DxD: Fusion

It began with laughter.

Not a social reflex, nor a rehearsed quip for the benefit of onlookers, but a swelling, spontaneous, reckless laughter that rang through the sterile glass-and-steel corridors and ricocheted from the catwalks. It was the kind of laughter that started as a gasp and built to a bellow, a rising tide with no regard for the dignity or decorum expected of a senior scientist at Commonwealth Fusion Systems.

The laughter was alive, and so, for the first time in months, was Scotty Gardner.

Toshio watched himself, or who he used to be, in confusion. He had no memory of how he got there, only that one moment he was passing out, either from exhaustion or into death and the next, someone had torn open the sky and let in the sun.

The control room was packed but there was space enough for Scotty to sling his arm around Chris—tall, solid, always quick with a joke—and nearly lift him off the ground with a victorious shake. Above them, the monitors pulsed an impossible verdict: Net Positive Output.

For real, this time. Not a rounding error. Not a fluke of calibration.

The data streamed downward in a relentless green river, columns of numbers flipping like a slot machine finally paying out.

He heard someone whoop behind him, high and clear, and a spray of confetti—god, where had that come from?—fluttered over the banks of machinery and fell into the tangle of wires below. Toshio looked down at himself, to see he was in that same spirit form back when he was above that nebula, before transmigrating. He lifted his head and paid attention to the scene unfolding in front of him.

Scotty whooped with the rest, and in that moment he was not the sum of his doubts and his deadlines and his stacked layers of unprocessed grief. He was thirty and brash and certain that the world could be rewired, its entropy bent backward for a single human heartbeat. He let his head fall back and laughed at the fluorescents, at the blinking LEDs, at the sheer idiocy of trying to bottle a star in a Massachusetts industrial park.

Even Chris, usually so measured, pounded the table with the flat of his hand, grinning so wide it looked painful. Scotty pulled him in for a crushing hug, and Chris yelped, "Dude, you're actually going to break me—" but neither let go.

"This isn't how it happened…" Toshio whispered to himself.

Somebody uncorked a bottle of cheap champagne. The cork ricocheted off the overhead ventilation, raining sticky droplets onto the crowd. The rest of the team swarmed in, awkwardly clapping each other on the back and shouting until they were hoarse.

There was no time for speeches, and nobody tried to make one. The moment was too fragile, too electric, for anything but noise.

Toshio, for a split second, recalled of a younger version of himself—Scotty at fifteen, in the battered library of his high school, staring at a diagram of the sun's interior and thinking, I want to do this. I want to know how it works. I want to control it. It was a simple want, but in that control room it felt as if the universe had rearranged itself to answer it.

The scene bent, flexed. The edges of the room softened, colors going saturated and strange, until the control room felt like a diorama glimpsed through a child's kaleidoscope, warping into his old office. Scotty was laughing still, but now the sound was wrapped in static, echoing down a hallway he didn't remember entering.

Toshio blinked, and the air shimmered around Scotty's form, glitching like he was stuck in 5 frames of laughter. A sudden, striking glitch and…

Scotty was alone.

Toshio blinked again and found Scotty at his office desk, hunched in the dim half-light. His suit jacket was gone, replaced by a threadbare hoodie he'd last worn years ago. The phone was still in his hand, but the line was dead. He set it down carefully, as if it might shatter.

In the grainy reflection of the powered-down monitor, his face looked older, the lines deeper, the hair at his temples a little grayer than he remembered.

Scotty pressed his palms to his face, feeling the warmth fade from his cheeks. Something cold and metallic pressed against his skin: a locket, delicate as a wishbone, dangling from a chain around his hand. His mother's locket. He opened it with a practiced thumb.

Inside, two photographs, badly faded: his mother, smiling at the camera; himself, squinting into the sun on some lost summer day. He held the locket until his fingers ached.

The silence in the office was absolute. There was no wind outside the windows, no motion in the parking lot. Even the flicker of the fluorescent bulbs was gone. Toshio tried to summon the sound of laughter again, but it was drowned out by the memory of the last time he'd seen her—the hospital room, the smell of bleach and medicine, her hands limp and cold on top of the sheets, and a hurried step that was just too late.

Scotty pressed his forehead to the edge of the desk and allowed himself to shake, the sobs rolling up from a place so deep he didn't know it existed. For a few minutes, or hours, or days, he cried, letting the sound fill the vacuum.

Toshio watched the scene, watching his past self sob and cry uncontrollably, the locket desperately clenched in his hand. The intense wails of sorrow seemed like they went on for an eternity.

And then—

A sword flashed—a line of light, violence, and intention.

Memory fractured, skipping its groove like a scratched lacquer disc. Instead of Scotty slumped in grief, the world was now a gymnasium, walls echoing with footfalls and the musty tang of sweat.

Time had unspooled forward, and the body braced beneath the steel light was not the postdoc with a dead mother but the teenage kendo prodigy, shirtless and lean, a blur of youth and muscle. This was Toshio Amano, not Scotty Gardner—the separation abrupt, but the spirit unmistakable. It was the same soul, only now stripped of the years and the long, slow sediment of regret.

He moved with a velocity that felt both impossible and familiar, each cut of the shinai more dance than combat. His sparring partner—Murayama, her ponytail flaring behind her like a pennant—was strong, but Toshio was reckless. He attacked with a kind of joy, a raw, unmediated emotion that left him open to counters, and he didn't care.

He wanted to win, sure, but more than that he wanted Murayama to see him—see the full, unfiltered engine of his being. The shinai cracked against hers, a staccato beat, and she grinned through the impact, eyes narrowing with satisfaction. They circled, each drawing out the other's best. He'd never felt so alive, so boundlessly in command of his own narrative.

He feinted and spun, and when she parried, he let out a laugh loud enough to bounce off the ceiling and startle the other students. "Come on, girl! You gotta do better than that!" His words were teasing, but the look in his eyes was something different: a dare, a beckoning.

Murayama responded in kind. "You talk too much!" she shot back, her own blade a blur as she pressed in, pushing Toshio to the edge of the mat. He danced on the boundary, let the tip of her shinai graze his ribs just enough to give her the point, then spun out of reach, laughing again, even as the scoring buzzer sounded and the instructor barked, "Yame!"

He bowed, chest heaving, sweat running down his face in clean twin rivers, and Murayama bowed right back, then punched him lightly in the shoulder. They both staggered off the mat, twin engines idling, more exhilarated than exhausted.

Toshio's spiritual form hovered, watching this memory play out with a fractured sense of presence. He was both inside and outside the experience. There was a rawness to these motions, a freedom he'd forgotten he ever possessed—a freedom that didn't survive the transition to adult life, or the years spent in the orbit of other people's expectations.

For a moment, he felt the memory rewire itself, as if the colors and noise and momentum were more real than any of the life that came before or after.

The gym faded into the pale coral and indigo of sunset, the shift seamless but absolute. Now it was the end of day, and Toshio walked side by side with Murayama and Katase— now his two closest friends that he's ever had—down the slow, sloping streets of Kuoh.

Their uniforms were half-in, half-out of the rules, sleeves rolled, and all three carried their kendo bags slung as if they were nothing more than props in a play about youth. The dusk was alive with cicada calls, and the streetlamps buzzed faintly as they flickered on, one by one.

Murayama elbowed him, hard, but with the affection of someone who'd known him since the first grade. "You ever gonna stop showboating on the mat, Amano?" she said, her grin betraying the absence of real irritation.

Toshio shrugged, exaggerated. "If I did, you'd start winning."

Katase, quieter, more precise in her speech, chimed in without looking up from the phone she pretended not to be checking.

"You're cooler than you let on, you know that?"

Toshio's memory-self, or maybe just the suppressed real him, paused. He almost deflected, almost spun the compliment into a joke or changed the subject, but something about the way they looked at him—expectant, teasing, but also genuine—made him stop.

He leaned in, voice a conspirator's whisper, and said something low, just for the two of them. It was lost to the real Toshio, watching from outside, but whatever it was, both girls turned a shade of red that would have embarrassed a firetruck.

Their laughter swelled, unfiltered, filling the hollow spaces of the street and the memory. Toshio's own voice was there, threaded into theirs, an instrument in a chorus he'd presumed lost forever. He felt, deeply and suddenly, the warmth of belonging—the knowledge that he was seen, not as a performer but as a person.

The three of them veered off to a diner, battered and bright in the twilight. They collapsed into a booth, hair damp with sweat, and ordered fries and sodas and the sort of cheap, fried things that only taste right when you're young and starving after practice.

Toshio sat between them, shoulders relaxed, no armor required. Katase mimicked a rival's awkward kendo stance from the match earlier, crossing her eyes and puffing her cheeks, and Murayama nearly choked on her drink laughing. Toshio laughed too, so hard his face hurt.

There was nothing complicated here; nothing tragic, nothing deferred. Just the moment, and the way it stretched, infinite, across the tiny table.

This, the watcher Toshio realized, was what he had lost: not a particular person, not the comfort of a specific friendship, but the ability to simply exist in the present, just like his mom tried to tell him. The capacity to be sincere, to act on impulse without filtering every word and motion through the sieve of anticipated disappointment. He envied this false self, and for a second, he hated him, too.

But mostly, he just wanted—desperately, irrationally—to be him.

"Why are these, memories, so different… Why do they feel more real than my own?" Toshio's spirit whispered.

The world spun, gently at first, then violently, as if the memory-scape were a coin flipped midair and now tumbling toward an uncertain fate. The colors of the diner bled into darkness, the laughter stretched and slowed, then cracked open like an egg. Toshio's spiritual form drifted, unmoored, as the scene warped again.

He was back in the dojo, but it was different this time. The mats were cleaner, the air colder. His opponent across the strip was not Murayama but a stranger—an older student, a 2nd Dan from another dojo, taller, older, and with the clipped, efficient movements of someone who'd been drilled to win and cared for nothing else.

The room was silent except for the careful tap of bare feet on vinyl and the dry, ticking sound of the wall clock.

There was a moment of pause, a microsecond in which the two measured each other with the smallest tilt of the head, the subtle flex of grip on the shinai.

"You've got this Toshio!" Murayama stated with confidence. Katase nodded beside her.

Then the 2nd Dan smirked, just enough to be visible.

"Little kendo harem you've got backing you up," he murmured. "Tch. I guess low-tier girls will cheer for anything with a pulse—must be easy to impress when you've never trained with real swordsmen."

The words were garden-variety cruelty, meant to push buttons. But in the memory, Toshio felt the old burn of anger, not defensive but something more—protective, territorial.

"You shouldn't have said that you piece of trash."

Spirit Toshio remembered at that moment, he had wanted to say something similar, but resolved to just win the match instead.

The physical Toshio bowed, perfect form, then straightened and stared his opponent dead in the eye. The 2nd Dan looked more than a little peeved at his comment. Toshio could feel the weight of Murayama and Katase watching from the side of the sparring floor, their presence unspoken but absolute in their support. The match began, and Toshio didn't hesitate.

He attacked with a clarity that bordered on violence, every strike a translation of intent into physics. The older student was skilled, but he was fighting for reputation. Toshio was fighting for something elemental.

His shinai became an extension of his anger and pride and longing to protect the small, perfect world he'd built with his friends. Strike after strike landed, clean and forceful, until the 2nd Dan stumbled, off-balance, and the match was over in a heartbeat.

There was a great sense of satisfaction. He won against the guy easily, channeling his anger to protect the girls' image. Toshio bowed again, then turned away from his opponent, gaze drawn to the side where Murayama and Katase were already on their feet, faces lit with pride and relief.

They met him at the edge of the mat, overlapping in a rush of praise and gratitude, but he silenced them both with a hug—awkward in its suddenness, but true, thanking him for standing up for them.

"Hey, what are friends for?" He held them until Murayama wriggled free, face pink, and Katase shook her head, smiling, sporting an atomic blush. There was no need to say more.

The memory contracted around that embrace, a point of warmth at the center of a cooling universe. Toshio's spirit, hovering above, felt a pull—a gravitational tug toward the bodies below, the living, laughing people who he now envied. He wanted to fall in, to let himself be recast in the role of the boy who could laugh and care and fight for his own happiness.

And then…

The forest.

Exactly as it had happened.

No distortion. No laughter. No shift in tone.

The memory was unrelenting, vivid in its clarity, as though fate demanded he relive it over and over again until it consumed every fragment of his being. Listening to the things that monster had said again…

Spirit Toshio stood over the grotesque corpse of Yomi, wishing he had a leg to kick the decapitated head of the abhorrent stray devil.

His dream counterpart was now up against the tree, blood still dripping off his blade. His body broken, his hand trembling, his knuckles white as he clutched his Zanpakutō to his chest and whispered that final, sorrowed plea while staring into the blade.

"I'm sorry… if only… you could give me… another chance…"

In spirit form, floating beside the scene, Toshio watched his own body fall unconscious. His emotions, even in spirit form, had twisted into a knot of sorrow. Something about disappointing his Zanpakutō, not even coming to learn their name; it was something to mourn for.

The blade in his unconscious form's hand began to glow.

It pulsed once.

It pulsed again—brighter this time—and with it came an odd sensation that rippled through Toshio's spirit form like a shockwave. It wasn't pain exactly—but it wasn't pleasant either. It felt like being unmoored from reality itself, like standing on shifting sand while an invisible tide pulled at him.

Light spilled from the seam of the hilt, climbing the blade like fire ascending a wick. It grew stronger, hotter, more blinding—until the world became white.

He shut his eyes against the brilliance—

—and opened them into darkness.

Total black. A perfect absence, not just of vision but of substance, of memory and category—an erasure so complete that for a span of seconds, even his sense of falling through the dark was lost.

There was no forest, no lingering scent of blood, no echo of adrenaline in his muscles—just a suffocating silence, and the knowledge that he existed within it, defined only by the boundaries of his own thoughts.

Then, as if conjured by the desperate need for context, something began to take shape in the distance. At first it was outline only: the faintest suggestion of vertical pillars, thick and uneven, emerging from the void like bone from black flesh.

A roof, slanted and broken, hovered above them with the implausibility of dream geometry, each tile held in place by some force more psychic than physical. Below, a slip of stone stair curved downward into the abyss, each riser chipped and half-drowned by shallow, crystal clear water that lapped at the edges with the gentlest, most deliberate sound.

The air was cold and thick, scented with the sharp tang of burnt wood and the impossible sweetness of cherry petals.

He stepped forward, surprised that he was suddenly in his physical form again. The temple—if that's what this place was—seemed to absorb him with every move, magnifying his loneliness and wonder until his thoughts hummed at the threshold of panic.

He almost felt like an intruder here, but also a necessary pilgrim, and the whole structure vibrated with the expectation of some ritual he'd never been taught. Each step brought the ruin into sharper focus, but yet still distant enough to not be able to make out any details.

At the base of the steps, standing in eerie stillness, was a figure. It was tall, and looked feminine. Long hair cascaded down around her(?) body, the color like pulsing flames of crimson and violet, with wisps of blue. Toshio was too far away to make out much else, other than its face—a blank canvas of white.

A mask, perfectly oval and featureless, her hair framing it perfectly. The figure did not move, but its entire being radiated focus—an attention so intense it warped the world around it. Despite the mask, it felt like her gaze was piercing right through him, its piercing power even greater than Gin Ichimaru's 'Shoot to Kill, Shinso.'

He tried to call out to the figure, but the void swallowed the sound of his voice before it reached the air. He tried to step closer, but the temple steps never got any closer, the mask of the figure refracting the dim light in a way that suggested warning, her hair burning like an intense rage. He hesitated, hands trembling, unsure if he was meant to continue or retreat.

Just then, behind him, there was a faint rustle—the unmistakable flutter of cloth in wind, though he felt no breeze on his skin. Instinct spun him around coming almost face to face with the pale white mask he had been observing. He was startled and tried to jump back, but his body wouldn't listen to any of his commands.

He could feel it studying him, cataloguing not just the surface of his presence but the churn of his thoughts, his failures, his yearning. He felt exposed in a way he never had before, as though even the things he'd hidden from himself were now the subject of a silent, merciless scrutiny. Being so much closer, he could feel her aura; an aura of intense, unyielding fury that seemed to bury something else. Sorrow?

He raised a hand, palm outward, a gesture of peace, or maybe surrender. The figure mirrored him, the motion eerily perfect, its arm rising in an arc that cut through the dark with surgical precision. For a long moment they held that position, two halves of a forgotten whole, staring at each other, faces mere inches from each other.

He tried to push his hand forward, her form mirroring his. Once their hands were only an inch apart, Toshio was almost crushed with an emotional intensity that he couldn't quite describe. It was suffocating. Rage. Sorrow. Envy. Lust(?). Joy. Greif. Passion. Love. The predominant emotions, rage and sorrow, despite their intensity, poured into him a profound sense of love.

Such intense love.

It made no sense to him. His eyes were streaming with tears. He didn't even notice. His gaze never left that pool of whiteness, an endless sea of something forgotten. Something removed. Something…more.

The mask tilted, and in the gap where a mouth might have been, a voice emerged. It was not a voice made of air or sound, but a vibration in his bones, a resonance that threatened to unmake him.

"I wore your name in silence. You forgot the sound of mine. Your reflection remembers what your mind discarded."

The sound of the figure's voice came without tone, the sound permeating the very fabric of the reality Toshio found himself it.

He tried to response, but his mouth filled with the taste of ash and flowers. The figure lifted her other hand up—fingers long and impossibly warm—and pressed the tip of her nail to his forehead.

The contact sent a jolt through him, a current of memory and sensation that bypassed thought and plunged straight into raw experience.

He saw every mistake, every petty cruelty, every moment he'd chosen truth over feeling, analysis over emotion, numbness of mind over the depths of his heart. He saw the smiles of Murayama and Katase, the warmth of belonging, and felt the knowledge that he would lose it all again and again.

He saw the forest, the blood, the corpse of Yomi. He saw his mom, weeping at his absence. And above all, the deep, gnawing shame, regret, and sorrow of never learning the name of his own Zanpakutō, the thing that had tried to save him.

Then, on the bottom left…

The mask cracked.

Toshio Perspective

I gasped awake and sat upright in my bed, drenched in sweat, chest heaving. My shirt clung to my chest, soaked through. His eyes darted around, wild. Clutched in both of my hands, was my sheathed Zanpakutō, my right hand on the hilt, left on the scabbard. I breathed hard, like my body couldn't get enough oxygen.

As I began to calm down, I noticed I was in a different change of clothes, there was a glass of water on my nightstand, my blankets were tucked around me, and my body washed.

I was… safe. Home. I was utterly bemused.

"What…just happened? What was that?" I then noticed a water droplet fall onto my arm. I reached up to my face. I was crying? Why?

Finding comfort in it, I placed my hand back on the scabbard of my sword, gripping it tight.

Once recovered, I drank the entire glass of water that was next to me. I lied back down.

"That dream…who was that?" I looked down at my Zanpakutō.

"Was it you?" I received no answer.

The silence of the room wrapped around me like a comforting shroud, yet the weight of the dream lingered, clawing at the edges of my mind. I turned the questions over in my head like stones in a stream, each thought sending ripples through my consciousness.

Who was that figure? What did it mean to wear names in silence? And why did I feel such profound emotion, an amalgam of grief and love that threatened to drown me?

As dawn's light crept shyly through the curtains, painting the room in soft hues of orange and gold, I pushed myself upright once more. The memory of the dream clung to me tenaciously—I could still feel her warm touch against my brow.

Who saved me? I looked around the room again. I looked down, then unsheathed my Zanpakutō, gazing at the blade's edge.

"If it was you, thank you." For some reason, the thought of my Zanpakutō spirit saving me just felt, right. Even though it made absolutely no sense. Only when you're ready to reach bankai could a spirit interact with the world in a physical manifestation. I was nowhere close to that.

I sighed. I needed a distraction.

"Status."

{Status

Name: Toshio Amano

Title: —

Race: Human

Age: 15

Level: 14 950/1400

Health: 100/100

Reiryoku: 3225 → 64,500/64,500

Physique: C-

Zanjutsu: D

Hoho: D

Hakuda: F

Spiritual Potential: C

Soul Resonance: 15%}

I stared at the screen for a moment, letting the numbers sink in.

Level 14.

I'd been fighting for my life barely a day ago, and out of it, I gained one level. A genuine reward. That hellish encounter hadn't been for nothing I guess.

A soft ding pulsed in the corner of my vision—an alert I hadn't noticed before. I focused on it, and a translucent menu unfurled before my eyes.

{Level Up Reward Available:

You have reached Level 14.

[Claim Reward]}

I didn't hesitate. I tapped the prompt, and a subtle shimmer filled the space before me. With a gentle flash, a single item materialized mid-air and dropped into my open palm.

{Hakuda Runestone (Common)

Crushing this stone will permanently enhance your Hakuda stat by one letter grade up to D.}

I blinked. "Hakuda, huh?"

Not what I was hoping for… but I wasn't about to complain. I turned the faintly glowing, thumb-sized gem over in my hand. Pale blue light pulsed inside it, a slow heartbeat of potential. With a sigh and a bit of ceremony, I clenched it in my fist—and crushed.

The stone disintegrated instantly. A pulse of energy surged through my body like a shockwave of motion, sudden yet oddly familiar. My joints ached, my tendons flexed, and then—

{Hakuda: F → E}

A sharp throb pressed behind my eyes as something new settled into my brain. Muscle memory. Patterns. Footwork. It wasn't much—just enough to know how to throw a real punch without breaking my wrist, how to absorb a blow without folding like paper.

Still… no Physique runestone, no Zanjutsu, no Hoho. The ones I was hoping for.

I exhaled through my nose, a small puff of disappointment.

"Would've been nice."

But it passed. I glanced back at the panel and my gaze slid down to the stat hadn't budged since my arrival here.

Soul Resonance 15%

My eyes widened slightly.

When I'd last seen it, it was a flat 5%. Immobile. Stubborn. And now… triple the value. Something had shifted.

The system hadn't marked the change with a triumphant jingle or a pop-up. No fanfare, no "Congratulations, you did it!" Even my casual stat-obsessed brain had failed to notice the shift until I sat here, glassy-eyed and still wrung out from the afterimages of the masked figure's gaze.

If not for my compulsive need to check and recheck my own numbers, I might have missed it entirely. Eh, probably not, but still.

I leaned back on my hands, staring at that number.

"What did I do?"

Immediately, my mind rewound to the dream—the way I'd held my blade, whispered that desperate apology, the unbearable weight of emotion flooding through me when I touched… her. Well, almost touched. That masked figure. Her rage. Her sorrow. Her presence.

And then my fight in the forest—how I had screamed, not for survival, but with a primal rage. The utter need to kill. The disgust. The fury. The grief. The reliance on my Zanpakutō when I thought no one else could hear me.

It all tied together.

"Emotional attunement," I murmured. "Maybe that's what it meant. Resonance."

The word itself wasn't scientific. It wasn't empirical. But the feeling—the sense of it—was undeniable. I felt different. Not stronger. Not smarter. But… more me.

Like some fragment I didn't know I was missing had returned and slotted back into place. Like an equation that finally balanced, even if I couldn't identify all its variables yet.

I still didn't know the name of my Zanpakutō. The masked figure—her—she'd spoken in riddles, allusions. She'd called herself a reflection, a thing discarded, a name worn in silence. She had to be my Zanpakutō spirit.

I want to reach her again, but I'm not too keen on almost dying to do it again. There had to be another way. I had to figure out what kept me distant from her. Emotion? That can't be all. There has to be something else. Something to ponder later.

I focused on soul resonance to see if the description updated at all.

{The space between breath and silence, no longer empty, but trembling with sound. A reflection rippling in water not yet still. As your soul begins to remember itself, the distance between you and your Zanpakutō shortens. Glimpses of truth stir beneath the surface, no longer hidden but not yet embraced. Pain has opened the door. Emotion has lit the path. Whether you walk it willingly or not, the voice you buried is already speaking.}

It was different! Still the same poetic style, but yet, reading it didn't induce a headache. Reading it almost felt like walking on down the right path, that gut feeling that you're headed in the right direction.

A strange sense of gratitude bloomed in my chest. I read it again, slowly, savoring each phrase. The words, oddly enough, comforted me. They made my skin prickle, not with irritation, but with a tentative anticipation.

As if some deeper part of me recognized the cadence, and accepted it as its own. It was like hearing my own voice echoed back to me from the end of a long tunnel—a voice that sounded distant but familiar, calling me forward.

I could safely say I no longer hated it's poetic nature. As much.

I closed the window and leaned back, arms folded behind my head.

"Okay," I said aloud, "I think we may be getting somewhere. I hope."

My eyes wandered to the next welcome surprise—Shunpo (Flash Step).

Finally.

I was still sore from thinking about it. I can't believe my first time using it tore my calves. Then again, if I recall correctly (and I often do), I did dump a stupid amount of reiryoku into my legs. If not for altered gamers body, I would have been in for a long recovery.

But the fact that I finally had it now, after all that work? After every failed attempt in the woods, every crash into a tree, every frustrating misfire?

It felt like justice.

But I wasn't reckless. That kind of high-speed movement didn't come without cost. Until I knew how to manage the strain—and until my body could handle repeated use—I'd need to treat it with respect. No flashy abuse. No casual teleporting just because I could.

"Later," I promised. "We'll train it properly. Together." I gripped my Zanpakutō a little tighter.

But first—

My stomach growled. Loudly.

"…I've gotta eat."

XXX

After a meal that could only be described as a tactical assault on my fridge, I finally felt like I wouldn't collapse from nutritional debt. My body still ached in places, phantom pains that echoed from healed injuries.

I settled cross-legged on the floor beside my bed, a towel draped around my neck. I wanted silence. Stillness. Some way to process everything.

Cultivation.

I hadn't done it to just experience the stillness before. The moment I slid into that meditative rhythm, I could already feel my reiryoku stirring. It was subtle at first, a trickle of awareness pulsing at the base of my spine. I breathed in. Out. The familiar method took hold.

And then, without thinking about it, I laid my Zanpakutō across my lap.

The effect was immediate.

My spiritual energy didn't just flow—it moved. Like a tide pulled by a greater moon. The resistance I was used to—the slight hesitation, the sluggish edge—was gone. It responded eagerly, like it was… waiting for this.

My spiritual energy didn't just flow; it was as if the dam cracked open and the river of reiryoku rushed outward, alive and insistent, sweeping aside all the silt and debris of mental thought processes that usually choked it. It wasn't just a current.

It was a living thing, a force of its own, and it wanted—no, demanded—to be near the blade.

I cracked one eye open and glanced at it.

"…I'm an idiot," I muttered. The sword gave a short, almost imperceptible vibration. My eyebrow twitched, and I sighed.

"Why the hell haven't I been cultivating with you before now?"

It felt right. Of course it did. The sword wasn't just a weapon. It was part of me. How could I try to strengthen my spirit and leave out the other half? I was so focused on unlocking and strengthening my reiryoku, so focused on leveling up skills and stats, I didn't even think about it. And the more I thought about it now, the more idiotic I felt.

"I'm starting to seriously doubt my intelligence."

I stared at the Zanpakutō in my lap, the way the reflected light played along the black gloss on the scabbard. It glimmered—not with menace, but with something like expectation. Like it was waiting for me to get it together, to finally stop being such a dumbass and listen.

"You're right, I know," I muttered, feeling a blush creep up my cheeks.

"I'm an idiot. A world-class idiot." No response this time, just a sense of wry resignation radiating from the sword. Like a teacher rolling her eyes at a slow student. There was something almost comforting about it.

Somehow.

I closed my eyes again, sinking deeper.

Then, something shifted. A quiver. A wobble in the current, a barely-there afterimage lingering at the periphery of consciousness. I focused on the sensation, expecting it to pass, but it only grew sharper, louder, as if whatever it was had been waiting for me to notice it.

I tried to analyze it, to break it down into familiar components, but found it… uncooperative. Try as I might, it resisted every attempt at categorization.

This wasn't Reiryoku.

This wasn't energy in the traditional sense. It had… feeling. It pulsed with emotion—like warmth and sadness wrapped in light, a river of half-formed thoughts and nameless urges. I recoiled at first from the sheer rawness of it, like standing too close to a bonfire.

My first instinct was to shield myself, to close off. But the sensation responding to my initial probing not with aggression, but with a gentle, persistent pressure. Like a heartbeat in the distance.

I stopped resisting.

I leaned into it.

And I stayed there.

Hours passed.

The sun drifted across the sky and dipped below the horizon. I sat still as stone, sword balanced across my legs, breathing slow, eyes closed. Time didn't matter. Hunger didn't matter. All that mattered was the flow—the integration of self, spirit, and sword.

I let the swirl of emotion mix with the cycle of energy, the two feeding each other, folding inward, wrapping around my soul like a second skin.

When I opened my eyes again, it was dark.

{Cultivation has increased to Rank 6.

Base Reiryoku +500.

Reiryoku regeneration multiplier increased.

Cultivation now passively improves clarity and emotion-based control of spiritual energy.}

{Physique has increased to C.}

I blinked, stunned.

"Wait—what?"

Cultivation increased, sure. That made sense. But Physique?

I stared at the stat again, but there was no mistake. C.

"The hell? Cultivation isn't even supposed to affect the body…"

But then I paused. No… maybe it did. Not directly. But if I'd been circulating reiryoku for twelve hours, reinforcing my body that whole time—

"Right," I muttered. "Passive reinforcement. My system is a hybrid."

I chuckled, dry and surprised.

"Guess that's what happens when you meditate for half a day while emotionally charged."

My legs were numb. My back ached. But I stood. Slowly. Satisfied.

And for the first time in what felt like forever…

I wanted to rest.

Not to sleep.

Just…

Rest.

I went to the living room and I turned on the television for the first time since coming here.

An anime came on, local to this world, so nothing I had heard of. Lizardblock A.

Seemed to be about martial arts. It wasn't good, but I didn't care. I relaxed into the couch of my living room.

And for the first time since transmigrating into this world—

I let myself just be.