The darkness peeled away, and when Rin opened his eyes, he was no longer where he had collapsed.
Rin's eyes opened to a hall built from night itself. A vast throne sat at its heart, carved in black curves like the ribs of some ancient beast. Candleflames guttered along the walls—pinpricks of light swallowed by shadows that seemed to breathe.
A man lounged on the throne.
Black robes draped off him like falling ink. A band of midnight silk covered his eyes. Red streams of power drifted around the seat, patient and serpentine. The air wasn't hostile; it was sovereign—like standing at the foot of a mountain that had outlived empires.
The man's voice was calm enough to settle dust.
"Welcome, inheritor. You stand before the Will of the Codex. From here, we will learn whether your blade is worthy of the path you chose."
He snapped his fingers.
The world broke.
Stone screamed. The floor split into avenues of ruin. Towers sheared in half as if some colossal hand had snapped them like reeds. Across the sky, wounds of scarlet gaped and oozed light. Rin found himself in the middle of a collapsed cityscape—a world scoured by Void until even the wind felt tired.
The man stood now where the throne had been moments earlier, barefoot among the rubble. He raised a finger.
Swords began to fall.
They drifted from the torn sky with the gravity of snow, spearing into cracked stone around Rin's feet—curved sabers, narrow jian, massive cleavers that looked like they'd been forged to argue with giants. The last blade struck with a chime and hummed like a plucked wire.
"Steel remembers," the man said. "Try them all. A warrior's first step is to find the weapon that breathes with his soul."
Rin moved among the fallen blades, lifting, testing, discarding. A saber bit too cruelly. A longsword felt honest but heavy. Then his hand closed around a black jian—its sheath lacquer-dark, fittings chased with silver dragons. When he drew it, faint patterns of mist ran along the flat, as if the blade held a storm inside its mirror.
It didn't feel new in his hand.
It felt like a promise he had once made to himself and forgotten.
He faced the man in black. "Who are you?"
The smile that touched the man's mouth never reached the blindfold. "I," he said lightly, "am what you will become. Your future self."
The words went through Rin like cold water. For one staggering heartbeat he saw his own features behind that silk—older, calm, dangerous.
Then he set his stance.
"Good," the man said, as if approving a child for finally standing. "Come."
Rin moved. His body remembered the line of One-Point Severance and cut clean at the throat—
—and discovered the man already standing at the tip of his blade, two fingers resting on steel as if on the rim of a teacup.
A pressure he hadn't felt registered too late. A line of cold opened across his neck. The world tilted, and he died.
---
He gasped awake in the same ruins, jian in hand, breath tearing at his lungs. He hadn't fallen; he hadn't even seen the man move.
On the throne again, as if he had never left it, the man waited with patient indifference.
Rin set his feet and went again.
He slashed Against the Grain, cutting through intent instead of flesh. The black-robed figure blurred—and Rin's sternum burst open as if a door had been kicked from the inside. He looked down, confused at the red feathering his shirt, and then there was only dark.
He respawned on broken stone with knees buckling.
Again.
A dozen times. A hundred. The man's presence wasn't violent; it was absolute. Rin swung, and a fingertip brushed his wrist and the sword tumbled and he was disemboweled by an absence he couldn't track. He feinted for the heart and the man was behind him, not with speed, but with a choice the world itself had obeyed.
Between deaths, the throne-room voice floated down without malice.
"Your body shouts. Your blade whispers. Hear it."
"Breath sits under motion. Still it, and steel will move first."
"Do not swing to strike. Place the outcome—and let the swing arrive later."
Sometimes, when the man moved, he murmured a thread of sound under his breath, a line Rin could barely catch:
> "…???—First Verse: Falling River."
The air around the words folded. The jian in Rin's hands felt briefly heavier, as if dragged by an undertow that wasn't there.
He died again.
---
Good, thought the one who called himself Codex, behind the blindfold and patience. The boy's breath ragged, the will unbroken. Each cut carves a furrow for power to flow. Each death pares away the stupid fear of dying. At the edge of the cliff, the seed wakes.
When he trembles like this, his dormant fragments stir. By pain, he remembers what blood already knows.
He rose from the throne only once, to stand with one hand folded behind him while Rin charged in frenzy. The jian sang in three clean lines—throat, heart, knee. Beautiful, the shape of it. Embryonic.
Codex tilted his head and stepped through the second cut as if the world had offered him the gap in courtesy. His palm touched the flat of Rin's blade. A hint of will rolled down the steel and Rin's bones turned to chalk.
"Again," Codex said as the city rewound.
---
Rin began to notice things.
He stopped blinking when the man moved. A subtle tension, like a drawn bowstring, ran through the city just before death arrived. His grip crept a finger-width higher. The muscles of his back learned to wait; the sword moved first, his body following like a shadow obeying a flame.
He tried speaking between lives. "Every time I die, I wake up… stronger," he managed, panting. "What are you doing to me?"
"Not I," the man said. "You. You are not learning; you are remembering. Steel only reveals what was written in your veins long before you were born."
Rin swallowed. He lunged—and for the first time, the ancestor's sleeve split.
Not skin. Not blood. A whisper of black cloth. But Rin saw it—and a thin, merciless pride lit his chest.
Codex heard it and allowed himself a private nod.
"Now," he said softly, almost to the city itself. "Let us see if your blade can stand in a conversation."
He drew—Rin hadn't seen a sword on him, yet a blade was in Codex's hand, narrow and unadorned and silent. He touched the air with two knuckles.
> "…???—Second Verse: Crossing Reed."
Rin felt the cut arrive inside his stance, his own body placed in the wrong century. He twisted with everything he had, spine bending, feet sliding on dust, and his jian shaved the line of death to a hair's width. Pain burned across his ribs but did not open.
He almost laughed.
"Better," Codex allowed, and vanished from sight in a way that wasn't speed so much as decision.
Rin died six times trying to answer that trick. The seventh, he didn't. The jian flicked, catching nothing—yet Codex's blade tapped his collarbone instead of his throat.
A mercy. A lesson.
Rin used Judgment of Silence, the world shrinking to a breath's worth of stillness where only result mattered. The jian cut a truth into the air.
For a heartbeat, Codex wasn't there.
Rin didn't know if he had dodged or agreed. Either way, when he reappeared, his blindfold tilted like a man smiling with his eyes.
"You are beginning to place outcomes," the ancestor said. "Do not chase openings. Name them."
"Name… them," Rin repeated, tasting the words.
"Place this one." Codex lifted his chin a fraction. "Me."
Rin moved.
Time frayed. The jian's black mirror filled with falling towers and red sky and a man in a blindfold who was not where a man should be, and yet his blade always found the place where Codex would have been if reality obeyed ordinary rules. His shoulders bled. His ankles turned to glass. He died, came back, died, came back.
On the two-hundredth death, he stopped counting.
On the two-hundred-and-first life, something changed.
He set his feet and nothing in him hurried. The ruin, the wind, the drifting red—everything seemed to lean toward the same hinge. He didn't feel faster. He felt clearer, like a window after rain. The jian rose by itself.
Codex's sword came down in a line neither wide nor narrow.
Rin's blade was already there.
Steel met with a chime so thin it might have been a moth's wing. No sparks. No crash. Just agreement. Rin's wrists shivered under the weight of it, but did not fold.
For the first time, Codex stepped back a half-step.
It felt like being knighted. Rin's throat tightened. The city seemed to breathe.
"Good," Codex murmured. "You are beginning to hear."
Rin exhaled, shaking, triumph trying to climb his face. "Then—"
"Do not mistake endurance for progress."
The words were almost kind.
Codex didn't rise from the ground. He didn't even seem to move. His fingers spoke a shape in the air.
> "…???—Third Verse: Where All Roads End."
The ruin fell silent.
Rin felt the idea of cut appear everywhere, as if the city itself had decided it was made of edges. His body registered pain before his mind understood and then he was in pieces without blood, falling in dignified quiet.
The world stitched back together.
Rin stood once more, panting. The man in black sat again on the throne, as though the last hour had merely been a thought he'd finished.
"Keep coming," Codex said. The blindfold hid his eyes; the voice hid nothing. "Until your blade sings louder than your screams."
Rin tightened his grip on the dragon-etched jian. The black mirrored the broken sky. His shoulders were fire, his breath a rasp—weary, yes, but strangely light, like a runner seeing the end of a long road and knowing there is another behind it.
He set his stance.
And went.