My life has always had a rhythm of sixty beats per minute. Not one more, not one less.
In the Tokyo Restoration Center, time moves slowly, and sometimes it seems to stagnate. My name is Kagutsuchi. Yes, I know, it's a rather strange name for this century, but that's what my parents named me.
I am 25 years old, and my world is reduced to what is on my workbench: a scalpel, sable brushes, a magnifying glass, and the constant hum of the air conditioning. I don't have an active social life; my best friends are the objects the rest of the world has forgotten.
When I'm not at work, I lock myself at home to read and distract myself. Solitude doesn't bother me; in fact, I prefer it.
"Tsuchi, staying late again?" asked Sato, my colleague, as he put on his jacket. "People our age are in bars or going on dates. You look like a twenty-first-century monk."
Only those closest to me were allowed to call me Tsuchi.
"Someone has to finish cleaning this Edo period ceramic, Sato," I replied without looking up. "Besides, I don't like the noise of the city. It's too... chaotic. And you already know I can't stand alcoholic drinks."
"Ha, ha, yeah, I got it. Well, see you later. If you change your mind, call me; I'll be at a bar nearby with some girls."
"You know I won't."
Sato walked away with his back to me, waving his hand in a farewell gesture. I sighed.
That was the truth. I had always felt a bit "disconnected." Bright lights gave me headaches and crowds made me feel overwhelmed. I preferred the peace of ancient objects and the history I could find in their cracks.
That night, just as I was about to close, my supervisor walked in with a cedar wood box that looked like it had been rescued from a shipwreck.
"Something special has arrived, Tsuchi. It comes from a hidden shrine in the Okutama mountains. A forest fire revealed a chamber that wasn't on the maps. Archeologists say it's a miracle this didn't turn to ash."
When he set the box on the table, a chill ran down my spine. A strange smell, like ozone and burnt wood, leaked through the crevices.
"Open it tomorrow if you want," he said before leaving.
I was about to give in to curiosity when the vibration of my phone pulled me out of the trance. It was my parents. I sighed as I looked at the screen.
My parents are prestigious musicians, artists who master any instrument. They are currently on tour, which makes me the legal guardian of my younger brother, a fourteen-year-old boy with a special talent for getting into trouble.
It seems he had been in a fight at school today and they needed me to go as his representative.
"Not again..." I muttered.
I placed a protective blanket over the mysterious cedar box, gathered my things, and walked to the parking lot. As I started my car engine, I couldn't stop thinking about that box. It was almost as if it were calling out to me to open it.
Driving through Tokyo at night is usually relaxing, but today the steering wheel felt heavy. I arrived at the small apartment I shared with my brother, Ren. At fourteen, he was everything I was not: impulsive, loud, and with an energy he didn't know how to handle.
I found him sitting on the sofa, with a patch on his cheekbone and his school uniform somewhat disheveled. He looked at me sideways, waiting for the lecture.
"Again, Ren?" I sighed, leaving the keys on the table.
"They started it, Tsuchi. They said your name was trash and that Mom and Dad abandoned us for their music. I wasn't going to stay quiet."
I sat down next to him. The name "Kagutsuchi" had always been a target for mockery, and Ren knew it better than anyone. He reminded me of myself at his age, although I always preferred silence over fists.
"I'll go to the meeting with the principal tomorrow," I said, rubbing my temples. "But you have to control yourself. I can't always be leaving work for your fights. Our parents trust me to take care of you."
"I know, I'm sorry..." he muttered, looking down. "How was work? Did anything new arrive?"
For a moment, the image of the cedar box and that burnt smell invaded my mind again.
"Yes... something strange. A box from an ancient shrine. I have to start working on it tomorrow after I go to your school."
We ate dinner in a tense but comfortable silence. Before going to sleep, Ren stopped at his bedroom door.
"Hey, Tsuchi... thanks for being here. I know you'd rather be alone with your old junk."
"Go to sleep, kid. Tomorrow will be a long day."
I watched him close the door and I was left alone in the living room. "I'd better get some sleep now, or I won't be able to later."
...
The next day, I woke up with a migraine pulsing behind my eyes. I hadn't slept well. In my dreams, I strangely heard a person's voice, but I didn't understand what they were talking about; every time I heard them, I woke up. In the end, they didn't let me rest.
I prepared breakfast in silence. Ren appeared shortly after, dragging his feet with his uniform a bit better put together than the night before.
"Ready for the lecture of your life?" I asked, handing him a piece of toast.
"Only if you're ready to put on your 'my brother is a saint, Mr. Principal' face," he replied with a forced smile, though his eyes showed he was still regretful.
We left the apartment and I dropped him off at the school entrance. The meeting with the principal was exactly as expected: a gray-haired man talking about "conduct" and "family responsibility" while I nodded mechanically. My mind, however, wasn't there. It was in the basement of the museum.
As we left, Ren was waiting for me at the door.
"And? Am I still expelled?"
"Just a week of suspension and extra homework," I sighed, giving him a small pat on the shoulder. "Go home, Ren. And please, don't burn the kitchen down while I'm gone."
"Done. See you later, Tsuchi."
I watched him walk home. It was a common image, one I had seen hundreds of times, but for some reason, I felt like it was the last time I would see it: his red backpack disappearing among the crowd of students.
I shook my head to clear that thought.
I took out my keys and drove to the museum with an anxiety I could no longer ignore. I skipped my lunch hour. When I entered the lab, Sato wasn't even there; he was probably still on his break. The basement was dark, plunged in silence. I approached the workbench. The blanket covering the box was still there.
"I'll just see if the humidity hasn't affected the wood," I lied to myself, my heart racing at a rhythm that was no longer 60 beats per minute.
I put on my latex gloves and carefully opened the lid. Inside, wrapped in fabrics that crumbled at the touch, was a katana hilt without a blade and a pair of hanafuda earrings. They were beautiful. The drawing of a red sun over white mountains.
"Kimetsu..." I murmured.
I remembered seeing those earrings somewhere. It was a famous anime, right? I once saw a trailer on YouTube while looking for Japanese forging techniques.
Something about demon hunters. It seemed like an exaggerated fantasy at the time, but seeing those earrings there, in reality, they looked very beautiful to the eye.
As I brought the magnifying glass closer to the earrings, I noticed something that made my skin crawl. They weren't painted. The color seemed to be inside the wood, as if the very essence of the object was that crimson color.
That was when it happened for the first time.
Without realizing it, my breathing changed. I inhaled the ash dust from the box and my vision flipped. For a second, the lab disappeared.
I didn't see the concrete walls; I saw the water pipes behind them. I looked at my own arm and, for a terrifying instant, I saw my bones.
I stumbled, dropping the magnifying glass.
"What...? What's happening to me?" My heart was beating a thousand miles an hour. I sat down, closing my eyes tightly. I rubbed them.
"It must be exhaustion from not sleeping. Or maybe the cleaning chemicals are affecting me." "Anatomy"—that's what I saw. A perfect anatomical vision of my own body.
I decided that I would take a break today and watch movies with my brother at home. I reached out to put the earrings back in the box, but the moment my fingers brushed the wood, my heartbeat didn't just accelerate... it synchronized with something else.
An external heartbeat. Slow. Powerful. Ba-dum. Ba-dum.
A searing heat was born in my chest, right at the sternum. I felt my lungs fill with fire, but I didn't feel it burning.
— "I'm sorry..." — a voice, heavy with a sadness that made me want to cry, resonated in my mind. — "There is no one else." —
The museum basement lit up with a blinding white light. I felt my body disintegrate into particles of light and shadow. The last thing I saw was the wall clock in the lab: the hands were spinning backward at an impossible speed before the glass shattered.
And then, absolute silence.
A few minutes passed, then I felt as if I were submerged miles beneath the ocean. I couldn't feel my arms. I couldn't feel my legs.
All that was left of me was that consciousness that had isolated me so much in the real world. I just felt like I was floating in a very dark place, but my eyes—if I still had eyes—did not stop working. I saw threads of red light intertwining in the darkness, like veins of fire trying to sew my existence back together.
— "Kagutsuchi..." — the voice resonated again, but this time it didn't come from outside. — "Breathe the breath. Do not let the flame go out." —
Instinctively, I tried to inhale. But there was no air. What entered my chest was a pure essence, hot and heavy. I felt a sharp pain, as if thousands of crystal needles were traveling through my bloodstream, engraving something into my cells.
Genetic Memory Synchronization of Yoriichi Tsugikuni: 10%
Characteristics similar to the character.
Those strange words appeared in my mind. And then, I felt myself falling. I stopped floating.
I felt the wind rush over my entire body. The heat vanished and was replaced by an extreme cold that forced my eyes wide open.
"Haaaah!" The scream came out torn.
What I saw was the ground rapidly approaching me. In an instant, I fell face-first into something soft and cold. Snow.
I stayed there for a few seconds, processing what had happened.
The smell of the museum had vanished; now the air smelled of pine, damp earth, and something metallic... something my brain identified as blood even before seeing it.
I forced myself to sit up. My hands sank into the deep snow. As I lifted them, I froze. They weren't my hands. Or rather, they weren't the hands I had had a few seconds ago. They were more calloused, rougher, and I was wearing rustic cloth clothes, a kimono I didn't remember ever putting on.
"What... what is this?" My voice sounded different.
I looked around. I was in a dense forest, where the trees were so tall they almost hid the gray sky. There was nothing to tell me where I was.
Then, my vision failed again. Or rather, something "turned on." Without my wanting it, the world became translucent. I saw the movement of water inside the tree roots. I saw the thermal flow of a small animal hidden several meters underground.
"What's wrong with my eyes?" I pressed my eyes, feeling like my brain was going to explode. It was as if my internal eyelids had been removed.
Nausea hit me and I ended up vomiting bile onto the snow. Using that vision, even for just a few seconds, left me exhausted, as if I had run a marathon.
A crack of breaking wood broke the silence of the forest. I turned, staggering. A few meters from me, in the shadows of the trees, something was moving.
It was a human figure, but it twisted in a grotesque way. Its eyes glowed in the night, making me remember every image of the monster trailers Sato had shown me.
The creature stepped out of the shadows. It had pale, almost bluish skin, and claws that dripped something dark. It let out a roar that didn't sound human at all and lunged at me.
Since I was sitting and my legs wouldn't respond out of panic, I desperately felt the frozen ground for something, anything, to defend myself.
My fingers brushed against something cold and metallic buried under the snow. I grabbed it tightly and, without thinking, thrust it in front of me just as the beast fell upon me.
The impact was brutal.
The monster crashed into the object, and a violent vibration traveled up my arms to my shoulders, as if I had stopped a truck with my hands.
The sound was a metallic blast, accompanied by a high-pitched shriek from the creature that pierced my ears. I was thrown backward, rolling through the snow until the air escaped my lungs all at once.
"Gh...!" I coughed, trying to sit up as snow slipped down my neck.
The creature backed up a couple of steps, surprised. It fixed its gaze on what I was holding. I did too. It was a katana. But it wasn't the broken fragment from the museum; this blade was complete, black as obsidian.
"So you're a demon slayer..." the thing hissed.
"What? Can this thing talk?" I stammered, my heart pounding very fast.
The demon licked its lips, revealing rows of sharp teeth. "You know, I've never tasted the flesh of a slayer. Feel lucky, you'll be a delicacy."
Then, it lunged again.
"Shit!" I got up and ran out of pure instinct, but it was useless. Within seconds, the creature stood in front of me with inhuman speed.
"Where do you think you're going?"
It swung a claw directly at my face. Unintentionally, the strange vision activated again; the world became transparent and I could see how its muscles tensed before the blow. I barely dodged the attack, rolling to one side.
The demon didn't stop: it continued attacking with blind fury. Some blows I dodged by millimeters and others I stopped with the katana, but each block sent me flying meters back.
"Ha... ha... I can't take it anymore," I gasped. My body was collapsing. My muscles burned, my head throbbed with pain, and the cold was numbing me.
"Hee hee... I think it's time for the meal. Thanks for the feast," the demon said, jumping toward me at a speed faster than before.
"I'm going to die... I'm really going to die here... A monster is going to eat me..". I could only see its claws heading toward me.
"Just feel... concentrate... Breathe."
That sad and powerful voice resonated in my mind again, calming the chaos of my thoughts.
"BREATHE AND REPEAT AFTER ME."
Ignoring the terror, I gripped the hilt of the katana with both hands. I began to inhale air in a rhythmic and deep way. I felt my lungs burn as if I were swallowing air—hot, very hot air—but due to the adrenaline, the pain transformed into pure energy.
"Sun Breathing: First Form... Waltz!"
I shot forward with a terrifying speed that my own legs shouldn't possess. The black katana seemed to ignite in a blazing fire, leaving a trail of solar flames in the darkness of the forest. I crossed the space in a blink and performed a single horizontal cut.
The demon, inches away, hadn't even noticed the movement. But when it tried to close its claws on me, its head slid smoothly from its neck. It fell to the ground with a look of absolute incredulity before beginning to crumble into gray ash.
Leaving the place in silence, with only my breathing and the sound of the wind.
At that moment, I felt the air escaping me. I fell to my knees, my lungs collapsed, trying to catch my breath in vain. My body felt as if it had been run over by a train after that single attack.
Just before the darkness swallowed me and I lost consciousness, a figure flashed in the void of my mind, like a progress counter:
Template Synchronization: +3% (Total: 13%)
And then, the world went out.
END OF CHAPTER.