The training had been going on for another two weeks.
Kikimuras body was getting stronger. He could feel it. His muscles were awake now. Like they had been sleeping and only now started to move.
That night, his body would not let him sleep.
He lay on his back. Stared at the ceiling. The room was dark. The house was quiet. No footsteps. No voices. Even Ashur was somewhere sleeping, probably filling up half a room with his body.
Kikimura turned to his side. Then to the side. Then back again.
His mind was too busy. It kept going in circles, running over the things he had learned. The breathing that Ashur showed him. The stances. The way KI felt like a river when he focused. The journal in the library.. The Servants of the Void.
He sat up.
He looked at the window. Outside, the grassland was silver under the night sky.
He got dressed quietly. Put on his boots and opened the door.
The house was completely dark. He moved through the hallway slowly, feeling the walls with his fingers. He passed the door to the library. Passed the kitchen. Made it to the door.
He. Listened.
Nothing. Just the faint sound of wind outside.
He opened the door carefully. One hinge made a sound. He froze. Waited. Still nothing. He slipped out.
The night hit him immediately. It was cooler than he expected. The air was clean and smelled of grass and wet earth. The stars above were countless. He had never seen many of them in his village. The sky there always seemed small. Here the sky was enormous.
He took a breath.
The grassland stretched out in front of him.. Vast and silent. The grass moved in the wind making sounds like water. There was no path. There were no trees or stones to mark direction. Just the flat land rolling away in every direction under the sky.
He started walking.
No reason. No direction. His feet just moved.
The grass was tall. It reached his waist in some places. Rustled against his clothes as he pushed through it. The moon was above him, not quite full, giving enough light to see a few steps ahead. His boots were quiet on the earth beneath the grass.
He walked for a time.
He did not think about anything at first. He just. Breathed and let the night be around him. It felt good to move without being told how. Without a stance to hold or a breathing pattern to follow. Just walking like a person.
He thought about his village. About his father's face, pale and still under the blanket. About the graduation, he watched from a tree. About the way Makira used to be his friend before everything changed. He wondered where she was now. What school did she go to? Whether she ever thought about Kikimura.
"Probably not". Kikimura thought.
He kept walking.
After a while, he stopped thinking about those things. Started noticing the grassland instead. It was beautiful at night. He had not expected that. During the day, it was just green and endless. At night, it became something else. The grass caught the moonlight. Turned silver. The shadows between the blades were dark and deep. The air smelled different.
Then he realised something.
"Where am I ?" He had no idea which direction the house was.
He stopped.
He turned around slowly. Looked in every direction. Grass. Stars. Darkness. Grass.
It all looked the same.
His stomach dropped.
He tried to retrace the path he had walked...
"Which way? " He had turned at some point. He was sure of that.. How many times? He could not remember.
He walked a step in the direction he thought was right. Then stopped again. Looked around again. Still the same.
The grassland was identical in every direction.
Panic started to rise in his chest. A familiar feeling. The kind he used to get in the forest. He pressed it down.
"Think..."
He looked up at the stars. The moon was... There. To his left. That meant west was that direction. So the house should be...
He did not know which direction the house was from the clearing. He had never paid attention to that. He had always followed the path the old man showed him.
"Stupid".
He told himself.
He stood still. Forced his breathing to slow. Ashur's breathing. Deep. From the center.
He breathed in. Breathed out. Breathed in again.
Then something happened.
It was not a sound. It was not a sight. It was a feeling. A pull.
Something at the edge of his awareness, like a weight on one side of a balance.
His instinct, the thing that had kept Kikimura alive in the forest, the same thing that let him sense danger before it arrived, was pointing at something.
He turned toward it.
His body was still uncertain.. The pull was real. He had felt enough of his KI in the training days to recognise when something was guiding him from inside.
He started walking toward the pull.
The cliff appeared slowly. First, as a shape against the sky. Then as something. A rock face rising out of the earth, much smaller than a mountain. Taller than any building he had seen. The grassland simply ended at its base, replaced by stone and shadow.
Kikimura stood at the bottom. Looked up.
The cliff was maybe thirty meters high. The stone was old. He could see that in the dark. It was the kind of old that had nothing to do with how worn it looked. It was old in the way that certain things feel old. Heavy with time.
He walked along the base of it following the pull.
Then he found the cave.
"What is this ?"
The entrance was not large.
It was not dramatic. Just a gap in the rock. Tall enough to walk without bending. Enough for two people side by side. The darkness inside was complete.
Kikimura stood at the entrance. Looked in.
The air coming from inside was cool. Not cold like winter. Cool like stone. Like water. It smelled of minerals. Of something that had not been breathed in a time.
"It looks like a bad Idea". He stood there for a moment.
Then he stepped inside.
The darkness swallowed him immediately.
He. Waited for his eyes to adjust. Slowly, the shapes of the walls appeared. The passage was narrow at first. The ceiling was low but not so low that he had to crouch. His footsteps echoed softly.
He moved forward slowly one hand on the wall.
"The wall feels strange, not rough like expected". The wall was smooth. Too smooth. Like someone had worked the stone.
He pressed his palm flat against it. Moved it slowly.
The surface was almost polished. There were marks in it. Grooves that his fingers followed. Too regular to be cracks. Too deliberate.
He kept walking.
The passage began to slope. The air was changing too. Getting cooler and fresher. Which made no sense. The deeper you went underground, the staler the air usually became.
The passage opened.
He stepped through. Stopped.
A chamber. Vast. The ceiling was above him, higher than he could judge in the dark. The walls curved outward into a space bigger than anything the passage had suggested.
In the center of it: the lake.
"This is..." Kikimura did not move for a time.
The water glowed.
Not because of moonlight, though there was a crack far above that let in a thin beam of it. The water itself glowed. A pale white light came from deep beneath the surface, steady and calm. It did not flicker like fire. It did not move. It simply was.
The lake was large.
He could not see the edge. The light from the water lit the chamber dimly but enough. Enough to see the walls. Enough to see his hands. Enough to see the reflection of his face looking up at him from the surface.
He walked to the edge slowly.
The water was clear. In the glow, he could see the bottom near the shore. Pale stone, smooth, the stone as the walls.
Out of the bottom dropped away into a deeper blue and then into darkness.
"I can see my face..." He crouched down. Held his hand just above the surface.
The air above it was cold.
He did not touch the water.
He stood up and looked around.
The walls of the chamber were the same as the passage. Smooth. Worked.
"These marks look strange..." There were marks everywhere. He walked along the edge of the lake, carefully studying them. Patterns. Lines. Shapes that might have been letters, in a language he did not know.. Pictures too worn to recognise.. Something else entirely.
"I can't read any of them". Kikimura thought to himself.
He stood at the lake's edge. Breathed with the technique Ashur had taught him. Deep. Centered. Aware.
In the stillness of the place surrounded by the glow of the water and the ancient silence of the stone, he felt his KI more clearly than ever before during training.
It was like the place was helping him feel it.
Like the cave itself had a quality that made KI easier to feel.
He stayed longer than he should have.
"I need to go back..." When he finally thought about time, time and not just the feeling of the place, he looked up at the crack in the ceiling.
The light coming through it was still dark. Still night.
The color had changed slightly. A shade less black. Deep blue.
It was getting close to dawn.
He traced his way back through the chamber, the passage, the darkness and out into the night air.
He used the stars to find his direction. The moon had moved. He corrected for it. Started walking.
He found the house just as the sky was beginning to turn grey at the edges.
He slipped inside. Down the hallway. To his room.
He took off his boots and lay down on the bed.
He did not sleep. His eyes stayed open. Stared at the ceiling again.
The same ceiling from before. The same quiet house.
The same distant sound of wind outside.
But he was different now.
He thought about the cave. The glowing water. The smooth walls. The marks he could not read.
The way his KI had felt in that silence. Cleaner. Closer. More real.
Questions kept coming to him.
How long had that cave been there? Who had worked those walls? Why did the water glow? What were the marks?
"Did the old man know about it?" That last question stuck with him.
He thought about everything he had observed in the days.
The way the old man had gone silent when he touched Kikimura's back.
The library with its section. The beast with his glasses and his patient teaching.
The girl who would not give her name, nor her grandfather.
Everyone in this house had secrets.
Maybe the cave was one of them.
The grey light outside the window grew slowly. The grassland became visible in pieces. The dark shapes of grass turning green.
Kikimura closed his eyes. Not to sleep. Just to hold the memory of the cave clearly.
The glow of the water. The cool air. The silence that felt alive.
"I will definitely go back". He was certain of that before he even finished the thought.
He would go back as soon as he could.
The house came alive around him slowly.
Footsteps somewhere. The sound of a pot.
Morning starting.
Kikimura lay in bed. Smiled at the ceiling. Exited.