the very Totosai I'm looking for."
Kobe Hikaru cut off the tanuki spirit's rambling. "How far have you spread your intelligence network across Suruga, Musashi, and Sagami?"
"Suruga's about done. The twenty-three Demons are scattered everywhere, we've linked up with the local minor yokai, and we can pick up most of the word on the streets! It's only Sagami Province that we've just begun on, still not up to much…"
"That's enough. Start from Suruga and spread west. Rouse every minor yokai you can reach, and get word of Totosai. The key is his location."
"Give priority to yokai settlements near volcanoes."
Suruga Province held Mount Fuji, the largest active volcano in the Eastern Isles, and it truly was the most likely region.
"Yes!"
The tanuki spirit straightened its plump little body, its mung-bean eyes brimming with drive. "Rest easy, my lord! I may be no good in a fight, but when it comes to running errands, passing word, and sniffing out news, no one in all the twenty-three Demons beats me!"
"Then go and see to it."
"As you command!"
The projection on the water's surface dispersed.
Kobe Hikaru withdrew his yokai power and leaned against the trunk of the old pine.
His fingers absently traced the Muramasa at his waist.
The blade was faintly hot, but the heat was no longer the earlier pleasant kind. It was a blocked-up, stifled heat.
"Wait."
He murmured, "I'll find you a good body."
Muramasa gave a hum.
Very soft.
Like a sigh, and like an answer.
Kikyo came walking from the direction of the main hall.
White robe and red hakama, a long bow slung across her back, her wet black hair telling that she had just bathed.
The morning light fell on the white cloth at her shoulder, tracing the delicate line of it. The red hakama was drawn tight at the waist, and below ran the straight, slender outline of her legs.
She came to the old pine and glanced down at the blade in his hand.
"Cracked?"
"It can't bear the load anymore. It needs recasting."
"With what material?"
"Yokai bone. But that part isn't hard. More important is finding a smith."
Kikyo asked nothing more.
She sat down beside him, her bow resting across her knees, the end of the white hair-tie hanging at her shoulder, swaying lightly in the wind.
Then, without a sound, she drew a fraction closer, her shoulder brushing his arm.
Leaning against each other.
At the same time.
The edge of Musashi Province.
White hair streaming, still smooth as a waterfall, a face one might almost call coldly beautiful, a young noble stood there, halting his steps amid the mountains.
He raised his eyes and could feel the surge of yokai aura across this whole province.
But unlike the muddy, filthy yokai aura elsewhere, thick with grudges, here there was only yokai, and no grudge.
"So this is the place?"
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