An endless labyrinth of spider silk was layered so densely that it choked out every conceivable path. Even to Li Ke, the sight was enough to trigger a mild case of trypophobia.
The master of this domain had clearly anticipated their arrival for quite some time, setting a trap that would ensure their absolute destruction the moment they blundered into its teeth.
"Looks like the advance scouts who went ahead of us are likely done for, too," Li Ke noted grimly.
He casually pushed the dazed Demon Slayer whose arm he had just reattached behind his back. The moment he severed the initial tripwires, the surrounding silk lines began vibrating frantically across the network, signaling to the weaver of this massive web that their prey had finally entered the parlor.
"Hey, did the preliminary intelligence files say anything about a freak like this?" Li Ke asked. He indifferently drew two more cheap katanas from his bundle, his expression slightly warped with disdain. Standard Japanese swords were genuinely sub-optimal for high-intensity, no-holds-barred deathmatches, and he was already heavily critical of their parameters.
"No. The reports transmitted by the Kasugai Crows mentioned encountering demons, but according to the baseline files, every single target encountered on the lower slopes was successfully neutralized," Tengen Uzui replied.
He vaulted off his saddle, landing seamlessly on the forest floor as he cast a look of profound astonishment at Li Ke.
"More importantly, your sensory perception actually completely outscales my own training. I didn't pick up a single anomaly on the road ahead."
Tengen was genuinely stunned. Until the exact microsecond Li Ke had hurled his fiery sword to sever the filaments, his own elite shinobi tracking and acoustic senses had registered absolutely zero structural threats along the path. For a Hashira of his caliber, failing to detect a trap of this magnitude was completely unprecedented.
"I have my ways... Heads up! It's here! And it's absolutely massive!"
Within the radar of his Observation Haki, Li Ke perceived a colossal life signature closing in on their coordinates at extreme velocity. To his bewilderment, the approaching creature was easily three to four stories tall, yet it moved with jarring, unnatural agility—physically skittering right across the single, hair-thin silk strands suspended in the canopy. The structural physics of its movement looked completely surreal.
The exact moment the warning left his lips, the dense timber ahead was violently obliterated. Giant trees were shattered and flung aside like twigs as the massive abomination Li Ke had tracked lunged directly into the open!
It was a monstrous, swollen spider, structurally modeled after a classic black widow. But situated where its cluster of compound eyes should have been were dozens of half-dissolved human heads, their jaws stretched wide in expressions of pure, frozen agony!
The flesh surrounding their facial sockets was severely liquefied, yet the severed heads and unseeing eyes continuously twitched and rolled within the beast's hide. Their gaping mouths gaped rhythmically, as if desperately trying to scream out a warning.
Embedded right at the absolute center of this grotesque skull cluster was a humanoid upper torso. Several fresh, non-dissolved heads were stacked around its perimeter, their pale faces still locked in masks of absolute terror.
Li Ke's advanced vision mapped out the finer details with ease. Crawling across the massive spider's armored carapace were untold thousands of tiny arachnid hatchlings. Wherever the giant beast advanced, a dense mesh of silk lines miraculously synthesized behind its wake, providing a continuous, floating scaffold that allowed it to step through the open air.
To the naked eye, the immense, terrifying creature looked as though it were hovering effortlessly above the earth!
Not only that, but Li Ke also saw that the creature was constantly dripping slime and tiny, egg-like spheres from its body. When these spheres landed in the slime, they immediately hatched into dozens of frantic little spiders. But when they fell onto the bare ground, they aggressively corroded the dirt, twigs, and dead leaves, transforming the terrain into a strange, unidentifiable substance.
Li Ke had no idea what that material was, but basic survival instinct warned him not to touch it under any circumstances.
He turned his head, hoping to check if the Demon Slayer Corps recognized this specific horror, but before he could even look over, Tengen Uzui's thoroughly shocked voice rang out.
"What in the world is that thing?!"
Excellent. It looked like they were completely in the dark, too.
Li Ke glanced at the colossal frame of the beast, then looked down at the flimsy katanas in his grip, wisely abandoning any notion of trying to challenge it in close quarters with raw steel. If his massive greatsword from One Piece were still intact, he might have attempted to shatter its armored legs. But given the current tactical layout—
It was much better to play the mage.
Li Ke snapped his hands together, instantly channeling his focus into the roaring energy pathways within his body. Throwing a sharp punch to build up his momentum, he spun fluidly on his heel and unleashed a soaring kick, driving a concentrated wave of Firebending straight at the oncoming monstrosity.
The fiery shockwave superheated the dense web of spider silk along its trajectory, turning the strands bright red. Seeing that, Li Ke realized standard fire lacked the raw potency to instantly vaporize this silk; only true Dragon Fire could clean the slate. The exact microsecond his foot touched the ground, he thrust both open palms dead-center toward the beast.
A violent, roaring torrent of fire erupted from his hands, surging straight toward the spider-fiend just as it raised its massive front legs to bat away the initial kick. The inferno completely swallowed the creature, and a deafening, crackling cacophony of burning chitin echoed through the woods. Within two seconds of the continuous burn, a chorus of agonizing, overlapping shrieks rippled outward from the flames.
But the loudest, most piercing scream among them belonged to a young boy, howling in pure, unhinged madness!
"I'll kill you! I'LL KILL YOU!! I don't want you to be part of my family anymore! You've ruined my family!!"
Because the thick curtain of fire fully obscured his line of sight, Li Ke couldn't see the structural changes happening to the demon. But since the target was shrieking in absolute agony, it was clear that standard fire was dealing massive, lethal damage. Unless the battlefield flipped, he could easily conserve his stamina and hold back his Dragon Fire for a bigger threat!
So he shifted his footing, drew in a sharp breath, and aggressively amplified the volume of his fire output.
An even more chaotic, roaring inferno erupted from his open palms. This time, however, he specifically integrated some of the subtle mechanical tricks Azula had drilled into him. In the very next breath, sharp streaks of cold, azure-blue began aggressively bleeding into the core of his flames.
The sheer destructive parameter of the blue fire was miles ahead of his standard element. Heavy trees that had merely been smoldering were instantaneously vaporized into towering torches upon contact with the azure heat. The monstrous silhouette that had briefly been visible through the embers was now completely transformed into a colossal, blinding beacon of sapphire fire.
The chorus of overlapping shrieks multiplied exponentially, and the young boy's voice was now entirely saturated with an absolute, venomous malice!
"I WILL KILL YOU!!"
The gargantuan abomination launched a desperate, blind counter-charge. Enveloped from head to toe in roaring flames, the titan skittered relentlessly straight toward Li Ke's coordinates. But because Li Ke's heightened perception accurately mapped out the exact microsecond the beast's muscle groups contracted to strike, his figure was already blurring away from the danger zone long before a massive, glob of thick, pressurized spider silk erupted from the curtain of fire. The projectile whistled through the void, hitting nothing but empty air.
The dense structural cluster of silk smashed into the earth, effortlessly blasting open a crater nearly a meter deep. Sensing the absolute kinetic payload of that single discharge through his Haki, Li Ke broke into a cold sweat. Given the sheer density of that impact, even with his monstrous One Piece-level physique, catching a direct hit from that mass would leave him broken and waiting for death.
While his Dragon Fire and Seimei Kikan could reliably piece his organs and bones back together, that level of cellular regeneration required concrete windows of uninterrupted time—and during that downtime, he would be completely stripped of any tactical mobility!
But the pacing of the battlefield left him zero time for idle reflection. A rapid-fire succession of massive silk projectiles continuously traced his retreat path as the burning giant thrashed forward, systematically erupting the terrain around his feet into deep, jagged craters.
Although the surrounding auxiliary members of the Demon Slayer Corps desperately yearned to reinforce his line, under a high-intensity artillery barrage of this scale, their baseline abilities were completely useless.
The brutal truth was right in front of them: against a three-to-four-story colossal nightmare, the structural limits of their conventional Nichirin blades and the parameters of their standard swordsmanship held absolutely zero combat meaning!
However, Tengen Uzui made his move!
Exploiting the window where the massive spider-fiend was entirely fixated on tracking Li Ke, his figure blurred like a phantom across the perimeter. Executing a sequence of precise, high-speed vaults, he landed seamlessly right onto the flank of a blazing, massive arachnid leg. Reaching out to anchor his grip, his fingers crushed through thousands of hair-thin bristles that had already been carbonized into charred ash by the heat.
But in the very next heartbeat, a wave of profound terror violently spiked through his chest.
His eyes locked onto a patch of bristles that had somehow resisted the fire. The unburned hairs glinted with an unnatural, luminescent sheen, continuously secreting a film of pale green slime. The heavy, solid iron guard wrapping his forearm had merely brushed against the fluid, yet half the metal hull was instantaneously dissolved into bubbling grease right before his eyes!
"What kind of unholy anomaly is this..."
Tengen instantly recognized that if Li Ke hadn't spearheaded the engagement by unleashing that massive azure inferno to strip away the beast's outer toxic defense, this exact leap would have cost him his life on the spot!
But having unraveled the lethal parameter of the threat, the Sound Hashira didn't permit himself to hesitate or waste another second. Vaulting upward with a display of impossible physical agility, he aggressively spun his twin massive cleavers, driving the heavy steel dead-center into the spider's main joint structure.
The joint violently shattered under the impact, unleashing a massive spray of pressurized green acid. Without a shred of hesitation, Tengen ripped off his own patterned haori and flung the fabric into the trajectory, utilizing the cloth as a temporary shield to absorb the expanding acid mist. Pivoting smoothly, he slammed his boot onto an adjacent leg, raising his blades to execute a decisive follow-up cleave.
But—
Absolutely nothing happened.
Staring down at his hands in absolute bewilderment, Tengen realized with a jolt of horror that within a mere microsecond of exposure, the heavy steel of his dual Nichirin blades had been completely liquefied—leaving him clutching nothing but two bare, smoking hilts!
Acting on pure shinobi muscle memory, Tengen instantly discarded the useless grips. Slipping his hands into his tactical pouches, he whipped out two matte-black anti-demon bombs and forcefully hurled them straight at the joint of yet another massive leg.
The exact millisecond his boots touched the forest floor, Tengen bolted like a man possessed. True to his calculations, the moment the black spheres collided with the armored leg, they triggered a violent, deafening explosion.
Though the sequence of actions was incredibly complex, the entire tactical execution had taken fewer than five seconds. Before the giant spider-fiend could even recalibrate its weight distribution, it found itself stripped of two functional limbs, causing its colossal, three-story chassis to violently stagger out of alignment.
"Beautifully executed!"
Li Ke roared his approval. Exploiting the exact window of the beast's imbalance, he executed a fluid mid-sprint pivot and ripped two fresh katanas from his back. Enveloping the steel in a blistering shroud of Dragon Fire, he aggressively unleashed a dual sweeping strike.
The physical load-bearing capacity of a common katana was completely inferior to his old One Piece greatsword, meaning the raw kinetic impact was noticeably lower. But as a structural tradeoff, his casting velocity was significantly faster.
The resulting high-velocity molten shrapnel didn't grant the spider-demon a single microsecond to react. The twin streams of superheated metal shot through the air; one buried itself deep into the beast's main arachnid skull, while the other perforated straight through the humanoid upper torso nested at its center.
There were no screams, and no vengeful shrieks. There was only the empty, localized twitching of a dying giant, paired with Li Ke's ruthless decision to aggressively maintain his thermal onslaught.
Even without factoring in the cosmic mutations from the 7 Days to Die shard, the native demons of this universe possessed a notoriously stubborn regeneration factor!
Because of that, Li Ke had absolutely zero intention of cutting off his flames until the target was entirely reduced to fine gray ash!
The blinding azure fire instantly blanketed the colossal exterior hull of the monster. However, the deep interior cavity remained largely untouched; the dense, viscous fluids flooding the beast's anatomy made it remarkably difficult for conventional fire to clean the slate. Within the transparent radar of his Observation Haki, Li Ke perceived that the demon's severed neural network and crushed skulls were already beginning to slowly stitch themselves back together.
Willing his energy to shift gears, Li Ke unleashed his signature Dragon Fire.
The white-hot, primordial element aggressively tunneled straight through the open wound in the spider's neck, violently consuming its internal anatomy from the inside out. Heavy crimson jets of fire exploded from every single structural seam of its armored carapace. The giant launched into its final, desperate death throes, thrashing and violently pivoting its melting weight across the clearing.
Regrettably for the anomaly, the sheer destructive parameter of Li Ke's true Dragon Fire was a force that no biological entity in this universe could ever dream of resisting. Within a matter of heartbeats, the colossal spider-beast completely disintegrated, scattering into the wind as a massive cloud of gray ash.
Yet, as the remains dissolved, the falling soot miraculously transformed into countless shimmering motes of golden light, drifting rhythmically toward Li Ke and Tengen Uzui.
Ninety percent of the harvested World Energy surged directly into Li Ke's body, instantaneously neutralizing the physical fatigue brought on by his massive deployment of Dragon Fire, while bestowing a clear, temporary stat elevation onto his baseline metrics.
Tengen, meanwhile, stared in absolute awe as the deep chemical burns on his forearm rapidly stitched themselves back together, his melted iron guard seamlessly reconstructing itself into its pristine state. He let out a long, heavy sigh of relief.
Through this high-intensity engagement, they had successfully mapped out several critical laws of this world's anomaly:
These golden motes prioritized cellular repair first. If a warrior was entirely unharmed, the surplus energy would actively elevate their baseline physical parameters instead. The fact that his iron guard had successfully reconstructed itself served as definitive proof that his body hadn't been compromised by any hidden, parasitic fungal corruption.
However, this raw physical stat reinforcement hit a hard bottleneck once a person reached a specific universal ceiling. After breaching that baseline threshold, the surplus golden light would automatically redirect its energy to repair and reinforce their immediate weapons and armor. Whether the system possessed even deeper mechanics remained entirely unmapped.
After all, the Demon Slayer Corps had never successfully put down an anomaly of this staggering scale until today.
Furthermore, the physical reinforcement they could receive from this world energy carried a strict, definitive bottleneck. Take Tengen, for example—his baseline stats had only elevated by about ten percent compared to his old self before hitting a hard ceiling. However, he had discovered that if he put his muscles through intense, conventional training afterward, his physical capacity would expand slightly, allowing him to absorb another wave of reinforcement down the line.
This structural limit was the hidden, ultimate reason why keeping Shinobu home to guard the base camp was the smartest play. If she were recklessly ordered to hunt these cosmic horrors, the mathematical probability of her growing stronger from the harvested light was near zero; instead, she would simply drop dead during a chaotic encounter.
Allowing Shinobu to focus entirely on her elite skills as a master pharmacist was, without a question, the safest and most optimal strategy.
Moreover, these world-energy injections shouldn't strictly be categorized as "reinforcements"—it was far more accurate to define the mechanic as a forced, aggressive awakening of a human's latent biological potential.
The veteran slayers of the Corps had all experienced these parameters during their previous skirmishes, so they naturally understood the underlying laws of the system. Therefore, the exact second Tengen witnessed the shimmering golden motes completely heal his chemical burns and seamlessly reconstruct his melted iron guards, he knew for a fact that his recent training regimens hadn't been intense enough to accumulate any additional latent potential.
However, as his gaze drifted back toward the dissolving remains of the giant spider-fiend, a look of profound, unadulterated bewilderment violently washed over his face.
Deep within the vortex of light where the monster's corpse was turning to ash, a physical human figure and a colossal greatsword suddenly materialized out of thin air!
This was a bizarre drop anomaly he had absolutely never seen in any previous battle!
The golden motes of light rapidly dissolved into the atmosphere, and the human form that had abruptly dropped into the clearing slowly, unsteadily pushed itself up onto its feet.
But the exact microsecond the protective shroud of world energy completely vanished, leaving the figure exposed beneath the harsh, bleeding rays of the setting sun—
"AAAAHHH!!!!"
A soul-shredding, agonizing shriek tore from the figure's throat. Under the petrified, deadpan gazes of Li Ke and Tengen Uzui, the human form violently disintegrated into the wind, leaving behind absolutely nothing but dust.
"..."
The entire tactical squad fell into a suffocating, dead silence. The reaction was especially severe for Tengen and the accompanying auxiliary slayers, because they were painfully familiar with that specific visual file. That was the definitive, terrifying signature of a demon being forcefully eradicated by direct sunlight.
Li Ke, however, was entirely out of the loop. His academic grasp on Demon Slayer lore was notoriously shallow, so he completely ignored the burning ash and marched straight toward the colossal greatsword resting in the dirt instead.
But when his eyes locked onto the steel, a wave of pure astonishment hit him.
"Wait... isn't this literally my old sword?"
Li Ke stepped forward and wrapped his fingers around the massive hilt. The exact millisecond his palm made solid contact, a bizarre, foreign resonance shot straight into his consciousness, instantaneously uploading the structural profile and item logs of the weapon directly into his mind.
[Blade of the Family]:This weapon harbors an obsessive, deeply rooted yearning for a family structure. When wielding this blade, if your consciousness desperately craves power (POWER!), it will instantaneously morph into a sleek katana that boasts double the baseline sharpness, at the cost of becoming drastically more brittle. Conversely, if your heart genuinely yearns for family, its structural durability and sharpness will receive a flat thirty percent boost.
"..."
Don't think for a second I don't know exactly who you're mockingly referencing with this description! Vergil, is that you?!
Li Ke's face completely collapsed into a mask of pure, black-lined irritation as he stared down at the massive weapon in his hand. This blade was unquestionably, without a shadow of a doubt, the exact same heavy greatsword he had carried over from One Piece—he could even clearly see the personalized inscription he had custom-carved onto the guard. The only change was that the weapon had been aggressively reinforced and altered by the world's consciousness.
He executed a few testing swings through the air. The physical feedback was fundamentally different; while the overall mass and structural weight of the steel had noticeably increased, swinging the weapon felt remarkably light, fluid, and effortless. It was blindingly obvious that the sword was passively augmenting his raw physical strength parameters.
This piece of iron had officially evolved into an exceptional, high-tier magical weapon, separating itself entirely from the basic white-board stats of mortal steel.
Li Ke channeled a burst of his Dragon Fire to test its thermal resistance. To his satisfaction, the upgraded alloy held strong; even after being subjected to the direct heat of his element for three full seconds, there wasn't a single physical sign of structural warping or liquefaction.
"Fascinating. So the system drops a custom, tailor-made reward based on what was destroyed?"
Li Ke executed a few more fluid sweeps, utilizing his advanced Observation Haki to peer deep into the internal grain of the metal. He discovered that all the micro-fractures, structural pockets, and internal air bubbles that had plagued the original iron had been completely eliminated. The forging was practically flawless.
Furthermore, the absolute microsecond he activated his Haki's X-ray tracking, his sensory radar picked up another ridiculous detail: the three cheap katanas he had previously remote-detonated had miraculously reconstructed themselves back into their pristine states, resting quietly on the forest floor right beside the discarded grips he had tossed away earlier.
It was glaringly obvious that those shimmering golden motes of light also actively prioritized restoring expendable consumables.
However, the moment Li Ke picked up the three reconstructed katanas, his advanced perception didn't pick up any unique or magical alterations woven into their steel. It was quite apparent that the distribution of World Energy followed a highly intelligent blueprint; the system recognized that he only ever utilized these cheap weapons as simple, disposable physical casings for his techniques.
"Huh... If the logic tracks this cleanly, I could honestly just use standard railroad spikes or massive iron nails next time."
Li Ke mused, weighing the katanas in his hands. It would be an incredibly efficient alternative. At worst, he would just need to forge a high-grade, heat-resistant casting glove so he wouldn't have to shear a layer of skin off his palm every time he played with superheated metal.
"Absolutely spectacular. This is the first time I've ever witnessed an object materialize completely out of thin air," Tengen Uzui admitted, his voice full of profound awe as he watched Li Ke smoothly slide the massive greatsword and the katanas back into the harness across his shoulders. "But looking at the design, it's clearly a reinforced version of that exact same greatsword you carried earlier... The direct blessings of the gods are truly a magnificent thing, aren't they?"
Indeed, within the current framework of the Demon Slayer Corps, the warriors universally viewed these shimmering energy motes as a divine, heavenly intervention—a systemic blessing explicitly granted to humanity to help them hold the line against these invading horrors. This conceptual framing was the single, fundamental reason why the Corps maintained an incredibly high baseline of military morale and hadn't collapsed into absolute despair.
In their eyes, every single drop was a literal, undeniable miracle from the heavens.
Li Ke opened his mouth, initially intending to clarify that this phenomenon was simply the automated operational byproduct of distilled World Energy. But on second thought, considering that the baseline consciousness of a universe could easily be defined as a deity by the mortals living beneath its laws, there was absolutely no reason to act like a pedantic buzzkill and ruin the mood.
"...You're absolutely right," he replied, offering a smooth nod instead.
He casually rolled his wrists. The sudden, concentrated influx of World Energy had left his physical stamina entirely topped off, and his mental fatigue had completely evaporated. At this exact microsecond, even if a secondary, three-story titan spider were to lunge straight out of the brush, he could effortlessly slice its anatomy to ribbons with absolute ease. He was feeling remarkably light and relaxed.
Conversely, Tengen Uzui stared down at the patch of scorched, empty earth where the young boy had turned to dust beneath the setting sun, letting out a heavy, solemn sigh.
"But even with the active intervention of the gods... it appears the absolute worst-case scenario we harbored has officially broken past our defenses."
Recalling the agonizing, soul-shredding shriek of the boy as the sunlight systematically erased his frame from the universe, the Sound Hashira's expression grew exponentially grim.
"What do you mean?" Li Ke asked, turning his gaze back to him.
"A native demon... has successfully fused with one of those alien monsters."