That night.
Kikyo went to sleep early.
It was the earliest Kobe Hikaru had ever seen her retire, in all the time he'd known her.
The night before, she had spread an Earth Barrier covering hundreds of li across three provinces, acting as the sole hub driving the faith of two provinces — even for Kikyo, the toll that took was far from ordinary.
And she hadn't closed her eyes once, all night long.
A shrine maiden's strength never showed in the body. Though Kikyo's constitution, steeped in spiritual power, could be called strong by ordinary human standards, it was still nothing compared to a yokai like Kobe Hikaru.
Kobe Hikaru stood at the door of the main hall, listening to the steady breathing within.
He watched for a while, then didn't go in.
Instead he turned and walked toward the shrine beside it, the one that now bore the plaque reading Demon God, Mitama-no-Mikoto.
This was the shrine Hojo Ujiyasu had ordered temporarily built in Kaede's Village, after reporting matters up to Kyoto.
A small wooden structure. At its center sat an offering table holding a bowl of clear water, an ever-burning lamp, and a small bronze mirror.
Modest, almost too plain for what a true god's trappings ought to be.
But for Kobe Hikaru, it was enough.
He sat cross-legged before the offering table, his crimson demon eyes fixed on the bowl of water.
Yokai aura seeped from his fingertips, brushing gently against the water's surface.
The instant the ripples spread, the clear water clouded — not with filth, but with the reflection of turbid qi.
Then—
Images began to surface on the water, one blurred shape after another.
Round bean-like eyes, a fluffy tail — the tanuki spirit, a Four Mutations minor yokai, yet possessed of intelligence and reason beyond ordinary yokai, steward-in-chief over all the yokai under Kobe Hikaru's command.
Emerald scales, a disc-shaped hollow atop its head pooling with deep-blue yokai power — the great Tono kappa, Eight Mutations chieftain, stationed at Shimizu Port in Suruga.
Silvery-white fur, crimson slit pupils — the Tono Kamaitachi, Eight Mutations, in the mountains of western Sagami.
Ice-blue eyes, white hair trailing to the ankles — the Tono snow woman, Eight Mutations, in northern Musashi.
And more besides.
The one-eyed little monk, kappa younglings, all manner of stray yokai gathered in from every corner.
Compared to before, all of them had grown stronger.
Each had undergone one or two more mutations.
In total, over a hundred of them now.
Scattered across Suruga, Musashi, and Sagami, gathering dread, spreading ghost tales.
The tanuki spirit's projection sprang forward first, its bean-eyes rolling.
"My lord! You're finally back!"
"How are things?"
"Couldn't be better! Over in Suruga, Imagawa finished repairing all the shrines he built for us — incense burns strong there. The great kappa senior at Shimizu Port makes his rounds along the waterway every night, scares the fishermen half to death, but the catches have genuinely gone up, because nobody dares poach at midnight anymore, ha!"
"And Sagami?"
"Senior Kamaitachi cleared out a few bandit nests in the western mountains along the way. Lord Hojo Ujiyasu's men even sent over a batch of offerings special, said it was thanks — though Senior Kamaitachi said the offerings weren't as good as the ones from Musashi."
Kobe Hikaru nodded.
The tanuki spirit's information network was crude, but it caught everything that mattered.
Musashi Province's situation was the most distinct of all.
This was where Kaede's Village lay, the core region certified under the true-god title of Demon God, Mitama-no-Mikoto.
During the time Naoe Kanetsugu had been confined within a five-li radius of Kaede's Village, she'd taken charge of coordinating Musashi Province's internal affairs —
liaising with the Hojo clan, pacifying the local populace, maintaining order.
Forced into it though she was, there was no denying it — this former chief steward-general under the last Uesugi Kenshin was genuinely capable.
With Musashi Province's people settled, the offerings there had naturally grown steadier too.
And what offerings brought—
Kobe Hikaru closed his eyes, sensing the two currents of power converging from every direction.
One was heavy, viscous, tinged with the scent of fear.
Dread.
The ghost tales among the hundred demons had circulated across the three provinces for months now, passed from mouth to mouth by traveling merchants, woodcutters, and fishermen, from Suruga to Musashi to Sagami — the "Hundred Tales" spreading ever wider.
Each retelling thickened the fear a little, deepened the awe a little.
Nearly a hundred yokai each held their own territory, and each one was a story, and every story kept growing.
And as the core of the hundred demons' ghost tales, Kobe Hikaru naturally reaped the most dread of all.
Even so, he didn't hoard it for himself.
Most of the dread he fed back down to the hundred demons under his command — the very reason they'd all managed a collective mutation in just a few short months.
The opposite of dread—
was a wholly different kind of power.
Solemn, pure, lofty.
Faith.
The Power of Faith.
From the hundred thousand subjects of Musashi and Sagami.
Ever since Hojo Ujiyasu had formally reported to Kyoto and elevated the Kaede's Village Shrine to the Shinto hub of both provinces, the faith of both had gathered here through the shrine's barrier network.
Kobe Hikaru now had this second harvest as well.
He was both master of yokai and the true god of two provinces.
Faith and dread were, at root, two faces of the same coin.
Dread flowed downward. Faith flowed upward.
The former nourished yokai; the latter was a power that even gods and buddhas drew upon.
And now, Kobe Hikaru held both.
Except the Power of Faith, he couldn't use directly.
That force was solemn and crushing, suppressing anything extraordinary — himself included.
At his core he was still a yokai, the extraordinary among the extraordinary. Calling on the Power of Faith directly would be turning the blade on himself.
Even an ordinary human couldn't bear that weight.
This was precisely why even Uesugi Kenshin needed a divine artifact to marshal the power of gathered faith — whether a god descending to earth or an avatar of Bishamonten, both needed a vessel.
But Uesugi Kenshin's method gave Kobe Hikaru an idea of his own.
She could carry it through a vessel.
Kobe Hikaru could too... or rather, he'd been doing exactly that all along.
His demon eyes lowered slightly.
The god-and-demon oni warrior raised a hand, letting yokai aura spill from his fingertips and stretch out toward Suruga.
Along the network of dread, along the invisible thread connecting the hundred demons, his intent crossed hundreds of li and touched the famed blade enshrined in the Imagawa main castle's shrine.
Raikiri, Soza Samonji.
The blade he had once used to sever the Thunder Beast.
The semi-divine artifact that, on the night of the Hundred Tales, he had summoned from afar and used to cut through the three clans of Tono's field of dread-power with a single stroke of faith-lightning.
After exhausting its stored power in that battle, it had been returned to the shrine for continued enshrinement — nearly a month had passed since then.
Nourished day and night by the faith of Suruga's people, the blade was slowly recovering — more than that, it was undergoing metamorphosis.
In this moment.
Kobe Hikaru drew out a thread of the Power of Faith gathered at the Kaede's Village Shrine and, across the distance, poured it into Raikiri.
Accelerating its metamorphosis!
A hum—
Hundreds of li away, in the Imagawa main castle's shrine in Suruga, the famed blade on the offering table gave off the faintest tremor, and a thin layer of indigo-blue sheen rose along its edge.
The panel flashed.
[Raikiri, Soza Samonji: Favourability +3]
[Current favourability: 31]
[First talent unlocked: Divine Qi Release — while wielded, can channel the Power of Faith into the aura of gods and buddhas, releasing it from a distance]
Thirty-one.
Finally past the threshold of thirty.
And this talent's approach — it really was the right one.
The corner of Kobe Hikaru's mouth curved up.
It couldn't compare to Uesugi Kenshin's blunt method of directly naming a spirit into a divine artifact, but it won out on flexibility.
And there was no risk of backlash against himself.
He'd seen other cases of yokai occupying divine positions — that toad of Ishimura, for instance. Yet such creatures only dared skim dread; they never dared touch faith, precisely because that all-suppressing force would crush them along with everything else.
He no longer held that worry.
Borrowing a divine artifact really was the correct path — if he remembered right, in the original story there had been a yokai who stole a water god's title and used a divine artifact sourced from the true water god to suppress Tetsusaiga's yokai aura, leaving even that great-yokai-forged fang blade almost powerless.
Just as he was thinking this, two distinct tremors ran through the weapons at his waist again.
Onikiri hummed, sending a thread of intent: Master...
On his right, Yomikiri trembled faintly too.
Two blades — one already a perfect yokai weapon, the other an ordinary yokai weapon.
Both at maxed favourability, both possessed of spirit.
Onikiri's case was milder; having a blade soul already, it merely felt its master was feeding another blade attention again, and was asserting its own presence.
Yomikiri felt its master cared more about a blade that wasn't even nearby than about itself, and was thoroughly jealous.
Kobe Hikaru patted Onikiri's sheath, then stroked Yomikiri's hilt.
"All right, all right, settle down."
A bit of soothing.
Both blades quieted.
Kobe Hikaru handled it smoothly, like a seasoned hand at romance.
But he also noticed something else at his waist had gone unusually silent.
Sakasagami no Yura.
The comb hung at his belt, motionless.
No tremor, no shiver, no rattling.
From the moment he'd returned until now — a full half a day — Sakasagami no Yura hadn't said a single word.
That wasn't right.
Given this comb's temper, after a month away he'd expected her to be bristling — shaking his belt loose, sulking so hard the panel would fill with complaints.
But she hadn't.
The silence was unsettling.
Kobe Hikaru unhooked the comb from his belt and set it in his palm.
"What's wrong?"
No response from the comb.
"Are you mad at me?"
Still no response.
"You don't think I forgot about you, do you?"
A faint response.
An extremely subtle tremor, lasting less than an instant before it stopped.
A line flashed on the panel.
[Sakasagami no Yura: She doesn't want to talk.]
[Current favourability: 94]
[Note: She's sulking. But this time it isn't jealousy — she watched Dokuko's reverse scale ability merge with you, watched how well the war hammer worked in sync with you, and she feels... she's not good enough.]
Night deepened, moonlight slanting pale and clear into the shrine's hall.
On the clean floorboards, Kobe Hikaru sat cross-legged, looking at the comb in his palm — and at the words on the panel.
She felt she wasn't good enough.
Sakasagami no Yura, a comb turned yokai, had started out as a Tsukumogami surviving by devouring its master's hair.
After he'd subdued her and she'd followed him all this way, her favourability had climbed from the negatives to thirty, to fifty, to ninety-four — starting later than most of his weapons, yet closing the gap faster than any of them.
She'd fought with him, sulked at him, envied, played coy.
But she had never once said she wasn't good enough.
Sakasagami no Yura's ninety-four favourability had been stuck at that plateau for a long while now.
It wasn't that he hadn't given her enough. It was that she herself hadn't crossed that inner threshold.
Plain rivalry no longer moved her. What she needed now was something deeper.
A deeper kind of recognition.
And for that, Kobe Hikaru had already prepared something — he reached into his robe and drew it out.
A necklace.
More precisely, a strand strung from seven stones.
The stones weren't large, each about the size of a fingernail, round and smooth, their surfaces polished bright.
But each was a different color.
And each came from a different place.
All of them things he'd picked up along the way, over the course of this past month's travels.
Every one had been carefully selected, polished, cultivated — each worth only a few points of favourability on its own, negligible really, but each carried the memory of the place it came from.
Along the way, he'd used fine bone threads drawn out through Bone Soul Transformation to string the seven stones together, polishing them into a chain.
The bone thread was tough, the stones smooth and round; when he swung it from his fingers it chimed, clear and bright.
"This is for you."
Kobe Hikaru set the necklace down beside the comb.
In his palm: a silent comb, and a chiming stone necklace.
The comb trembled once.
The panel flashed.
[Sakasagami no Yura: ...What is this?]
"This past month, everywhere I went, I picked up a stone," Kobe Hikaru said. "It wasn't meant for you at first — just a habit, greeting whatever I passed by, building a connection along the way."
"But somewhere along the line, I started thinking of you."
"Because these stones are like you."
"At first everyone would've thought them nothing — just plain stones by the roadside. But once I'd touched them, they weren't the same anymore."
The comb's tremor changed.
From the tentative, hesitant flicker of before, it deepened into a longer, steadier vibration.
Words flickered on the panel.
[Sakasagami no Yura: Favourability 94]
No increase, but the trembling didn't stop either.
She was listening, taking it in.
Wrestling with herself.
Kobe Hikaru slipped the necklace over the comb's handle.
The seven stones caught perfectly, dangling among the teeth, chiming softly.
"Sakasagami no Yura."
He said her name. "You don't need to compare yourself to anyone."
"The time you've spent with me hasn't been short. The help you've given me hasn't been small. And you're already something one of a kind."
So spoke the shameless flirt that was Kobe Hikaru.
And so, at that—
the comb shook violently once, then fell still.
But this stillness was nothing like the earlier silence — before it had been sulking; now it was—
holding back.
Holding back from letting herself feel happy.
A yokai tsundere to the bone. That was just how she was.
One last line flashed on the panel.
[Sakasagami no Yura: Hmph.]
[Current favourability: 95]
It had loosened.
Cracks were showing in that threshold.
He'd done it.
Kobe Hikaru looked at the line of text, thoroughly pleased with himself, thinking with some amusement that he really was a genius.
Of course, what he'd said had come from the heart too.
Though they'd started out as enemies, Sakasagami no Yura had genuinely helped him a great deal over this time, and she really was one of a kind.
Kobe Hikaru had always been sentimental — and always generous with his affections.
So then.
"Let's keep going, shall we?"
With the plateau broken, the progress that followed came fast.
[Sakasagami no Yura: Favourability +2]
[Current favourability: 100 (Unity)]
[All talents unlocked — Hair Binding (unlocked), Hair Metamorphosis (new): control hair to grow and extend freely, usable as an independent limb for attack, binding, and defense — hair strength scales with yokai aura infused. All talents can now be integrated into your own body]
Full.
One hundred.
Kobe Hikaru looked down at the comb on his chest.
Light seeped out from between Sakasagami no Yura's teeth — not the venomous green of poison, not the dark red of flame, but a soft, near-emerald glow carrying the scent of wind and growth.
The light spread along his chest, seeping into his body along his veins.
Where did it go?
Into his hair.
His long, pale hair changed in that moment.
At the roots, a faint luster began to seep out — his hair, once pale but somewhat withered despite its softness, now looked as if vitality had returned, glossy and smooth.
That sheen crept down along each strand, spreading like a growing vine.
This was Hair Metamorphosis.
The ability to control hair, to make it grow freely — the moment it merged into him, it set off a chain reaction with the mutations already in place.
It wasn't confined to any single mutation, but folded into every part of Kobe Hikaru's whole body.
Hair, after all, wasn't limited to the scalp — the body held millions of pores, countless fine hairs great and small, and the Hair Mutation touched them all, everywhere.
It merged into his limbs, into his torso, into his waist.
So that power now reached to his very fingertips and toes, drawn from strength at every fine hair.
It merged into the Blood Mutation too, since blood is the root of hair, and so blood too could surge with new vigor.
This was a wholesale change, folding into all six bones and skeleton.
Where before one part of strength yielded only one part of effect, now with Hair Metamorphosis, one part of Kobe Hikaru's strength could yield three parts of effect, or more.
And this new element belonged to Wind.
It resonated with the Thunder Metamorphosis he already possessed.
Both were changes of growth and extension.
And among the Five Elements, Wood governs growth.
Wind belongs to Wood; Thunder too connects to Wood — naturally, wind and thunder striking together spurs all things to grow.
This, then, was Wood.
Wood corresponds to the liver.
Kobe Hikaru felt a stirring on the right side of his abdomen.
The projection of the Asura Mutation was cycling on its own within his body — he didn't need to actively unfurl his six-meter giant frame; the internal circulation, resonating through the three viscera together, had sensed the new Five-Element energy merging in, and had begun automatically constructing a fourth viscus.
Heart-fire dwelt in the chest, kidney-water in the waist, lung-metal on both sides.
Now, liver-wood settled at his right rib.
Emerald light gathered at his right rib, condensing into a core threaded with patterns of wind and thunder.
The core's shape was irregular, like a sprouting seed, its surface covered in patterns of lightning and swirling wind, something inside it growing, unfurling, reaching outward.
Liver of Asura.
Forged.
Four viscera complete — heart-fire, kidney-water, lung-metal, liver-wood.
Only one left.
The spleen.
Missing one.
Missing earth.
Kobe Hikaru opened his eyes.
The four viscera had formed a nearly closed cycle within his body — fire generates earth, earth generates metal, metal generates water, water generates wood, wood generates fire — but one link was still missing in the middle.
Fire needed to generate earth, but there was no earth to receive it.
The cycle broke off there.
One step short.
One final step, and the Asura Mutation would form a true Five-Element internal cycle, no longer dependent on his original body for power.
But that was a matter for later.
Before that, though—
The Sakasagami no Yura necklace at his waist gave a soft chime.
The panel flashed one final line.
[Sakasagami no Yura: ...Thank you.]
No pretense.
No coyness.
Just those two words.
Kobe Hikaru reached out and tied the comb back onto his belt.
The necklace hung from its handle, chiming twice as it swung, then went still.
He ran a hand over the back of the comb.
"You're welcome."
____
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