The wood hit the floor.
Thud.
My knees buckled immediately after. I didn't fall, but it was a close thing. My right hand caught the edge of the low wooden table, sending a dull, sickening vibration through my arm and straight into my cracked ribs.
I sucked air through my teeth.
Hiss.
It was a sharp, jagged sound. The exact opposite of what Tanjiro had shown me.
"You're gasping again," Tanjiro said.
He didn't even look up from the charcoal crate he was unloading by the door. His movements were fluid, even though he was covered in black dust and shivering from the mountain wind.
"When you gasp, you tense the intercostal muscles," he continued, his voice flat and clinical. "When you tense those muscles, they pull on the fractures. You're stabbing yourself from the inside. Every single time."
"Shut up," I rasped.
My forehead was pressed against the cold wood of the table. Sweat was stinging my eyes. The room felt like it was spinning at a slow, nauseating tilt. I could feel the heat of the hearth on my right side and the draft of the mountain winter on my left.
I was a mess. A week ago, I was cutting through flesh. Now, a five-pound log of cedar was winning the fight. My body felt like a machine with half its bolts missing.
"Sit down," Tanjiro's mother, Kie, said.
She walked over and placed a hand on my shoulder. Her touch was light, but I flinched. Everything was hyper-sensitive. My nervous system was on a hair-trigger, misinterpreting every touch as a threat. My skin felt raw, as if the blizzard had peeled away a layer of my soul along with my body heat.
"You've done enough for today," she said. "Your bandages are red. You'll bleed through the futon if you keep forcing this. Pushing won't make the bone knit faster. It will only make it jagged."
"I don't care about the futon," I said, but I sat.
The relief was instantaneous, but it felt like a defeat. Every second I spent sitting was a second the world moved on without me. I looked at my hands. They were pale, the knuckles prominent. I had lost weight. My body was eating its own muscle to repair the bone. The calluses on my palms were softening—a soldier's greatest fear.
Tanjiro finished with the crate and walked over. He stood in front of me. He didn't have the build of a warrior. He had the build of a beast of burden. Thick neck, broad shoulders, low center of gravity. He looked at me not with pity, but with a strange, analytical distance.
"Why are you in such a hurry?" he asked.
"I'm in a hurry to be capable," I said. "There are things out there. You saw them. You saw what happened in that ravine. You saw the blood."
Tanjiro's expression didn't change, but his scent—or the way he carried himself—went sharp. He knew what I was talking about. He lived on this mountain. He knew the stories, even if he hadn't seen the monsters face-to-face yet.
"I saw a man who couldn't protect himself," Tanjiro said. "If I hadn't found you, the crows would have finished you. You want to be capable? Then stop fighting the air. You treat your lungs like a bellows. They aren't a tool. They're the engine. If the engine is flooded, the wheels don't turn."
He sat down across from me on the floor, crossing his legs.
"Watch my chest," he commanded.
I watched. He wasn't wearing much—just a thin kimono. I could see the movement of his torso. It didn't heave. His shoulders didn't rise and fall like mine did when I was winded. Instead, his entire midsection expanded outward, a uniform swelling of the trunk.
Inhale.
The expansion was slow. Methodical. I could hear the air entering his nostrils—a clean, consistent stream. There was no hitching. No struggle. It was a perfect vacuum.
Hold.
His body remained perfectly still. Not a muscle twitched. He wasn't holding his breath by closing his throat; he was holding it by keeping his diaphragm locked in a downward position, creating internal pressure that supported his spine from the inside.
Exhale.
The air left his mouth in a thin, focused line. It sounded like steam escaping a pressurized valve. Controlled. Lethal in its precision.
"Do it," he said.
I tried. I forced my belly out.
Crack.
A sharp, lightning-bolt pain shot from my left sixth rib. I buckled, clutching my side. My vision went dark at the edges.
"No," Tanjiro said, his voice hard. "You're forcing the muscle. You're using your abs to push. That's wrong. You have to let the vacuum do the work. Relax the tension. If you're tense, the bone moves. If you're soft, the bone stays. Adaptation is about yielding, not breaking."
"It's easy for you to say," I groaned, leaning back against the wall. "Your ribs aren't in three pieces. Your lungs aren't scarred."
"My father did this when he was so sick he couldn't stand," Tanjiro said. "He danced for three days in the snow during the Kagura. He didn't do it with muscle. He didn't have any muscle left. He did it because he knew how to move the energy through the breath. If he could do it while dying, you can do it while healing."
I looked at him. He wasn't lying. There was a weird, stubborn conviction in his eyes. He believed in this "rhythm" more than he believed in the ground beneath his feet.
I closed my eyes. I let my arms hang limp at my sides. I focused on the tip of my nose.
Inhale.
I didn't try to fill my lungs. I just let the air fall in. I imagined my chest was a hollow vessel, empty and waiting.
I felt the rib move. It hurt, but the pain wasn't the sharp "stabbing" sensation from before. It was a duller, more manageable ache. Like a bruise rather than a knife.
Hold.
I counted. One. Two. Three. My heart was thudding against the inside of my chest like a trapped bird. I tried to slow it down. I tried to tell my heart that we weren't in the ravine anymore.
Exhale.
I let the air out slowly. My body slumped, but I stayed upright.
"Again," Tanjiro said.
We did this for an hour. The sun dipped lower, casting long, bruised-purple shadows across the snow outside. The house grew colder. Kie started the evening meal—more of that thin soup and some pickled radishes. The smell of vinegar and boiling roots filled the room.
By the time we stopped, my head was buzzing. It wasn't the lightheadedness of oxygen deprivation. It felt like my blood was vibrating. A strange, electric hum was running through my limbs. The cold in the room didn't feel as biting. The dull ache in my side had receded into a numb, warm sensation.
"Better," Tanjiro said, standing up. He stretched his back, the joints popping like dry twigs. "Your heart rate is down. You aren't wasting as much heat. You're starting to adapt."
"What is this?" I asked. "Is this a style? A school of combat?"
"It's just surviving," Tanjiro replied. "In the mountains, if you don't breathe right, you freeze. If you don't move right, you fall. There's no name for it. It's just the way the world demands we live."
He walked toward the door to get more water.
I looked over at Kū-on in the corner. For the first time since I woke up, the sword didn't look like an impossible weight. It didn't look like a burden. It looked like a tool.
I stood up. This time, it didn't take twenty minutes. It took ten seconds.
I walked to the corner. My gait was still stiff, my left side still heavily guarded, but I wasn't dragging my feet anymore. My center of gravity felt lower, more stable. I reached down and picked up the blade.
I didn't try to swing it. I just held it.
I matched my breath to the weight of the steel.
Inhale. The sword felt heavy. Exhale. The weight shifted into my feet, into the floor. The sword became part of my arm again.
I wasn't a warrior again. Not yet. My edges were still dull. But I was no longer a broken man. I was a man in the process of being reforged. I was learning the mechanics of a machine I had been using wrong for my entire life.
I looked at the notched, ruined edge of the blade. It was a mess. It needed a grindstone. It needed fire. It needed to be reborn, just like I did.
"Tomorrow," I whispered to the steel. "Tomorrow, we go outside. Tomorrow, we see if the mountain still wants us."
I sat back down on the futon, but I didn't lie down. I stayed upright, legs crossed, back against the wall. I kept the rhythm going.
Inhale. Hold. Exhale.
The pain was there, a constant companion, but it was no longer the master of the house. I was the one in control.
I watched the embers of the hearth die down until they were nothing but a faint, orange glow in the dark. I didn't feel the cold. I only felt the air moving in and out, a slow, steady tide that was slowly knitting me back together.
I would be ready. When the things in the snow came back—and they always came back—I wouldn't be a victim.
I would be the thing that breathes in the dark.