Chapter 85: The Cold Moon Descends, Avīci Hell
Time froze.
At the heart of that sea of corpses, where Sun Breathing's heat had once burned like a tyrant's fire, something colder began to emerge.
A moon.
Silent.
Phantomlike.
It rose without sound behind Yami's back, pale and distant, yet carrying a pressure so eerie that even the stitched curses crowding the Domain hesitated.
Under that cold moonlight, his broken body began to change.
The torn organs inside him reshaped themselves.
Muscle fibers rewove.
Misaligned bones clicked back into place one by one.
Blood that should have continued pouring from the wound slowed, then stopped.
When Yami opened his eyes again, the darkness itself seemed to flinch.
Within his deep red pupils, a crescent moon slowly turned.
And behind that reflection, for a fleeting instant, there seemed to be another pair of eyes superimposed there—cold, divine, and unreadable, like a broken phantom of the Six Eyes staring at the world through him.
The Proliferation Curse shrieked first.
Its massive body convulsed violently, every mouth on it opening at once as if trying to scream out a warning to the rest of the Domain.
Instinct.
Pure instinct.
Something was wrong.
Very wrong.
Then the order went out.
The corpse sea that had momentarily stalled boiled again.
The tide surged.
Tens of thousands of stitched monsters charged all at once, flooding toward Yami like a wall of flesh and bone. The pressure of it was enough to suffocate an ordinary sorcerer before the first claw even landed.
But Yami did not move.
He stood there calmly, sword lowered slightly, body relaxed.
As if he had already accepted the coming avalanche.
Only if one looked closely would they notice the air around him.
Within a radius of three meters, countless invisible slashes were already spinning, shredding the space into a vacuum with faint, shrill whispers.
Yami breathed once.
Deep.
Steady.
Then his lips parted.
"[Total Concentration: Moon Breathing.]"
His voice was quiet.
Yet somehow, every curse in the Domain heard it.
"[Sixth Form: Perpetual Night, Lonely Moon - Incessant.]"
Swish.
There was no explosion.
No roar.
No dramatic blast of force.
Only a brittle sound, like the final note of a violin string snapping in an empty hall.
Then every stitched monster froze.
All at once.
Those at the front still held their charging posture. Those in the back were still pushing forward. Those mid leap remained suspended for one uncanny heartbeat.
Their eyes went empty.
A faint crack sounded.
Then another.
Then all at once—
Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang.
Thin lines of blood appeared across every body in the horde.
The next instant, tens of thousands of monsters came apart as though they had all been fed into an invisible grinder. Flesh separated into fragments. Limbs fell in ribbons. Heads burst open into wet red mist.
And before that rain of blood could even touch the ground, the countless hidden crescents still lingering in the air cut through it again, reducing the downpour into a drifting crimson fog.
One move.
Just one.
And the entire tide was erased.
This was Moon Breathing.
If Sun Breathing was absolute dominance—straight, overwhelming, unyielding—then Moon Breathing was treachery made beautiful. A killing art of hidden arcs, splintered slashes, and omnidirectional death.
Where the enemy was many, Moon Breathing only became more terrifying.
The Space Curse trembled.
For the first time, something like fear surfaced in its muddled, half formed mind.
The human before it no longer resembled the one it had cornered moments ago.
The warm, blazing aura of the sun had vanished.
In its place was a suffocating stillness, cold enough to freeze the marrow. Behind Yami, the image of a blood moon seemed to rise over a mountain of corpses and a sea of blood.
And he stood beneath it like the master of some lower hell.
Yami slowly lifted his head.
His eyes had darkened into a stranger shade of red. Within them, the crescent kept turning, endless and silent.
That was the Transparent World pushed to its limit.
That was Moon Breathing intertwining with the Tsugikuni template at a depth far beyond before.
"What is it?"
A smile appeared at the corner of his mouth.
It was not warm.
"Scared already?"
He vanished.
There was no warning.
No burst of sound.
Just absence.
When Yami appeared again, he was already in front of the Space Curse.
Too fast.
Too clean.
Not even an afterimage remained.
The curse recoiled in panic, tentacles twisting as it tried to invoke its space folding technique.
Too late.
"[Moon Breathing, First Form: Dark Moon, Evening Palace.]"
A great black crescent swept out.
But that main arc was only the shell.
Wrapped around it were countless smaller moon blades, jagged, irregular, and dancing like broken fragments of night.
Splat.
The Space Curse's beloved defense—its distorted folds of warped space—was shredded almost instantly. Half its body split open in a cut so smooth it looked polished.
Then the small crescents followed the wound inward.
They slipped into its body and began tearing through its cursed core from the inside.
The scream that came out of it no longer sounded monstrous.
It sounded pathetic.
It tried to regenerate.
It could not.
Moon Breathing's cursed energy clung to the wound like a living parasite, not incinerating like Sun Breathing, but ceaselessly grinding away at every attempt to recover.
That made it worse.
Far worse.
Yami was already beside it.
So close his voice landed right against its ear.
"That strike," he said softly, "was repayment."
The blade turned in his hand.
"Now comes the interest."
His movements changed.
Less restrained.
Less human.
Moon Breathing flowed from him with an eerie grace, like a dance performed in a graveyard under a winter moon.
"[Moon Breathing, Third Form: Loathsome Moon, Chains.]"
Two enormous crescents crossed through the air in an X, sealing every avenue of escape.
At the same time, a storm of smaller moon blades rained down.
The Space Curse convulsed as those slashes pierced through it from every direction. In an instant, its body was nailed into the ground like some grotesque offering.
Boom!
It crashed into the concrete hard enough to shake the entire Domain.
Dust and blood exploded upward.
The other two Special Grades finally moved.
Their earlier confidence was gone, replaced by blind fury.
The Gravity Curse slammed both hands into the ground.
The space around Yami groaned, and a crushing field capable of flattening steel descended on him from every direction.
At the same moment, the Proliferation Curse disgorged a fresh wave of small suicide curses. They swarmed through the air like locusts, each one swelling with unstable energy.
A pincer strike.
Perfectly timed.
Against the Yami from before, it might have forced caution.
Now?
He barely looked impressed.
"Too slow."
His body lowered slightly, sword held horizontally beside him.
The pressure field came down.
Nothing happened.
Not really.
Because the instant Moon Breathing had awakened, the space surrounding Yami had already been shredded into layered currents by those countless invisible crescents.
Gravity needed structure.
A medium.
A stable field to pin down.
But what could it hold when the space itself had already been sliced apart?
As for the self detonating swarm—
Yami turned once.
"[Moon Breathing, Fifth Form: Moon Spirit Calamitous Eddy.]"
Boom.
A great spiral burst outward.
Not wind.
Not flame.
Blades.
A towering vortex made entirely of moon crescents roared into existence around him, a silver black cyclone that tore through everything it touched.
The self destructing curses were sucked in before they could get close.
Inside that storm, they did not even get the chance to explode. They were ground into powder instantly, their fragments scattering into the blood fog.
When the spiral subsided, Yami stood at its center untouched.
The two remaining Special Grades hesitated.
Actually hesitated.
Yami looked at them and tilted his head slightly.
"Is that all?"
His voice was almost disappointed.
"If you're done, then I'll stop being polite."
And he disappeared again.
This time, he went for the Gravity Curse.
"[Moon Breathing, Eighth Form: Moon Dragon Ringtail.]"
A dragon rose.
Not a real beast, but something worse—a vast serpentine arc of moon blades twisting together into the shape of a dragon in flight. It roared soundlessly as it crossed the battlefield and slammed into the Gravity Curse head on.
Rumble!
The huge body of the curse blasted backward.
Walls shattered.
Steel support beams twisted apart.
It was hurled clean through multiple layers of the ruined plant before finally slamming into the outer reactor shell hard enough to embed half its body there.
The entire nuclear power plant shook.
The Sea of Ten Thousand Cursed Corpses wavered.
What had been a carefully prepared death trap was becoming something else.
A massacre.
And only one side was being massacred.
The last remaining Proliferation Curse let out a low, desperate sound.
For the first time in its existence, it wanted to flee.
It began to turn.
A voice sounded directly behind it.
"Where are you going?"
The curse froze.
Yami was already there.
No one had seen him move.
He stood close enough for the Proliferation Curse to feel the cold on his skin. The sword in his hands rose slowly, and above the black blade, a beautiful, mournful crescent formed in silence.
This one was different.
Calmer.
Sadder.
It did not look like an attack.
It looked like judgment.
"Since you came…"
His hands tightened.
"…then stay here forever."
He swung.
And the world turned blood red.
The Domain, the plant, the sea of corpses, the monitoring room—everything seemed drowned in crimson in that one impossible instant.
Within that crimson world, a single cold moon hung high above.
Its light was lonely.
Merciless.
Under it, all filth, all malice, all hidden sin was exposed with nowhere left to run.
.....
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