The mountain forest steamed in the morning light. Fog clung to the earth like old skin, torn in patches where sunlight sliced through the canopy. Soma Kushō crouched low near a broken streambed, fingers pressed against the damp soil. The boar's chakra lingered faintly—burning hot, tinged with rage.
"Two minutes ahead," he murmured, standing slowly.
His hunting partners grumbled behind him, tired from the long stalk. They were older than him, but they followed. Soma didn't speak often unless it concerned the art. And when he spoke of Shokuyō no Jutsu, they listened.
The kill came swiftly. The boar, tusked and chakra-warped from generations in these woods, charged with thunder in its eyes. Soma danced under it, his blade cutting deep into the chest cavity, right beneath the heart. A clean rupture. Blood fountained hot over his arms. It wasn't a loud death. Not loud enough for what it carried.
The body was dragged to a clearing. A shallow pit was dug. Soma prepared the consumption ritual himself.
He removed his gloves, cleaned his hands with incense ash, and pressed his palm to the boar's still-warm flesh. His chakra threaded through the tissue. It was not a devouring, not in the way others imagined. It was communion. Inquiry.
His breath slowed as the boar's chakra curled into him. He felt weight—a memory of pain, of some old wound never healed. An iron snare, maybe. Rage tempered by cunning. He whispered to the others:
"It remembered."
They looked at him like he always talked too much. Maybe he did. But there was beauty in knowing what the beast had been.
---
The Kushō clan compound rose from the cliffs like a second spine of the mountain. Bone-arch gates creaked in the wind. Smoke curled from stew pits that lined the stone terraces, where elders stirred meat and marrow into chakra-rich broth.
Soma passed beneath an arch and paused before the engraved pillars. He pressed his forehead gently to the carved symbol of consumption: an open jaw with a spiral tongue.
Inside, Elder Kabe met him near the bonefire.
"Another boar?" the old man asked, voice dry as salt.
"One heavy with chakra. A worthy kill."
"Yet you come back smelling of incense and not blood."
Soma bowed. "Clean rituals are more precise."
The elder narrowed his eyes. "Precision doesn't make power. It makes weakness look neat."
Soma smiled faintly. "They aren't the same thing, no."
---
He retreated to his private cavern, carved into the stone far from the communal dorms. Scrolls littered the shelves. Insect husks, preserved in chakra resin, lined the walls in glass jars. His table bore a half-filled pot of chakra-stewed locusts.
He selected three and dropped them into the pot. He waited. Stirred. Drank.
The taste was always bitter at first. Then warm. Then... hollow. Like stepping into a void just before the ground gave out. He sat cross-legged and let his chakra spread inward.
For minutes, there was nothing.
Then something flickered.
Not a voice, not even a feeling. A tremor. Like wind blowing across the surface of still water.
He opened his eyes, heart pounding. There was no surge of strength. No vision. But something had answered.
---
He wrote by candlelight:
> Test #41: Three locusts, slow-cooked in salt chakra brine. Chakra resonance detected, inconsistent.
> Note: No manifest abilities. Will attempt 5-insect batch next. Possibly cumulative imprinting.
Below the note, he sketched a diagram of a spiral just beneath the ribcage. The area that had tingled.
He flipped back to the previous pages—scores of failed tests. Crushed centipedes, beetle shells, bee venom extractions. All dismissed by the clan. Insects were "too small," they said. "Too insignificant."
Soma tapped his pen against his teeth, staring at the spiral.
"Then why did it feel like it moved?"
---
That night, he dreamed of the first time he saw an insect feast.
He had been seven. A hunter failed to return. They found his body days later, twisted at the foot of a ravine. The vultures came too late. The insects were first. They moved like a single thought, stripping flesh in hours.
He remembered being unafraid. He remembered being fascinated.
When he awoke, his stomach throbbed with heat. He lifted his shirt. The skin below his ribs was red. Not bruised, not burned—inflamed by something moving beneath.
His breath came quick. Not in fear.
In awe.
---
He dipped his brush in ink and added one final line to his page:
> "They don't need to believe in the art. They only need to witness what it becomes."
The spiral burned beneath his skin. And somewhere deep inside, something pulsed in answer.