Hajime Kashimo had only just made a death binding vow himself, so he knew exactly how much a binding vow could strengthen a jujutsu sorcerer. He hurried to interrupt, but even his swift reaction came a moment too late.
Was this part of the binding vow too?
Forcing the opponent to watch the cast bar fill?
Was that fair?
It was perfectly fair, because the price his opponent paid far exceeded anything he could imagine. Utterly shameless-the king of binding vows born from it. The one who taught you how to borrow against your future was...
A binding vow as elaborate as an incantation began:
-O gods, O Buddha, O world that acknowledges the existence of jujutsu.
I swear:
For the rest of my life, I will never forge a blade.
For the rest of my life, I will never drink alcohol.
For the rest of my life, I will never fish.
For the rest of my life, I will never become truly human.
For the rest of my life, I will never save those who wander without a home.
For the rest of my life, I will never return to that place filled with memories.
For the rest of my life, I will never pluck a beautiful flower.
For the rest of my life, I will never cry before others.
For the rest of my life, I will never make anyone shed tears.
For the rest of my life, I will never speak of my memories.
For the rest of my life, I will never tell the stories I love.
For the rest of my life, I will never address anyone with an endearment or honorific.
For the rest of my life, I will never invite anyone into my home.
For the rest of my life, I will never see anyone through their final moments.
For the rest of my life, I will never eat the food I love.
For the rest of my life, I will never return to my hometown.
For the rest of my life, I will never hold anyone's hand.
For the rest of my life, I will never hope to reconcile with anyone.
For the rest of my life, I will never become angry on anyone's behalf.
For the rest of my life, I will never reveal my secrets to anyone.
For the rest of my life, I will never show weakness to anyone.
For the rest of my life, I will never watch the sunrise with anyone.
For the rest of my life, I will never be picky about food.
For the rest of my life, I will never cry for another person.
For the rest of my life, I will never admire the stars with anyone.
For the rest of my life, I will never promise to meet anyone.
For the rest of my life, I will never mourn a parting.
For the rest of my life, I will never walk with anyone beneath the setting sun.
For the rest of my life, I will never step on the shadow of someone walking beside me.
For the rest of my life, I will never take part in any celebration.
For the rest of my life, I will never speak of dreams with anyone.
For the rest of my life, I will never give a gift.
For the rest of my life, I will never wave to anyone.
For the rest of my life, I will never make a wish before sleep.
For the rest of my life, I will never soothe anyone's pain.
For the rest of my life, I will never rejoice at a sunny day.
For the rest of my life, I will never sigh at a rainy day.
For the rest of my life, I will never gaze up at a rainbow with another person.
For the rest of my life, I will never reveal an important secret.
For the rest of my life, I will never cling to peace.
For the rest of my life, I will never crave anyone's kindness.
For the rest of my life, I will never see anyone off on a journey.
For the rest of my life, I will never accept anyone's charity.
For the rest of my life, I will never tell the story of my failures.
For the rest of my life, I will never let anyone understand my true feelings.
For the rest of my life, I will never hope for good fortune.
For the rest of my life, I will never support anyone from behind the scenes.
For the rest of my life, I will never give up.
For the rest of my life, I will never yield.
For the rest of my life, I will never regret my choices.
For the rest of my life, I will never shed tears of regret.
For the rest of my life, I will never forget the things and people I love most.
For the rest of my life, I will never forget the things and people I hate most.
Finally, after this battle, I will die.
-Let this be my binding vow: strengthen my body, hone my soul, empower my jujutsu. Take everything I possess at this moment apart from myself, and everything I might obtain in the future, as material for that strengthening. At any cost, turn it all into pure martial might that will carry me to victory.
That would do for now.
The binding vow was complete.
After pledging all of that, Amabuki Xia Xia, what did you have left? What did you have left, you bastard?
He surrendered everything that made a human human.
Because he had never possessed any of it, he had never felt its loss.
Xia Xia himself had no idea how he had made it through the past dozen years. He had drifted through them in a daze, like a ghost left wandering the mortal world.
He forged blades, studied swordsmanship, killed people, learned barrier techniques, developed his innate cursed technique, mastered reverse cursed technique, mastered cursed technique extension, mastered domain expansion, and learned to turn a technique that could only forge blades into a means of certain death...
He could no longer remember what Isshin looked like.
So much time had passed. So much that his memories had begun to blur. The years he had spent suffering alone had long since exceeded that relatively peaceful, happy stretch of his life.
Then nothing mattered anymore.
He could have waited for Hajime Kashimo to die of old age.
But...
There was always that tiny trace of unwillingness to let it go.
"Forgive me, Isshin. Forgive me, Father, Mother. I'm a monster destined never to become truly human. I'm an empty shell, shameless and cowardly..."
"At least... I'm not so afraid of death anymore. I'll be coming to see you soon."
"...Hajime Kashimo!!!"
Hajime Kashimo had never imagined anyone would call his name like that. Over his lifetime, he had cut short far too many lives and thoughts. In people's dying words, he had heard regret, resentment, defiance, anger, cowardice, and despair, but never a cry so harrowing.
Was he human? A ghost? Or a true cursed spirit?
Hajime Kashimo had never imagined someone could hate him so deeply, hate him down to the bone. This man might still be chanting his name on the way to hell...
The moment the binding vow was complete, Xia Xia ceased to be human, and could never become human again.
That vast ocean of cursed energy, that malice so dense it had become an abyss-through some unknown means, his opponent had already become a monster, half human and half cursed spirit.
[Demon-Repelling Edge • Maximum Technique • Maple]
There was no obvious change to Xia Xia's body, but the space around him had already undergone an invisible transformation.
Things as light as feathers began to drift through the domain, resembling both drizzle and orange-red maple leaves. Their beauty was ethereal, their beauty lonely, and a ripple spread from far away.
At that moment, all that remained of the world in Hajime Kashimo's eyes was a blinding, all-encompassing scarlet.
No immediate attack? After all that, you were only buffing yourself? Were you saying that the ultimate height you had reached wasn't jujutsu?
A storm was brewing.
But that could not make him afraid.
Living beings inevitably felt fear when confronted with something beyond their understanding. The survival instinct born of evolution made the body want to give up and flee before the mind could catch up. Those were perfectly normal reactions.
But that was how the weak thought.
Run away just because you faced a monster you might not defeat? Impossible. Had you ever seen a god fear a mortal's courage and martial might?
You had merely used a death binding vow. All I had to do was defeat you even after you made it.
That beam of lightning just now...
Faced with the incoming lethal finger strike, Xia Xia neither dodged nor evaded. His still lifeless eyes betrayed no emotion. He even lifted his head, staring straight at Hajime Kashimo's bladelike finger as though in provocation, refusing to move.
Useless. Utterly useless.
The peerless killing strike that should have obliterated everything in its path, bursting his head and scattering his brains, now stopped against his forehead. It could not even leave a scratch on his skin.
After the binding vow, he was immune to attacks from lightning-aspected cursed energy. More specifically, not all lightning-aspected cursed energy-only the lightning-aspected cursed energy discharged by Hajime Kashimo.
In other words, this was another part of his targeted strategy.
Was even something like that possible?
It was. As long as you grasped the essence of binding vows, as long as you lost enough, the rewards would be all the richer. They could even distort reality to a certain extent.
Now it was time for a delightful counterattack.
With his entire life engraved upon the edge, Xia Xia had a premonition that he would die once he swung this blade. As a swordsman, he also knew that was not necessarily a bad thing, because this slash would be the strongest he had ever delivered.
He hurled the Demon Blade Isshin, pinning down Hajime Kashimo's range of movement. At the same time, he gripped Same Light and Clouded, one in each hand, and traced dangerous arcs.
The Thunder God Hajime Kashimo? He, too, could be cut down.
Ultimate force surpassed the limits of speed. As cursed energy and impact arrived together, Hajime Kashimo even saw an ink-black line split open in midair when the blow struck him.
Was... was that even right?
Could swordsmanship really reach that level?
It could.
Niten Ichi-ryu was a peculiar school of swordsmanship that relied purely on tremendous strength and wild swings. Its practitioner, Miyamoto Musashi, was the strangest of the strange, firmly believing that sheer power could overcome every art.
Setting aside the logic of jujutsu sorcerers, slicing space open with a physical slash was not impossible. Only a nearly flawless whirling dance of twin blades that tore through the flow of energy surrounding the body could withstand three simultaneous slashes-in other words, take Tsubame Gaeshi head-on.
Miyamoto Musashi had survived his battle with Sasaki Kojiro. According to legend, he had even used an oar rather than a sword. Thus, the world knew the brilliance of his swordsmanship, but few knew that his school held another secret art.
To accomplish that...
The one delivering the slash had to possess a mind as clear and unclouded as the Buddha's, able to reflect the color of the sky in his soul and perceive all things with the eye of wisdom. Only then could he... cut through anything.
Its name-Heavenly Origin • Boundary of Emptiness.
Sword-drawing techniques and iaijutsu had always been inseparable. As the twin blades flowed around his body, even causality and insubstantial karmic hindrances became obstacles that ought to be cleaved away.
[Six Realms, Five Wheels]
[Immovable Kurikara]
[Ishana Dharma Phenomenon]
In an instant, Hajime Kashimo's vision went white. Lightning, fighting spirit-everything was torn apart in that single second. Then he found himself in another world.
All was silent.
Only the roar of that slash resounded from beginning to end.
He looked toward his chest, but saw only a headless body dissolving into lightning. He wanted to say something, only to discover that time had stopped flowing. Several familiar voices sounded beside his ears.
"How did it feel?"
Someone asked him casually.
Hajime Kashimo knew who they were without looking: a few acquaintances from when he had first begun studying martial arts.
"He was strong."
"So strong it almost didn't feel real."
The souls of powerful jujutsu sorcerers understood that they were going to die before their bodies perished. Perhaps that was the final kindness of their abilities as jujutsu sorcerers. The stronger the sorcerer, the more they might see in their final moments.
Hajime Kashimo had known that long ago.
Yet he calmly chose to chat with his old friends, like a child who had found a novel toy.
That was what martial arts fanatics were like.
"That swordsmanship was truly beautiful."
"For an instant, I almost wanted to give up. But only when I could no longer dodge did I realize that instant had been my entire life."
Hajime Kashimo smiled, his smile a little lonely, tinged with an inexplicable shame.
"Someone who could deliver that slash could no longer remain in this world. A soul that beautiful really was more than this world could bear."
"To kill a jujutsu sorcerer like me, he actually spent such a precious opportunity on me..."
"I'm sorry... even giving it everything I had, I couldn't teach that boy a thing. In the end, this doddering old man was the one getting a lesson from the younger generation."
The memories flashing before his eyes had come to an end.
When he looked ahead again, the man who had unleashed that slash was down on one knee. He, too, appeared to be dead.
The domain was in upheaval. A sense of danger locked onto Hajime Kashimo's head, which had not yet fully died and still retained a faint possibility of survival. All the cursed energy Amabuki Xia Xia had left unused in life was here, every last bit reserved for him.
[Cursed Execution]
The mighty Thunder God finally understood why, despite preparing so many contingencies, his opponent had still insisted on assassination and surprise attacks.
Those had not been surprise attacks at all, but an extension of the future.
They were the three fatal slashes delivered at this moment, crossing time through some unknown effect that allowed a later strike to arrive first, finally landing on him. From the moment Amabuki Xia Xia entered, Hajime Kashimo had never had any chance of survival.
"That was truly exhilarating."
The strongest sorcerer of four hundred years ago closed his eyes in satisfaction. Like an old man passing peacefully at the end of his natural life, he lost every last trace of vitality. With that, the legend of an era came to an end.
Before you continue