They arrived not through gates, nor through light.
But through pressure.
Like falling into a thought that wasn't their own.
The air changed first. It tasted like rusted silver and springwater grief—so heavy that Rakan coughed the moment it touched his lungs, his body confused by the weight of something that couldn't be seen.
And then came the light.
Not daylight. Not moonlight.
Something else.
As if the sky above Kyōgai had learned to glow without a sun. It shimmered with impossible colors—indigo bled into silver, and clouds rippled in slow, aching spirals. The horizon stretched like a scar that refused to close.
Rakan landed hard—knees meeting a surface that was not soil. It was warm, and soft, and thrummed like a muted drum beneath his palms. Like a heart. Like the world here had a pulse and it didn't beat for mortals.
He gasped.
The air clung to his throat like honeyed smoke—thick with Ka'ro, saturated with weight, memory, pressure.
"I can't… I can'tbreathe," he rasped.
"Breathe through it," Mazanka said calmly, not turning. "It's not choking you. It's welcoming you."
That didn't make it easier.
The ground throbbed with faint pulses of Ka'ro.
Mazanka stood beside him, gaze unreadable, his golden eye dimmed behind a half-lidded stare.
Teruko inhaled once—long, sharp, contained.
"This is Kyōgai," she whispered. "The realm of the woven breath."
Rakan said nothing.
Because he couldn't.
The world didn't look like his own.
It didn't even feel like a world.
It felt like being inside a memory. Or a heartbeat that had gone too long without stopping.
The sky above them was a flat stretch of nothingness veined with flickers of spectral light. There was no sun. No clouds. Only glowing streaks like rivers of pale Ka'ro that drifted slowly, as though time had learned to sleepwalk.
The trees were giants—no, elders. Roots coiled out like serpents in prayer, trunks hollowed with symbols that glowed as if remembering names long dead. Moss draped them like robes, and flowers hung upside down, dripping soft trails of glowing dew.
Every color felt wrong.
Too sharp.
Too still.
Too aware.
Rakan stood unsteadily, brushing glowing dust from his knees. His skin prickled. The hair on his arms stood as if called by static.
He looked around. The air shimmered when he moved, like water folding around his limbs.
Only his limbs.
Teruko took three steps—nothing.
Mazanka walked ahead—stillness.
But when Rakan stepped forward, a nearby leaf twisted midair and bloomed.
From nothing.
A second later, the bark of a tree behind him peeled back, exposing a spiral of glyphs that hadn't been visible before.
He didn't see it.
But they did.
Teruko blinked.
Mazanka narrowed his eye slightly.
But neither said a word.
"This isn't normal," Rakan muttered. "This place… it feels like it's watching."
"It is," Mazanka said.
His tone was unreadable. Not sharp. Not soft. Like a stone left beneath running water.
Rakan braced himself with one hand against a luminous root curling from the soil. It pulsed. Not visibly—but in a way he could feel. Like the memory of a heartbeat pressed into his palm.
Teruko stepped past him without pause, gaze sharp, trained on the shifting terrain.
"It's denser than I remember," she murmured. "Almost like it's grown thicker."
Mazanka shrugged.
"More like something's waking."
They emerged into a clearing that stretched too far for any natural grove. The trees were titanic, their trunks carved with runic swirls that glowed dimly when the breeze touched them. Leaves hung like silk sheets, some translucent, others metallic. Each tree had its own color, its own music—soft tones that vibrated faintly with the Ka'ro that saturated everything.
Above them, the sky glowed. Not bright—but strange.
No sun. No stars. Just shifting tendrils of pale light twisting across a smoky sky like veins in a glass dome.
Rakan looked up—and paused.
There was something… familiar about it. Not a memory. Not quite déjà vu.
Just a hum in his bones.
A pressure behind the ribs.
They continued walking.
The trees didn't whisper. The glyphs on their bark did—changing faintly in shape as they passed. Teruko watched this closely.
Rakan didn't seem to notice.
He was too focused on breathing evenly.
On standing tall in a place that didn't seem to care whether or not he belonged.
When they made camp, it was at the base of a root-spiraled hill where the wind refused to blow. Everything was too still—like the air had stopped out of respect.
Mazanka sat with his back to a tree, slowly retying the bandage over his eye.
Teruko watched the horizon.
Rakan sat by the edge of the hill, staring down at a pool of still water nestled in the basin. Shapes shifted faintly beneath the surface—glyphs without context. Symbols lost before language.
He didn't know what they meant.
But they didn't feel alien.
Just… distant.
Like something that hadn't arrived yet.
Later, as Teruko lay back, hands folded into the pockets of her Kenshiki uniform, she caught Rakan looking at her.
"What?"
He blinked.
"Nothing. Just thinking."
"About what?"
He hesitated.
"About how different you look when you're not arguing with someone."
Teruko huffed out a poorly concealed snort.
Mazanka chuckled from across the fire.
"Don't be fooled. She's probably is arguing. Just quietly. With herself."
Teruko rolled her eyes.
But the moment passed with ease.
Far above them, the sky pulsed once more.
A faint ripple.
As though something behind the veil had turned to look down for just a second—and decided to wait.
After a while of peace, they were on their feet again.
They walked for hours, though time in Kyōgai was a thing without shape.
The air had changed.
It wasn't the suffocating pressure from before, nor the Ka'ro-saturated heaviness. It was thinner now—cooler, drier—like something had drained the life from the trees without killing them. Even the birds, if they existed here, had stopped calling.
Rakan kept glancing over his shoulder. Not out of fear.
Out of instinct.
Something just behind him itched in the ribs. Not a presence. A feeling. Like deja vu that didn't belong to him.
They reached the slope by accident.
It began as a shift in the terrain—stone overgrown with soft-rooted moss. But beneath the moss, you could see it: carved glyphs, etched into the stone in spiraling lines, almost eroded, almost forgotten.
"They're travel glyphs," Teruko said softly and in some surprise. "But that doesn't make any sense. These are outdated, we don't use them anymore. They're old. Something from ancient Kenshiki but…but I thought they were lost."
Mazanka crouched, ran a thumb along one of the glyphs. His expression darkened just a flicker.
"They weren't lost. They were sealed."
"Why?"
"Because no one was meant to follow this path anymore."
Rakan tilted his head, brushing away another patch of moss near his boot.
There, at the base of the slope, was a flat stone disc.
Circular.
Unmoving.
But as his fingers brushed it—
The glyph beneath it flared.
Bright. Pale.
Then vanished.
The slope ahead lit faintly in response—like something dormant had been unlocked.
"…What was that?" Rakan asked.
Mazanka said nothing.
Teruko stepped backward once.
Mazanka rose, brushing dirt off his knees.
"Guess we're taking a detour."
"You're not worried?" Teruko said, quiet.
"Oh, deeply," Mazanka replied. "But worrying doesn't change much except digestion."
The path wound downward into mist.
Not fog—mist.
Heavy, slow, breathing. It curled along the trees, licking at their boots, hiding the space between one breath and the next. The trees grew stranger here—twisted inward, roots pulling into themselves, some with no leaves at all. Their bark shimmered with veins of Ka'ro that didn't pulse… they coiled.
The group grew quieter.
The further they walked, the more their voices seemed to be swallowed.
Even Mazanka had stopped joking.
Then they reached it.
A grove so still it may as well have been carved from time.
At its center: a stone.
Monolithic. Humanoid. Carved in some pre-glyph script. A statue—faceless, one arm extended, palm facing outward. Moss clung to its hips. Flowers grew from its chest like an offering.
"That's not Kenshiki," Teruko whispered. "That's… pre-Rift."
Mazanka's jaw tightened.
"This shouldn't exist."
"Why?" Rakan asked, his voice low.
Mazanka didn't look at him when he answered.
"Because this was from before the split. When Ka'ro was… raw. Before it was filtered. Refined. This is wild Ka'ro."
He took a step back.
But Rakan took a step forward.
And then—
he heard them
Whispers.
Not from the trees.
Not from his friends.
From somewhere else.
Soft. Lingering.
Not language. Just syllables. Half-thoughts.
Not loud. But unmistakable.
Come.
Return.
You are finally here…
He blinked. His hands trembled slightly.
The sound wasn't in his ears—it was in his bones. In the marrow of his thoughts. It curled under his skin like a memory he'd forgotten how to name.
Mazanka was saying something—something about caution, about Ka'ro wells—but the words were too far away now.
Teruko shifted slightly beside him, alert. Watching him.
But Rakan didn't seem aware of her gaze.
He took another step forward.
The air thickened.
The whisper grew clearer—not louder, just closer.
We remember…
Come find us.
His hand lifted.
He didn't mean to.
Didn't decide to.
But it rose, slow and inevitable, like a tide climbing shore.
Free us.
He reached toward the statue.
And the moment his skin brushed the ancient stone—
The world vanished.
And he was alone.
No grove.
No mist.
No stone.
No sound.
Just void.
Not darkness. Not light.
But something in between.
A blue so deep it swallowed thought.
A stillness so complete it pressed against his bones.
He floated.
Or maybe he sank.
There was no ground. No up. No breath. Just a sense of drifting—slow, endless—through something that remembered gravity but had long since given it up.
Then, from far off—a hum.
Faint. Melodic.
It wasn't a song.
It was memory. Half-spoken.
A syllable never finished. A name never given.
And it called to him.
Not his name. But something older than him, made of him. Something whispering behind his ribs.
You were never whole.
You were never lost.
We are what waits behind the veil.
Then the world shivered.
And he saw a shape.
A ripple, first. Like the surface of still water disturbed by a drop too heavy to exist.
Then—
A figure.
Far away at first. Walking toward him across no ground.
Each step echoed without sound.
Each movement peeled a layer of silence from the world.
Rakan's limbs tensed.
He stepped back—or thought he did—but the world didn't change. There was no space here. Only directionless inevitability.
And the figure kept coming.
Not quickly.
Not cruelly.
Just inevitably.
Then he saw it.
The jawline. The way the weight sat on the shoulders. The eyes—they burned with a Ka'ro that wasn't natural. That didn't glow—they consumed.
His hair was long. Tangled with ash. Dusted with Ka'ro scars.
The robes he wore were torn and layered like battle relics, not Kenshiki garb nor anything of the human world—wrapped in glyphs that didn't belong to any language Rakan had ever learned, or should have learned.
This man—this thing—was him. Looked like him.
But not him.
Not just older.
Wounded.
And still walking.
Each step cracked something unseen in the void.
And then—he smiled.
Not a smile of joy.
Not cruelty.
Just… emptiness.
A smile stretched across a face that had long since forgotten what it meant to feel something and still wore the habit of emotion-like armour.
Rakan froze.
He wanted to scream. But the breath wouldn't come.
He wanted to move. But space wouldn't obey.
The air in the void began to hum louder.
Not as a sound, but as a pressure. A vibration beneath the skin, inside the blood, in the cage of the skull where memory becomes movement. Rakan's limbs wouldn't obey him. His breath slowed. Time seemed to twist—not slowing, not stopping—just moving wrong.
And the figure—
That thing that wore his face— raised his hand—slowly, gracefully, like an executioner admiring the silence before a swing.
The hand pulsed with raw Ka'ro.
And this time he finally spoke.
"Hamon-Tensei."
The words were barely audible.
A whisper.
A curse.
A reminder.
Rakan's eyes widened. Not in recognition—because the name meant nothing to him yet.
But something in him remembered.
Something buried.
His chest seized. His Ka'ro writhed—violent, confused, alive.
A glyph cracked down his forearm like a branch struck by lightning,.
And the world reacted with him.
And in the instant before it landed—
Rakan saw his own face reflected in the hollow eyes of the other.
Saw how far it could fall.
The void split open behind the older self.
And from it—shadows.
Figures. Not forms. Just impressions of souls reaching, screaming, clinging to the remnants of light with nothing but agony.
"W-what is—" Rakan tried to ask.
But his body answered before his mind did.
Ka'ro exploded from his back—raw, jagged, wrong.
Tendrils of power he didn't summon began to arc through the void.
His arms jerked upward like he was a puppet strung to something else—like the name of the technique had summoned a part of him that didn't belong to now.
And then—
A clash.
But it wasn't just flesh that shattered.
The blow struck something within.
Not his body—
But something softer.
More hidden.
Something made of memory and light.
It didn't hurt. Not at first.
It unmade.
His thoughts unfurled like smoke.
Images cracked across his mind—his mother's face, Mazanka's laugh, Teruko's eyes before a strike—
All splintered.
And in that rupture, he felt everything.
Every fear.
Every moment he doubted himself.
Every thought of violence that ever curled in the back of his skull.
Every version of himself that might become this.
It was a wound without blood.
A scream without sound.
A mirror turned toward what he could not yet understand.
And then it was gone.
The vision shattered.
And with it, so did the world around him.
He came back to a world breaking.
Not suddenly.
Not all at once.
But in pieces—
As though reality had forgotten how to hold itself together without him.
His body hit the earth with a shudder that echoed in the roots.
Air tore into his lungs.
But it wasn't breath—it was shock.
A desperate, fractured attempt to remember which way up was.
To remember who he was.
The grove was no longer still.
It had been torn open.
Where the statue had stood—there was nothing.
No stone.
No ash.
Only air that refused to settle, swirling with flecks of Ka'ro dust suspended mid-fall, like the memory of a storm that hadn't yet decided if it was over.
The ground beneath him was a crater—subtle, but precise. A ring scorched into the soil, lines of power carved like burns across the roots of ancient trees.
The trees themselves bent outward.
Not broken.
Not dead.
Just… bowing.
As if something divine and dangerous had passed through them.
And they weren't sure whether to mourn or kneel.
Ka'ro flickered across his arms like static chained to skin.
Not painful—just wrong.
Like it wasn't finished deciding what it wanted to become.
Rakan looked at his hands.
They were glowing.
And trembling.
And when he turned his head—
Teruko was there.
She stood like a blade half-drawn.
Her body was still, but her eyes weren't.
They scanned him—read him—not with fear, but with calculation.
Like she was trying to see if the boy in front of her was still the same one she'd sparred with days ago.
Or if he was now something else entirely.
Her weapon wasn't raised.
But it wasn't at her side either.
She hadn't decided yet.
"Teruko—" he breathed.
But she didn't answer.
Didn't blink.
Just watched.
Studied.
Measured the space between trust and threat and hadn't found where he landed yet.
And it hurt.
Because she had always seen through him.
Now she was seeing around him.
Then, quietly—like a shadow long forgotten—
Mazanka stepped into view.
He didn't speak right away.
Didn't rush to intervene.
He just stood there—coat loose, arms crossed, a familiar smirk nearly forming at the corner of his mouth.
But it didn't make it.
Because something in his face had changed.
No mirth.
No coyness.
Just the look of someone who had once seen a wound like this long ago and hadn't figured out how to stop it the second time.
He stared at Rakan—not harshly.
But like someone taking inventory of a fragile thing they weren't sure they could repair.
"You alright, kid?" he asked.
His voice was light.
Soft.
Too soft.
A practiced note.
The kind you only use when everything inside is screaming but you don't want anyone to hear it.
Rakan didn't answer right away.
His lips parted.
But no words came.
Because how do you explain a vision of yourself as a weapon?
How do you speak when your own Ka'ro had just tried to escape your skin?
He glanced again at Teruko.
Still distant. Still poised.
And then to Mazanka—whose silence said more than his voice ever could.
And finally, back to the space where the statue had once stood.
Hamon-Tensei.
The name echoed in the back of his skull like a song that didn't belong to him—
But had been waiting for him all the same.
Something had called.
Something had answered.
And part of him?
Part of him had answered back.