Nayona turned five, and the scrutiny intensified to an unbearable pitch. His small room, once a sanctuary for quiet breathing, had become less a home and more a clinical observation chamber under the unblinking, judgmental eyes of the Zenin clan's Cursed Technique Division. His bizarre, passive awakening under Naobito's terrifying pressure had branded him as useful, a concept far more terrifying than the quiet death sentence of being labeled useless. Utility in the Zenin clan meant submission, exploitation, and eventual consumption by the clan's endless greed for power.
His principal observer was his grandmother, Maari Zenin, an elderly sorceress renowned not for raw power, but for her rigid, ruthless control and her fanatic adherence to the clan's ancestral power structures. Her presence was cold, like granite carved into human form. She sat across from him on a silk cushion, her posture impeccable, her expression a mask of chilly, porcelain disapproval. She represented the unyielding Zenin creed: power must manifest as immediate, measurable destruction; it must crush opponents swiftly and leave a bloody, undeniable tally of victory. Anything less was blasphemy.
"Again," Maari commanded, her voice dry and brittle as parchment. It carried the weight of tradition and the expectation of conformity, a sound Nayona was learning to associate with spiritual bondage. "Focus the energy in the hand. Mold it into a shape. A spear. A blade. Something that cuts the life thread, as any true Zenin technique should. We do not waste our time with useless, esoteric meditation."
Nayona sat cross-legged, physically and spiritually exhausted from the endless, fruitless demands. For weeks, they had forced him to attempt explosive or piercing techniques to channel his strange, greyish Cursed Energy into simple concussive blasts against training dummies or to simulate a physical cutting edge. It always failed. His energy felt profoundly responsive to concentration and acceptance, like mercury yielding to a slight incline, but utterly repulsive to violence or malice. It simply refused to hold the sharp, aggressive shape of a weapon, instead flowing like water or smoke, neutralizing the sharp intent.
"It resists, Grandmother," Nayona confessed, staring down at his small, clean palm. He could feel the energy welling up, a cool, neutral tide the purest manifestation of negative emotion without the intention of aggression, the residual bitterness of countless lifetimes. But the moment he introduced the Zenin-mandated intention to harm, to sever, or to destroy, the flow would stutter and dissipate into a harmless puff of grey mist. "The principle is wrong. It is not meant for cutting. It is meant for guiding the flow, not stopping it."
"Nonsense! In the Zenin clan, everything is meant for cutting!" Maari snapped, slapping her hand against the fine tatami, the sound echoing sharply. The implicit threat was clear. "Cursed Energy is the refined product of negative emotion malice, resentment, fear. Negativity is weaponized in this clan! Your devotion to those dusty old scrolls those philosophies of weakness has infected your core. It is a fundamental contamination that must be burned out! Try again. Visualize the cessation of life. Visualize the complete, final emptiness of your target. Visualize oblivion."
Nayona knew he couldn't comply. He couldn't visualize cessation because his past life, lived fully on the paths of enlightenment, taught him there was no such thing as an end. There was only transformation and rebirth. Nirvana was not nothingness, but the state beyond the cycle.
The test target was brought in by a shamed servant: a small, weak Cursed Spirit, barely Grade 4, that resembled a perpetually twitching shadow the embodied, concentrated fear of a rodent, a creature desperate to escape its current form. It was bound loosely by a simple paper talisman, thrashing pitifully in its futile struggle for freedom.
Nayona looked at the creature. He didn't see an enemy or a monster worthy of eradication. He saw concentrated dukkha suffering born of its own panicked attachment to existence and fear of non-existence. Killing it in the Zenin way, with brutal force, would only release its volatile energy back into the chaotic cycle, to be reborn almost immediately as another curse of equal or greater strength. It was a temporary solution that ignored the root cause.
If I cannot cut, I must illuminate, he reasoned, ignoring the rising dread from his grandmother. If I cannot destroy the cycle, I must accelerate the understanding of it. I must show it the truth of the Middle Way.
He closed his eyes, ignoring Maari's loud, impatient sigh of disdain. He didn't reach for the anger or malice that the Zenin demanded. Instead, he reached for the core principle of his past life's doctrine: Anicca impermanence. The unshakable understanding that everything that arises must also change, decay, and pass away. This acceptance was his true Cursed Technique requirement.
Nayona lifted his small hands and performed the first seal, an instinctual, precise movement of his fingers that mirrored the unfolding of a lotus flower, or perhaps the turning of a prayer wheel. It was not a violent gesture but a sacred invitation, a doorway into spiritual reality.
His grey Cursed Energy flowed, not outward as a projectile, but inward, sinking deep into the spirit's karmic thread the weak tether binding it to this current, miserable plane of existence. He didn't try to sever the thread; he didn't attack the energy mass. He simply sped up the spiritual reel, compressing eternity into a flash.
The Cursed Spirit let out a single, piercing, high-frequency screech, not of physical injury, but of blinding, existential confusion and overload. The sound was like glass shattering inside the observers' minds.
The transformation was purely visual to the observers, but spiritually devastating to the target, a forced, rapid journey through the Wheel.
As the grey energy enveloped the shadow, the spirit was subjected to the Illusory Rebirth Loop, a sequence of three overwhelming psychic flashes that rewound and compressed its existence:
The Flash of Birth (Jāti): The spirit saw itself not as a shadow-rat, but as the raw, unrefined fear of a starving farmer who had lost his harvest, which was its fundamental origin. It experienced the crushing, primal terror of its own creation, realizing it was not an entity, but an agglomeration of borrowed dread.
The Flash of Mundane Existence (Bhava): It experienced not centuries, but compressed millennia of its cyclical existence being ignored, growing slightly stronger, feeding on dread and petty anxieties, fighting, hiding, and existing solely to fuel negative emotion. The unbearable monotony, the endless, futile striving, and the pointlessness of its suffering were laid bare in a moment of agonizing clarity. The spirit recognized the flaw in its own programming.
The Flash of Death (Māraṇa): It saw its inevitable, final dissipation the moment when its Cursed Energy dissolved into the aether, ready to reconstitute and begin the pointless cycle anew. This wasn't a threat; it was a simple, unavoidable truth seen from a detached perspective.
This entire loop, normally spanning years or decades, was projected onto its nascent consciousness in a single, crushing instant. It was a momentary glimpse of its own Saṃsāra the terrible futility of its endless, suffering cycle. The spirit's energy core couldn't handle the rapid succession of existence, non-existence, and return; the truth was too fast and too absolute.
The spirit stopped twitching. It didn't explode; it didn't bleed. It simply yielded. The fear-shadow flattened itself against the floor, whimpering a sound of profound spiritual fatigue, its Cursed Energy dissipating not through destruction, but through utter, existential exhaustion and surrender. It realized the inherent pointlessness of its attachment to its current form. It simply vanished, like smoke resolving into clean air, leaving behind no cursed trace, no energy spike, and no destructive signature.
Maari shot up, knocking over her cushion, her face contorted with disbelief and barely contained rage. "What sorcery was that? It wasn't an exorcism! It was a seizure! You didn't even leave behind residue for calculation! How can we assess the damage or grade the power when there's nothing left but air?"
"It saw the consequence of its desire, Grandmother," Nayona explained, breathing heavily, the spiritual exertion immense and leaving a heavy ache in his soul. He focused not on the lack of residue, but the result. "It realized Nirvana the state beyond suffering. It released its attachment to being a curse. It simply... moved on to its next form."
A collective, unnerved murmur went through the half-dozen observing elders. They examined the empty spot. No residue. No blast crater. No evidence of cursed technique use in the traditional sense. The lack of violence was the most shocking violence of all. It was the absolute antithesis of Zenin combat philosophy, which prized the spectacular display of force and the measurable acquisition of power.
"He didn't hurt it physically," whispered an older sorcerer, adjusting his glasses nervously. "He... he shattered its spiritual conviction. He convinced it to give up."
Maari glowered, her disappointment warring with her tactical instinct. The power was subtle, un-Zen like, but effective. "This is a humiliation. A pacifier." Yet, her strategic mind, honed by decades of cutthroat survival, registered the chilling implications for human targets. The boy could pacify without expending raw power. He could achieve a total kill a spiritual dissolution without making a sound or leaving a trail.
"The technique is confirmed: Saṃsāra Cycle," Maari finally announced, the name tasting like ash and heresy on her tongue. "It manipulates the spiritual cycle of the target. A useless killing technique against large, resilient Curses, but potentially devastating for intelligence gathering or psychological incapacitation against human sorcerers. He's a tactical asset, not a frontline warrior."
She knelt before Nayona, not with tenderness, but with chilling, absolute control. The intimacy of the gesture was terrifying. "Listen to me, boy. In the Zenin clan, we turn even wisdom into a weapon. You will learn to focus that Rebirth Loop not on an entire existence, but on a human enemy's trauma their fear, their regret, their single greatest sin. You will use the cycle of life to make them wish for death. You will show them their past life's failures and their future life's damnation. You will weaponize despair. Do not speak of peace again. In this house, Saṃsāra is a cage, not a release. Understood?"
That night, Nayona lay awake, looking at the intricate ceiling beams. He had successfully manifested his power, but the cost was its immediate corruption. The Zenin sought to turn his philosophical tool of liberation into a precise instrument of torment. His power was a mirror, and the Zenin only wanted to reflect hate.
The method is sound, he thought, tracing the newly formed flow of Cursed Energy through his small limbs. The function is to show the truth of the Wheel. Their purpose is suffering. My path will be to guide the wheel toward release, even if they only intend it for despair. I must be the silent refuge. He vowed that one day, he would use the Saṃsāra Cycle to grant the greatest release of all: the unbinding of the suffering Zenin clan itself, freeing them from their attachment to power and malice, thereby dissolving the toxic foundation of their house.