The mountain air had grown colder.
Even the elders felt it. A shift in the world, a tear in the veil between realms. The wind that once whispered secrets through Mount Enkaku now carried silence — a still, oppressive quiet. The type that comes before calamity.
On the twelfth day of the crimson moon, a messenger arrived.
Bloodied. Burned. Broken.
He collapsed at the steps of the Kimoto enclave, skin scorched by an unseen fire. His last words croaked out as black veins split across his throat:
> "Stonewake… it moves…"
And then he died.
---
Stonewake — a mining region east of Enkaku, once rich in spiritual ore and sacred stone, had been silent for months. No travelers returned. No monks returned. No merchants passed through. The enclave assumed the villagers had fled due to war.
They were wrong.
The Council convened at once. Master Renji's voice rang clear:
> "It's a Jūshin. There's no doubt."
The elders argued. The enclave had remained neutral for years. To engage meant open defiance against the gods' judgment — an act that could invite retribution. But Renji spoke again, gaze fixed not on the others… but on Shinkū, who stood outside the chamber like a shadow waiting to be acknowledged.
> "Send him."
Master Ayami was the only one who protested.
> "He is not ready. He is barely thirteen. His mind is still shaped by darkness. We know not what it whispers to him."
Renji met her gaze.
> "And yet the darkness is afraid of him."
---
The Mission
Shinkū left at dawn. No escort. No blessings. Only the sealed robes of the enclave wrapped around his frame, and the Voidblade, forged by Kaien and blessed by Miyori before he left the village years ago.
Three days of travel.
The forests near Stonewake were wrong. The trees breathed — not in the way wind rustles leaves, but in the way lungs exhale. The sky above twisted in colors unknown to human eyes. The air crackled with inverted sound.
And then he found it.
The remains of Stonewake.
No blood. No bodies. No bones. Just… dust. As if the village had been aged a thousand years in an instant.
At the center of the ruin stood the beast.
Ten meters tall, skin like obsidian granite stitched with molten veins, a mouth that split across its chest in jagged, toothless laughter. It had no eyes — only an ancient stone crown fused into its forehead.
A Rank-A Jūshin: Iwakuro.
The Medium of Earth's Rot.
It turned slowly toward Shinkū. Not in surprise. Not in rage.
But recognition.
> "So the gods gave you flesh," it spoke, voice like boulders grinding.
Shinkū stepped forward. Calm. Silent.
The beast bent low, its molten claws scorching the soil beneath it.
> "What are you, boy?"
Shinkū gripped the Voidblade.
> "The reason your kind falls."
---
The First Clash
Iwakuro charged — the ground erupting behind each step. Shinkū dodged right, barely avoiding a strike that shattered the mountain ridge. The air turned heavy, gravity bending under the Jūshin's pressure.
Shinkū countered with a flicker-step, a burst of Kimoto footwork, striking upward.
His blade scraped Iwakuro's hide — and stopped.
The Jūshin laughed, the sound crumbling rocks in a hundred-yard radius.
> "Your steel is a whisper."
But Shinkū's eyes remained calm.
He slid backward, hands forming the First Posture of the Abysswalker — Still Flame Rising.
Black aura bloomed from his body.
The ground beneath him turned silent. Even the wind dared not move.
He vanished.
And reappeared above the beast, blade downward.
Iwakuro roared as the steel struck its molten neck — slicing just enough to draw ichor like magma.
The beast screamed in confusion, stumbling back.
> "That… should not be possible!"
Shinkū landed, crouched. Eyes glowing with dull violet.
> "That was form one."
---
The Dance of Void
What followed was not a battle.
It was a revelation.
Shinkū danced between boulders and tremors, weaving through gravity warps and seismic bursts. Each form he used bent the laws of Kimoto into something new — less art, more instinct. He wasn't fighting like a disciple.
He was fighting like something older.
Something forgotten.
Iwakuro screamed, channeling Rend Pulse, a technique that caused the ground to ripple in waves, tearing trees apart.
Shinkū stood firm — blade sheathed — and muttered a single word.
> "Invert."
And then… the waves turned inward, collapsing into the Jūshin's own body.
It staggered, coughing molten blood.
> "What… are you made of?!"
Shinkū didn't answer.
He was no longer listening.
He was already preparing the next form.
---
Abysswalker Form IV – Black Horizon Veil
A step forward — then nothing.
Shinkū blurred into a rift, his body bending space around it. Iwakuro spun, clawing at illusions. Dozens of Shinkūs circled him — all echoes, all silent.
> "ENOUGH!" the beast cried, slamming its fists into the ground.
Spikes of black stone erupted — catching one echo.
But the real Shinkū descended from above, arms wide, blade horizontal.
A whisper escaped his lips.
> "Fade."
And he passed through the Jūshin.
Clean.
No blood.
Just a line of heat across the monster's chest.
And then, slowly, its body split in two.
Not with force — but with absence.
As if part of it had never existed.
---
The Aftermath
The body of Iwakuro dissolved into dust.
But Shinkū didn't move.
He stood over the fading remains, eyes distant.
> "This won't be the last," he murmured.
He turned to the crater left behind. Where a village once stood, only silence remained.
He knelt, placing the Voidblade into the earth.
A gesture not of victory, but mourning.
Then he walked away.
---
Mount Enkaku — Days Later
The enclave erupted when Shinkū returned.
The elders called it impossible.
Ayami wept.
Renji only nodded once and said:
> "Then the age of Jūshin ends not with gods… but with monsters made from men."
But Shinkū had no interest in praise.
He returned to his quarters and wrote only one word into the training hall's sacred wall — a wall reserved only for Grand Masters and saints.
He wrote it with blood and ink: