Chapter 196: The Cult Leader Kisshoin... Sesshoin?
At the foot of the mountain, Rengoku Juro finished dragging the five mangled bodies into a neat row. He draped the remnants of a scorched banner over their remains, offering them what little dignity the battlefield allowed. As he straightened his posture, the flickering torchlight danced across his thick brows and wide, intense eyes. No tears fell down his scarred face. Instead, his expression hardened into a mask of cold, unquenchable resolve.
Juro glanced up toward the hillside, spotting the two silent figures standing watch. A heavy breath escaped his lungs, easing the tight knot in his chest. Tonight marked his first true trial wielding Flame Breathing in life-or-death combat. Had those two not been present, he never would have risked confronting a demon pack with such a meager squad—just two low-ranking swordsmen and a single Kakushi logistics member. In the past, he wouldn't have dared leave the estate without at least half a dozen seasoned slayers at his back.
His momentary relief shattered.
A sound drifted from the deepest shadows of the ruined camp.
Laughter.
It was crisp, melodic, and distinctly feminine. The eerie giggling echoed from the only large shed that hadn't yet collapsed into ash, punctuated by the sharp crack of splintering wood.
Juro whipped around, his calloused hand instantly dropping back to the hilt of his Nichirin Blade. Behind him, the burly swordsman, the female slayer, and the masked Kakushi codenamed 'Butterfly' drew their weapons in unison. The three of them snapped into a tight, back-to-back triangular formation, eyes scanning the darkness.
The sagging roof of the wooden shed groaned before violently bursting outward. Dust plumed into the night air as a figure rose from the wreckage.
A woman.
Or, more accurately, a female demon.
She draped herself in a crimson dharma robe. The garment's cut hovered strangely between the austere garb of a Buddhist nun and the flowing elegance of a shrine maiden. complex, esoteric yin-yang patterns of the Tachikawa-ryu sect lined her collar. A golden silk cord cinched her waist tightly, ending in a macabre, thumb-sized skull pendant that clinked against her hip.
Her facial features possessed a haunting, striking beauty—provided one ignored the turbid, vertical slits of her pupils and the grotesque way the corners of her mouth split all the way back to her ears. Her grayish-white skin caught the firelight, giving off a sickly, waxy luster. Long, ink-black hair spilled from beneath her hood, the ends matted and stained with dark, coagulated crimson.
The demon tilted her head, her slit eyes locking onto Juro. A grotesque smile stretched across her face, revealing rows of needle-like teeth.
"Oh my, how impressive," she purred. "That little slash of yours was much stronger than the pathetic fools who came before you."
Her voice dripped with a cloying sweetness, like melted sugar left to rot in the sun. "But tell me... why did you stop my precious 'believers' from attaining Buddhahood?"
Juro's pupils shrank to pinpricks.
Believers.
Hearing such a sacred word spill from the maw of a flesh-eating monster made his stomach violently churn. He thought of the mangled corpses behind him—innocent villagers whose throats had been ripped out. Those were her 'believers'?
"You..." Juro's grip tightened on his hilt, his knuckles turning white. "You are the leader of this cult?"
He had assumed this was merely a human fanatic camp that had the misfortune of being overrun by wandering demons. To realize that the architect of this entire massacre was a demon herself sent a chill through his blood.
"A cult? How rude. How can you call my divine work a cult?" The female demon tilted her head further, her jaw unhinging slightly to expose two full rows of jagged, bloodstained fangs. "I am Kisshoin, the exalted leader of the Tachikawa True Sect."
"These poor souls came here to practice, to seek immediate and absolute Buddhahood."
"I was simply helping them."
She spread her arms wide, as if embracing an invisible congregation. "If not for your rude interruption, they would have already attained enlightenment... right inside our bellies."
It was 'our'bellies. Not'my' belly. The lesser demon Juro had beheaded moments ago had undoubtedly been her accomplice in this twisted religion.
Juro ground his teeth, gripping his Nichirin Blade until the leather wrap groaned. That single, explosive strike of Flame Breathing had already drained a massive portion of his stamina. He had only just learned the technique; forcing his lungs to mobilize that fiery oxygen again might tear his muscles apart. Yet, he did not take a single step back. He raised his glowing blade and marched forward.
Kisshoin moved first.
She didn't lunge. Instead, she lazily raised her right hand, spreading her pale fingers wide.
A thick, dark purple mist began to seep from her pores.
It wasn't demonic aura, nor was it spiritual power. It didn't even feel like the raw, brute strength of an ordinary demon. It was a sinister, concentrated energy that none of the slayers had ever witnessed before.
The toxic purple fog cascaded from Kisshoin's fingertips, rolling across the earth like an invisible, blooming lotus of death. Wherever the mist touched, the soil violently changed color. It shifted from natural brown to a sickly dark red, then to a rotting, pitch-black sludge. The very ground was being corroded alive.
First came the corrosion, then came the growth.
Sickly, dark purple flora erupted from the rotting earth. They sprouted rapidly from the bubbling cracks, their petals trembling—as thin and translucent as cicada wings. But deep within the center of each blossom, tiny, razor-sharp fangs glistened. Every single flower was a mouth.
A starving, flesh-eating maw.
In the blink of an eye, the demonic flora carpeted a ten-pace radius around the camp. Two massive buds burst from the dirt directly beneath Juro's boots, their fanged petals snapping shut toward his ankles—
"Look out!"
The burly slayer roared, bringing his blade down to sever a thick stem near his own feet. As the steel bit through the plant, a spray of dark purple sap splashed across the back of his hand. His skin hissed, instantly blistering into an angry, scalded red.
"Don't let them touch you! The sap is poisonous!"
The female swordsman backpedaled frantically, leveling her Nichirin Blade horizontally to fend off the rapidly encroaching patch of snapping flowers. Butterfly darted backward alongside her. As a trained Kakushi accustomed to swift extractions, the masked girl's footwork was surprisingly nimble, allowing her to outpace the spreading flora.
Juro gritted his teeth, forcing his burning lungs to draw in massive amounts of oxygen. He mobilized his Flame Breathing. His blade ignited with a fierce, orange-red glow. With a brutal horizontal sweep, he unleashed a wave of heat, incinerating every demonic flower within a three-pace radius of his boots.
But the victory was agonizingly brief. From the freshly scorched earth, new buds violently tore through the ash, sprouting faster and denser than before.
Kisshoin stood at the epicenter of the botanical nightmare. The hem of her dharma robe dragged across the snapping, dark purple petals, making her look as though she were floating upon a writhing sea of teeth.
She tilted her head, her slit pupils swimming with playful mockery.
"That fiery little slash of yours was indeed quite painful. Congratulations, you are the first human to ever make me feel pain."
Her smile widened into a grotesque crescent. "Such a pity... it seems your lungs are giving out. You can't continue to swing your blade, can you?"
Juro's chest heaved, his breathing ragged and shallow. That second activation of Flame Breathing felt as though someone had poured boiling water down his throat. He had only grasped the fundamentals of the Breathing Style a few days prior; his mortal flesh was nowhere near adapted to the sheer internal pressure it required.
One full-power strike was his absolute limit. The second strike had already seen a drastic drop in intensity. A third attempt... would likely burst his heart.
"Captain!" The burly man and the female swordsman shouted in unison, abandoning their defensive stances to rush forward and aid him.
Kisshoin didn't even bother to glance in their direction.
The dark purple flowerbed surged with a predatory life of its own. Thick, thorny vines whipped upward, violently entangling the two charging slayers. A spiked tendril coiled around the burly man's left leg. Corrosive sap seeped through the gaps in his armor, eating into his flesh. He let out an agonized roar, crashing heavily to one knee. The female swordsman frantically hacked at the vines snaking up her waist, but the moment she severed one, two more sprouted from the bleeding stump, binding her even tighter.
In the end, only one person remained free—Butterfly.
Amidst the chaotic struggle of Juro and the two swordsmen fighting the poisonous thicket, all eyes were glued to the terrifying demon in the crimson robe. No one spared a single glance for the lowly logistics member.
No one ever paid attention to a Kakushi.
But she moved.
This was her first time stepping onto the bloody front lines, her first real chance to prove she was more than just a cleaner. The girl codenamed 'Butterfly' might have had a sister who stood at the absolute pinnacle as a Hashira, but beneath her mask, she harbored the exact same burning, inextinguishable hatred for demons as the rest of the Corps.
The opportunity lay bare before her, and she refused to let it slip through her fingers.
More, she absolutely could not disappoint the imposing figure who had granted her this chance to hold a blade.
Butterfly drew a deep breath, her blade sliding from its sheath.
Her breathing pattern was entirely distinct from an ordinary swordsman's. It was an excruciatingly slow, perfectly even, and razor-fine inhalation. It didn't feel like she was drawing in oxygen; it felt as though she were carefully measuring out a lethal dose of medicine. She treated the very act of inhaling and exhaling as the delicate process of brewing and administering a potent drug.
This was the technique she had been relentlessly practicing over the past few days.
It had no official name. It couldn't even be classified as a true Breathing Style. It served only the most rudimentary function: forcefully spiking her muscle reaction speed for a brief window by strictly regulating her respiratory frequency.
Three breaths.
Her fragile body could only withstand three.
But right now, even if it cost her life for a single breath, she had to strike.
The instant her first breath peaked, a sudden weightlessness washed over her limbs. She pushed off her toes, launching herself toward the burly man trapped in the corrosive vines. Her speed wasn't blinding; it paled in comparison to Juro's explosive Flame Breathing.
But it was barely, desperately enough.
Her Nichirin Blade flashed through the dark, the steel grazing the thick roots constricting the man's leg. It was a shallow, imperfect cut, but the metal carried the unique, purifying sunlight luster forged into every slayer's weapon.
The vines snapped.
They didn't just break; they burned. The sunlight-infused ore triggered a violent chemical reaction the moment it bit into the demonic plant tissue. While the faint heat was nowhere near potent enough to threaten Kisshoin's main body, it was just enough to force the poisonous vines to instantly wither and carbonize into ash.
"Go! Quickly!" Butterfly shouted, her voice muffled by her mask.
She drew her second breath.
The burly man tore himself free, limping backward. The flesh of his left leg had already begun to turn a necrotic black from the corrosive sap, but he was alive. He had survived.
She prepared for the third breath—
But it never came.
The oxygen exploded violently inside Butterfly's chest. A searing agony ripped through her lungs, as if an invisible iron fist had crushed them. The metallic tang of blood surged up the back of her throat, and her vision swam with dark spots.
Her untrained body simply couldn't handle the immense internal pressure of the artificial Breathing Style. Three breaths were her absolute limit, a threshold reached only by severely overdrawing her life force.
Now, the inevitable backlash of total exhaustion crashed down upon her.
Her knees buckled. She swayed, nearly collapsing face-first into the writhing patch of poisonous flora. Fresh vines erupted from the scorched earth directly beneath her boots, thicker and more vicious than before. The massive petals peeled back, revealing rows of dripping fangs where stamens should be. They lunged straight for her exposed neck—
Kisshoin casually tilted her head, her vertical pupils devoid of even a flicker of interest.
"Oh my. It seems a little bug slipped through." Her tone dripped with absolute, aristocratic disdain.
Butterfly gritted her teeth, her fingers trembling violently around the hilt of her sword. She raised her Nichirin Blade in a clumsy, desperate guard.
She knew her failing muscles couldn't possibly block the incoming strike.
Yet, she refused to close her eyes. She would watch death take her.
However, in the very next heartbeat.
The air directly in front of her violently split apart.
A faint, spectral purple arc of light—radiating the chilling aura of the underworld—swept down from the high ridge. It was absolutely silent and impossibly fast. Neither the gasping Butterfly nor the exhausted Juro could even track the blur before the crescent of energy cleaved straight through the entire demonic flowerbed.
Every single dark purple petal, thorny vine, and fanged stamen instantly carbonized and shattered the exact moment the Yomikiri's spectral light washed over them. It was as though their very life force had been violently ripped away by an ancient power from the depths of hell. They bypassed the natural process of withering entirely, disintegrating directly into a cloud of fine, dead dust.
Kisshoin's arrogant smile froze on her face.
Slowly, mechanically, she looked down at her own chest. What she saw was a razor-thin, diagonal line stretching from her left shoulder all the way down to her right waist. The cut was flawlessly smooth, as if she had been bisected by a phantom guillotine.
The exposed flesh along the bisection glowed with the dark, eerie hue of the underworld. It radiated a terrifying, bone-chilling cold that completely paralyzed her demonic cells.
"Wha—"
Her upper torso slowly slid off her lower half, hitting the dirt with a wet thud.
Not a single drop of blood spilled from the massive wound. Instead, the freezing miasma of the underworld poured from the severed flesh, rapidly spreading throughout her remaining body parts. Kisshoin's vaunted demonic regeneration couldn't even trigger. That spectral purple energy ruthlessly annihilated the vitality of her cells, completely uprooting her immortal biology at the source.
Yet, she did not perish immediately.
The sheer, stubborn vitality of a high-ranking demon kept her conscious despite being cleanly severed in two. Her jaw snapped open and shut in silent panic, and her vertical pupils spun frantically in their sockets, desperately searching the darkness for the monster that had struck her down.
Up on the hillside, a gray-clad figure touched down lightly at the edge of the ruined camp.
Pale, flowing hair fluttered wildly in the night wind. A terrifying demon mask concealed his features, but a pair of glowing, Crimson Demon Eyes pierced through the eye-slits. Kobe Hikaru looked down with utter apathy at the bisected demon writhing in the dirt.
He slowly slid Yomikiri back into its scabbard.
The crisp, metallic click of the guard locking into place echoed sharply across the silent graveyard.
Tsugikuni Yoriichi landed softly a half-second later. His hand rested calmly on his own hilt, his deep red eyes observing the ruined state of Kisshoin. He had been prepared to move; the fiery essence of Sun Breathing was already coiled and surging through his veins.
But Hikaru had simply been one step faster.
Juro remained crouched in the dirt, gasping greedily for air as he stared up at the imposing gray figure in awe. "Ko... Hikaru-sama..."
Hikaru ignored the swordsman entirely. His crimson gaze shifted toward Butterfly, who was in a far more pathetic state. The masked girl was swaying on her feet, teetering on the absolute brink of unconsciousness, yet she stubbornly fought to keep her eyes open and look at him.
"Hikaru-sama..." she wheezed, her voice barely a whisper. "I... I swung my sword..."
Her eyes held no lingering terror, nor the typical relief of a survivor. Instead, they shone with a pure, overwhelming joy.
It was her first time drawing a blade in anger. Her first time actively trying to slay a demon. True, her strike hadn't landed a fatal blow on the main body. But she had finally taken that terrifying first step. She hadn't disgraced the steel in her hands, nor had she squandered the precious opportunity the undead samurai had bestowed upon her.
Hikaru offered her a slow, approving nod.
She wasn't his formal disciple, but even setting aside the strange matters of her 'reincarnation', his impression of the stubborn girl was surprisingly positive.
It was just a pity that Butterfly's eyes rolled back, and she fainted dead away before she could actually see his nod of approval. Another masked female Kakushi, who had silently trailed behind Hikaru and Yoriichi, quickly darted forward to catch the unconscious girl and carry her to safety.
Juro, relying on his superior physique, managed to hold on. He staggered heavily as he forced himself back onto his feet.
Hikaru paid him no mind. The Oni Samurai crouched down in the dirt, tilting his masked face to study the bisected Kisshoin.
His glowing eyes reflected her ruined, yet strangely beautiful face.
"Blood Demon Art," Hikaru murmured.
His voice was incredibly soft, a dry rasp meant only for his own ears and the half-dead creature bleeding out before him.
Before tonight, every single demon he had encountered—from the grunts he had personally slaughtered to the historical bounties logged in the Demon Slayer Corps' archives—had never displayed such an esoteric ability. The demons of this era possessed terrifying strength, blinding speed, and absurd regeneration, but at their core, they were merely violent, physically enhanced beasts.
Kisshoin was a completely different breed.
She could conjure fields of poisonous flora from thin air. That wasn't just a simple venom secreted from fangs or claws; she was actively transmuting her own demonic blood into complex, independent biological constructs that could grow, hunt, and attack on command.
According to the lore Hikaru retained from his past life, this phenomenon was known exclusively as a Blood Demon Art. It was an unnatural, spell-like manifestation that could only awaken once the cursed blood bestowed by Kibutsuji Muzan reached a highly concentrated threshold within a demon's body.
Each Art was entirely unique to its host. Some demons could manipulate razor-sharp threads, others could warp the very fabric of space, some breathed freezing frost, and others, like the wretch before him, cultivated carnivorous gardens.
Yet, in this brutal Sengoku era—at least in the violent months since Hikaru had transmigrated into this world—he hadn't witnessed a single one.
He had never crossed blades with a demon capable of wielding a Blood Demon Art.
Not one.
There was likely only one logical explanation. Kibutsuji Muzan had not yet begun bestowing high concentrations of his blood on a massive scale. The evolution of Blood Demon Arts was still in its infancy, a dark privilege granted only to a microscopic fraction of his immortal army.
Hikaru stared down at Kisshoin's twitching, fading remains.
"Speak," he commanded, his tone deadpan and devoid of any empathy. "What exactly are you?"
He had originally tagged along tonight just to supervise the rookies, hoping to casually butcher a few low-level stragglers to grind some easy favorability points for Yomikiri. He certainly hadn't expected to stumble across such an anomalous prize.
The name 'Kisshoin' had been nagging at the back of his mind since he heard it. It felt entirely too familiar.
Was her name truly Kisshoin, or was it perhaps...
"Sesshoin?"
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