Night fell.
The open wilderness. Aya-Gozen's procession had made camp upon a broad, open meadow. Her escort of over twenty riders established a perimeter, bonfires crackling to life, the horses tethered near the low thickets on the leeward side.
Aya-Gozen's tent was pitched at the very center, its flap half-drawn, revealing the thin bedding and neatly folded traveling packs within.
She did not enter the tent. Instead, she sat beside the campfire, a bowl of hot broth cradled in her hands. The hem of her dark kimono spread across the grass, the firelight casting a warm glow over her features and tracing her brows with a soft, amber hue.
The curve of her waist, cinched by the narrow sash of her riding kimono, was sharply defined in the fire's sidelong light, softer than her younger sister Kenshin, her shoulders more rounded, the fabric of her divided hakama stretched full and smooth over her hips where she sat upon the ground. The night wind swept across the meadow, carrying the chill of late autumn.
Yet her gaze was fixed upon the darkness beyond the camp's perimeter. In that direction, roughly twenty paces away, there was a figure. Gray robes. Flowing white hair. Seated upon a stone, his bamboo hat resting beside his knee.
He simply sat there. No fire kindled. Not drawing near. As though he had merely happened to pass by and chosen this spot to rest. But Aya-Gozen remembered this man. The one she had brushed past on the main road during the day. The strange warrior who spoke to stones and grass.
"Have you been following us?" Aya-Gozen spoke. Her voice was not loud, yet it carried clearly through the night wind. The guards within the camp tensed at her words, hands flying to their hilts, their gazes snapping toward that direction. Only then did they realize someone was there.
In the darkness, the figure stirred. He rose. The bamboo hat was left aside. Moonlight fell upon his pale face, features sharp and striking, countenance cold and severe, pupils a deep, vivid crimson.
It was a very young face. In the intermingled light of the campfire and the moon, those demonic eyes were startlingly conspicuous.
"Your perception is keen," Shinji said, his voice flat. "But I have no interest in following you. What I'm following simply happens to share the same road."
Aya-Gozen was not frightened by those eyes. She was Uesugi Kenshin's elder sister. Having spent her days in the company of two successive incarnations of Bishamonten, she had seen more inhuman things than all the guards present combined. She was merely curious.
"Then why have you stopped here?"
"To rest."
"There are plenty of places twenty paces away."
"This stone is the best in the area."
"..."
Aya-Gozen fell silent for a moment. She set down her soup bowl, suppressing the blunt words that had nearly escaped her lips—You're referring to that thing that looks like a lump of cracked charcoal?
"You don't seem like an ordinary traveler."
"I'm not a traveler. I'm not even human."
Shinji spoke these words, and before Aya-Gozen could react, his demon eyes swept across the darkness surrounding the camp. His gaze stopped. "Your luck is truly terrible."
Aya-Gozen's brow furrowed. "What do you mean?"
Shinji lifted his head and looked at the sky. The moon was perfectly full. It hung at the very center of the heavenly vault, its silver-white light bathing the wilderness in a cold, clear glow. And then, the moonlight dimmed.
There were no clouds. Something was beginning to devour the light from the moon's edge. The Heavenly Dog devouring the moon. A lunar eclipse. The shadow began to spread from the lower-left curve of the lunar disk, slowly, inexorably consuming the silver-white circle.
With every fraction the moonlight faded, the temperature across the meadow dropped another degree. By itself, this was merely a celestial phenomenon. But in this world where demons and monsters ran rampant, an eclipse had never been merely a change of the moon alone.
The moment the moonlight vanished, was also the moment the things lurking in the dark grew most active.
A faint stench of decay began to permeate the air. Faint. But undeniably present. Aya-Gozen smelled it. She rose to her feet, her hand closing around the short blade at her waist.
"All hands, on guard!"
The captain of the guard barked the order. The samurai drew their blades and formed a defensive ring. Half the moon had already been swallowed.
The wilderness plunged into a dim, ashen twilight. And then, from every direction in the darkness, sounds began to rise. Something was approaching. And it was not one. It was many.
Ashen-white figures poured out from the tall grass. From behind the low hills. From the distant tree line. Skin gray and waxy. Mouths split to the ears. Fangs jagged and interlocking. Eyes jaundiced and clouded.
Demons.
The demons spawned by Kibutsuji Muzan. Neither yōkai nor monster, but humans mutated by a tainted blood, possessing near-infinite regenerative ability. Their only weakness, sunlight. Their numbers… at least over thirty. Surpassing the number of humans present. Every single one of them was staring at the camp.
Staring at the scent of living flesh emanating from within. On the night of a lunar eclipse, a demon's regenerative ability and sensory range were both amplified.
This was a special window of time that even the Demon Slayer Corps dreaded. And Aya-Gozen's company had stumbled directly into it.
The faces of the guards had gone bone-white. They did not recognize these as demons, only as things that resembled yōkai. They were samurai, not demon slayers. Outnumbered as they were, the blades in their hands could not cut down such creatures.
Aya-Gozen tightened her grip on her short sword, her brows drawn taut. She did not fear death. But she held a vital post. She could not die here without cause. And she was utterly unprepared. Within Uesugi territory, "yōkai" on this scale were vanishingly rare.
"Step aside." A voice came from behind her. Very soft. Entirely casual. She turned her head. That young warrior had already entered the camp. He was walking toward the perimeter.
Shinji's pale face gleamed with a cold, hard light beneath the waning moon. Facing the emerging demons, he did not draw the Onikiri at his left hip. Instead, he drew the blade at his right hip.
Yomi-giri.
The moment the black-violet Nichirin Blade left its sheath, an exceedingly faint layer of black-violet light shimmered along its cutting edge. That cold luminescence was, beneath the shadow of the dying moon, all the more piercingly visible. And at the same moment, he breathed.
That single breath was impossibly deep, impossibly long. His chest did not rise. His lungs did not expand. Yet the air around him surged violently toward him.
The impure energies diffused between heaven and earth, those invisible, turbid currents that lay sunken beneath the surface of the night, rushed toward him as though drawn into an unseen vortex, converging from every direction upon his mouth and nose. Inhaled. Swirled. Refined. Then exhaled.
A dark, ghostly mist spilled from his lips, seeping along his throat and flooding into his chest, then pouring down his right arm into the blade he held.
The Demon's Breath. Dead lungs as the furnace. Impure energy as the fuel. The imagined pulse of Yomi as its rhythm. The Ghostbloom of Yomi's hue adhered to Yomi-giri's cutting edge.
The sunlight power inherent in the Nichirin Blade intertwined with the refined impure energy of the Demon's Breath, forming a membrane of light so still it seemed to sink into absolute silence.
He struck. Only one slash. A horizontal arc. From left to right. There was no explosion. No roar. Only an arc of Yomi-colored light, silent, almost soundless, drawn from the tip of Yomi-giri, stretching across the entire meadow.
When the arc swept past the first demon's waist, that demon didn't even have time to react. Its upper body and lower body separated. The cut was flawlessly smooth. The edges were coated in that dark, spectral Yomi hue.
The Ghostbloom had annihilated all vitality at the wound. All regeneration, erased. And the sunlight property carried by the Nichirin Blade followed immediately after, searing inward from the obliterated wound, spreading its incineration.
The double execution of Sun and Demon. The arc of light continued forward.
The second. The third. The fifth. The tenth. A horizontal sweep. A single arc swept across the entire meadow, severing everything at waist height and above. Including the grass. Including thirty-seven demons. The cuts were immaculate. The demons, their upper bodies still suspended in the air, stared with jaundiced eyes.
On their faces, split to the ears, an expression of profound confusion surfaced. And then, the carbonization began. The Ghostbloom annihilated. The sunlight seared. Both properties acted simultaneously upon every severed surface. The speed of regeneration could not remotely keep pace with the speed of destruction.
All thirty-seven demons shattered in unison. Turned to flying ash at the same instant. From the drawing of the blade to its return to the sheath, the span of a single blink. Click. The crisp sound of the blade seating home echoed across the wilderness.
The System panel flickered.
[Nichirin Blade · Yomi-giri: Affection +7]
[Current Affection: 41 (Acknowledgment — Initial)]
Demon-slaying. The founding purpose of Yomi-giri had been fulfilled once more. The growth of its Affection came far more decisively than any infusion of yōki or honeyed words ever could.
And then, the wind. The wind swept across the meadow, carrying the ash drifting through the air far into the distance. The moon was still being devoured by the shadow. But upon that meadow, there were no longer any living demons. Even the ashes were scattering.
Shinji stood beside the campfire, the ghostly violet mist slowly receding from the surface of his body. He turned around. The twenty-some guards remained frozen in place. Some still held their blades half-raised. Some had already gone weak at the knees.
Aya-Gozen's hand had not loosened from her short sword, but her pupils had dilated. Within those eyes, so similar to Kenshin's, shock was now etched in vivid clarity. As she had noted before, she had witnessed the supernatural.
She had seen Kenshin invoke the power of Bishamonten. That was the mightiest force she had ever witnessed in the mortal realm. But when Kenshin acted, she still needed to deploy the Hachika Armaments, unleash her faith-power, and spend a certain amount of time.
The young warrior before her, had only needed one slash. Just one slash.
"I told you," Shinji said, brushing the dust from his sleeves. His demon eyes gleamed faintly beneath the waning moon. "Your luck is terrible. But it doesn't matter. You ran into me. I truly wasn't following you. What I was following, was them." He turned his head, gazing into the distant darkness.
But as he finished speaking, his tone shifted. The violet veins and orange luminescence within his crimson demon eyes flared simultaneously, fixing upon a point deeper in the northeastern direction beyond the camp.
There. Something was there. Something heavier than all thirty-seven demons combined. Something more dangerous. Drawing closer. Aya-Gozen saw the expression on Shinji's face.
On that cold, severe countenance, a look she found difficult to describe flickered for the briefest instant. It could not possibly be fear, but for an ordinary person, it was far more alarming than fear.
"Here it comes." He straightened, his voice very soft. Even softer than when he had cut down the thirty-seven demons. "If you want to live, leave. Now."
"Has something come—?"
"Don't ask. Go." He repeated the word. Then he stepped forward into the darkness. His gray robes billowed beneath the dying moon. His white hair hung down his back. Aya-Gozen watched him walk beyond the circle of firelight, vanishing into the edge of her sight.
She tightened her grip on her short sword. Her heart was racing. Because of the thirty-seven demons. Because of that retreating silhouette. And because of the unknown.
What could it be, that could make an existence capable of annihilating an entire horde of demons in a single stroke wear an expression like that? But she did not ask further. She merely rose swiftly and, heedless of the night, ordered everyone to break camp.
Retreat.
In this age of chaos, there were too many matters that those without sufficient strength could not participate in, could not even witness. She was not her sister. She was not strong. So she had self-awareness. Even so, she cast one more glance in the direction Shinji had vanished.
She committed that silhouette to memory. She resolved, that after she returned… she would go ask Kenshin.
...
...
At the same moment. A thousand kilometers away. The headquarters of the Demon Slayer Corps. Within the main hall of the Ubuyashiki estate, the lamplight flickered.
Ubuyashiki Rikiya knelt upon his cushion. Before him stood a Kasugai Crow, its pitch-black feathers bristled, its golden eyes stretched wide and round. It had just flown back from the direction of Kyōto.
"Report!" The crow's voice was hoarse and urgent. "The scouts sent toward Kyōto have sent back word, Kibutsuji Muzan is no longer there."
Rikiya's spine snapped ramrod straight.
"What… do you mean?"
"The residual traces of Muzan's presence we detected earlier, they were false." The Kasugai Crow's wings trembled, mimicking the tone of the one who had sent the message.
"There was only a single demon there. A decoy, imbued with Muzan's aura. It replicated the characteristics of Muzan's yōki, but its true body was merely a high-ranking demon. Muzan's true body is not in Kyōto. As of several days ago, it was already gone."
Silence fell over the hall. Rikiya's clouded eyes slowly opened. His blind pupils shifted once, he could see nothing, but he felt it. The precognitive ability passed down through generations of the Ubuyashiki family screamed to life in that instant, as though something deep within his chest had been seized and wrung violently.
Danger. Immense danger. Direction, southeast. He wrenched his head around. He stared fixedly at the southeastern wall of the main hall, as though gazing far beyond it, across at least several hundred ri to a distant wilderness.
"…Which direction did Lord Shinji travel today?"
The attendant beside him froze. "My lord, according to Lord Rengoku, Lord Shinji departed toward Musashi Province… to the southeast."
The color drained from Rikiya's face. He rose unsteadily to his feet. This young family head, so long bedridden and slow to move, stood in that moment with a speed he had never before shown.
The hem of his plain white kariginu whipped outward. "Send word—" His voice was no longer calm. It carried an urgency he had never displayed. "All Hashira—immediately—"
He stopped mid-sentence. His expression twisted into something terrible. Because, the Seven Hashira. After receiving Shinji's intelligence, he had dispatched every single Hashira toward Kyōto. The plan was to wait until Muzan, lured by the rumors of the Blue Spider Lily, left the protective sphere of Hagoromo Gitsune to investigate.
Then the Seven Hashira, coordinating with their Nichirin Blades, would encircle and annihilate him. It was an opportunity the Ubuyashiki family had not seen in five hundred years. And so he had not hesitated to stake everything upon it.
But now, the intelligence was false.
Muzan was not in Kyōto. The Seven Hashira had already reached the vicinity of Kyōto at top speed. They were lying in wait. To summon them back now… it seemed it was already too late.
But at that very moment, from the direction of the rear courtyard, a blaze of incandescent light suddenly erupted. It pierced through the shōji doors of the corridors. It pierced through the wisteria trellises.
It illuminated the entire rear courtyard of the estate as though it were broad daylight. It was sunlight. Yet there was no sun. It was only the light radiating from a single person, a light as blinding and scorching as the sun itself.
Tsugikuni Yoriichi. The red-haired young man stood in the corridor of the rear courtyard. His deep crimson eyes reflected the very same direction Rikiya had sensed. Southeast. His breathing changed.
It was as though his chest had swallowed a miniature sun. Heat seeped from his pores, forming a visible layer of golden thermal mist across his body. The Breath of the Sun. Unleashed to its absolute fullest.
His Transparent World told him, in that direction, something of unimaginable danger was closing in upon his benefactor. He took a step. His figure vanished at the end of the corridor.
When Rengoku Jinjūrō burst out from the side entrance of the main hall, who was not yet a Hashira, all he saw was the lingering wisp of golden thermal mist in the corridor, and the wooden floorboards scorched black by the heat. "SIR TSUGIKUNI—!"
And so, Ubuyashiki Rikiya stood motionless at the center of the main hall. His face, half-consumed by the creeping purple decay, was so pale beneath the lamplight it seemed utterly bloodless.
He could see nothing. But the instant Tsugikuni Yoriichi moved, that bloodline intuition, bordering on prophecy, told him: there was still hope.
Elsewhere. In that very moment. Southern Kōzuke Province. The wilderness.
The dying light of the eclipsed moon was ghostly pale as paper. Withered grass stretched endlessly. Fragments of blades and stalks swirled through the air.
Shinji stood at the edge of the meadow, roughly a hundred paces from Aya-Gozen's camp. He faced northeast. Blood mist spread silently beneath his feet, forming a sensory web.
The Soul-Chasing BowArm Transformation auto-marked everything that entered his perception. The Keen-Eye Transformation pierced through the veil of night. He saw it. At the distant tree line, a single figure was emerging from the darkness.
The steps were very slow. Each footfall pressed into the earth with an exceedingly soft, nearly inaudible sound. Yet when that faint, minuscule sound reached Shinji's sensory web, the entire blood mist trembled. Not because the footsteps were heavy. But because the very presence of that being exerted an oppressive force upon all life surrounding it.
Moonlight fell upon the figure. Elegant, understated kimono. Dark outer garment. A face of refined, exquisite beauty. Skin impossibly pale, pale to the point of abnormality.
Crimson, slit-pupiled eyes gleamed faintly beneath the moonlight. It was the body of a woman. Yet it was not entirely a woman. Because those eyes were not even eyes a human should possess.
They were serpentine, slit-pupiled, glowing with a cold, phosphorescent light beneath the ghastly white remnants of the dying moon.
Shinji recognized her. No prompt was needed. No verification of any kind. Kibutsuji Muzan. The Progenitor of Demons. The absolute ruler of all demons, born five hundred years ago.
Five brains. Seven hearts. Infinite regeneration. Undying and indestructible save for sunlight. Able to freely alter appearance, sex, and age.
"At last… I have found you." Kibutsuji Muzan spoke. Her voice was as smooth and fluid as running water. Crisp to the point of abnormality. "Nakai..... Shinji."