The forest was a cathedral of ancient, gnarled trees and dappled sunlight, a place of serene, untouched life. In a small clearing, a man slept, his back against the moss-covered trunk of an ironwood tree. He was not peaceful. His brow was furrowed, his fingers twitching, caught in the throes of a memory more real than the world around him.
In his mind, he was not in a forest. He was on a plain of shattered obsidian, under a sky bleeding crimson. And he was facing her.
She moved like a shadow given purpose, her sword, Yami no Hikari, a slash of absolute nothingness that seemed to sever the very light from the air. It was a blow meant to erase him from existence. He met it, not with a block, but with a technique of his own—a fist wreathed in chaotic, devouring energy. The impact was silent, yet it vibrated through the core of his being, a perfect, thrilling dissonance that was the purest music he had ever known. Her eyes, fierce and unyielding, met his across their locked weapons. In that moment, there was no hatred, no grand cause—only the sublime recognition of a perfect equal.
The man's eyes snapped open.
The serene greens and browns of the forest flooded his vision, a jarring, pathetic substitute for the glorious battlefield of his memory. The echo of that clash still thrummed in his bones. He remained still for a long moment, the ghost of that satisfaction a painful addiction compared to the bland reality of his existence.
"Yami," he breathed, the name a sacred curse on his lips.
He pushed himself to his feet, a simple, fluid motion. And as he did, the life around him died.
It began with the moss at his feet. The vibrant green turned a sickly grey, then black, crumbling into fine, lifeless dust. The effect spread outwards from him in a silent, invisible wave. The great ironwood tree groaned, its leaves withering and falling in a brittle, brown rain, its bark cracking and peeling to reveal a rotten, hollow core. The ferns, the wildflowers, the fungi—everything within a radius of several kilometers simply… gave up. Their life force was siphoned away, leaving behind a landscape of brittle, grey desolation. The air, once fresh and clean, now carried the cloying, sweet stench of advanced decay. The birds were silent, the insects still. In the space of a few heartbeats, the thriving forest had become a graveyard.
He did not even glance at the destruction. It was as natural to him as breathing. His eyes, heavy-lidded and burning with a dull, amber glow, turned westward. He could feel it, a pull on the strings of his destiny. A familiar, infuriating, and comforting presence. Kāiwánxiào.
As he began to walk, his boots leaving ashen prints on the newly dead earth, the memories he had long suppressed rose to the surface, no longer as fragments, but as a relentless, waking tide.
---
Memory Fragment: The Boy in the Corner
The hovel was dark, the air thick with the smell of cheap alcohol and despair. A young boy, Xi'an, huddled in the farthest corner, knees drawn to his chest. He flinched with every crash and slurred shout from the other room—the sound of his father. He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to focus on the only warmth in his life: his mother's voice, whispering stories in the stolen moments of peace.
"The Compassionate One, the Buddha," she would say, her voice a fragile melody, "sees all suffering. He does not judge. He offers a path away from the pain, to a world where the heart is light, and no one is ever hungry or afraid."
Xi'an clung to those stories. They were his sanctuary, a fragile raft on a sea of terror.
---
Memory Fragment: The End of Sanctuary
He was older, his body lean with hunger and hard labor. The royal guards, clad in polisher steel that seemed to mock the squalor of their district, filled the single room of their hovel. His father was already a broken heap on the floor, sobbing.
His mother stood tall, her face a mask of serene dignity that broke Xi'an's heart. The captain read the decree, his voice bored. "...henceforth, the woman, Li, is conscripted into the Royal Comfort Attendants to settle the family's debts to the crown."
"Comfort Attendant." The euphemism was more brutal than any slur. It meant a slave for the nobility's pleasure. As they dragged her away, she turned her head. Her eyes met his. It was not a look of fear. It was a look of such profound, gut-wrenching shame that it seared his soul. The stories of the Compassionate Buddha died in that look. The raft sank.
---
Memory Fragment: The First Fist
He was a feral thing, fighting in the mud-streaked alleys for a scrap of bread, his heart a hard, cold stone. A shadow fell over him. He looked up, ready to snarl, to fight. It was a young man, not much older than him, with emerald eyes that held a terrifying, cheerful light.
"You fight like you're trying to kill the ground," the young man said, his voice laced with amusement. He didn't offer a hand. He didn't offer pity. Instead, he balled his own hand into a fist. "The world is your enemy. Show me you can hit it back."
Driven by a rage he could no longer contain, Xi'an lunged. He was effortlessly knocked into the mud. Again and again. But each time, the young man—Kāiwánxiào—would pull him up, point out a flaw in his stance, a hesitation in his strike. Later, he shared a stolen loaf of bread. It was the first full meal Xi'an had eaten in a week. For the first time since his mother was taken, he had not received charity. He had been given a challenge. He had found a friend.
Kāiwánxiào became his anchor. He gave Xi'an a purpose: strength. They trained, they fought, they stole from the rich to feed the desperate in their district. For a few, fleeting years, the world held a semblance of meaning. Kāiwánxiào spoke of a greater path, of a temple and a master who could teach them to channel their rage into something purer. Xi'an listened, but the memory of his mother's shame was a cancer his friend's kindness could not cut out.
---
Memory Fragment: The Temple of Ashes
They had been away on a mission for their master, Buddha. When they returned, the temple was a charnel house. The air, once fragrant with incense, was choked with the smell of burned flesh and spilled blood. The monks, the acolytes, the cooks—all of them, slaughtered. The demons had been thorough.
Kāiwánxiào fell to his knees, a roar of anguish tearing from his throat, his divine energy flaring in a wave of pure, destructive grief.
Xi'an stood amidst the carnage, silent. He looked at the body of a young novice, no older than he had been when his mother was taken. He saw no compassion in the boy's glazed eyes. He saw no Buddha. He saw only the same brutal, meaningless end that awaited all things. The hope Kāiwánxiào had kindled in him guttered and died, leaving only the cold, hard stone that had been forming since childhood.
"There is no path away from the pain," Xi'an said, his voice flat, echoing in the bloody silence. "There is only pain. And the strength to inflict it upon others before they inflict it upon you."
He turned and walked away from the temple, from his friend's grief, from the lies of compassion. He walked into the world, and he began to make it rot.
---
The memories ceased as abruptly as they had come. The man—once Xi'an—stood at the edge of a vast, windswept plain. The psychic signal of Jokedone's power was a beacon directly ahead. He would reach him by nightfall.
But another memory, the final one before the battle, surfaced with crystalline clarity.
He stood before her on a rain-slicked plateau. Yami Matsumoto, the master of the dark blade, her stance one of weary readiness. He had sought her out, drawn by the legend of her power, a power born of shadow, like his own rot.
"You carry a great sorrow," Yami had said, her voice not judging, but observing.
"I carry the truth of the world," he had replied. "It is a rotting fruit. I am merely hastening its fall."
"The world has pain," she acknowledged, her hand resting on the hilt of her blade. "But it also has love. It has sacrifice. It has friends who share their bread."
The mention of Kāiwánxiào was a needle in a wound he thought had calloused over. A flicker of rage, the first true emotion he'd felt in years, stirred.
"They are lies," he hissed. "Momentary comforts before the inevitable decay. Your balance is a delusion. I will show you the only true state of existence. Entropy."
He had unleashed his power then, a wave of pure corruption meant to rot the flesh from her bones, to wither her soul. And she had drawn her blade. Not to counter his decay with light, but to meet it with a deeper, more accepting darkness. Her sword, Yami no Hikari, had not reflected the moonlight. It had swallowed it.
Their clash was not of light and dark, but of two different kinds of darkness: his, a nihilistic rot that sought to unmake everything, and hers, a sorrowful acceptance of the void that sought to find meaning within it. When their weapons met, it was her eyes he saw. Full of a pain that mirrored his own, yet tempered by a resolve he could not comprehend. A resolve that, for a single, terrifying moment, made him doubt.
He would find Kāiwánxiào. And he would make him watch as everything he tried to protect withered and died.
The battle had raged for days. The ground was molten, the sky torn. He had faced armies and gods, but none like Yami Matsumoto. She was his perfect opposite, a darkness that was whole and accepted, not a festering wound like his own.
They stood facing each other, both bleeding, both breathing heavily, yet their spirits burned brighter than ever.
"You fight with a pain that consumes you," Yami said, her voice calm despite the chaos. "It does not have to be this way."
He laughed, a harsh, broken sound. "You understand nothing. This pain is all I am."
"No," she said, raising Yami no Hikari. "It is a chain. Let me show you what lies beyond it."
She unleashed her ultimate technique, the "Embrace of the Final Void." It was not an attack of hatred, but one of release, an offer to end his suffering by unmaking it.
He met it with his "World-Devouring Fist," a technique that sought to consume all, even the void itself.
The collision was not an explosion, but an implosion of reality. For a single, timeless moment, he saw it—a world without the rot, a peace he could never possess. He saw the truth in her eyes. And he knew, with terrifying clarity, that he could never walk that path.
He rejected it. He poured every ounce of his hatred, his pain, his twisted love for the memory of his mother, into his fist. The balance shattered. The feedback of power was catastrophic. When the light faded, Yami was gone. Not dead by his hand, but… erased by the paradox of their clash. He had survived, but the one being who had ever offered him a glimpse of salvation was lost, and with her, the last vestige of Xi'an was finally, completely, extinguished.
---
The man shook his head, dispelling the image. The doubt was gone, burned away by centuries of perfecting his craft. He had walked away from that battle, but the encounter had changed him. It had given him a purpose beyond mere destruction. He would prove to the world, and to the memory of the friend he had left weeping in a temple of ashes, that his was the only truth.
He stopped walking, arriving at the edge of a cliff. Below, stretching into the distance, was the vibrant, living landscape of the kingdom where Jokedone now resided. The memory of Yami's final, pitying look was a brand on his soul.
He had once been Xi'an, a boy who believed in a compassionate Buddha. Now, he was a vessel for the world's corruption, a being who carried his own graveyard with him. He was going to find his oldest friend, his greatest enemy. Not for reunion. Not for vengeance.
But to show him that the rot, once set in, could never be cleansed. It could only be spread. And he would start with the last place that held a memory of light.