Chapter 199: Muzan
Night fell over the untamed wilderness.
Aya-gozen's party established their camp across an open, wind-swept meadow. Over twenty mounted guards quickly formed a defensive perimeter, striking flint to ignite campfires that snapped and hissed against the encroaching dark. The horses were tethered near a cluster of dwarf shrubs on the leeward side, shielded from the biting gusts.
Pitched in the very center of the formation was Aya-gozen's tent. The heavy fabric flap was half-draped, revealing a thin, woven blanket spread over the grass and her carefully folded luggage.
She did not enter the tent.
Instead, she sat near the largest campfire, her slender fingers wrapped around a ceramic bowl of hot soup. The hem of her dark-colored kimono cascaded over the grass. Firelight danced across her elegant features, casting a warm, flickering glow over her brow and eyes.
The curve of her waist, cinched tightly by the narrow sash of her riding attire, was thrown into sharp relief by the side-lighting of the flames. Her silhouette was noticeably softer than that of her sister, Kenshin, possessing rounder shoulder lines. The thick fabric of her hakama stretched into a smooth arc as she rested her weight against the earth.
A sudden gust of night wind swept across the meadow, carrying the distinct, biting chill of late autumn.
Yet, her gaze remained anchored on the impenetrable darkness just beyond the camp's illuminated perimeter.
In that specific direction, roughly twenty paces away, sat a lone silhouette.
Gray robes fluttered slightly in the wind. Long, pale hair spilled down the figure's back. He sat perfectly still on a jagged rock, a woven straw hat resting casually against his knee. He made no move to light a fire, nor did he attempt to approach the warmth of the camp. He simply existed there, like a wandering phantom who had decided this exact stone was an adequate place to rest.
Aya-gozen remembered him.
He was the strange, solitary samurai who had passed their retinue on the official road earlier that afternoon—the eccentric young man she had caught murmuring to stones and blades of grass.
"Have you been following us?"
Aya-gozen's voice was not particularly loud, yet the refined, clear timbre of her tone sliced effortlessly through the howling night wind.
The surrounding guards instantly stiffened. Hands dropped to sword hilts. Two dozen pairs of eyes snapped toward the darkness, the men only just realizing that a stranger had been sitting within striking distance of their lady this entire time.
In the shadows, the silhouette finally moved.
He stood up.
Leaving the straw hat behind, he stepped forward just enough for the moonlight to catch his pale face. He possessed handsome, sharply defined features and a cold, emotionless contour. But it was his eyes that commanded attention—striking, luminescent scarlet pupils.
It was an undeniably young face. Yet, under the shifting interplay of the orange campfire and the silver moonlight, those demonic eyes felt ancient and exceptionally piercing.
"Your perception is sharp."
Hikaru's voice was entirely flat, devoid of any inflection. "But I have no interest in following you. The thing I am tracking simply happens to be traveling the exact same path you are."
Aya-gozen did not flinch beneath that scarlet stare.
She was the sister of Uesugi Kenshin. Having lived day and night alongside the two-generation incarnation of Bishamonten, she had been exposed to more terrifying, non-human entities than every single guard in this camp combined.
She was merely curious.
"Then why stop here?"
"To rest."
"There is plenty of open space twenty paces in the other direction."
"This rock is the best one in the vicinity."
Aya-gozen fell silent for a long moment. She slowly lowered her soup bowl, forcing herself to swallow the highly impolite remark resting on the tip of her tongue: Do you mean that charred, crumbling lump of stone that looks ready to shatter?
"You do not look like an ordinary traveler," she noted instead.
"I am not a traveler. In fact, I am not human."
Before Aya-gozen could even process the blunt admission, Hikaru's demon eyes darted away from her. His gaze swept across the oppressive darkness encircling the camp, finally locking onto a specific patch of shadows.
"Your luck is truly terrible," he muttered.
Aya-gozen's brows knit together. "What do you mean?"
Hikaru simply tilted his chin toward the sky.
The moon was full. Hanging in the dead center of the firmament, it cast a blanket of silver-white frost over the wilderness.
Then—the light began to die.
There were no clouds rolling in. Instead, a creeping blackness began to eat away at the edge of the lunar disk.
A lunar eclipse.
The shadow spread from the bottom left corner, slowly and methodically devouring the silver face of the moon. With every fraction of light that vanished, the temperature across the meadow plummeted.
To ordinary scholars, this was merely a celestial phenomenon. But in a world where demons and curses ran rampant through the night, a lunar eclipse was a harbinger of slaughter. The exact moment the moonlight vanished was the moment the foulest things in the dark reached their absolute peak of activity.
A sickening stench began to bleed into the air.
It was faint at first, like rotting meat left in a damp cellar, but it rapidly intensified.
Aya-gozen smelled it. Her expression hardened. She rose to her feet in a single fluid motion, her right hand dropping to rest on the ornate short sword secured at her waist.
"All hands on alert!"
The guard captain's frantic shout shattered the quiet. Steel hissed against wooden scabbards as the guards drew their blades, hastily forming a tight defensive circle around the campfire.
The moon was half-swallowed. The wilderness plunged into a suffocating gloom.
Immediately, the sounds began. Rustling grass. Snapping twigs. Low, guttural wet noises echoing from all directions.
Something was approaching.
Not just one. A swarm.
Grayish-white figures poured out from the tall grass, slithering over the low hills and emerging from the distant, jagged tree line.
Their skin was the color of fresh ash. Their mouths were split grotesquely wide, tearing all the way to their ears to reveal rows of interlocking, jagged fangs. Their eyeballs rolled wildly in their sockets, a sickly, turbid yellow.
These were the evil demons created by Kibutsuji Muzan. They were neither natural monsters nor spiritual curses. They were abominations mutated from humans infected by a highly toxic blood, possessing near-infinite regenerative capabilities. Their sole, absolute weakness was the sun.
And there were at least thirty of them. They heavily outnumbered the living humans in the camp.
Every single yellow eye was locked onto the center of the meadow. They were salivating, drawn by the intoxicating scent of fresh, pulsing flesh and blood.
On the night of a lunar eclipse, a demon's regenerative speed and sensory range skyrocketed. It was a terrifying window of time that even the elite Demon Slayer Corps actively avoided.
Aya-gozen's retinue had walked right into a slaughterhouse.
The guards' faces drained of color. They did not understand the biological mechanics of these demons; they only saw nightmarish monsters. They were mortal samurai, not trained Exorcists. Against numbers like this, standard steel would do nothing but chip against bone.
Aya-gozen gripped her short sword so tightly her knuckles turned white. She was not afraid of dying, but she held a critical political position. She could not afford to perish in some nameless field due to a random ambush.
After all, within the borders of the Uesugi Clan's territory, 'monsters' of this sheer scale were practically unheard of.
"Move aside."
The voice drifted from behind her. It was soft. Utterly casual.
She snapped her head back. The young, eccentric samurai had already bypassed the defensive perimeter and was strolling directly toward the encroaching horde.
Hikaru's pale face took on a deathly, cold tone under the waning, eclipsed light. Staring down the wave of salivating demons, he did not reach for the Onikiri strapped to his left waist.
Instead, his hand fell to his right side. He gripped the hilt of Yomikiri.
The instant the black-purple Nichirin Blade cleared its scabbard, a sinister, dark-violet hue rippled across the steel. The cold glint of the metal looked violently out of place in the shadows.
At that exact moment—he breathed.
It was a terrifyingly deep, impossibly long inhalation. His chest did not rise. His dead lungs did not physically expand. Yet, the surrounding atmosphere violently rushed toward his face.
The Turbid Qi stagnating between heaven and earth—the invisible, foul air currents that sank to the lowest layers of the night—were violently sucked into an invisible vortex, funneling directly into his nose and mouth.
Inhale. Rotate. Refine. Exhale.
A dense, dark mist spilled from between his lips, seeping down his throat, flooding his chest, and surging violently down his right arm into the hilt of the sword.
Breath of the Demon.
Using dead lungs as a blazing furnace, Turbid Qi as the raw fuel, and the heavy pulse of the underworld as his rhythm.
A ghostly, violet brilliance—the literal color of the underworld—clung to Yomikiri's edge. The latent sunlight energy forged into the Nichirin steel violently intertwined with the refined Turbid Qi, forming a razor-thin film of light that was silent to the extreme.
He swung.
Only one strike.
A perfect, horizontal arc. Left to right.
There was no deafening explosion. No roaring shockwave.
Just an eerily quiet, near-silent crescent of underworld-colored light that detached from the tip of Yomikiri and expanded outward, sweeping across the entire expanse of the wilderness.
When the arc of light phased through the waist of the first charging demon, the creature didn't even blink.
A second later, its upper torso slid cleanly off its hips.
The cut was impossibly smooth. The edges of the severed flesh were instantly coated in a layer of dark, necrotic violet. The ghostly brilliance violently annihilated all cellular vitality at the incision point, completely erasing the demon's regenerative factor.
Simultaneously, the sunlight property embedded within the Nichirin Blade flared to life, burning fiercely inward from the ruined tissue.
It was a flawless, dual strangulation of sun and demon.
The arc of light did not stop. It kept expanding.
The second. The third. The fifth. The tenth.
The crescent swept across the entire meadow, cleanly bisecting absolutely everything above waist height.
The tall grass.
And thirty-seven evil demons.
The cuts were mathematically perfect. The upper halves of the demons hung suspended in the air for a fraction of a second. Their turbid yellow eyes widened. Extreme, uncomprehending confusion warped their grotesque faces.
Then, the carbonization began.
The ghostly brilliance annihilated their life force while the sunlight burned their cells to ash. Both lethal attributes acted simultaneously on every single severed surface.
Their vaunted regeneration could not even begin to outpace the sheer speed of their destruction.
Thirty-seven demons shattered at the exact same time.
They dissolved into a massive cloud of gray fly ash.
From the moment Hikaru drew the blade to the moment he returned it to its scabbard, barely a second had passed.
Click.
The crisp sound of the handguard locking against the scabbard echoed sharply across the dead silent wilderness.
A translucent blue panel flickered in his vision.
[Nichirin Blade · Yomikiri: favorability + 7]
[Current favorability: 41 (Recognition · Initial)]
Slaying demons. This was the fundamental, burning desire woven into Yomikiri's existence. Satisfying its bloodlust provided a far more straightforward increase in favorability than any amount of spiritual infusion or sweet-talking.
A low wind howled across the meadow, catching the massive cloud of floating ash and scattering it into the distant dark.
The moon was still being devoured by the eclipse's shadow.
But on the wilderness, not a single living demon remained. Even their ashes were rapidly ceasing to exist.
Hikaru stood casually by the campfire, the ghostly purple mist slowly venting from his pores and dissipating into the night.
He turned around.
Over twenty heavily armed guards were frozen like stone statues. Some still held their swords awkwardly raised in the air; others had simply collapsed, their knees giving out from sheer shock.
Aya-gozen had not loosened her death grip on her short sword, but her pupils were blown wide. In those refined eyes—eyes so strikingly similar to Kenshin's—was absolute, unadulterated awe.
She had witnessed the extraordinary before. She had watched Kenshin channel the divine wrath of Bishamonten. That was, without question, the pinnacle of power in the human realm.
But when Kenshin fought, she required time. She needed to deploy her Eight-equipment and carefully release the power of accumulated faith.
This young, deadpan samurai had wiped out an entire horde in a single, casual breath.
Just one strike.
"I told you—you are unlucky," Hikaru said, calmly brushing a speck of ash from his gray cuff. His crimson eyes glowed faintly in the dim light. "But it is fine."
"You met me."
"I was not following you. I was hunting them." He tilted his head, staring past the camp into the deep, northeastern darkness.
But as he stared, his tone suddenly shifted. The flat, casual indifference vanished.
The complex purple patterns and orange streamers buried deep within his crimson pupils flared to life. They spun rapidly, locking onto something far beyond the tree line.
Something was out there.
Something infinitely heavier, darker, and more suffocatingly dangerous than those thirty-seven demons combined.
It was approaching.
Aya-gozen caught the shift in Hikaru's expression. On that perpetually cold, stern face, a fleeting, indescribable look surfaced.
It wasn't exactly fear. But to an ordinary human, seeing that look on the face of a monster was far more terrifying than any panic.
"It is here," he murmured.
He straightened his posture. His voice dropped to a whisper, far softer than when he had casually slaughtered the horde moments ago. "If you want to live, you need to leave this place immediately."
"Is something else coming—?"
"Do not ask. Just go."
He didn't wait for her to argue. He simply stepped past the firelight and walked directly into the suffocating darkness. His gray robes whipped wildly in the wind, his pale hair a stark streak against the black night.
Aya-gozen watched him walk away until the shadows completely swallowed him.
Her heart hammered violently against her ribs.
Partially because of the thirty-seven demons. But mostly because of his retreating back. Because of the terrifying unknown.
What in the world could make an entity capable of erasing an entire horde with a single strike look so incredibly grim?
She didn't waste time asking questions. She spun around, her voice cracking like a whip as she ordered her paralyzed men to break camp immediately.
Retreat.
In this chaotic, blood-soaked era, there were simply too many horrors that ordinary mortals had no right to witness. She was not her sister. She was not a god of war. She knew exactly where her limitations lay.
But as she mounted her horse, she cast one final, lingering glance toward the northeast.
She burned Hikaru's silhouette into her memory. If she survived the night and made it back... she was going to have a very long conversation with Kenshin.
Meanwhile.
Thousands of miles away, deep within the hidden headquarters of the Demon Slayer Corps.
Inside the grand main hall of the Ubuyashiki estate, the oil lamps flickered violently.
Ubuyashiki Rikiya knelt rigidly on a woven cushion. A Kasugai Crow stood on the tatami mat before him, its jet-black feathers puffed out in extreme agitation, its golden eyes wide and frantic.
It had just flown at breakneck speed from the direction of Kyoto.
"Report!" The crow's voice was hoarse, cracking with panic. "The scouts positioned around Kyoto have sent urgent news—"
"Kibutsuji Muzan is not there!"
Rikiya's spine snapped completely straight.
"What... do you mean?"
"The residual aura of Muzan detected in the city was a decoy!" The crow's wings trembled violently as it mimicked the terrified tone of the scout. "There was only one demon present! A flesh-puppet substitute imbued with a fraction of Muzan's blood. It perfectly mimicked Muzan's demonic aura, but the main body was nothing more than a high-ranking pawn!"
"Muzan's true body is not in Kyoto!"
"He hasn't been there for days!"
A suffocating silence crashed down upon the main hall.
Rikiya slowly opened his eyes. The cloudy, blind orbs rotated slightly in their sockets. He could not see the room, but he could feel the shifting currents of the world.
The absolute precognitive intuition passed down through the cursed Ubuyashiki bloodline violently violently flared to life. It felt as though a massive, icy hand had just plunged into his chest and crushed his heart.
Extreme, catastrophic danger.
Direction—southeast.
He violently whipped his head to the side, staring blindly at the southeast wall of the main hall, as if his sightless eyes could pierce through the wood and gaze across hundreds of miles of wilderness.
"...Which direction did Lord Hikaru travel today?" Rikiya whispered, his voice trembling.
The attendant kneeling beside him blinked in confusion. "Reporting to the Master... Lord Rengoku Juro stated that Lord Hikaru departed toward Musashi Province. To the... southeast."
Rikiya's face drained of all color.
He forced himself to his feet.
This frail, bedridden young family head, who usually moved with agonizing slowness, stood up with terrifying, unmatched speed. The hem of his plain white kariginu robe snapped sharply in the air.
"Pass the order—"
His voice lost all of its usual, soothing calm. It was laced with raw, unadulterated panic.
"All Hashira, immediately—"
He choked on the words, his expression twisting into a mask of pure despair.
Because it was impossible.
The Seven Hashira.
After receiving Hikaru's initial intelligence, Rikiya had deployed every single Pillar directly to Kyoto. They were supposed to wait for Muzan to be lured out by the rumors of the Blue Spider Lily, wait for him to step outside the protection of Hagoromo Gitsune, and then execute a perfectly coordinated ambush to annihilate him.
It was a flawless trap. An opportunity the Ubuyashiki family had prayed for over five hundred agonizing years.
He had committed his entire military force to that single location.
And it was a fake.
Muzan was not in Kyoto.
But the Seven Hashira were already there, hiding in the shadows, waiting for a ghost. Even if he dispatched the fastest crows right now, recalling them to the southeast would take days. It was far, far too late.
But in that exact moment of despair, a blinding, scorching light suddenly erupted from the direction of the estate's backyard.
The intense radiance blasted through the paper shoji doors of the corridor, piercing through the hanging curtains of wisteria flowers.
It illuminated the entire courtyard as if the sun had suddenly risen at midnight.
It was sunlight.
Yet, there was no sun in the sky.
It was simply the sheer, radiant heat exploding from the body of a single man.
Tsugikuni Yoriichi.
The red-haired swordsman stood motionless on the wooden corridor. His deep, crimson eyes were locked onto the exact same southeast horizon that Rikiya's blind eyes had found.
His breathing shifted.
It sounded as though a miniature sun had ignited within his chest. Intense, blistering heat vented from his pores, forming a thick, golden mist of thermal energy that visibly warped the air around him.
Sun Breathing.
Pushed to its absolute, maximum output.
His Transparent World had already shown him the truth. Far across the continent, an entity of apocalyptic danger was rapidly closing in on his benefactor.
Yoriichi took a single step.
His figure instantly vanished from the corridor, leaving behind nothing but a sonic boom.
Rengoku Juro, who had just sprinted out from the side door of the main hall, threw his arms up to shield his face from the blast of hot wind. When he lowered his arms, he saw only a lingering wisp of golden heat mist and the deep, charred footprints burned directly into the solid oak floorboards.
"Mr. Tsugikuni—!" Juro yelled into the empty night.
Back inside the hall, Rikiya slowly lowered his hands.
Standing in the center of the room, his face—half-ravaged by the purple curse—looked like a porcelain mask.
He could see nothing.
But the instant Yoriichi shattered the sound barrier, Rikiya's prophetic intuition whispered a single, fragile truth.
There was still hope.
On the other side of the world.
In the southern reaches of Kozuke Province, the residual light from the lunar eclipse painted the open wilderness in a sickly, paper-white hue. The wild grass swayed heavily, scattering debris into the freezing air.
Hikaru stood perfectly still at the edge of the meadow, roughly a hundred paces away from where Aya-gozen's camp had been.
He faced the northeast.
A thin, imperceptible layer of blood mist had silently expanded beneath his boots, blanketing the earth to serve as a massive sensory web.
His Spirit-Tracking Archer Transformation automatically painted targets across his vision. The piercing clarity of his Sharp Eye Transformation effortlessly cut through the pitch-black night.
He saw it.
At the very edge of the distant tree line, a lone figure stepped out of the shadows.
The pace was agonizingly slow.
Every single footfall pressed against the dirt with an incredibly light, almost inaudible grace. Yet, the instant that microscopic vibration touched Hikaru's sensory web, the entire expanse of blood mist violently shuddered.
It wasn't because the physical footsteps were heavy. It was because the sheer, suffocating pressure of this entity's existence was actively crushing the life out of the surrounding environment.
The pale moonlight finally washed over the figure.
An impeccably elegant kimono draped over a dark outer coat. The face was stunningly beautiful, with skin so flawlessly white it looked carved from marble.
Red vertical pupils shimmered with a toxic, cold fluorescence in the dark.
It was a female body.
Yet, it was not a woman.
Because those eyes did not belong to anything human. They were the cold, calculating, reptilian slits of a predator.
Hikaru recognized her instantly.
He didn't need a system prompt. He didn't need to analyze the aura.
Kibutsuji Muzan.
The Progenitor of Demons.
The absolute, immortal tyrant born five hundred years ago. Five brains. Seven hearts. Infinite, instantaneous regeneration. An entity completely indestructible by anything save the sun itself. A monster capable of freely warping its flesh, gender, and age at will.
"I have finally met you."
Muzan spoke. The voice was as smooth as flowing silk, yet abnormally, terrifyingly crisp.
"Kobe Hikaru."
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