Turning Swallow
Summary:
OR, One morning, four-year-old Sasaki Kojiro remembers a life not yet lived, and decides to do something about it. History changes. SI!Sasaki Kojiro. Expect general lightheartedness, but dark topics when the time comes.
CH. 35 START
The next week served primarily as a time for recovery and rehabilitation. And most of the time he was doing precisely nothing. Chiyome had explicitly told him that if he attempted to perform or utilize his Embodiment in any way, she'd knock him out for his own good. Seeing as his shadow was better versed in the mystic arts, given the Dragon God in her head, Kojiro choose to listen to her. And to clarify, his 'mental blade' was undeniably mystical, and was, according to Chiyome, a frustrating mix between Magecraft and Magic. Given the properties of his 'mental blade,' the fact that it was a manifestation of his very soul, his accomplishment could be considered a manifestation of the soul. At his request, the ninja had explained the difference.
The core conceptual difference between 'Magecraft' and 'Magic' was 'Mystery.' Simply put, 'Magecraft' was a replication of a phenomenon that humans were able to produce through mystical means. 'Magic' was a phenomenon that was impossible for humans to perform, even if given an infinite amount of resources and an uncountable amount of time. 'Magecraft' was something that humans could perform, while 'Magic' was something restricted to the Gods. The reason Kojiro's 'mental sword' could be considered 'Magic' was that it was able to hurt a God, namely the summoned body of Yamata-no-Orochi. Of course, humans could perform actions akin to Magic through worship and resonance with a God. Such was the case with Chiyome, who reported that she'd gained a potent regeneration factor among several other things, from her intrinsic connection to the Dragon God. Supposedly, its presence was always there, listening and watching, but according to her, it was far better than the pain of before.
The second week post-Imperial Palace incident was reserved for getting back into shape. Nobunaga, also, had informed him that he wasn't to perform any sort of official work. It was basically a mandated vacation. He wasn't to return to any sort of active command over the soldiers, or hell, even help with maintaining order in the city, he was to recover. So for the second week, in between recovering from his strain a week earlier, he learned more about the mystical side of the world. He was taught a single all-purpose spell by the name of Reinforcement. By pouring magical energy into something, you could make it stronger in a variety of ways. Though it was called Reinforcement, it wasn't merely a physical thing. You strengthened the concept of something, rather than the thing itself.
It was meant to enhance the existence of a target. You could reinforce a blade to make it sharper, lighter, or more durable in the same way that you could make food more nourishing or better tasting. The human body was no exception. It wasn't an infallible spell though, since Magecraft was undeniably supernatural. It was dangerous, as were all things supernatural, even in the most basic form, given how easily it could backfire. It was like making the air even more oxygenated. It was fine to breathe in normally, but when an excess of oxygen was in the air, it could lead to oxygen poisoning. Most things were better in moderation, just like water. Too little, and you'd die of dehydration, while too much, and you'd drown. Chiyome had been eager to demonstrate the dangers. The knife she'd reinforced had become sharper and more durable, certainly, able to withstand blows from his odachi without being chipped and able to cut through wood without much issue, but after hitting some invisible absorption limit, it'd simply exploded.
Without warning, he'd heard a 'crack,' and Chiyome was tossing the small blade at a nearby tree. The knife fractured and sent shrapnel flying all over the place. Upon inspection, pieces of the knife were buried inches into both tree trunk and dirt. It was a potent demonstration of the perils of Reinforcement, while Chiyome herself served as an example of Reinforcement done properly. The ninja had a passive Reinforcement going on at all times, which explained her tremendous strength during their duel. That was on top of being a vessel for a God, so the fact that Kojiro had come out relatively unscathed was a miracle. He'd certainly been surprised to wake up with his ribs, in fact, not broken, but apparently, the Dragon God had seen it fit to do him a favor.
His training began, and he was instructed to visualize the piece of cloth that he was trying to Reinforce as incomplete. Despite physical appearances, everything had gaps within them that could be filled. It was filling these gaps and absences that allowed something could be Reinforced. The cloth was a plain thing, obviously borrowed from some unused clothing. Kojiro tried to fill it with his magical energy, only to feel no small amount of resistance. His magical energy seemed to flow through his body well enough, but when it came to other objects, issues came up. It was difficult to shove his magical energy into a foreign object and when he pushed too hard, the cloth was torn from his hands and thrown into the air. It was proof that he had magical energy, but was further proof of his inadequacy with it. Things changed when he drew his mental sword, the activity suddenly became trivial, but soon after, he felt tired. The sword helped in moving energy, but was too much of a crutch and an energy drain. Stubbornly, he spent the entire day and night sitting crosslegged with that piece of cloth in his hands, until at long last, something seemed to click, and magical energy began to move.
What he needed to do was almost match the wavelength of the cloth. He closed his eyes and tried to enter a state of focus. It came quickly, his breath aligning with the fibers of the cloth beneath his hands, and he felt it. A coarse yarn, likely from either linen or hemp, was interwoven above and under itself. The entire thing was made from a single stand and the piece that Kojiro was holding was merely less than a tenth of the entire thing. He spent perhaps an hour or so simply observing the cloth, so unassuming, yet so astonishingly complex in its creation. He could see the individual strands of hemp that'd formed into the yarn. He could see that it was woven by a common seamstress, likely as part of a batch, but there was undeniable surety in its making. Each weave was like the stroke of a paintbrush, up and down and left and right, coming together to form this little piece of fabric.
Kojiro opened his eyes, breathing for the first time in what seemed like hours. It was like waking up from a dream. He felt refreshed, but the sky above was a light blue. He'd spent the entire night sitting on the floor with a piece of fabric in his hands. How strange. How astonishing. How utterly terrifying. If what amounted to a piece of scrap fabric could occupy his attention for an entire night, how distracted would he be by the entire thing, let alone a sword? What about a tree? A person? Each was increasingly complex, a thousand billion cells working in unison to create life. It was so easy to get lost in the workings of it all. He looked around after refocusing himself. Chiyome was nearby, he was certain, likely lurking in a tree to watch over him. He was safe, so he returned to his task.
He wasn't supposed to simply admire the fabric, he needed to Reinforce it. He knew this little cut of fabric almost as well as he knew himself. It was a simple matter to bring his mind back among the little individual fibers, to see the gaps in the cloth, where one strand of hemp was a little frayed, where another was too strained, where another was too loose. Each of these, he soothed and filled, until he could find no more errors, not without learning more about the craft of needle and thread or correcting the entire piece of cloth. The portion of fabric was more cohesive now, without any spaces in between, but the weave of the fibers remained unchanged. He drew his mind back and felt the fabric. It felt normal. It bent like normal. Yet, Kojiro knew it'd been changed.
He called into the emptiness, "Chiyome."
His shadow answered at once, flashing down from some vantage point into a kneeling position, saying, "Lord Kojiro!"
Kojiro sighed, then pulled her to her feet. She rose without fuss, looking at him with an amused light dancing in her eyes.
"I need you to hold the cloth," Kojiro said, indicating the fabric, "I wish to ascertain the result of my efforts."
Chiyome plucked the fabric from his hands and raised it up in front of her. The thing was about three feet long, and the ninja was holding it like it was a present, arms outstretched and locked. He drew his odachi and stepped back, measuring out the distance carefully.
The ninja spoke in a teasing tone, "Be careful, my Lord. Wouldn't want to lop my arms off, now would you?"
As odd as her behavior was, he ignored it, for now, focusing on his swing. He brought the blade down, intent on cutting the fabric clean through, but rather than split apart, the fabric seemed to catch the odachi's blade. Rather than be cut, the cloth was ripped from Chiyome's hands. The cloth fluttered to the floor, leaving the ninja empty-handed. He let out a slow breath and sheathed his blade. Meanwhile, the ninja squatted down to pick up the fabric, stretching it curiously.
"You did it…?" Chiyome said, surprise filling her voice.
With a small grin on his face, Kojiro asked curiously, "Was I not supposed to?"
"No. You were meant to return to me upon failure so that I could teach you another spell first." She replied instantly, saying, "It was supposed to be a lesson on becoming used to how easily Magecraft can end in failure and proper magical practice, but that seems to have backfired. Once again, Lord Kojiro, you prove yourself the exception."
Laughing, he asked, "I see. Well, would you mind teaching me the proper spells now? I'd hate to explode after all this effort."
Mollified by that statement, Chiyome nodded her head, explaining, "I intended to educate you on how to perform a spell named Structural Grasping. It allows you to read an object's structure, something that's extremely valuable when performing Reinforcement upon your own body. To start with, you need to touch the object lightly with your magical energy. Run your power over its' surface, then use that energy to pull information from it. The basics of that object like how heavy it is, when it was made, who it was made by, and where it was made should come to mind."
With a hand, she indicated for Kojiro to try his own hand at it. The ninja had just given him one of her blades to allow him to experiment. He did so and sat down, laying the blade across his lap, then closing his eyes to focus. It was a rather unremarkable blade, ideal for a ninja like Chiyome, but undeniably high-quality. A wakizashi of about two feet long, her blade had been forged by a well-versed smith native to her home village. It wasn't really hers, given that those blades had been broken during their duel. She'd gotten this one from one of the Koga Clan's hidden armories. All of this was, as Chiyome said, surface level. It was easy enough to read off the blade in his hands, but there was more information still lying in wait.
Kojiro straightened his back, took a breath, and focused more deeply. The desire to know the blade as well as he knew himself was predominant, and he indulged that wish. He saw how the very metal that formed this wakizashi had been created. The lands of Japan were relatively poor, metal-wise, so blacksmiths had needed to become creative in order to secure good metal to smith with. He dove deeper and deeper, observing the ripples of metal in the blade, how it reflected the morning light, measured its weight as it lay on his lap, and then, Kojiro saw.
The blade had been crafted from tamahagane, otherwise known as jewel steel. The jewel steel had been obtained after twenty-five tons of iron-bearing river sand and charcoal had been gathered over three days and three nights, before being shoveled into a tatara furnace to smelt down. During the smelting process, the rectangular clay furnace that was the tatara had approached temperatures of about two thousand and five hundred degrees Fahrenheit, causing the twenty-five tons of raw material to become two tons of steel. The process formed two types of tamahagane, one type of high-carbon steel and the other of low-carbon steel. High-carbon metal was hard, allowing for a sharp edge, while low-carbon metal was tough, allowing for shock absorption. A blade made solely from high-carbon or low-carbon steel would either dull quickly or break in battle. All this information filled Kojiro's head, and yet, he'd never even stepped into sight of a blacksmith.
It was like the world had opened up to him, and his physical body was no longer a restriction. Time and space unraveled as his mind explored the distant past. He knew how the tamahagane had been gathered because he'd been there, one of the workers who'd worked for three grueling days and nights to gather materials for the next smelting. Memories of a young child and a wife spoke to him, though he didn't recognize their faces. The exhaustion of the week's worth plagued him like heavy shackles until the work was done, and his soul bore witness to the next phase of the blade's journey. Now, he was the tatara master, working with the furnace he'd worked with for a decade.
He inspected the steel with ease, picking one up, and trying to break it apart. He failed and took a hammer to it. Even after a solid ten seconds of hammering, it didn't come apart and thusly, was placed into the high-carbon pile of steel. The next came apart like clay after a bit of force and was placed into the low-carbon steel pile. The material would be shipped by cart from a village nearby, whose smith always paid them ten percent above what tamahagane was usually sold for. It was good business and had provided fot the village for a good three generations. His father had sold to the same village, and so had his grandfather.
Kojiro came back to himself briefly before he went on to the next step. Now, he was a Koga blacksmith, getting the biannual shipment of tamahagane from a nearby mining village. He paid the person in charge of delivery extra, as always, to incentivize further business. Had he been an independent blacksmith, biannual purchases of metal would have been extravagant, but his family had long worked for the Koga Clan. His father, aside from teaching him how to hammer metal, had given him a warning. 'The Koga will pay you well, but never question an order. Just make what they request, and you will live well.'
By now, he was familiar with strange requests. Shuriken, kunai, and caltrops were standard fair, along with swords. His own son helped carry the metal into the forge, and he began to work on melting down the tamahagane into a more usable form. By heating the metal, hammering it, and folding it repeatedly, he forced out the undissolved impurities. The slag was drawn out of the steel. Given that he was making a wakizashi, once the slag was gone, he shaped the steel into a long 'U-shaped' channel. Low-carbon steel was placed into the channel before he forged them together. The hard steel formed the sword's outer shell, giving the blade its sharpness, while the tought steel formed the sword's durable core. The balance allowed the wakizashi formed to serve as a functional weapon.
Once the body of the sword was done, he moved on to the next step. Over the sword, he painted a thick and insulating mixture of clay and charcoal powder onto the blade's upper side and dull back edge, so that only the sharp edge was left light-coated. The clay would serve to protect the blade and give the blade its distinctive hamon. He placed the wakizashi back into the fire, to heat it up once more, before dunking it into a trough of water to quench it. As the blade cooled, the back edge and the inner core contracted rapidly, due to them containing less carbon. The difference in speed and degree of contraction between the two types of tamahagane causes the sword to bend, resulting in a slight curve. Fortunately, this time, the blade was properly formed and didn't crack.
Despite his familiarity with the forge, his sword tended to break at this stage, more often than not. Normally if he was independent, he'd have to send the blade to a sword polisher to get it honed to a razor edge, but given the Koga's propensity for secrecy, that was also his duty. Over the course of the next week, Kojiro meticulously polished the blade with several grinding and polishing stones, gettin the blade sharper and sharper. Finally, once the sword was sharp, he fit an iron guard onto the blade, before fixing a wooden handle on it too. All of this was placed into a nondescript, carved wooden sheathe. The Koga would come to retrieve this, and several other swords from him within the next month, so he had to keep on working.
Kojiro woke with a start, feeling like his head was about to explode. A headache rampaged through his skull, and his stomach seemed to turn in on itself. He turned his head to the side, before dry heaving. Chiyome was by his side a moment later, holding him up.
"You didn't tell me Structural Grasping could do that, " he said to her, in a weak voice, "I feel like I'm about to die."
A/N:
Kojiro's powerset is going to include something called Breathing and Walking, something cool that I found on the Type-Moon Wiki page. This is the setup. No matter how similar it seems, I'm not ripping off of Shirou Emiya's powers. Promise that we move on soon I stg. Last set up chapter I promise.
Also, the thing in the Nasuverse about Magic being exclusive to a single person and impossible to reproduce seem kinda like bullshit to me, so I'm changing that. The reason why is this: to quote the Type-Moon wiki, "It represents the actualization of events that are impossible to reproduce in a certain era, whether by humans or the planet, even if given an infinite amount of time and resources." The thing is though, like, the planet AKA Gaia and Alaya already do this.
For example, the Magics are, to my best knowledge/theorizing:
1- (Unknown/Denial of Nothingness/ Probably Rejection of 'Matter Cannot Be Created or Destroyed')
2- (Kaleidoscope/Operation of Parallel Worlds)
3- (Heavens's Feel/Materialization of the Soul)
4- (Unknown/ Probably Confirmation of Mystery since "The currently existing magi will say that "it definitely exists" when talking about it and agree that it continues to exist. The name of the user is unknown even to them.")
5- (Magic Blue/Time Travel/Probably Manipulation of Entropy)
Alaya/Gaia and their Beasts/Counter Guardians are literal able to do most of these things, i.e, planting Holy Grails in the past to create Singularities(5), Singularities themselves + rayshifting(2&3&5), literally just Heroic Spirits(2&3), Counter Guardians like EMIYA(Archer) being in Rome during that cinematic(5), Counter Guardians having knowledge of other worlds(2). We haven't seen the other Magics, but the planet is probably able to do these things too.
TLDR: Magic being unreproducible by the planet is bull, so changing it.