The kitchen at midnight was a battlefield, and the enemy was mundanity.
Asuta stood at the counter, the fluorescent light humming overhead like a disapproving insect. Before him lay his arsenal: the Ghost-Fang Vine, pale and sinister; the gnarled Iron-Bark Root; the Earth Ginseng, looking unremarkable; a digital thermometer, a precision scale borrowed from the school chemistry club (a minor theft for a greater cause), a mortar and pestle, and his mother's second-best saucepan.
No Flaming Dragon Cauldron. No Spirit-Gathering Arrays. No Eternal Ice-Fire. The ghost of a smile touched his lips. Just a teenage boy in his pajamas, about to perform heresy against the laws of physics with a non-stick pan.
The Divine God Body Sutra prescribed specific, brutal exercises. But the body needed fuel for its transformation—catalysts to force the purification along. The Basic Tempering Pill was the first rung on that ladder. In a Qi-rich world, it would be a trivial concoction, its energy doing most of the work. Here, he had to brute-force the process with chemistry guided by spiritual intuition.
He began, his movements methodical. First, the Ginseng. He sliced it thinly with a chef's knife, his fingers applying pressure at exact angles to preserve the fragile capillary structures where the last dregs of earthy essence might linger. Like performing surgery on a ghost, he thought, laying the slices on a tray to dry in the low oven. Extracting a whisper.
Next, the Iron-Bark Root. This required force. He placed it in the mortar, bringing the pestle down not with random crushing strength, but in a specific, rhythmic pattern. Thud. Twist. Thud. Twist. Each impact was meant to fracture the woody fibers along their natural planes, not pulverize them. He closed his eyes, his spiritual sense extending into the mortar like a surgeon's delicate probe. He felt the moment a microscopic pocket of trapped, mineral-rich sap was released—a faint, gritty coolness against his senses. There. The memory of stone, of endurance.
The Ghost-Fang Vine was the dangerous one. The thorns contained the active principle—a neuro-stimulant so potent it could cause permanent tremors if mishandled. With a pair of tweezers, he plucked each thorn, placing them in a small ceramic bowl. The vine itself he set aside; its woody body would be boiled for a separate, less potent broth. The thorns gleamed under the light, looking less like plant matter and more like slivers of bone.
Now, the dance.
He filled the saucepan with distilled water and set it to heat. Not to a rolling boil, but to precisely 82 degrees Celsius—the temperature where water's molecular agitation was most receptive to holding dissolved intent, according to alchemical principles lost to this age. He dropped in the Ginseng slices. A faint, almost imaginary scent of wet stone and old forests rose. He stirred counter-clockwise, nine times, then let it steep.
His focus was absolute. The world narrowed to the saucepan, his senses, and the ghostly blueprint in his mind. He added the powdered Iron-Bark Root, stirring clockwise seven times to integrate the earthy essence. The water clouded, taking on a murky, brownish hue.
Finally, the thorns. He didn't add them directly. Instead, he held the ceramic bowl over the steaming pot. Using his spiritual sense—a strain that made a vein throb in his temple—he pushed. Not on the physical thorns, but on the infinitesimal, dormant energy signature within them. It was like trying to blow out a candle from a mile away using only the warmth of his breath.
A minute passed. Two. Sweat dripped from his chin onto the counter. Then, a single, pale thorn vibrated. A wisp of something—not smoke, but a distortion of the light above it—detached and drifted down into the simmering liquid.
The effect was instantaneous. The murky broth flashed a sickly, phosphorescent yellow for a split second before settling. A sharp, medicinal odor, like camphor and lightning, filled the kitchen. Asuta's eyes watered, but he smiled. The spark. The catalyst has taken.
He strained the liquid through a coffee filter into a glass bowl, then set it over a bath of ice. As it cooled, he added a pinch of pure starch as a binding agent. The mixture thickened into a viscous, mud-grey paste. Unappetizing. Primitive.
Using a dropper, he placed small dollops of the paste onto a sheet of parchment paper. Twelve in total. Then came the final, most delicate part: sealing the fleeting energy inside. He placed his palms flat on the counter on either side of the parchment, closed his eyes, and breathed.
He couldn't command Qi. But he could command attention. He focused his entire will, his seven centuries of experience with the nature of energy, onto those twelve dollops. He imagined a shell around each one, a vacuum seal of intent, holding the volatile reaction in stasis. It was a psychic weightlifting feat with muscles he hadn't used in this body. A nosebleed threatened, hot and metallic at the back of his throat. He swallowed it down.
After an hour, the dollops had hardened into rough, grey, pea-sized pellets. They looked like rabbit droppings. They smelled of bitter earth and ozone.
He picked one up. It was cool to the touch. He brought it to his lips, then paused. This is the first true step off the cliff. The Sutra will use this as a wedge to break me open. The pain will be… instructive.
He swallowed it dry.
For a moment, nothing. Then, a warmth bloomed in his stomach. Not the gentle warmth of soup, but the deep, penetrating heat of a heating pad set too high. It spread, sinking into his muscles, his bones. The familiar aches from the day's exertion flared, then were subsumed by a new, sharper sensation—a cellular itching, a deep-seated need to move, to strain, to break.
He didn't wait. He moved to the center of his room, assumed the first stance of the Sutra's foundational exercise—The Mountain Bears the Sky—and let the pill's energy guide the agony.
It was a symphony of pain. His muscles didn't just burn; they screamed as if each fiber were being individually stretched on a rack. His bones felt like they were being gently sanded from the inside. He shook, sweat pouring from him, this time carrying a visible grey tinge—the true, deep-seated impurities of a modern body, packed with processed toxins and lazy metabolism.
He held the stance for twenty minutes, cycling through the brutal breathing pattern. When he finally collapsed, he was a trembling heap on the floor. But as the pain receded, it left behind a profound clarity. His skin felt tighter, cleaner. His muscles, though exhausted, hummed with a new potential. He flexed a hand. The motion was slightly smoother, the tremor of fatigue less pronounced.
Layer One of the Tempered Vessel Stage… is consolidating. He looked at the remaining eleven crude pills on his desk. Eleven steps. A foundation of mud and will. It will have to be enough.
---
The next day was Saturday. The football match was in eight hours. He had 5,000 yen to his name—all that remained after the herb purchase.
The betting shop was in a different part of the city, a narrow room thick with cigarette smoke and the tense silence of concentrated greed. Screens flickered with odds and scores from around the world. Asuta approached the counter, feeling the eyes of the other patrons—mostly older men with weary faces—slide over him with disinterest.
"Manchester United versus Aston Villa," he said, his voice calm. "Aston Villa to win. 3-1."
The clerk, a man with a bored expression, raised an eyebrow. "Kid, you sure? The odds on that are insane. United are massive favorites."
"I'm sure."
The man shrugged, as if humoring a fool. He took Asuta's money, printed the ticket, and slid it across the counter. The numbers stared back at Asuta: a potential return of 85,000 yen. A fortune to a student. A pittance in the grand scheme of saving the world. But it was a start. The first resource stream. Tainted, but necessary.
He left, the ticket a burning piece of paper in his pocket. Using foreknowledge for this felt… small. Degrading. Like using a sacred sword to chop vegetables. But even a god, he reminded himself, walking back into the clean afternoon light, must first secure his treasury.
He spent the afternoon at the local library, not on homework, but on geological surveys and old botanical records of the region. He was cross-referencing his memories of spiritual ley lines—dormant now—with modern land maps, looking for places where unusual mineral deposits or rare plant life might have been recorded, hints of where the fading world's energy might have pooled.
It was there, in the quiet of the reference section, that he felt it again. The lack.
He didn't look up from the topographical map of the nearby mountains. He kept his breathing even, his posture that of a diligent student. But his senses were screaming.
Someone was watching him. Not with casual interest, but with focused, analytical attention. The sterile, metallic absence he'd felt near the black sedan now permeated the air three rows over, near the periodicals. The curator has come to observe the specimen in its natural habitat.
Asuta carefully turned a page, the sound loud in the silence. He could feel the gaze like a physical pressure on the back of his neck. They weren't hiding. This was a message. We see you. We are noting your behavior.
He closed the book after another twenty minutes, gathered his notes, and stood. As he walked toward the exit, he allowed himself a single, casual glance toward the periodicals.
A man in a crisp, beige overcoat was reading a financial magazine. It was the same man from the car. He didn't look up as Asuta passed.
But as Asuta pushed through the library's heavy doors into the fading daylight, a single, quiet sentence, spoken in fluent, unaccented Japanese, reached his ears. It was so faint he almost thought he imagined it.
"The Longevity Shop sells interesting things to interesting young men."
Asuta didn't break stride. He didn't turn around. He kept walking, the cool air biting his face.
The message was received. And returned. They knew about the herbs. They knew where he'd been. His financial gamble tonight would not go unnoticed either. He was no longer a shadow preparing in secret. He was a figure on a board, and other players were beginning to make their opening moves.
He touched the betting ticket in his pocket. The wager was no longer just for money. It was the first move in a different game—a game of credibility, of demonstrating that he was not just a strange teenager, but a variable that produced results.
That night, alone in his room, he watched the match on a grainy stream on his laptop. The game unfolded exactly as he remembered: the underdog's stunning, relentless energy, the favorite's arrogant collapse. When the final whistle blew, 3-1, he felt no thrill of victory. Only a cold satisfaction.
He had his seed money. And he had, undoubtedly, attracted more attention.
He took out a second Tempering Pill, looking at its ugly, grey form. Alchemy and wagers. One forges the body. The other forges the path. Both are tools. Both have costs.
He swallowed the pill, and once more, surrendered himself to the sacred, brutal pain of becoming.