** Thirty minutes earlier
The lessons from the previous day had carved me anew.
Learning to access soul energy wasn't a trick — it was a wound carved by will.
I discovered that opening that inner door wasn't about technique, but about pure desperation: it was like trying to break open the lock of a nuclear bunker with your bare hands. There was only one kind of fuel that worked there — the will to not die.
Nothing more honest, nothing more raw.
So I used that will.
I pushed it inward, consumed it, until the lock finally gave way.
When the soul energy finally responded, it didn't come with fireworks — it came as a whisper that ran through my bones and etched its ink into my brain.
The trick of the eyes — the one I'd used with halo energy — could be repeated using soul energy, becoming the trigger that allowed the technique to write itself onto my body like a sentence carved with a dagger.
The sensation was strange and immediate: a thin, icy flow surged from the depths of my mind, slid through my veins, and settled like a thread around my blade.
My eyes, once human and weary, turned pale as alabaster — white — and yet I could see with more clarity than in any battle before. I saw the layers between air and strike, and began to understand the idea of letting my own soul energy become an afterimage of who I was.
The secret was intention. The stronger your intention to win, to cause pain, to kill — the stronger the afterimage became.
Soul energy responded to will; in the end, everything came down to how badly you wanted something to happen. That's why they said willpower was the energy of the soul itself.
"BOOOOOOOOOOOM!"
The impact came as always — stone exploding, ash scattering.
But something had changed in the rhythm of the world.
Behind me, like a shadow, an afterimage followed every movement — not just a visual echo, but a doubled body that existed for a breath longer.
Where I once saw a single movement, now there were two — my present motion and its delayed reflection, following me with a measured lag, like a note striking just after the chord.
The guardian, too, produced his own afterimage — a marble distortion that replicated his arcs, so each collision unfolded in two shockwaves: the first from the real body, the second, a ghostly repetition when the afterimage reached the original physical position.
It was terrifying and beautiful — a two-tempo dance that tore through the air.
In the midst of the carnage, I finally understood the principle that had haunted me since the first lesson: the Phantom Moon Technique didn't make the strike appear — it extended it in time, granting a second chance to execute the same attack twice, in two distinct moments.
What seemed invisible was, in truth, something that could only be seen through a very specific energy — the energy of the soul.
There was a delay between action and repercussion, a space where a shadow of myself could act with its own will.
And through trial and error, I discovered that to kill that eternal abomination, it wasn't enough to pierce it with my current blade. I needed my afterimage — that obedient phantom trailing behind me — to deliver the final mark.
The killing blow had to occur in the second beat, when the replica's strike reached the point where the guardian's physical form had already "spent" its ethereal defenses.
I pictured the mechanism: provoke the first collision to measure the pulse of recoil; use my real body as bait and catalyst; align the swing of the afterimage so that, in the instant its replica crossed the creature's torso, the energy fueling its regeneration would break — impaled by a blade coming from the other side of time.
The realization burned and thrilled my chest at once. It was a gamble in two layers: first, to demand a monumental toll from my body to generate the afterimage; then, to carve the right intention into the delay, so the ghost of my own movement became the true blade. It was absurd, dangerous… and maybe, it was the only way.
I breathed.
Pain had become music now, and each breath tuned the string I needed to snap. I adjusted my grip, feeling the thread of soul energy vibrate like a harp string, brushing my wrist, guiding the arc of my arm. Out there, the guardian rolled between stones, rebuilding itself each second — denser, angrier, still bound to the mist that fed it.
'This is it,' I thought.
Our bodies clashed in a fury stripped of reason.
Each blade strike reverberated like a cataclysm — the mountain shattered, the ground splintered into shards of stone, and the air stank of ozone and iron.
The abomination now stood nearly five meters tall; the mist around it pulsed like an extra heart, and its marble flesh had hardened to a metallic gleam. Its blows, once brute, now carried the precision of a forge hammer — pure destruction.
I focused on the delay — that temporal gap I had memorized like the rhythm of a drum.
In the clash of our blades, I listened for the cadence of the second beat. Our battle followed a razor-thin line of synchronicity, both strikes landing with relentless ferocity.
But if I wanted to end it, I'd need a different strategy.
"Now!" For a split second, during one of our collisions, it wasn't my afterimage's blade that countered — it was the fist.
I froze my intention, dragged my will along the thread of the soul, and released the afterimage in a phantom punch straight to the creature's jaw.
The first true impact between my sword and its blade held the stalemate. But the second collapsed onto me like an avalanche — the phantom blade struck with brutal force, knocking my sword aside and slashing my face open in a deep wound. My right eye burst in a lacerating cut, and the blazing pain rang through my skull like a cracked bell.
In return, the monstrous body took both of my fists to its chin; its torso buckled, its stony flesh crumbled beneath my blows, and its feet left the ground, catapulted more than five meters into the air. The creature lost its footing and its balance.
I didn't even have time to scream.
The beast, dazed, was hurled upward, tracing a cruel arc across the sky bathed in the light of a full moon.
I tensed my legs and threw myself with all the strength I had left, as if the last fibers of my will were answering the call; my legs forgot exhaustion and launched me toward its exposed back. The blade I wielded pierced shallowly through its spine, but it was the strike of my specter that impaled it deeply — the afterimage rose like a second, cutting soul, carving a path within and spearing through it.
I wrapped my left arm around the creature's neck and, still gripping my sword tightly with the right, twisted in a desperate spin, dragging both of us toward the ground.
The world detonated in a single impact.
"BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM."
The crater was swallowed by dust.
My sword was buried at the center, pinning the abomination to the earth; I felt the hilt vibrate down to my wrist — then came the explosion of pain: my left arm snapped at an angle that shouldn't exist. The sound of bone cracking was dry, like splitting wood — and I smiled, a grin half madness, half triumph.
Without thinking, I grabbed the creature's own serrated blade with my right hand — crude, uneven steel, but sharp as the claws of a primitive world.
Savage instinct consumed me — something feral and unrestrained.
I swung again and again at its head, using the jagged blade as a weapon.
Each impact echoed, but the head wouldn't come off. Then the afterimage followed, repeating the process — "BOOOOOOOOM" — a delayed sentence that sealed its fate. The head burst into mist and stone, shattering into silver shards that scattered across the valley.
A bestial roar erupted from what was left of the creature — pure fury.
In a blood-soaked golden trance, I repeated the same process for each limb: a physical strike to wound, a temporal replica to shatter the re-forming mist.
I tore off legs, arms; its body dissolved into silver dust.
Finally, with one last surge, I split its torso in half.
The trunk collapsed like the column of a fallen statue, scattering fragments that still smoldered.
When silence finally fell, it was heavy as an iron lid. My body was a battlefield — slashed, bones exposed, one eye lost; hot blood dripped in circles around the sword that kept me standing.
I didn't fall because, stubbornly, I clung to the hilt buried in the ground and leaned on what was left of myself.
The world spun, and I could feel every organ trembling.
Triumph was there — bitter and cruel as the battle itself — because the price had been far too high.
My muscles twitched uncontrollably, the vision in my remaining eye began to blur, and I felt my mind slipping, my body fading.
And so we returned to the beginning — the moment I had won, yet was completely destroyed along with that damned Phantom Moon technique.
Kneeling, blood-soaked, staring at the shattered carcass of my "teacher," feeling every thread of energy whisper for the last time, my strength drained away and my body trembled in one spasm after another.
I gripped the hilt with the little vigor I had left and, through the haze rising like smoke from an offering, whispered to the world: there was a price for every technique, and I had paid it.
All that remained was to endure the final hours before the body claimed its debt.
It didn't take long for the price to be collected.
My body simply collapsed onto the gray ground — heavy, lifeless — as if every tendon and muscle had turned to ash along with the guardian. The outer world faded into a distant hum — the sound of mist dispersing, of wind scraping the stones, and of life itself retreating from me. Each breath was a razor scraping my chest; each heartbeat, a muffled thud announcing the inevitable collapse.
But inside me, something entirely different was happening.
In my inner world, above the black abyss stretching into infinity, far beyond the spatial rifts tearing through the void, across the firmament above the storm-laden clouds flashing with blue lightning...
Floated the same scenery that had always greeted me: two suns — one red, one blue — burning in eternal silence.
And now, for the first time, something new began to form between them.
Slowly, as if sculpted by the very echo of battle, a full moon — crimson as blood — started to take shape. It was only a spectral silhouette, translucent, unstable and trembling, but it was there — rising, drawing in a faint, ancient light.
It wasn't solid yet, but it was on its way to becoming so.
Every fragment of pain my body felt, every thread of energy I drained in the real world, seemed to be absorbed by that newborn moon, feeding it.
It was as if the price I had paid — the blood, the loss, the struggle, the destroyed eye — was being converted into the raw material for that inner celestial body. And deep down, even half-conscious, I knew what it was: a sign. A prelude. The harbinger of the true Phantom Moon technique.