The morning after the world remade itself, Asuta Kirigaya nearly died tying his shoes.
Not from a celestial tribulation or an assassin's blade, but from the simple, mundane act of bending over. A sharp, electric cramp seized the muscles of his lower back—muscles that in his previous life could have supported a mountain—and for three agonizing seconds, he was paralyzed, bent double over his scuffed school shoes, gripping his desk for balance.
Pathetic, the thought came, cold and clear amid the pain. This vessel is clay. Unfired. Fragile. The Divine God Body Sutra does not build—it breaks first. This… this is the breaking.
The Sutra was not a forgiving path. It operated on a principle of absolute honesty: the body would only give what it was first forced to endure. Last night's inaugural cultivation session had been less about gaining power and more about awakening his system to the brutal truth of the work ahead. Every cell in his body felt tenderized, as if he'd spent the night being used as a training dummy by a regiment of war giants.
He finally straightened, his breath coming in shallow puffs. In the mirror, his reflection was a study in dissonance. The face was young, unlined, with the softness of a life uninterrupted by century-spanning wars. But the eyes… they held a weary, ancient patience that belonged in a portrait of a sage, not a second-year high school student. He looked like a ghost wearing his own skin. Seven hundred years, he mused, tracing the unfamiliar smoothness of his jaw. I wore scars like medals. Now I wear youth like a disguise.
Downstairs, the familiar sounds of morning anchored him: the clatter of dishes, the sizzle of eggs in a pan, Ruri's quiet humming. The domestic symphony was a treasure so profound it ached. He descended the stairs, each step sending fresh complaints from his thighs. The Tempered Vessel Stage. Nine layers of pure, grinding physical metamorphosis. I once shattered continents. Now a staircase is my opponent.
Ruri was at the stove, deftly flipping an omelet. She glanced over her shoulder, and for a fleeting moment, her eyes held that same searching look from yesterday—part concern, part suspicion. Then it was gone, replaced by her usual pragmatic expression.
"You're slow today," she noted, sliding an omelet onto a plate. "Stay up too late studying ancient martial arts or whatever?" Her tone was light, teasing, but the question was a probe. She's sharper than I remembered. Or I've forgotten how to hide.
"Something like that," he grunted, accepting the plate. The aroma should have been heavenly. Instead, his newly sensitive stomach churned. The food was… dead. Devoid of the vital essence that even the most basic spirit grain in his past life would have possessed. It was empty calories, fuel for a mortal engine. He ate it anyway, forcing down each bland, textureless bite. Nutritional optimization will have to wait. The body is a machine. This is low-grade fuel, but fuel nonetheless.
"Your wrist," he said suddenly, nodding to her right hand as she poured tea. "You're not favoring it."
She paused, looking down at her wrist as if noticing it for the first time. She flexed it experimentally. A slight, habitual wince that had always been there—a remnant of a childhood fall from a tree she'd never admitted to their parents—was absent. Her brow furrowed.
"It… feels better," she said slowly, rotating the joint. "Really better. I didn't even do anything to it."
Asuta took a sip of tea to hide his smile. Last night, after his cultivation, he'd sat by her sleeping form. With spiritual sense that could map the flow of energy in a galaxy but currently had to be focused down to the cellular level, he'd examined the old, minor misalignment in her carpal bones, the slight inflammation in the tendons. He had no Qi to heal her. But he had seven centuries of anatomical knowledge, of pressure points and neural pathways, of the body as a machine that could be tuned. A master blacksmith doesn't need magic to fix a hinge. He needs understanding, and the right touch. For ten minutes, he'd applied precise, almost imperceptible pressure at specific nodes along her arm, encouraging circulation, subtly guiding tissue back toward proper alignment. It was medicine so advanced it looked like nothing at all.
"Must be the weather," he offered, shrugging.
Ruri gave him a long, unreadable look but said nothing more.
---
School was a special kind of torture. Not the algebra or the history—those were simple puzzles, their answers fixed and knowable. The torture was physical.
The walk to school, which he'd once done while contemplating Daoist paradoxes, now left him winded, his heart thumping a frantic, amateur rhythm against his ribs. Ken's effortless, loping stride beside him was a silent accusation of his own body's inadequacy. This is the forge, he reminded himself, the burn in his lungs a familiar, almost welcome pain. The hammer is weakness. The anvil is will. Endure.
In gym class, the true humiliation arrived. They were running laps. Asuta, whose body in its prime had once outrun a lightning tribulation, found himself lagging behind the pack within the first 200 meters. His lungs burned like he was breathing glass dust. His legs, tempered by a single night of the Sutra, felt like sacks of wet sand. The gym teacher's whistle was a derisive shriek in his ears.
"Come on, Kirigaya! You're moving like your grandfather!" the teacher barked.
Grandfather? Asuta thought, a grim irony twisting inside him. I am older than the language you're shouting in. He gritted his teeth, pushing through the shame. This was the process. This discomfort, this mortal weakness, was the raw ore. He focused on his breathing, not the advanced cyclical patterns of the Sutra, but the basic, forgotten rhythm of his current body. In. Out. The body is a bellows. Stoke the fire. Do not collapse.
He finished last. Drenched in sweat that smelled oddly sour—the first hints of bodily impurity being expelled—he leaned against the cool brick wall of the gym, watching his classmates disperse.
"Whoa, dude, you okay?" Ken asked, not unkindly, clapping him on a shoulder that screamed in protest. "You look like you just fought a bear."
"Felt like it," Asuta managed, offering a weak smile. A bear would have been cleaner. Quicker.
The bell for lunch was a mercy. As he sat in the cafeteria, pushing tasteless curry around his plate, his mind was elsewhere. It was compiling a list. Not of homework, but of survival. Strategy in war begins with logistics. My war is against time, and my army is this single, frail body.
Phase One: Resource Acquisition.
He needed materials. The Basic Tempering Pill he'd conceptualized required:
1. Ghost-Fang Vine (Huya Teng): A creeping plant with thorny, pale shoots. In a Qi-rich world, it was a low-grade spiritual herb that aggravated the nerves to stimulate growth. Here, it would be a rare, possibly extinct medicinal oddity. The spark of pain, to wake the sleeping nerves.
2. Iron-Bark Root (Tiepi Shen): The gnarled root of an old pine. It held trace earthly strength, useful for reinforcing bones. The memory of endurance, for the skeleton.
3. Ten-Year Earth Ginseng (Shi Nian Tu Renshen): The most common item, but even a decade of growth in this sterile soil would yield only a faint whisper of energy. The whisper of life, to bind the process.
He needed a source. A modern pharmacy was useless. He needed an old-world apothecary, the kind that smelled of dust and dried secrets, run by someone who might still believe in the old ways. The forgotten places hold the forgotten things.
He also needed money. His allowance was a pittance. His past life's knowledge presented… options. The stock market was a slow game. Sports betting was quicker but required capital. There was a football match this weekend. Manchester United versus… he sifted through the fog of centuries. Yes. He remembered the score. A fluke upset. The odds would be long.
It was a trivial use of cosmic foreknowledge. It felt almost blasphemous. To use the memory of epochs for gambling debts… But gods, he was learning, needed cash. A warrior must use every weapon. Even distasteful ones.
---
After school, he told Ken and Ruri he had club activities—a lie that left a bitter taste—and took a train to the older quarter of the city. Here, skyscrapers gave way to narrow streets and buildings stained with time. He found it nestled between a noodle shop and a shuttered electronics store: "Longevity Herbs & Antiques." The sign was faded, the window cluttered with dusty jars of unidentifiable things.
A bell tinkled as he entered. The air was thick with the complex scent of a hundred dried plants, minerals, and time. An old man with a wispy beard and eyes like polished river stones looked up from behind a counter where he was weighing something on a brass scale.
"Looking for something specific, young man?" His voice was dry as autumn leaves.
Asuta's spiritual sense, though feeble in range, flared to life. He didn't see energy, but he felt potential. Like a musician hearing a faint, perfect note in a cacophony. The shop was a graveyard of faded potency, but here and there, a faint, stubborn spark remained. A tomb of echoes, he thought. But echoes can still hold power.
"I'm… researching traditional tonics for physical training," Asuta said, adopting the respectful tone of a student. "I was hoping to find Huya Teng, Tiepi Shen, and a good quality Earth Ginseng."
The old man's eyes sharpened. He set down his scale. "Huya Teng? That's an… unusual request. Nasty stuff if not prepared correctly. Causes terrible cramps. Why would a boy like you want it?"
"A family recipe," Asuta said, meeting his gaze steadily. Not a lie. The family is my past self. The recipe is written in my soul. "For recovery."
The old man stared at him for a long moment, then sighed. "The world forgets the old knowledge. Waits for pills from factories." He shuffled into the back. He returned with three packages wrapped in brittle yellow paper. He laid them on the counter. "The ginseng is ten years, from the mountains. Good quality. The Tiepi Shen… this is all I have. It's old. From my grandfather's stock."
He unwrapped the third package last. Inside lay a length of vine, bone-white and covered in tiny, hook-like thorns that seemed to gleam under the shop's dim light. Ghost-Fang Vine. Asuta's senses tingled. It was the strongest source here, a dormant flicker of aggressive, stimulating energy trapped within its woody flesh. There. A dying ember. But an ember can start a forge-fire.
"This," the old man said quietly, "is not for play. It is a key that unlocks pain. You understand?"
Asuta nodded, a formal, almost bow-like dip of his head that felt instinctive from another era. "I understand the nature of keys. And of doors." The door to power is always pain. I have walked through it before.
The old man's expression shifted, becoming unreadable. He named a price. It was high—it would clean out Asuta's savings and the meager winnings from his planned bet. Asuta paid without hesitation. As he took the packages, his fingers brushed the old man's.
A jolt, faint but distinct. Not energy, but recognition. A spark of something knowing passing between them.
The old man didn't react, but his eyes held a new depth. "You have interesting hands for a student. Callused in the wrong places." He feels the ghost of old sword-grips, of decades of staff training, Asuta realized. The old man continued, "Come back if you need more… unusual ingredients."
Asuta left, the precious packages tucked in his bag. He hadn't just bought herbs. He had, perhaps, found a source. An ally? Or just a merchant who recognizes a strange customer? Time will tell.
He walked toward the station, his body aching, his mind already calculating the alchemical process he would use tonight—temperatures, sequences, the precise moment to introduce the Ghost-Fang Vine's essence. He was so focused on the internal blueprint that he almost didn't notice the sleek, black sedan idling halfway down the block. Or the man in the passenger seat—mid-forties, wearing a tailored suit, reading a tablet. The man glanced up as Asuta passed.
Their eyes met for a fraction of a second.
Asuta felt nothing. No spiritual pressure, no aura of power. But he felt a lack. A cold, clean emptiness around the man, as if he'd been scrubbed free of the world's natural resonance. It was the silence after a loud noise. It was the scent of sterile metal. Not a cultivator. A curator. A collector of anomalies. The thought was ice in his veins.
The man gave a small, polite, utterly meaningless smile and looked back at his tablet.
Asuta kept walking, his pace unchanged, but his blood ran colder than the February air.
They're already here. The thought was a stone in his gut, settling with final weight. The Elysian Foundation, or something like it. They weren't cultivators. They were archaeologists of the coming storm. And they had just cataloged him. I am a variable. An unknown. They will want to quantify me, control me, or remove me.
He reached the station, the weight of the herbs in his bag now feeling absurdly light compared to the new weight settling on his shoulders. The mission was no longer abstract. The race wasn't just against time, or his own mortal limits.
It was against the shadows gathering in the corners of his second chance, watching, waiting, taking notes.
---
That night, as Asuta climbed the stairs to begin his work, Ruri watched from the living room. Her brother moved with a new, deliberate heaviness. The packages from that strange shop were tucked under his arm. Her wrist, perfectly pain-free for the first time in years, flexed effortlessly as she closed her book.
It felt like a clue to a riddle she couldn't yet solve.