As he spoke, Koushirou gently removed the half-shattered lens still hanging on the bridge of his nose.
His movements were light, though they still pulled at the bruise near his mouth and made him suck in a breath.
His kimono was already in tatters, strips of cloth hanging loose from his body and barely covering him.
"If we keep fighting, then even if I say nothing about the damage, the village guards will most likely treat you as a dangerous man."
Zaraki said nothing.
He only shrugged his still-bleeding shoulder as if it meant nothing.
The sharp pain from the movement tightened his wound and cleared some of the haze from his head.
That was enough, his body was still working.
He glanced around.
The bamboo grove that had been neat and quiet before was now full of broken stalks and churned-up earth.
They could not keep going.
The Kenpachi Zaraki Template craved battle, but it was not mindless.
"That strike from earlier..." Koushirou pulled a roll of bandages from his robe.
It had somehow survived the shockwaves intact.
He tossed it over, his tone as calm as ever, though his eyes now carried a different kind of scrutiny.
"You stopped the blade with your body by force, that was not cutting."
Zaraki caught the bandages and wrapped them roughly around his shoulder, stopping the bleeding for the moment.
Then he leaned against a broken bamboo stalk and waited for him to continue.
"A swordsman's realm lies in protecting what he wishes to protect, and cutting what he wishes to cut." Koushirou bent down, picked up a withered yellow bamboo leaf, and held it lightly between his fingers.
The leaf did not crumble. It split cleanly down its grain into two neat halves.
"This is the threshold of Iron Cutting. The Breath of All Things."
In the distance, Zoro was still dragging himself out of the rubble.
The moment he heard those words, his dazed eyes widened and locked onto the scene.
Koushirou looked at his disciple, then turned back to Zaraki and gave a soft sigh.
"That child Zoro is too impatient and too fierce. To even brush against this threshold, he will likely need another five years of tempering. As for you, Zaraki..." Koushirou paused for a moment.
"Your strength is absurdly powerful, but that power is also your barrier. To hear the breath, to learn stillness..."
He lifted a hand toward the glasses that were no longer there and calmly gave his estimate.
"Perhaps three years. That is, if you're willing to restrain your killing intent."
'Three years?'
Zaraki raised a brow, but said nothing.
Instead, he quietly opened the pale-blue interface deep within his mind.
At the edge of his vision, lines of data appeared one after another.
That fight had paid off in a different way than he expected.
Reaching 10% template progress had unlocked the System Shop, and all the points accumulated from his previous battles and milestones had finally been settled at once.
His total available points now stood at 1520.
[System Shop Unlocked]
Zaraki's gaze swept across the item list.
Most of it was the same junk as before—basic potions, low-grade materials—but two items at the top, glowing with purple light, caught his eye immediately.
[Primary Enlightenment Tags (Consumable): Greatly enhances comprehension for one hour after use, allowing forced insight into the principles of high-level skills.
Price: 500 Points.]
[Modified Gravity Adjustment Garment (Rare Equipment): Appears as an ordinary black coat. Contains a miniature gravity field adjustable up to 20x gravity.
Note: A restraining garment for monsters who find Earth's gravity too light.
Price: 1000 Points.]
Zaraki's heartbeat skipped.
The timing was almost too perfect!
He had just been thinking about whether Kenpachi Zaraki's direct, brutal style of fighting might run into trouble in the Pirate World.
Once Haki entered the picture, and once enemies like Logia users or people with strange concepts came into play, raw force alone could indeed leave him pinned down.
Koushirou had already shown him that much.
With the Enlightenment Tags, grasping the Breath of All Things would be easy.
As for the Gravity Garment, it suited the him perfectly.
The weighted wrist guards had already reached their limit. If he wanted constant, high-intensity suppression, this thing was necessary.
But...
Zaraki glanced at the balance in the lower right corner.
1520 points.
The two items together cost exactly 1500.
This damned system might as well have been spying on him!
The number was too exact!
He had risked his life against Koushirou just to scrape together some savings, and now one purchase was about to strip him clean.
Even crueler than the black-hearted landlords from his last life.
"Tch." Zaraki clicked his tongue and rolled his eyes.
"What? Do you think three years is too long?" Koushirou mistook the look on his face and spoke in a patient tone.
"On the path of the sword, haste leads only to waste. Especially for someone like you, born with monstrous strength. You need time to settle and—"
[Purchase successful. Balance: 20 Points.]
With a crisp ding in his mind, Zaraki felt a slightly cool tags appear in his hand, while the gravity garment settled quietly into his inventory.
He had become poor in an instant, but the thought of what came next still excited him.
'Settle?'
'Who needed that to get stronger?'
Zaraki lowered his head.
He did not use the Enlightenment Tags yet, but the corners of his mouth slowly pulled wider and wider, greed and excitement mixing in his smile.
He really wanted to see what expression Koushirou would make when he grasped the essence of swordsmanship right here on the spot!
Koushirou, standing across from him, had just opened his mouth to continue speaking when a chill ran up his spine.
Something about this felt very wrong.
The man in front of him had clearly calmed down after the fight, yet now he felt even more dangerous than before.
It was not just killing intent..... tt felt more like the air before something overturned.
Zaraki slowly raised his head.
The eyes that had dimmed a little after the battle were now shining with a frightening brightness.
"Koushirou-san,"
Zaraki grinned, showing a row of white teeth.
That smile alone made Koushirou's heart jolt.
"Explain the specific process of the Breath of All Things to me. Right now!"
"You want the process?"
Koushirou looked at the impatience on the young man's face and swallowed back the word insight that had nearly left his mouth.
That urgency made the hair on his back rise on instinct.
This did not feel like someone asking to learn.
It felt like someone marking the weakness of his prey.
"Fine."
Koushirou shook his head with a bitter smile and picked up the split bamboo leaf again.
"Since you want to know, I can explain. The so-called breath is the frequency in which all things exist. It is not something you hear with your ears. Stone has the frequency of stone. Steel has the rhythm of steel. When you—"
"So you find the weak point, or the gap, then drive your strength into it. That's it, right? Got it."
Zaraki cut off the explanation.
At the same moment, he crushed the [Primary Enlightenment Tags] within his consciousness.
A cold sensation exploded at once and spread through every nerve in his body.
His mind, dulled earlier by blood loss, became clearer than it had ever been.
The world changed in his eyes.
The sound of the wind moving through the bamboo grove was no longer just noise.
He could almost see the path of the airflow, the subtle trembling of the bamboo leaves, the tightening and loosening of their fibers in the wind.
The half bamboo leaf in Koushirou's hand no longer looked like a dead object.
In Zaraki's eyes, it was a structure woven from countless crossing lines.
As long as he cut along those lines, even a blade of grass would be enough to slice it apart.
Was this what 500 points bought him?
Zaraki narrowed his eyes and slowly swept his gaze across everything around him.
The feeling was extraordinary!
The whole world had become sharp and clear, as if the essence of things lay open before his eyes.
Three years?
He did not need that long.
Even three minutes already sounded excessive to him!