Chapter Text
Burning, burning brightly, burning incessantly.
He bore the flames of his sin, and would pay the price for as long as his sins had carried him. The atrocities beckoned by both his blade and hand had finally clawed itself onto his stern, dragging him deeper and deeper into the pits of Naraka, a punishment fit to soothe the four hundred years he ought to pay the debt for.
Claw as he might to drive himself out of the sulfuric pits, all prove naught but a fruitless endeavour. Should there be an end to eternity, he had become sure it would not be something he would experience in his damnable lifetime of irony. A Demon should be as a Demon should be, a pitiable creature thrown away by the world; and he served the reflection of that. An offense to the natural order of life.
So, he sat as he would in the way of an honorable samurai, stuck within the blackened pits where immolating hellfire encompassed him all ‘round. It was the posture he knew most well, and now the only posture he knew, a deeply-engraved instinct written in the crevices of his muscle’s mind.
However, it was nothing but a frail imitation of what he could have been, and what he desired to be. He was, by no means, anything his countenance—now burnt beyond recognition—would dare imply.
By breaking the seal of his six dreary eyes, he unlatched them to gape once more the dry flames licking his body. Pain had become so diluted over the centuries, however long he would need to stave his transgressions, he was more afraid of becoming a senseless mass rather than a suffering one. Fear had been the crux of many things in his life, and in death, it would only continue to persist.
It was only then, by some profound miracle or happenstance, that the strangest occurrence came to pass. His body once serving as pyre had finally ceased its infernal combustion. The air was still heated, and he could do nothing but keep his lips clamped shut, observing the void with an unbroken mind. An inexplicable weightlessness filled his complex, and yet he couldn’t find it in himself to command his body.
Clamped lips, trailing eyes, and a distorted consciousness was all he could work with, senselessly reflecting on his life, finding solitude within the memories of a dance and Moon Breath.
When the last residues of thought and vice had come to pass, so did the final hour of his punishment.
The crops of the field tousled and churned by the eastern zephyr blowing its breath against them. Surrounded by a verdant prairie and only separated by fences, a small populace of farmers could be seen in the fields, the orange light of the still young day smiling upon them. People worked in the fields, severing weeds, plucking reeds, or tending to wheat as they moved about, legs splashing in small rivers of water artificially brought there.
A villager wiped his forehead as he brought a basket filled with crops recently picked, letting the sweat flitter off and into the arid conditions. Although participating in arduous and back-breaking labor, for him who had been inured in such activities for so long, it wasn’t much too strainful for his spine or back.
“Whew…” the villager, Hy, breathed out. His gaze turned elsewhere as he hoisted a basket
A distance away, where a slope met a shadowed grove of Yanese tallow trees, he saw a… distant observer; a recent one as of late. The leaves, painted in hues of burnt ochre and burgundy, crackled underfoot as he stepped across the narrow trail that traced the edge of the rice terraces.
Hy continued to watch the peculiar man.
From where the man stood, he could practically see all, from the scattered movement of villagers in coir hats and hemp tunics, to the glint of iron tools under morning light, and finally, the trickle of irrigation streams cutting severing paths into the soil in a vein-patterned orientation.
His own hands were idle. He turned to watch another man carry him a length of mulberry wood, recently hewn, and in his other hand, a carving knife most likely borrowed from Zhang. Said man took a seat by a local flat stone beneath trees, dressed underneath shadows, and began to whittle away curls of the wood, wherein they joined the crushed leaves beneath foot.
“The day is growing weary. I should head back home,” Hy whispered to himself, dusting off his pants, and bending inward his back for a stretch.
He began moving, toward a village off in the distance, carrying a woven basket with the daily necessities and growth.
But then, while he sauntered through, from the corner of Hy’s eye, there was something rather peculiar.
He could see the distant figure of a man with black hair tipped with crimson at the ends, dressed in a mauve Higashinese kimono with delicate hexagonal tessellations distinctly black in some areas.
He also wore a conical bamboo hat with beige hue, but most particular of all was the large six-marked ofuda covering his face—most likely a traditional accent brought from his culture. To complete his full aspect, a black-sheathed katana was held in the furls of his sash.
Now what could he say about this man? Well, he wasn’t a long-time visitor of the village, but he visited frequently around these days of spring. He looked to be of nobility, mayhaps even a samurai under service of a Higashinese daimyo.
Hy didn’t know how he had even come upon their humble abode. What was great however, was his rather friendly attitude if it could be called so. No, actually, would it be more accurate to say he held a reclusive one?
Maybe he was overthinking it. Polite would fit the moniker like a bracelet. Simplicity was always the better option.
Well, whether he was one or the other didn’t matter much to Hy right now. He needed to make it to his village anyways, and losing track of time was the last thing he needed.
If there was something Hy knew about the village ever since he was a child, it would be its Wuguan. At some part close to the center of the rather spacious village was a structure which was known to breed fine warriors of the sword.
In fact, he was sure it wouldn’t be out of place to call it the village’s pride, especially with how many times warriors from that exact Wuguan had repelled bandits who found their way across the plains, and to this secluded part of Yan.
Usually, it would be vacated aside from days where lessons were to be imparted upon the students, and Hy was confident it was supposed to be one of those days. Color him surprised when he was falling behind recent news when spotting a crowd of people gathered around the structure.
As Hy neared the heart of the village, he could immediately tell the mood and physiognomy of the people were rather different from usual. They were rustling about, anticipation brimming from their forms. The cicadas from potted plants were now filled with the crocking of crows, thrown into the pot of clashing blades.
A crowd had gathered at the Wuguan, semicircular and wide, spilling from the stone entrance of the Wuguan like water from a basin. Old men with scrolls tucked under arm, women with hands clasped at their waists, and children peeking through sleeves and gaps—they stood, murmuring, transfixed.
“What’s all this about…?” Hy mumbled as he adjusted the basket at his back, weaving through the press of villagers, feeling elbows jab into his side, prompting an apology from him, and when he reached the front, he saw what it was.
Within the wooden-floored hall of the Wuguan, beneath lanterns inscribed with traditional aphorisms—[以刀刃啟迪」[從邊緣汲取生命]—a duel had been initiated to be underway. Or, rather, had it just ended? The question lingered in his mind, especially when he blinked once, and heard something crash against the ground.
A young disciple lay on the ground, the bamboo blade once in his grip skidding across the polished floor, stopped only by the straw mat lining the edge. His chest rose and fell, and his eyes were wide, but he didn’t particularly look to be in agony.
Disbelief marred his features, and above him… was the exact man Hy remembered seeing from the fields.
That same pale-mauve kimono, patterned with black tessellations. That same bamboo hat, now set slightly askew by motion, brought with silence, and the strange ofuda.
In his hand wasn't a true blade either, a substitute blade dubbed as mokujin rudimentarily provided by the Wuguan out of courtesy. Despite its unimpressive appearance, held in the man’s grasp it felt like it beheld the mass of the moon.
Another disciple stepped forward at an older age, perhaps nearing the same rank as an instructor. He bowed with practiced courtesy with a lowered center of gravity, quite quickly, and then lunged like a tiger who had finished preparing its crouch.
What blitzed afterward was a blur of sheer speed that his eyes couldn’t keep track of. He would’ve expected a harsh wind to boom from it, but the motion was far simpler than he thought, with a kamae foreign to the styles taught within the village.
The mysterious stranger executed a moderate and gentle turn of the wrist, causing the second challenger to nearly fold in on himself like a piece of parchment paper, causing him to fall over and slam into the ground. The breath escaped him along with small motes of spit as the force of the floorboards settled.
The gathered villagers gasped, muttering, a child squealed in excitement, and somebody had clapped—the only soul to do so—which had prompted themself to immediately stop when nobody else had followed along.
Hy stood still, eyes wide, not desiring to tear his eyes away from the scene.
The stranger bowed faintly in the way a Higashinese man would. Instead of the hurried motion of the previous challenger, it was held with great leisure and… power? Could it be described as power? It was hard to say, but he looked to be a dàshī of the sword.
From henceforth, more challengers had stepped up in order to partake in the act of hopefully, and by any means, to take the Higashinese man off his pedestal and restore honor to the Wuguan. Then another came, and another one, until it reached five…
Six…
Seven…
Nine…
Twelve…
Fifteen…
Now even the instructors themselves looked hesitant.
Although bones remained unbroken, and no strikes reached the noggin, or any place above the shoulders in general, something else was being shattered. It must have been because—and by Hy’s mere speculation—the Higashinese stranger was hardly outputting any effort in his style and technique.
His sheer acceleration itself was enough to bury the challengers into the floorboard like a corpse into a desolate gravestone.
Finally, as the crowd reached the peak of its restless anticipation, the head instructor of the Wuguan emerged. An older man many respected and revered as Master Qiu, who had once been rumored to have swiftly dispatched twenty bandits in less than twenty seconds.
It was the destined eighth strike of his blade which would collapse even an entire platoon, a peerless technique within the local villages. Anticipated by some, his origins actually lay nestled in the Tianshi, which simply bespoke more of his skills.
His hair was like frost lining the ridges of his high topknot, stepping barefoot across the hall, the hem of his robe whisking alongside his professional footwork.
“This one humbly asks for your name, honored guest,” Master Qiu said, bowing low in the Yanese etiquette.
The stranger looked to be contemplating over something for a good minute, before opening his mouth with his response.
“Kokushibou.” His voice was almost regal, already sending Hy’s head spinning with possibilities, especially of the one pertaining to the man being of aristocratic origins.
“…Very well.” Master Qiu raised his own weapon, a proper jian wrapped safely in cloth, all in the spirit of non-lethal sparring. “Kokushibou, Higashinese for ‘Black Death Eye.’ I wonder if that is why you cover your face.”
“That is irrelevant,” Kokushibou, the man with the purple kimono, said, bringing the bamboo sword in his hand in front with a downward-tilted lull stance in front of himself.
Steel was in his spine with how firm and steady his stance was, an unyielding bastion. In comparison, Master Qiu was like an aged glacier standing in the midst of a bifrost ocean.
A hush fell upon the crowd as if they had been drafted to by a drape of cerulean-white snow. A shrill wind passed through the stillness as the villagers continued to watch with anticipation, some even making foolhardy bets with bated whispers.
Kokushibou, once lulled, broke into a near thunderclap which had nearly sent a form of mortal peril within the watchers from the shockwave that had passed through.
Master Qiu’s eyes widened by merely a small margin, recognition ladened within his pupils rather than anything else. His vision hadn’t clouded in the slightest, as a veil of frost—
Arts! Hy’s mouth fell open, giddy at the prospect of seeing professional Arts being casted before his very eyes!
—Started to form, the famed technique of the Bīng Shén Lǐ school which focused on the serenity of the cold rather than the boisterous rips of lightning of the Lei Fa school. Two different courts which contrasted one another, but each served their purpose.
When a crow cried, both of their blunted blades met.
One held the light of the moon in it, a waning into some kind of darkness Hy found himself also entranced into. He had to ask himself, was it Arts too the Higashinese man was utilizing? Was he about to witness what a clash between Arts was like?
Like the waves bent on the axis to a celestial object, a gibbous motion was executed by Kokushibou as he twisted his blade in order to redirect Master Qiu while they were interlocked in a clash.
Master Qiu met it head on with an elegant parry, like water dripping from melted ace, before frosting unto the sky-blue cloth-wrapped blade. Delicate snowflakes formed in the air along with a brief flicker of crescents, making the spectators audibly awed at its beauty.
Motion after motion, held in their technique, a manifold stack of both the moon and glacier continued to form. What was supposed to be a clash between blades, in all honesty, looked to Hy like a professional dance between the two.
A single gust of wind exploded from the center of the Wuguan, scattering dust and snapping loose straw mats into the air. Some villagers stumbled back as leaves tussled from nearby trees into spirals, all like green locusts in the unheeding gale.
Kokushibou’s blade came again in a thrust, looking to be unavoidable with its strange technique.
Master Qiu glanced at it, brows furrowed as he held his jian in front of himself with a guarded slant, long sleeves fluttering as a lotus shield seemed to form from ice.
Their clash met, and the two paused to look at one another.
Kokushibou pulled back, going for another thrust, and Master Qiu met it continuously with a shift of his blade, taking a step back each time he did so. It happened once, twice, thrice, and then four times, as the two traversed all ‘round the interior of the Wuguan.
A whirl of a blizzard surged upward, intercepting Kokushibou’s motion altered into an improvised crescent slash. The two techniques collided with a clack, gentle and almost weak from what Hy felt from the shockwave.
He would have brushed it off as a flaw or misdirection—a feint or something of the like—between the two, but he clamped his lips tighter when a hairline fissure appeared on one of the Wuguan’s ligneous pillars.
Hy stepped back with a deep-rooted instinct begging him to do so, self-preservation at the works.
Back within the sparring ring, the two swordsmen retracted in perfect symmetry. Kokushibou’s ofuda had fluttered slightly, virtually revealing his face had he not promptly clamped it back into place with a palm of his hand.
“What moon do you serve, traveler?” Master Qiu said, flourishing his jian a couple times, movement as smooth as melted ice cubes.
“If you speak of a daimyo, then I’m afraid none,” Kokushibou answered in monotony.
“Hm,” he nodded in response to the stranger. “I see.”
Hy watched as the two readied their blades once more. The two entered a stance, and one looked to be the magnum opus of the Bīng Shén Lǐ Arts with the pressure that seemed to irradiate off of Master Qiu, but for the man known as Kokushibou…?
He gulped, tugged at his loose collar, watching the two stand opposite sides. Hy was confident their spar was about to end at that moment.
By all means, he had been correct the very moment their swords connected.
Bushidō.
He stood at the edge of a flowing river, where osmanthus trees aligned the forestry underneath the stern gaze of mountains. At his side was his sheathed katana, pride and lifeline of himself, where one’s spirit confined itself in Nichirin.
With a flick of his wrist and arm, he drew it, delivering a sideways slash to the space in front, where the Evening Palace laid underneath the Dark Moon.
The honor code of the samurai, the plasma to their iron-blooded nature which kept them as human, a warrior who tread the path of, and for their daimyo; until their honorable death. Even if it didn’t birth in the womb of his age, its foundational blood did, and so did it flow down the canals of time.
His blade was primed, possessing a magenta gleam by the edges as he swung it slowly. His entire body weight shifted as the moonlight shone upon the spine of his instrument, before he placed both hands on the handle, bringing it back into an ox guard, and from henceforth applied a tighter grip.
An arc was then drawn in a downwards crescent, the luminescence of a celestial body carried in mixtures of aureate amethyst; churning the Pearl Flowers underneath his feet, accompanying his Moongazing.
E’er since the Sengoku period, ‘strongest’ and ‘samurai’ had been concepts he sought to attain in his very hands, no matter how immaterial. Oh, how enticing it was to imagine a katana shimmer underneath night and day, accompanied by the very gods Japan held in centuries of worship.
His knees bent, drawing it to the side as his entire body pivoted, the grass stood underneath his feet like marching bands of soldiers twisting in tandem. More colors of the cosmos ebbed from his blade as he continued to traverse through forms steadily, physiognomy still masked by his ofuda.
The Loathsome Moon which bore its Chains against his pale skin had shattered then and there.
Yet during his time, the Bushidō hadn’t existed. The values of a samurai, whatever they may be, forever shifted as should a rock by the wayside of a river, bittered by salt, bitten by fish, and caressed by water. It would chip away, either rot or refine, and veer into something new.
Up down motion, into a downward strike, both hands still gripped flawless and firm, embedded with a calm spirit. He was liberated from those Chains, and so he led with the Moon Spirit, beckoning a Calamitous Eddy.
Did he hate it? Did he change himself?
He never understood the constancy of change, but it was the only eternity he would bear testimony to in his four hundred years of heartbeats. The samurai, what did it even mean?
A thrust, localized to points where the blade could incise, slipped through the crevices of armors—that for his eyes—were as wide and obvious as chasms. Then, he veered his blade into Incessantly curved motions, only the Lonely Moon, the object hung above the Perpetual Night as his witness.
Unto the Azuchi–Momoyama period, the Edo period, the Meiji period, the Taishō period, he had seen the weathered rocks change into something imperceptible, and until it eroded away completely.
A crescent turn of the feet, spanning wide as his knees bent, blade held above his head in an spacious and exaggerated stance. The eastern gale fluttered the ebony conglomerates of his pony-tail, and his ofuda churned along with it.
Change, change, change, it continued to change, and it continued to irk him.
With dainty feet, he leapt and stamped the toes of his sandal on the ground, oscillating yet another arc. More colors of the kaleidoscope were held inside his steel, and so when his blade hung over the waters, he let his blade stagnate. A petal of the osmanthus tree hued in ivory flowed and settled atop the blade, Misfortune shone back from the Moonlit Mirror underneath.
Kikkō turned into kevlar, katana turned into muskets, steel turned into gunpowder, and all else had been lost.
Generations passed and the Demon Slayers ushered forward a future without him, a future uneeding of him. Yet, he could do nothing but grovel, masking jealousy and envy underneath the sickly amber reflection of six vain jewels, that although Saw Through The World—could not see through himself.
His blade remained still as he brought it back, arms outstretched as his other hand traced the backline of his katana. The osmanthus petal remained there, untouched, as he observed it perched on the blunt side from underneath his ofuda mask.
A thumb and index eventually pinched it from his moonlit weapon, rubbing it in-between, before he dashed it into the air, letting the piece of a century-fold perennial tree whisk away.
Sheathing his katana, he looked upward to the distorted sky, content with letting the moment pass him by. The twin moons of a new world were just before him, all after holing his body underneath a cove for time immemorial, the clock rushing far ahead of him.
He stared down at his palm. It was the endless flames of Naraka which had left him such a broken mind, where all he could do was rehearse the memories of his breathing, and the muscles of his technique.
Until his mind recovered—it had now—that was how… However long he had been stuck in this world for now, still yet to experience much, but at least so far; some modicum of activity had been made.
Shaking his head, Kokushibou crouched over, seeing his masked reflection over the reflection of the water. He lifted his hand, swiftly executing a jab into the waters which hadn’t caused the waters to ripple or shift to any degree.
In his clawed grasp was a fish as his hand liberated itself from the water, still with speeds that didn’t tamper with the surface. It continued to jolt in his iron-grip, but it proved fruitless as he brought it to his mouth, lifting his ofuda to the side, and taking a bite of it.
It tasted like stale meat.
How admirable it was to see what the world was like when doused in light, rather than dark. Whatever perpetual forces which governed the universe, he offered his thanks and prayers—while still keeping in mind his sins—for this blessing.
Kokushibou continued to stare at the majesty of the sun, enticed with the invisible pressure it seemed to emit, the domineering presence it basked over the entire world. Unreachable, more so than even the moon, and any hands which grazed its surface would be incinerated.
Perhaps even as agonizing as the flames of Naraka.
With those thoughts, he turned elsewhere, continuing on. There was a city of Duahang he wished to visit, a focal city of this Yan he had found himself in.
Maybe there, he could find more swordsmen to hone his skills.
A/N: No idea where I’m taking this, which is why the scenes may feel a bit disconnected this chapter, since it’s more of a One-shot. Likely to remain a One-shot, maybe, might continue. Was supposed to be a Yoriichi x Arknights, but I’m saving that One-shot for some other time.
Ngl, I hate powerscaling, but Kokushibou would get demolished in Arknights lmfao. That’s why he’s still gotta grow, and maybe why I’m pulling out so many things out of my ass with his implied training and practice so he doesn’t get breathed on and evaporate.