The 85,000 yen felt alien in Asuta's wallet. A crisp stack of notes, earned not through labor or talent, but through the quiet theft of a future memory. The first fruits of a forbidden tree, he thought, placing the money in his desk drawer. It was a tool, nothing more. But tools had a way of shaping the hand that wielded them.
The effects of two Basic Tempering Pills were becoming visible. Not in dramatic, superhuman feats, but in the silent restructuring of his ordinary life. The walk to school on Monday no longer left him winded. His body moved with a newfound economy, muscles learning the Sutra's lessons of leverage and alignment even without conscious effort. In gym class, he finished mid-pack in the run, his breathing controlled, his movements efficient. The teacher gave him a nod of faint approval. Ken just looked confused.
"Dude, did you, like, join a secret ninja bootcamp over the weekend?" Ken asked, leaning against the lockers after class. "You're not wheezing anymore."
"Just trying to keep up," Asuta deflected, his tone light. The lie was ash on his tongue. Keeping up? I am running a race against the end of everything, and you are all standing still at the starting line, unaware the gun has already fired. "Maybe I'm finally hitting a growth spurt."
Ken shrugged, easy and accepting. "Cool. Hey, my mom got those crazy spicy ramen bowls. Come over after school? Ruri's welcome too."
The normalcy of the invitation was a lance of poignant pain. This. This is what I am fighting for. Not for empires or cosmic principles, but for spicy ramen with a friend on a Tuesday afternoon. "Yeah," Asuta said, the word thick. "That sounds good."
But first, he had a purchase to make. The herbs from Longevity Herbs & Antiques had been a starter kit. Now, with capital, he needed to scale up. He needed a dedicated space, equipment that wasn't his mother's saucepan, and higher-grade materials.
He returned to the old quarter after school, the weight of the money in his bag a tangible purpose. The bell over the shop door tinkled the same lonely note.
The old apothecary—Asuta had learned his name was Li Chen from a faded certificate on the wall—looked up from grinding something with a stone mortar. His river-stone eyes fixed on Asuta, and a knowing, almost imperceptible smile touched his lips. "Back so soon, young man? The 'family recipe' required adjustment?"
"The recipe was sound," Asuta said, approaching the counter. He kept his voice respectful but direct. No more playing the curious student. "It worked. Now I need to increase the yield and purity. And I need… specialized tools."
Li Chen set down his pestle. The rhythmic grinding ceased, leaving a sudden, attentive silence. "Specialized tools," he repeated. "Such as?"
"A ceramic crucible, glazed internally with cobalt oxide if possible. Not for chemistry class. For high-temperature reduction without metallic contamination." Asuta's voice was low, clinical. "A set of agate mortars and pestles, different sizes. A distillation apparatus with copper components. And…" he paused, meeting the old man's gaze. "Information."
Li Chen's eyebrows climbed towards his hairline. The boy before him was speaking the language of a master alchemist, not a dabbling teenager. The words 'cobalt oxide glaze' and 'metallic contamination' did not belong in this world. "Information is often the most expensive commodity," he said slowly. "And the most dangerous. What do you wish to know?"
"The other customers," Asuta said. "The ones who ask for 'unusual' things. Who are they?"
A shadow passed behind Li Chen's eyes. He glanced instinctively toward the front window, as if checking the street. "That," he said softly, "is a door best left unopened. They are not collectors. They are… acquisitors. They have clean suits and empty eyes. They pay very well and ask no questions about provenance, which is never a good sign."
The Foundation. Or the Seekers. Asuta stored the description. "Have they been here since my visit?"
Li Chen gave a slow, grave nod. "A man came. Asked about a teenage boy purchasing Huya Teng. He was very polite. His shoes were very expensive. He left a card." The old man reached under the counter and slid a simple, matte black card across the worn wood. There was no name, no title. Just a phone number and a small, embossed symbol: a stylized, abstract eye over a horizontal line that could be a horizon or a page. The Elysian Foundation.
Asuta didn't touch the card. "What did you tell him?"
"I am an old man with a bad memory," Li Chen said, his voice a dry rustle. "I told him many young people come and go. I could not recall a specific face." His gaze held Asuta's. "But they do not believe in bad memories. They believe in surveillance and databases. You have been noted."
"I know," Asuta said. He pushed a folded stack of yen across the counter. "For the equipment. The best quality you can source discreetly. And for your discretion."
Li Chen looked at the money, then back at Asuta's face—at the ancient calm in the young eyes. He did not count the cash. He simply swept it into a drawer. "The tools will be here in three days. They will be delivered to a post office box. I will text you the details." He leaned forward slightly, his voice dropping to a whisper. "A word of advice, from one who has seen many winds blow. When you play with fire, even a small one, those who fear conflagrations will come to stamp it out. Be sure your fire is worth the breeze you are summoning."
Asuta dipped his head in a slight bow, a gesture of genuine respect. "The fire is not for warming hands. It is for forging a sword."
He left the shop, the old man's warning echoing in his mind. He had known the attention would come. Now it had a name, a symbol. An Eye over a Horizon. Observers of the new age. He needed to understand them before they decided to understand him with more invasive methods.
He met Ruri at the school gate. She was waiting, a slight frown on her face as she scrolled through her phone. "Ken's mom just messaged. Ken's sick. Sudden fever. Ramen's off."
A cold, instinctual dread, sharp and wholly separate from logic, seized Asuta's heart. Coincidence? In a world of converging probabilities, there is no such thing. "Did she say anything else? Symptoms?"
Ruri looked up, startled by the intensity in his voice. "Just a fever and chills. Why? It's probably just a flu."
Or the first whisper of the world's immune system reacting to a foreign presence, a part of his mind supplied, the part that remembered the Spiritual Flux that sometimes preceded dimensional rifts. But no, it was too early. Wasn't it?
"Let's go see him," Asuta said, already turning.
"What? Brother, no, she said he's sleeping! We shouldn't bother them."
"We'll just drop off some juice or something. A quick visit." His tone brooked no argument. The dread was a knot in his stomach. Ken was his anchor to this normal world, his proof that not everything was about cosmic wars. He couldn't be a casualty before the war even began.
The Zuto household was a modest duplex a fifteen-minute walk away. Mrs. Zuto answered the door, looking tired but not panicked. "Oh, Asuta, Ruri. That's sweet of you. He's asleep upstairs. Really, it's just a bug."
"Could I just see him for a second?" Asuta asked, his voice carefully neutral. "I wanted to leave these." He held up a bottle of electrolyte drink he'd bought from a vending machine.
Mrs. Zuto hesitated, then nodded. "Alright, but be quiet. Second door on the left."
Asuta climbed the stairs, Ruri trailing behind him, confused. Ken's room was dark, curtains drawn. Ken was bundled under a thick comforter, asleep, his face pale and slick with sweat. Asuta stood in the doorway, not entering, and extended his spiritual sense.
He wasn't looking for Qi. He was looking for a signature.
He filtered out the normal hum of a living body—the pulse, the breath, the thermal noise. He searched for anomalies. A residue. A cold, foreign flicker. The tell-tale metallic aftertaste of an Elysian Foundation "pacification" drug, or the chaotic, unstable buzz of a crude, tainted spiritual enhancement.
For a long moment, he sensed nothing but the mundane misery of a seasonal virus. He began to relax. Paranoia. You are seeing patterns in the static.
Then he felt it. Faint. So faint it was almost an illusion. A coolness in the air around Ken's sleeping form, not a temperature drop, but an energetic one. A slight, localized dulling of the ambient spiritual potential in the room. It was the same sterile, scrubbed-clean absence he associated with the man in the beige coat, but weaker, dissipating.
They didn't make him sick, Asuta realized, the pieces clicking together with cold clarity. They tested him. They scanned him. They used some device or technique near him to measure his spiritual latency, his potential reaction to external energy. And his body, confused and ordinary, reacted with a fever.
It was a probe. Not an attack. A survey.
And if they were surveying Ken, his closest friend, then they were building a comprehensive profile. Mapping his social connections. Assessing threats and assets.
He turned and walked back downstairs, his face a careful mask. "He looks rough, but he'll be okay," he told Mrs. Zuto, forcing a smile. "Tell him we'll catch up later."
Outside, walking home in the gathering dusk, Ruri was silent for a block before speaking. "What was that about, brother? You acted… strange."
He looked at her, his sister who noticed everything. He couldn't tell her about sterile energy signatures and organizational profiling. But he could give her a piece of the truth, wrapped in a warning.
"Ken's my best friend," he said quietly. "In this world, that can make him a target. Not by bullies. By… larger things. I just needed to be sure he was really just sick." He stopped walking and faced her, the streetlight casting his features in sharp relief. "Ruri, if you ever feel like you're being watched, if something feels off… trust that feeling. Tell me immediately. Promise me."
Her eyes widened, the worry from the first day returning in full force. "Brother, you're scaring me. What's going on?"
"I'm just being careful," he said, resuming their walk. "The world is bigger and stranger than it looks. And I need you to be safe."
That night, after another grueling Tempering session fueled by a third pill, Asuta sat at his desk. He looked at the black card Li Chen had shown him. He opened his laptop, not to study, but to begin his own reconnaissance.
He had funds. He had a source for tools. And now, he had a confirmed adversary. The Foundation was no longer a shadow; it was an unseen hand, already touching his world. It was time to learn its grip, its reach, and where its fingers were most vulnerable.
He opened a private browser and began to search, not for 'Elysian Foundation,' but for the corporate holdings, philanthropic grants, and research papers linked to the names of its known board members—names he would pull from the digital ether using methods that wouldn't be invented for another fifty years.
The game had shifted. It was no longer just preparation.
It was espionage.