Chapter 156: Reincarnation of the Hakkesshu (Patreon)

With the fight over, Yang did a quick check on Iori Yagami's condition, used the Golden Flame to stimulate his tissue and keep the wounds from worsening, then turned and headed for the shadows beyond the lights.

"A-Yang? Where are you going?" Chun-Li asked, a little worried.

"Bathroom."

Yang gestured downward and added calmly, "The breakdown products of rhabdomyolysis are dissolved and stored in my bladder. If I don't flush them out, it'll slow down my recovery."

Chun-Li let out a breath at that. "Be careful."

After quickly expelling the metabolic waste from his body, Yang returned to the restaurant to rest. Once he was sure his injuries wouldn't get any worse, he started eating, replenishing his healing effect to speed up recovery.

Chun-Li and the others weren't surprised to see Yang gorging himself. They knew he needed the raw material to replenish his healing effect, so they passed over the huge amounts of food they'd already prepared.

Unlike other people, Yang didn't need life cuisine to convert the nutrients in his food into healing effect.

Or rather, life cuisine had started out as a training method Yang tinkered together to understand healing effect better.

Now that his strength had advanced and his understanding of healing effect had deepened, making life cuisine did very little for him. It had gone from a training method to a plain habit, a hobby of sorts.

In a situation like this one, where he had to replenish healing effect urgently, even gnawing on raw vegetables made no difference compared to eating life cuisine. It all got converted into pure energy inside his body anyway.

Juri Han blinked at the sight of Yang stuffing himself right where the fight had ended. She thought back to the stance he'd used during the battle.

"Come to think of it, you pulled some flashy new tricks back there, didn't you? Stuff I've never seen before."

"Flashy tricks? In what way?" Yang raised an eyebrow at her.

"That weird stance, the way your qi flowed, and the ring of blood vessels that suddenly bulged around your eyes..." Juri Han said. "Was that Fusui's thing?"

"Fusui's Eye of Removal?" she asked curiously.

"Close enough."

Yang nodded. "Except it isn't the vision enhancement the Kure clan gets by performing Removal on the body's limits. I used healing effect to directly activate the optic nerves and the redundant mechanisms around the eyes. The result differs depending on how strongly you activate them."

He pointed at his own eyes. "At full activation, like just now, the pressure in the eyeballs spikes. The capillaries keep rupturing, and that's the lesser problem. If I dragged it out, there'd even be a risk of temporary blindness."

"That's just temporary blindness, though, right?" Juri Han clicked her tongue. "With your livestock-grade stamina and recovery that leaves livestock in the dust, you'd be fine soon after you stopped, wouldn't you?"

"More or less." Yang nodded. "It was my first attempt, but it felt pretty good. If I train up my eyes' tolerance, the cost should drop even further."

"Even so, isn't that a bit ridiculous..."

Kure Fusui couldn't help griping from the side.

"It was one thing when studying my eyes let Juri evolve a Feng Shui Engine that boosts her qi and body across the board. But now Brother Yang just casually awakens a technique my clan took over a thousand years to barely master?"

"The mechanism is different. And Removal of the body's limits is a fairly common approach anyway."

Yang didn't take Kure Fusui's words to heart.

Techniques like Removal, which lift the body's limiters in exchange for a surge of power, exist in plenty of schools. Niko-ryu's Possessing Spirit, for instance, overloads the heart to pump blood faster, gaining strength far beyond the norm by lifting the body's own limiters.

The price is severe wear on the user's heart.

"With the Kure clan, Removal is certainly the signature technique, but if you ask me, the constitution that can handle Removal without suffering damage from the limiters being lifted is probably the more important part," Yang said.

"Take old man Kure Erioh. He lifted his body's limiters constantly when he was young, and he's still perfectly healthy today."

Kure Fusui nodded in understanding.

Juri Han couldn't help cutting in. "Hey, hey, hey, what about me? What was that weird stance of yours?"

Up to now, Juri Han had never actually seen Yang use Sou and Ki Ansatsuken.

Even in their first clash, he'd used strikes built around Muay Thai and plain throws. In their later sparring matches he rarely used Sou and Ki Ansatsuken, so rarely that Juri Han didn't even remember it, and she'd just assumed it was a whim.

The main reason was that Yang was already far too familiar with Sou and Ki Ansatsuken, so there was little need to keep refining it.

Or rather, to improve beyond his current level, precision of technique had become secondary. What mattered more was qi, intent, energy conversion and the like.

Things like that couldn't be advanced through grinding practice the way technique could. Sometimes an epiphany born from drawing parallels between disciplines worked better than endless, grueling training.

They ate and chatted. After a while, Iori Yagami, who had been lying unconscious on the restaurant floor, gave a slight shudder as if he'd sensed something, then opened his eyes in a daze.

He looked around, stunned for a moment. The sight of Yang sent a flood of memories through his mind, and he remembered at once why he was here.

Seeing Iori wake, Yang raised a hand to greet him. Iori ignored him completely. He scrambled up from the floor and hurriedly began patting down his trousers.

Only after confirming that his belt and zipper showed no signs of being torn off, and that there was no unbearable discomfort behind him, no swollen pain from any foreign object, did he finally relax.

Yang watched Iori wake up and start performing a pantomime all on his own. After a brief silence, he couldn't help asking, "What are you... doing?"

Iori's expression froze for a moment, a faint stiffness showing through. Then he buried the wobble under his usual coldness and forced a blank face. "Checking my wounds."

His voice was as icy as ever, but anyone could clearly sense the slight worry and awkwardness mixed into his look.

"You don't have any wounds on your ass," Yang pointed out. During the fight, he hadn't gone after Iori's lower body.

"Just in case," Iori answered flatly.

Juri Han finally couldn't hold it in. Slumped sideways in her chair, she burst out laughing.

Yang didn't mind. He simply explained that what had been stored in his bladder was the metabolic waste fluid from rhabdomyolysis, and that he hadn't gotten worked up in the middle of the fight.

"I'm not some kind of masochist. It's not like the more I get hit, the more I... Well, okay. The fight was fun, sure, but not to the point of getting excited in that way."

Iori arched an eyebrow at the explanation. "Then why did it keep bulging more and more?"

"Because the damage kept piling up, so there was more and more metabolic waste," Yang said concisely.

"And if the bladder gets full?" A flicker of curiosity crossed Iori's eyes.

"There's also the intestines and stomach, or I can push it out through the sweat glands, or just piss it out." Yang shrugged, not bothered by the question.

Neither Yang nor Iori nor the others gave the matter of urine another thought.

It might sound embarrassing, but martial artists are among the most practical people in the world. When they aren't fighting, training, practicing and enjoying themselves are all personal hobbies, and as long as nobody else is affected, anything goes.

But once the fighting starts, the only thing left to think about is how to win.

For those who pursue strength, shame doesn't belong to the victor.

"Have something to eat."

Yang ladled another portion out of a pot nearby and handed it to Iori. "Life cuisine. Think of it as something like medicinal cuisine. It'll speed up your recovery."

Iori didn't suspect a thing. If Yang had really wanted to do something to him, he could have finished it in one go while Iori was unconscious.

Yang hadn't done that. Quite the opposite: Iori's condition was decent and his injuries lighter than expected. He did a quick check and found obvious traces of that golden fire still lingering on his body, especially his hands. Clearly Yang had already treated him.

He scooped up a spoonful of warm porridge and put it in his mouth. A clean, savory taste and a lingering sweetness bloomed on his tongue, and surprise flickered in Iori's eyes.

He swallowed. Streams of heat followed, spreading from his stomach through his whole body. Iori fell silent for a moment, then nodded. "Tastes good. Thanks."

"No problem." Yang shook his head, then turned to Iori. "So, do you know anything about Shiranui Village?"

"...That's a very direct question." Iori glanced at Yang.

"Because you're not someone who gets shackled by family destiny." Without hurry, Yang poured two glasses of beer and gave Iori a slight gesture.

Iori raised an eyebrow, then nodded, and Yang handed him the beer. Iori took it and, after a brief silence, said:

"About Shiranui Village, I don't know anything."

He spoke as he thought it through. He gave off an air of rebellion, perversity and wild arrogance, but in truth Iori was very calm. Without hurry, he laid out what he knew and what he suspected.

"Our clan changed its name from Yasakani to Yagami more than six hundred and sixty years ago. And if, as you say, Shiranui Village was attacked over a thousand years ago, then my clan hadn't yet taken in the Riot of the Blood. We were still using the Crimson Flames, not some strange flame."

"But if Shiranui Village really did possess an energy-conversion martial art that let ordinary people wield the Crimson Flames, then whoever attacked it must have been remnants of Orochi's line."

"A thousand years ago, our three clans sealed the souls of Orochi and his Hakkesshu," Iori said. "But Orochi's bloodline wasn't cut off by that. For the next two centuries, the remnants kept trying to resurrect Orochi, until our three clans hunted and killed them relentlessly and those who carried Orochi's blood gradually vanished without a trace."

"Going by the timeline, the people who attacked Shiranui Village must have been the surviving descendants of Orochi's blood."

"So that means this feud was settled long ago, right?"

Mai Shiranui looked complicated at that. "After all, the remnants were hunted down to the last one by your ancestors."

"More or less." Iori nodded. He glanced at Mai Shiranui, paused, then added:

"I don't know much about the Shiranui-ryu legacy, but the grudges tied to Orochi are a thousand years old. Personally, I don't think there's any need to be shackled by something from the past."

"Honestly, it's fine." Mai Shiranui didn't seem to take Iori's advice too much to heart.

"That history is just too distant for me. Not just me. Even my grandfather, or maybe even his grandfather, probably doesn't know much. It's less our family's history and more like a story out of a legend."

"Still, it's worth keeping something in mind."

Yang drank his beer as he addressed the heirs of two thousand-year-old clans.

"After the Yasakani clan became the Yagami clan, the corruption of the Riot of the Blood left gaps in Orochi's seal. If I remember right, Orochi's own consciousness is still asleep inside the seal, but the souls of the Hakkesshu have already slipped free of it and been reincarnated."

Iori's eating stopped for a moment at Yang's words. He lifted his head and looked at Yang, his eyes full of shock and doubt. "You're sure?"

"Why would I lie to you?" Yang shrugged.

Watching the two of them, Chun-Li sighed helplessly. "I think this gentleman is wondering why you'd tell him something like that, A-Yang."

She turned to Iori. "And the reason is that A-Yang just thinks it means more opponents worth fighting."

Yang gave her a thumbs up. "Exactly."