Volume 7 Chapter 4 Ako’s Resolve
Edited by: Kanaa-senpai
Deep in the mountains, Ako pressed onward.
With the threshold of early summer looming, the spiritual temperature of the mountain air was gradually climbing. Fortunately, the thick canopy of leaves overhead fractured the harsh sunlight, casting deep shadows that offered a welcome reprieve from the heat. Every now and then, a refreshing breeze filtered through the trees, rich and thick with the crisp, vibrant scent of new greenery.
Even so, by the time she finally reached the mountain ridge, a thin sheen of sweat glistened against Ako’s forehead.
”Phew…”
Exhaling a soft breath, Ako slipped a plastic bottle from the side pocket of her backpack. She held it tightly for a moment, letting her innate chill sap the ambient warmth from the plastic, before taking a deep, satisfying draught of the ice-cold tea to soothe her parched throat.
She pulled out her map to check her bearings.
According to the marked route, she was supposed to follow the ridge line for a short while, then descend the slope and head down toward a mountain ravine. Hidden down along that rushing stream was the Ichino-yu1-the First Spring-which served as the training grounds.
Ako hadn’t asked what the training would actually entail. Unlike ordinary academic lessons, there were paths in an exorcist’s training where prior preparation and previewing only served to clutter the mind and hinder true mastery. Furthermore, the specific technique she sought to master today was Tonjutsu2, the ninja art of concealment, escape, and misdirection. There would be time enough to unpack the secrets of the craft once she had experienced it with her own body.
Closing the map, Ako slipped the bottle back into her pocket and set off through the mountain wilds once more. Far in the distance, the lonely cry of a wild pheasant echoed through the quiet peaks.
About thirty minutes later, she finally arrived. The Ichino-yu sat nestled right along the edge of a rushing mountain stream.
The massive boulders lining the riverbank were choked with thick, velvet moss, and the spiritual energy permeating the atmosphere was heavy with the damp, frigid mist of the water, leaving the entire area feeling ice-cold. Purity. Serenity. No other words could quite capture the essence of the space. It was the kind of sanctuary that naturally commanded reverence-a place that served as a stark reminder that humanity could never truly conquer or master every corner of this world.
Tucked into one corner of this clearing was a pool enveloped in rising white plumes of spiritual steam.
It was a man-made open-air bath, its border formed by stones meticulously laid out in a rough, one-meter oval. The water itself wasn’t particularly deep; it looked just large enough for a single adult to lie down and soak if they curled their knees tightly to their chest. A weathered wooden signpost, bearing the unmistakable marks of age, stood driven into the earth nearby.
Ako took a slow lap around the perimeter of the open-air bath to inspect it. Though the stone rim appeared casually assembled at a glance, it was built with flawless structural integrity. A thick white line-crusted mineral deposits from the hot spring-clung to the edges of the rock. A narrow, trench-like channel had been cut into the earth to drain the overflow away from the main stream, and its bed was similarly stained a chalky white.
A tiny river crab darted across the rocks, passing right between her feet.
”Ah-“
Suddenly, the wind veered, sweeping a thick gust of the rising steam directly across her legs.
The sheer intensity of the heat made her catch her breath in surprise. It was scalding.
Undoubtedly, the spring wasn’t meant to be used raw; one was supposed to mix it with the cold water of the mountain stream to regulate the temperature. Yet, while there was clearly space designed for the waters to meet, there were no tools, no buckets, and absolutely no instructions left behind.
Ako turned back toward the wooden signpost to find a clue.
Elegant, flowing characters had been painted onto the weathered wood in a stark, bold black that looked far too fresh for the board beneath it. It had clearly been repainted recently. Deciphering the text was easy enough, but the writing amounted to nothing more than a generic description of the spring’s origins and its health benefits-the exact sort of thing you would find at any mundane hot spring resort.
”Oh…”
As Ako stepped around to the back of the signpost, a soft murmur escaped her lips.
Attached to the reverse side was a crisp, brand-new slip of paper. Written in a masterful, sweeping hand that possessed a distinctly soft, feminine grace was a single, cryptic phrase:
”Bring them to absolute balance.”
The sign conveniently omitted the most crucial piece of information-what exactly she was supposed to balance-but after coming all this way, there was no matching possibility that this was unrelated to the spring. And it certainly wasn’t as simple as merely dumping river water into the source-or so she assumed.
Ako stepped down to the riverbank and dipped her hand into the rushing stream to gauge its temperature.
Within seconds, her fingers went numb, a biting, bone-deep chill seeping straight into her skeletal structure. The natural temperature of the water was already incredibly low, and because the riverbed was shallow and the current swift, it stripped away bodily warmth with terrifying efficiency. (In the dead of summer, this place must feel like a natural refrigerator,) she thought to herself.
Pulling her numbed hand from the river, she immediately plunged it into the source of the hot spring.
The transition was jarring; the blistering heat made the water feel as though it were boiling against her frozen skin, throwing her senses into total disarray. If she hadn’t protected her flesh with her internal pool of spiritual energy, she would have suffered severe burns on the spot. The spring had to be fluctuating somewhere between sixty and seventy degrees Celsius, while the river stream couldn’t be more than ten.
First, Ako decided to try cooling the spring directly.
When people heard the word Yuki-onna, they invariably assumed the bloodline’s power was strictly limited to conjuring ice and snow. But if one parsed the ability down to its fundamental roots, it was entirely a matter of manipulating thermal energy and controlling temperature. Perhaps in a bygone era, before the advancement of physical sciences, it had been perceived differently. But Ako was a child of the modern world, and she carried the common sense taught to her in the present day. Attempting to wield her power while completely ignoring those natural laws wasn’t impossible, but it was profoundly inefficient.
”…It’s no use, is it?” Ako muttered to herself.
The physical volume of the spring’s output wasn’t overwhelming. If she unleashed the full weight of her power, she could easily freeze the entire pool solid in an instant. Yet, the moment she tried to gently lower the temperature to match the natural flow of the stream, she found she couldn’t penetrate its core; the water’s supernatural depth resisted her, holding onto its searing heat.
The Ayabe clan hadn’t chosen this place as a sacred training ground for nothing. This wasn’t just water; it had to be classified as a spiritual font, a localized locus of anomalous power.
Could she raise the temperature of the entire rushing stream to match the spring instead? She dismissed the thought immediately without even trying. Heating was fundamentally against her nature, and the sheer volume and velocity of the river water vastly outmatched the hot spring.
What if she simply forced her way through and froze both bodies of water completely? No, that was nothing more than a crude display of brute force. If she caused irreversible damage to a sacred spiritual font, it could create a permanent rift between their families.
She needed to tap into a perception she had never used before. Fortunately, the crucial hint had been given to her very recently.
”So, it’s about the manipulation of heat, is it?” Touma Yukinojo-san had said during their recent discussion, his voice carrying the clean, precise cadence of a master. “Forgive me for answering a question with a question, but when you ‘cool’ something, Ako-san… Ah, I see. It’s exactly the same as how I do it. That might make it easier for you to visualize.”
Those were the words of the strongest exorcist in Japan-the third-generation Touma Yukinojo-san, who shared her Yuki-onna lineage. To cool was not to destroy heat. It was to take, and then to give.
It wasn’t a revolutionary concept. Thermal exchange was a fundamental principle woven into the fabric of everyday human life, utilized across countless fields of modern technology. The theory was perfectly clear in her head; all she lacked was the visceral, physical realization of it.
Perhaps due to her heritage, Ako’s baseline body temperature was unusually low, and her deep-seated aversion to heat meant she had always preferred light clothing. Because of this, her mind had become conditioned to see heat as something to be “discarded”-an unwanted waste product to be thrown away.
She had to shatter that ingrained mental framework.
And once again, fortune smiled upon her, for she had recently accumulated a wealth of experiences that could serve as her anchor.
Namely, her intimate physical unions with her adoptive brother, Naoshi-san.
The memory of his voice and his touch flooded her mind, carrying that blunt, warm, comforting Northern weight that always cut straight through her defenses. When they held each other close, tangling their limbs and sharing their skin, the intense heat moving back and forth between them wasn’t something stolen, nor was it something forced away. It wasn’t a matter of one person taking and the other losing out. They were melting into each other completely, dissolving every boundary, until they were simply sharing the warmth as one cohesive whole.
Clinging to that exact physical memory, Ako dropped to her knees on the damp earth. She extended both arms to their absolute limits, immersing her right hand deep into the boiling source of the hot spring, and her left into the biting current of the mountain river.
She closed her eyes, driving her consciousness deep, deep into her internal core. Using her own spiritual pathways as a conduit, she began to bridge the two extremes, forcing the disparate thermal profiles to find an equilibrium through her.
The visualization expanded through her mind with a fluid, effortless ease she had never experienced during her previous attempts at heating.
Slowly, the sensations shocking her palms began to shift, rewriting themselves until the water enveloping both hands softened into a perfectly uniform, exquisitely comfortable warmth.
(I did it.)
The moment the realization solidified and she opened her eyes, a sharp splash fractured the quiet of the ravine right beside her.
”A lukewarm bath…” a sharp female voice muttered from the edge of the pool. “Is this really your preference? Talk about terrible taste.”
There had been absolutely no shift in the spiritual atmosphere-no presence, no warning whatsoever.
”?!”
Startled, Ako snapped her gaze toward the sound. Standing right there in the open-air pool, having appeared out of thin air, was a young girl clad in a striking scarlet kimono, her face concealed behind a lacquered fox mask, casually dipping her bare feet into the newly balanced water.
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Summary:
Ako journeys deep into a secluded mountain ravine to begin her training at the Ichino-yu spring. After discovering a cryptic hint left behind on a wooden signpost, she attempts to harmonize the opposing thermal extremes of a freezing stream and a boiling supernatural font. She achieves a profound breakthrough by leveraging the somatic memories of her physical intimacy with Naoshi, only to be abruptly interrupted by an enigmatic girl wearing a fox mask.
—
Trivia:
The Ichino-yu is explicitly treated as a sacred training ground under the jurisdiction of the Ayabe clan.
Yuki-onna abilities are fundamentally based on the manipulation of thermal energy rather than simply generating snow out of nothing.
Ako subconsciously visualizes her supernatural powers through the lens of modern thermodynamic concepts due to her mainstream education.
Touma Yukinojo is established as the strongest exorcist in Japan and acts as a direct conceptual mentor for Ako.
The mysterious girl wearing the fox mask leaves zero trace of spiritual presence or intent before materializing.
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Translation Notes:
Notes:
• Ako – A young girl with a doll-like, expressionless face who conceals deep emotional intensity. She is the niece and adopted sister of Naoshi and serves as the assistant to the Acting Head of the Kazuramichi family while possessing the blood of a Yuki-onna.
• Ayabe – The Ayabe family name, associated with Nara. The lineage is one of the Kansai Eight Families and has its roots in a clan of shinobi.
• Touma Yukinojo – The head of the Touma family, a prominent exorcist clan from Kanto. At just 21 years old, he is regarded as the strongest exorcist in Japan, known for his exceptional swordsmanship and mastery over fire. He is also referred to by the title ‘Ice Blade’, which scatters spirits, and is noted for possessing the ‘Divine Eye’, a unique ability that further enhances his prowess. Yukinojo is described as a handsome young man with the blood of a snow woman.
• Naoshi – A man with thin lips and a cynical smirk who possesses eyes that occasionally soften with a rare, gentle light. He is the only son of the Kazuramichi house head and acts as the legal guardian and step-brother to Ako, operating with a ‘fake’ Kansai accent.
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Edited by Kanaa-senpai.
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