SAIKON Chapter 7: In The Depths Of Your Soul

Read chapter 7 of SAIKON by SoraIkigai on NovelPedia.

4:40 AM. The alarm didn't ring. It didn't have to. Ryo woke to a pressure against the back of his skull. Not pain, not sound, but awareness. The specific feeling of being noticed by something that had been awake longer than he'd been alive. He sat up in the dark and knew, without checking, that Yua was already standing outside his door. He opened it. Dark training clothes, sleeves fitted, hair tied back with a single cord. No uniform. No sash. Just efficiency shaped into a person. "You're awake." "You woke me up. With your… frequency thing." "Seishu pulse. A directed compression, not a broadcast. Only you felt it." She studied his face. "You noticed it before the alarm. That's faster than I expected." 'Is that a compliment? I genuinely can't tell.' "Give me two minutes." "You have ninety seconds." He changed in seventy. They moved through the sleeping house. Past Rumi's door, shut, the faint rhythm of her breathing audible through the wood. Past Kujuro's room, also shut, but something in the silence said he wasn't asleep. The silence of someone listening. 'He knows we're leaving. He's choosing not to stop us.' 'Another thing filed under Dad Knows More Than He Says.' Outside, the street existed in that state between night and morning where the city hasn't decided what to be yet. No cars. No voices. Just the hum of power lines and a traffic light cycling through colors for nobody. Yua moved like the dark was her native country. Not fast. Precise. Each step placed with the intention of someone who'd spent years learning that carelessness kills. The blade was warm against Ryo's back, strapped the way she'd shown him, diagonal across the shoulders, wrapped in cloth to muffle the hum. Even muffled, he felt it. A second heartbeat riding alongside his own. The park was empty. Benches, a swing set, a path looping through trees that looked different at this hour. Less decorative. More structural, like the bones of the neighborhood showing through. Yua stopped at the center of the path. Turned. "Sit." Ryo sat. The cold came through his clothes at once. "The blade. Across your knees." He unwrapped it. The Kizugami caught what little light existed and held it. Not reflecting, not glowing. Containing, the way a deep lake holds the sky without giving it back. "What do you know about Seishu?" Ryo considered. "It's energy. Living energy. Runs through the body, has three parts. Physical, mental, spiritual. If they're out of balance, bad things happen." "That's correct enough to be dangerous. You know the vocabulary, not the grammar." She crouched to his eye level. "Seishu isn't energy the way electricity is. Electricity doesn't care who's carrying it. Seishu does. It's personal. It carries your signature. Not just your power, your pattern. The exact shape of who you are, expressed as living force." She raised her hand. In the pre-dawn dark Ryo saw nothing, then something. Not light, not color. A density in the air around her fingers, like heat distortion without the heat. "This is mine, compressed. A trained Hunter could read it and know my three-axis ratio without my saying a word. Physical, mental, spiritual. Everyone leans one way. I lean mental. Awareness, perception, processing, all heavier than my body or my spirit." The density vanished. "Physical-heavy hits harder and reads slower. Spirit-heavy runs on instinct and can't always survive where the instinct leads." 'So it's not three categories. It's a ratio. A shape.' "What's mine?" Yua's eyes changed. The clinical teacher giving way to something more careful, the look of someone choosing words the way a surgeon chooses where to cut. "I don't know. Your signature is unusual." "Unusual how?" "Your eruption during the Spider Hunt should have given me more than enough to read you. It gave me nothing." She paused. "Your Seishu doesn't lean. Not on any axis. It sits at center, perfectly distributed, which shouldn't be possible for someone untrained." 'That sounds like it should be good. The wa