Gashin

Akira Kageyama is an ordinary young man until the night an ancient demon called Gashin — the Devouring Eclipse, a being sealed since the Heian period — awakens inside him and nearly kills a stranger. Captured by the exorcist organization tasked with hunting threats like him, Akira is given an impossible choice by Kairo, the strongest exorcist of the modern era: become his student and learn to control the demon, or be executed before sunrise. Akira chooses to live — and is thrown into a world of exorcists, monster-fused vessels, and ancient evils he barely understands. He joins a class of wildly gifted students: Saki, the girl Gashin nearly killed, now forced to train alongside him; Tatsuya, a monstrously strong Vanguard-class fighter; Damien, a burnt-out genius who trades his own lifespan for power; and others, each with their own techniques, scars, and history. As Akira trains to master his own strength — and the ancient, calculating being sharing his body — he begins to realize Gashin isn’t a mindless monster, but a cursed human from a thousand years ago, one who still remembers what he lost. Meanwhile, forces move in the shadows: a council of elders who want Akira dead, a mysterious cult-robed figure quietly manipulating a family of powerful “Catastrophic” demons, and a hired killer called the Ghost Killer stalking Kairo and his old friend Keito for a bounty neither of them know exists yet. Woven through the present-day story are flashbacks to Kairo’s own youth — his rivalry-turned-friendship with Keito, his complicated bond with his master Miyako, and the origins of the techniques and relationships that shaped the man Akira now calls sensei. At its core, Gashin is a story about inherited violence and the choice to control power rather than be consumed by it — following a boy forced to share his body with a monster, a teacher hiding grief behind a smile, and a growing group of exorcists who will all eventually have to answer the same question: how much of yourself are you willing to sacrifice to protect the people you love? — Description from novelcodex.orgFull novel: Gashin — read the rest free on N​o⁠v​e⁠l​C⁠o​d⁠e​x⁠.​o⁠r​g⁠