The ceasefire with the Elysian Foundation held a brittle silence. The black sedan vanished. Mr. Li became a ghost that no longer walked the periphery of Asuta's vision. The first sanitized list arrived via encrypted email three days after the alley confrontation, a simple .txt file with codenames and sparse descriptions. It was a test.
Asuta scrolled through it on a library computer, a burner phone in his pocket. The list was a museum of the forgotten and the bizarre: a fossilized insect that hummed at 40kHz, a chunk of basalt that consistently registered 0.5 degrees below ambient temperature, a medieval grimoire whose ink fluoresced under no known wavelength. And there, as promised: Item #047-B (Kyoto Vault): Unidentified bronze seal. Shang Dynasty stylization, depicts serpent consuming own tail. Emits non-ionizing radiation, pattern chaotic. Psychometric resonance induces vertigo and temporary aphasia.
Ouroboros Seal, Asuta's mind supplied instantly, the knowledge surfacing from the silt of centuries. Not Shang. Pre-Flood. A Qi-containment ward, primitive but effective. The "radiation" is decayed spiritual binding energy. The effects are from a broken mind-warding sub-glyph.
He typed his reply on the spot, brief and clinical: "047-B: Qi-containment ward, origin pre-Shang. 'Radiation' is decayed binding energy. Psychometric effect from fractured guardian-glyph. Do not allow personnel with latent psychic sensitivity near it. Containment: store in lead-lined box, surround with grounded iron filings. Will degrade to inert metal within 12-18 months."
He hit send, erased the browser history, and left. The proof of concept was delivered. Now, he would wait to see if they believed him, or if they would try to verify his analysis through means that might break the fragile artifact—and their trust.
The space he'd carved out was immediately filled with relentless, grueling progress. With the Foundation's eye temporarily averted, he intensified his cultivation. The Divine God Body Sutra was a cruel but honest master. His daily life became a series of micro-temperings. He carried weighted bags of rice home from the market, using the walk to practice the Unbending Pillar footwork. He did isometric contractions during boring classes, channeling the agony of held muscles into the Sutra's purification cycles. At night, the closet lab hummed with the quiet work of alchemy.
His focus was the next major bottleneck: Layer 4. The first three layers had tempered muscle, sinew, and bone. The fourth required cleansing the Blood Meridian Network, the body's foundational river of life. For this, he needed the Vermilion Blood Purification Pill. Its primary ingredient was a substance that didn't exist on modern Earth: Heartblood of a First-Spawn Flame Lizard. A low-tier spirit beast from volcanic realms.
Again, he would have to simulate. The principle was intense Yang heat to scour impurities. He spent a week of his remaining funds sourcing the hottest natural peppers known to man—Carolina Reapers, Ghost Peppers—and capsaicin extract of pharmaceutical purity. He combined these with powdered iron oxide (for blood's iron core) and a tincture of hawthorn berry and cayenne (to stimulate circulation). The catalyst, however, was the problem. He needed a spark of true volcanic essence, a mineral memory of primordial earth-fire.
Which is why he found himself on a Saturday morning, on a train heading out of the city toward the dormant volcanic region to the north. His backpack held water, simple tools, and a void. He needed to find a piece of fresh obsidian—volcanic glass forged in an instant of extreme heat and pressure. Not museum obsidian, but a piece still connected to the geothermal memory of the land. It was a long shot.
Ruri had been watching him pack. "Another 'research trip'?" she asked, leaning against his doorway. Her voice was light, but the worry in her eyes was a constant, quiet companion these days.
"Geology field sample," he said, offering half the truth. "For an independent study." He hated the lies, each one a hairline fracture in the bond he was trying so desperately to rebuild. But the full truth was a poison he couldn't administer.
"You've changed," she said, not for the first time, but this time it wasn't an accusation. It was an observation, tinged with a sadness that cut him deeper than any Sutra-induced pain. "You're here, but you're somewhere else all the time. It's like you're… preparing for a war no one else can see."
He stopped packing and looked at her. The directness of her insight was terrifying. She was too smart, too perceptive. The lie he'd offered about a "nightmare future" was a thin veil, and it was tearing. He walked over and placed his hands on her shoulders. They felt thin under his palms, so fragile. "Ruri," he said, his voice low and earnest, "the world is bigger and stranger than school, or this city, or even this country. There are… currents. Changes coming. I'm trying to learn to swim in them, so I can make sure you're safe. So I can pull you to shore if you need it. That's all."
Her eyes searched his, and he let her see the sincerity, the love, the bone-deep fear that was for her, not of anything else. She saw it, and some of the tension left her frame. She didn't understand, but she believed him. "Just… be careful, okay? Whatever you're looking for out there." She punched his arm, a feeble echo of their childhood. "And bring me back a cool rock."
He smiled, a real one. "I'll find the coolest rock."
---
The hiking trail to the old volcanic flow was steep and deserted in the late winter chill. The air was clean and sharp, smelling of pine and cold stone. Asuta moved with the steady, ground-eating pace of someone for whom distance was a triviality. His Layer 3 body handled the incline without complaint, his breath even.
He reached the obsidian flow by mid-afternoon. It was a river of black glass frozen in time, spilling down the mountainside, jagged and beautiful. Tourist pamphlets called it majestic. Asuta's spiritual sense, stretched to its limit in the clean, open air, felt only a faint, sleeping warmth deep within the earth below. The surface obsidian was dead, its memory of fire long faded.
He needed a piece from deeper, from where the flow met the living rock. He spent an hour carefully navigating the treacherous glass, using a small geologist's hammer to tap and listen. The sound was usually a clean tink. Then, near a fissure where steam still whispered on the coldest days, he heard a duller thunk.
He pried at the edge with the hammer's pick. A plate of obsidian the size of his hand flaked away. Underneath, revealed where it had been shielded from millennia of weathering, was a core of the flow. It wasn't just black; it was a deep, translucent bottle-green, with a fiery red sheen at its heart where minerals had been caught in the act of creation. He picked it up. It was warm to the touch—not from the sun, but from a residual, geological memory.
There. A whisper of the forge.
As he straightened, triumph a cool ember in his chest, his senses, still extended, brushed against something else.
It was a flicker. A tiny, discordant ripple in the ambient stillness of the mountain. Not natural. Not geological. It was the same sterile, technological absence he associated with Foundation scanners, but… cruder. Louder. And it was moving.
His hunter's instincts, older than the mountain itself, flared to life. He wasn't alone.
He didn't look around wildly. He pocketed the obsidian core with a smooth motion and began walking back down the trail, his pace unhurried. He tuned his senses, filtering out the wind, the distant cry of a hawk, the creak of the trees.
There. Fifty meters behind and above him, on the ridge parallel to the trail. The soft crunch of a boot on gravel, out of rhythm with the natural sounds. One person. Trying to be quiet, but not skilled enough to mask their presence from him.
This wasn't Mr. Li. The Foundation moved with ghostly silence. This was someone else. The Seekers. The artifact-hoarding rivals Li Chen had warned him about. They must have been monitoring the Foundation's communications or had their own sensors that had picked up his transaction with Li Chen or his unusual purchases. They'd tracked him here.
A cold, analytical calm settled over Asuta. He was on a remote mountain trail. His pursuer likely had a weapon. Asuta had a rock hammer and a body that was only slightly superhuman. The odds were poor. But he had terrain, and he had seven hundred years of tactical experience.
He reached a switchback in the trail that took him behind a thick stand of pine trees, out of the pursuer's line of sight for maybe eight seconds. It was all he needed.
He didn't run. He moved. He flowed off the trail and into the trees, his steps silent on the thick bed of needles. He circled upslope, using the sound of the wind as cover. In less than a minute, he was above and behind the position where his tracker should be.
He peered through the pines.
A man in rugged, non-descript outdoor gear was crouched behind a boulder, peering down the empty trail through a compact pair of electronic binoculars. He had a bulky pistol holstered at his hip—a tranquilizer gun, Asuta guessed, for "acquisitions." A small sensor pack was strapped to his thigh, its LED blinking a steady green. The crude energy signature emanated from it.
The man muttered into a throat mic. "Lost visual on the primary. Trail's empty. He might have doubled back or gone off-trail. Permission to move in and sweep?"
Asuta listened to the faint, tinny response from the earpiece. "Confirm. Secure the sample location. If you encounter the subject, pacify and extract. He has value."
Pacify and extract. The words were a cold confirmation. They saw him as a resource to be collected, like his piece of obsidian.
The Seeker stood, unsnapping the holster of his tranq gun, and began moving cautiously down toward the spot where Asuta had found the obsidian.
Asuta made his decision. He could fade away, lose them in the wilderness. But that would tell them he was just prey that could run. He needed to send a different message. He needed to tell them he was a predator in his own right.
He picked up a stone the size of his fist. He didn't throw it at the man. He threw it past him, twenty meters down the slope. It crashed through brush.
The Seeker spun, tranq gun coming up, trained on the noise.
In that moment of distraction, Asuta moved. He didn't charge. He descended the slope like a shadow, utterly silent. He was upon the man in three heartbeats.
The Seeker's situational awareness was good. He sensed movement, started to turn. But Asuta was already inside his guard. He didn't strike to injure. He struck to dismantle.
A palm-heel strike to the brachial plexus nerve cluster on the man's gun arm. A numbing shock. The tranq gun fell from nerveless fingers. A simultaneous, precise kick to the back of the knee, not to break it, but to buckle it. The man grunted, going down on one knee. Asuta's hand shot out, not for the throat, but for the sensor pack on the man's thigh. He ripped it free, wires snapping, and crushed it under his heel in one fluid motion. The blinking LED died.
The entire encounter took less than four seconds. The Seeker, kneeling, clutching his numb arm, stared up at Asuta with wide, shocked eyes. He saw not a teenager, but a figure of terrifying, efficient violence wrapped in a school jacket.
Asuta stood over him, his breathing calm. He picked up the tranq gun, examined it, then ejected the dart cartridge. He tossed the harmless weapon into the ravine.
"Tell your employers," Asuta said, his voice quiet but carrying the absolute authority of the ancient general, "that I am not an artifact to be collected. I am a force of nature. The next one they send, I will not send back. Do you understand this message?"
The man, pale, nodded jerkily.
"Good. The mountain is large. Find your own way down."
Asuta turned and walked away, disappearing into the tree line. He didn't run. He walked with the steady, unconcerned pace of the apex creature on this slope, leaving the stunned Seeker kneeling in the dirt.
He made it back to the train station by nightfall, the precious obsidian core warm in his pocket. The confrontation had been a risk, but a necessary one. He had drawn a line not just with the observing Foundation, but with the acquisitive Seekers.
He had declared himself sovereign territory.
On the train home, rattling through the darkness, he looked at his reflection in the black window. The face was still young, but the eyes held a new hardness, forged in the cold fire of the mountain. The path of the Divine God Body Sutra was not just one of physical tempering. It was a path of will. And today, his will had been tested, and had held.
He had his catalyst. The Vermilion Blood Purification Pill was within reach.
And the world of shadows now knew his name. The game had just become infinitely more dangerous.