…
Murakami's eyes opened slowly, immediately noticing that the balcony was darker than he remembered.
He sat with that for a moment, his forearm felt warm, not the painful kind, but the peculiar kind that came from the residual heat of tissue that had been worked at a level it hadn't been worked at before.
Beneath the skin, the green thread pulsed, unchanged in appearance, but somehow denser in presence.
The way a muscle felt different after a training session even before any visible change had taken place.
He then turned his attention inward as the mindscape surfaced immediately, clear and still beneath the pale blue moon.
He looked up at it.
The moon was dimmer.
Not dramatically, but Murakami noticed.
The very blue light that had illuminated his mindscape had pulled back, just slightly.
He studied it for a long moment, then withdrew.
'So that's the cost on that side.'
He filed it away without alarm. It made sense, the mental precision required to separate vital energy from chakra, hold it stable, compress it incrementally without crossing into damage, and sustain that process across an extended session was not a passive act.
It had drawn on the same reserves the moon represented, and the moon had reflected that accurately.
Rest and meditation would restore it.
Probably by morning.
It wasn't long after he made that conclusion that the physical side of the cost made itself known, and considerably less quietly.
His stomach growled and contracted.
Not the mild contraction that came with hunger, this was something more fundamental.
A deep, insistent pull from somewhere beneath ordinary hunger, the body presenting a bill and making clear it expected payment promptly.
He stood, and his body reminded him it had opinions about that too.
'Reconstruction requires materials,' he thought, moving toward the sliding door with careful deliberate steps, 'And materials come from food.'
For a moment, the kitchen felt further away than usual but he reached it anyway, pulled open the cold storage seal and stood in front of it for a moment taking inventory with focused attention.
Then he pulled out everything.
Twenty minutes later, every pot he owned had been used.
He ate everything he cooked, went back for more, and when he finally sat back from the cleared table, he stared at the empty dishes for a moment.
He was going to need significantly more food in the house.
With that conclusion, he turned his attention inward again.
The moon was the same as it had been twenty minutes ago, still slightly dimmed, the restoration not yet begun in any meaningful way.
'That would probably take the night.' he thought then turned his attention to his arm. The forearm was still warm. 'Could be a sign of it processing the refinement.'
The hunger had receded to a manageable degree, the body's most urgent signal had quieted now that it had been given the materials it had asked for.
Murakami considered the arithmetic of it.
The cost behind one session on one thread had been a dimmed moon, a trembling hand, and enough hunger to empty his entire cold storage in a single sitting.
He was also going to need to think carefully about pacing.
The body could be pushed, but it couldn't be pushed faster than it could rebuild, he'd established that much already from the pressure tests.
The same logic applied to the recovery window between sessions.
Push too frequently and the reconstruction never completed.
The refinement would probably stall, or worse, accumulate damage faster than it resolved.
Murakami opened his eyes as a wave of dizziness and fatigue settled over him.
'I guess this is the mindscape asking for its due.' Murakami thought and let out a wry chuckle.
For now, he would wait and see how things turned out by the morrow.
But even without knowing that, he knew he needed more food in the house.
And when Aiko's research eventually produces something useful…
He let that thought complete itself.
He cleaned the table, set the dishes in the basin, and went to bed earlier than he normally would have.
His last thought, as consciousness began to recede, was a mental addition to his morning routine.
'More food.'
…
Murakami woke before dawn, as he always did.
For a moment he simply lay still, eyes open to the ceiling, running the habitual inventory he'd made a point of performing every morning since he was old enough to understand that the body communicated more honestly in the first minutes of waking than at any other point in the day.
He noticed several things in quick succession.
The dizziness from the night before was gone as it should.
The moon, when he checked, had returned to its normal luminescence indicating that his spiritual reserves had been restored.
That was useful data, he thought as he filed it away and turned his attention to his forearm.
It was no longer warm.
That was the more interesting observation. The residual heat had been replaced by something harder to describe.
It left behind a faint feeling of density and firmness beneath his skin that hadn't been there before.
Like the difference between green wood and seasoned wood.
Structurally the same, fundamentally different in quality.
It was a small return on a significant investment of focus and food. He rose, washed, and moved through his morning routine.
Stretches first, then the kata sequence.
Every move felt marginally cleaner than usual, whether that was due to the refinement or simply a good night's sleep he couldn't say with certainty yet.
He didn't claim conclusions he hadn't earned.
After he was done, he settled down in a lotus position. Twenty minutes beneath the blue moon, using his internal observation to observe the green thread.
It pulsed with the same steady rhythm it always had, but the density he'd noticed in the waking world confirmed itself here too, slightly more defined against the surrounding tissue and more present.
'Good progress.'
He withdrew from the mindscape.
Whether it was fast or slow, he didn't know, but that wasn't what mattered.
What did was that there was progress.
Refining the body was a process that could not be rushed. As long as there was progress, that was what counted.
With that done, he stood and made his way towards the kitchen, already mentally assembling breakfast from whatever the cold storage had left him.
He pulled the handle and cold mist curled out into the kitchen air.
He looked inside only to have bare shelves look back at him.
He stood there for a moment, hand still on the handle, looking at the empty interior with the expression of a man who had no one to blame but himself.
He sighed and closed the door. He was going to have to go to the market.
Luckily, they had just returned from a high level mission and were required to rest for a few days…
'Well, not days, but at least, I should have the day to myself.' He thought to himself and didn't find anything wrong with that train of thought.
He turned from the empty cold storage, left the kitchen, made his way to his room and pulled out a grey haori and shrugged it over his shoulders, smoothing it once before turning toward the door.
There was no need to stress himself over a grocery run when he had perfectly capable people on payroll.
He smirked inwardly at that.
The perks of being a young chaebol.
…
The Lotus Store had grown.
That was always his first thought when he visited after an extended absence, not pride exactly, more like the satisfaction of watching a system perform exactly as designed.
He thinned his presence out of habit as he approached, chakra pulled inward until he read as nothing more than another face in the foot traffic moving in and out of the entrance.
He stepped inside.
The interior was busier than he remembered from his last visit, which was a good thing.
He stood just inside the entrance for a moment, taking it in.
Not bad for a store that had started as a failing general shop and a kid with a marketing strategy.
He moved on before anyone could look twice at him, cutting through the floor traffic toward the staircase at the far end of the store that led up to the higher floors.
Hina's office was up there.
-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_
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