While the Dream Realm was a chessboard of deceptions and defenses, and the waking world concealed invisible threats, the veil between dimensions was thinning, allowing new forces to emerge.
The Spirit Assassins were born not of magic, nor of the Ash, but from an ancient understanding of vital energy, the Ki, which permeated everything.
Their history was rooted in the Eastern lands, in remote mountain schools where monks and warriors learned to perceive, manipulate, and channel the Ki. To them, the world was a constant flow of this invisible energy, which coursed through the body, mind, and spirit.
When Ki was in balance, it manifested as health, vitality, and clarity. When it was unbalanced or corrupted, it brought sickness, weakness, and darkness.
Their philosophy was based on the idea that every living being possessed a Ki core, and that, through rigorous training, one could access powers that transcended physical limitations.
This training was divided into Five Schools, each focused on a specific aspect of Ki and its manifestation, named after the natural elements that embodied their qualities.
The initiates of the Water School learned to make their Ki fluid and changeable like a river.
Their training consisted of meditations under freezing waterfalls and movements that emulated the ebb and flow of the tides. They developed the ability to deflect attacks without offering resistance, turning the enemy's strength against them.
Their strikes, seemingly soft, could penetrate the most rigid defenses, dissolving adversarial energy like water erodes rock. They were masters of infiltration and disarmament, their spiritual arts silently lethal, capable of suffocating an opponent's Ki or making it docile to their own will.
The practitioners of the Fire School channeled their Ki into explosions of pure energy.
Their training involved intense exercises that generated body heat and focused on controlled anger. They were known for their speed and the ability to infuse their Ki into visible flames, capable of burning and purifying.
A punch or cut infused with Fire Ki could incinerate a target or trigger explosions, devastating spiritual and physical defenses. They were often the vanguards, the purifiers, their presence a burning flash in the dark.
The Earth School taught stability, resilience, and immovable strength.
Their students spent hours meditating in fixed positions, rooting their Ki into the ground, becoming one with the rock and the mountain. They developed exceptional physical and spiritual resistance, capable of absorbing tremendous impacts and repelling aggression with granite strength.
Their strikes were powerful and direct, capable of shattering armor and shaking an opponent's inner balance. They were the defenders, the immovable pillars of the sect.
The adherents of the Air School focused on lightness, speed, and the amplification of the senses. Their training involved rapid and silent movements, almost like a breath of wind.
They learned to move without leaving traces, to perceive the slightest change in the air and the surrounding Ki. Their presence was almost impalpable, their attacks swift and unpredictable.
They could create currents of Ki to disorient or push enemies, or to enhance their own agility to superhuman levels. They were the scouts and the quick attackers, able to strike and vanish before the enemy could react.
The rarest and most difficult, the Void School, focused not on an element, but on the absence of it—on totality.
They taught how to merge with the flow of universal Ki, to perceive harmony and disharmony on a broader scale. These masters could balance the other schools, drawing on all their strengths and perceptions, and could manipulate Ki in ways that defied comprehension, rendering their presence almost omnipresent.
The Ronin was a disciple of this school, which is why his perceptions were so refined.
Despite their mastery, even the Spirit Assassins were not immune. In recent months, some of them had sensed subtle discomforts: more restless sleep, a slight decrease in their natural vitality, a feeling of "heaviness" in the air that they could not explain.
These were the widespread effects of something influencing the Ki currents in ways they did not even comprehend. They knew nothing of an "Ash" or a "Dream Realm" in a magical sense.
They perceived only a growing disharmony in the world, and their mission in the West was, in part, a search for the causes of this imbalance.
The Ronin, after sending his message, returned to his meditation.
The distortions of the disharmonious entities had become more acute, closer. He knew their hunt represented a threat to the balance of Ki in those lands.
However, amidst all that negativity and disharmony, he had also perceived a strange and small positive variation in the flow of Ki right here, around the village.
Kenshin focused his listening, allowing his Void Ki to expand gently like a ripple on the surface of a pond. The Ash's disharmony was a jarring note, easy to isolate, but beneath it pulsed something different.
'It is not the earth itself,' he thought, his mind sharp as a blade. 'The earth is contaminated by their traces, but this... this is a warm, controlled flow. It is conscious manipulation, channeling vital energy. Pure, but unstable.'
It was the resonance of the Keepers recharging Anya, the manifestation of the Silent Guardian's Ki propagating from the hidden refuge. To the Ronin, it was not magic, but simply potent Ki, used for an active and defensive purpose.
'It is like a small fire, lit for warmth in the middle of a blizzard,' he reflected, mentally tracing the source. 'The fire does not fight the blizzard, but it draws attention to itself. It attracts those impure presences, like a shadow being drawn to light.'
The trace led him past the trees, where the positive Ki grew denser and more concentrated. He moved, rising from his meditation without a sound, his linen robes dissolving into the twilight shadows. He did not hurry, but his pace was the calculated speed of a predator.
'If this anomaly is strong enough to challenge the disorder, perhaps it is also the key to purifying it,' he concluded, as his Ki merged with the forest, rendering him invisible to sight and Ki alike.
He followed the positive current through the undergrowth, avoiding every dry twig, every unstable stone, until he reached the outermost edge of the woods. There, the beneficial Ki emanated in a barely perceptible protective bubble, just a few yards from the first, battered palisades of the village.
The Ronin stopped, becoming still in the air. His attention was now split: on one side, the growing and aggressive traces of the dark entities converging on the area; on the other, the source of that pure Ki, which was neither a threat nor an enemy. It was, simply, a point of resistance.
He needed to know more.