The Weapon Genius: Anything I Hold Can Kill-Chapter 100: Searching for the Demon’s Echo

The table was a mess of open books, diagrams sketched across faded pages, notes scribbled in cramped hands by instructors long dead. Jin flipped through them carefully, scanning each for some kind of thread. Something that could explain what had happened back in his sword’s inner world.

He hadn’t impressed Muramasa. He hadn’t even survived their clash.

But Muramasa had recognized something.

The form he used.

The way Jin had moved without thinking, drawn from somewhere deeper than memory.

It hadn’t been luck. It hadn’t been a fluke.

There was something real buried under his instinct.

Maybe if he understood it, if he found where it came from, he could turn it into something he could actually stand on.

He needed to know more.

And there was only one place to start, the swordsmanship of Muramasa’s time.

Jin pulled more books down, stacking them around him until the table looked like the aftermath of a desperate scholar’s siege. His fingers worked quickly now, flipping through Chapters, scanning dates, tracing the roots of technique across centuries.

It wasn’t neat. It wasn’t easy.

Most of the Heian era’s styles were fragmented, half-lost to time, their wisdom passed orally from swordsman to swordsman rather than meticulously recorded. But the glimpses he found told a clearer story than any polished manual.

Heian warriors didn’t duel for honor.

They fought to survive.

The blade was a tool of war, and every movement was a decision to live or die. No wasted steps. No flourishes. Only the shortest, most brutal path between one heartbeat and the next.

Jin leaned forward, his hand resting lightly against a page showing a simplified drawing, a warrior mid-step, sword low at the hip, eyes forward.

"The River’s Edge," the caption read.

"Strike before the river knows you have entered. Move as if you were always part of its current."

He could almost feel it, the pulse of combat, the way those warriors had. Not clashing blades in prolonged, theatrical battles, but moving once, decisively, ending the fight in the space between breaths.

Jin sat back, letting his muscles relax. His mind turned over the ideas slowly, feeling out the shape of something still forming.

Muramasa had called his form sacred.

Had accused him of defiling it.

But maybe what Jin had done was something closer to instinct reaching back through time. A broken, raw attempt to move the way warriors used to move. Before tradition buried it under ceremony.

He needed to test it.

Not in theory.

Not in imagination.

He needed to move.

Jin rose from his chair carefully, pushing the stack of books back just enough that they wouldn’t spill over. His hands hovered over one last manual for a moment, a battered old book that had been tucked near the back of the shelf.

"Of Flow and Steel," it read.

"Movement not as defiance of death, but acceptance of its presence. Each step taken with the knowledge that it may be the last."

Jin nodded once to himself.

No promises.

No grand declarations.

Just a man. A blade. And the simple, stubborn will to move one step closer to understanding.

He turned toward the library doors.

His boots scraped lightly against the worn floorboards as he crossed the room. Dust caught the light in soft eddies around his ankles, the old building breathing quietly and patiently as it always had.

Outside, the sun was well into its climb. The light was sharper now, cutting the edges of the training grounds into clearer focus.

Jin stepped through the doors without hesitation.

The warmth hit him first, a gentle press against his skin, chased by the faint tang of sweat from the distance, where Seul, Joon, Echo, and the recruits were still hammering away at their own training.

Jin ignored them for now.

This wasn’t about anyone else.

This was about the gap he had to cross himself.

He moved toward an empty patch of the yard, a space where the old stones had cracked under the pressure of time but still held enough firmness underfoot to trust.

Only then, when he had space, when he had breath—

He summoned the katana.

It flickered into his hand, the familiar hum running up his wrist.

The broken blade glinted under the sun, chipped but defiant.

Still standing.

Still ready.

Jin closed his eyes for a moment, feeling the weight settle into his palm.

The stance he had seen in the book rose easily in his mind’s eye. Feet shoulder-width apart. Weight forward but not locked. Sword low, the point almost invisible to an enemy’s distracted eye.

He adjusted, shifting his footing carefully.

Every motion deliberate.

Every breath drawn full and slow.

The broken katana felt awkward at first, its balance thrown off by the missing piece of steel. But he didn’t fight it. He let it remind him to move smarter. Cleaner. No wasted energy.

He inhaled deeply through his nose.

Stepped forward—

And cut.

The blade whispered through the empty air, not with the power of a system-enhanced skill, not with the reckless speed he used to rely on, but with intent.

Direct.

Clear.

He checked his footing after the slash, feeling where his weight had drifted wrong.

His hips needed to stay looser. His shoulder needed to be guided, not dragged.

He set himself again.

Stepped.

Cut.

Again.

And again.

The rhythm started slow, uneven, and almost awkward.

But the more he moved, the clearer the sensation became.

It wasn’t about speed.

It wasn’t about strength.

It was about moving through, not against.

Finding the gap in the enemy’s guard before it even truly existed.

Trusting that space to open because he willed it open.

He wiped the back of his arm across his forehead once, sweat already starting to bead at his temples.

No system prompts. No stat bonuses.

Just the ground under his boots.

The breath in his lungs.

And the broken sword stitching arcs through the sunlit air.

He wasn’t trying to be Muramasa.

He wasn’t trying to resurrect some lost art.

He was trying to find what was real for him.

A way forward that wasn’t borrowed.

A path that belonged to his own two feet.

Jin stepped again.

Cut.

Felt the blade hum against the resistance of the world—

Not breaking it yet.

But pressing.

Pushing.

Beginning.