Getting lost in a dense forest is an inconvenience.
Getting lost in a freezing mountain pass while a demonic blizzard threatens to freeze the fluid in your eyeballs is a mathematical failure.
I trudged through the knee-deep snow, the cold biting through the standard-issue purple Demon Slayer uniform.
I had wrapped a thick, woolen scarf around the lower half of my face, but it did little to stop the icy wind from cutting into my lungs.
My right hand rested heavily on the polished oak stock of the Sun-Spitter, the cold metal of the double barrels biting through my fingerless gloves.
“Caw!
Wrong way!
Again!
You have the navigational instincts of a blind rock!” My Kasugai crow plummeted from the grey sky, landing on a frost-covered pine branch a few feet ahead of me.
It ruffled its black feathers angrily, glaring at me with beady, judgmental eyes.
“If you don’t shut up, I’m going to find out if this shotgun works on poultry,” I grumbled, my voice muffled by the scarf.
“Threats!
Caw!
South!
I said South!
You have been walking West for three hours!” the crow shrieked.
“The waystation is in the valley!
You are climbing a ridge!” I stopped, exhaling a long plume of white breath.
I looked down.
Through the swirling curtain of snow, I could faintly make out the dilapidated, snow-crushed roof of a massive wooden structure nestled in the gorge below.
The crow was right, though I would never admit it out loud.
I adjusted the leather bandolier across my chest.
The heavy brass Nichirin shells clinked together, a comforting, mechanical sound in the dead silence of the mountain.
Since leaving the Butterfly Mansion, my mind had been dissecting the limits of the Devourer’s Physique.
The fight with Akaza had given me a taste of genuine, upper-tier power.
The strength to shatter boulders, the speed to break the sound barrier, the ability to project kinetic force—it was all intoxicating.
But it was fleeting.
The moment the demon’s flesh was fully metabolized, I was dumped violently back to my baseline.
I couldn’t stockpile the buffs.
I couldn’t slowly build my stats by snacking on low-level fodder.
I had to consume the flesh during the fight to bridge the gap.
It turned every battle into a twisted culinary wager.
I was a swordsman relying on a temporary, highly volatile biological engine.
I didn’t bother finding a path down the ridge.
I just stepped off the edge, sliding down the steep, snowy incline in a controlled fall, using the scabbard of my moss-green katana as a makeshift rudder.
I hit the valley floor with a heavy crunch, sending a spray of powder into the air.
The waystation loomed before me.
It was a sprawling, multi-story traditional inn built directly into the side of the mountain.
It looked like it had once been a luxurious stopover for wealthy merchants traveling through the pass.
Now, it was a tomb.
The paper sliding doors were shredded.
The wooden engawa porch was rotting, covered in a thick layer of undisturbed snow.
There were no lights.
There was no smoke rising from the chimneys.
“Travelers enter!
None leave!
Caw!” the crow warned from the sky before wisely circling high above the cloud line, completely refusing to land near the structure.
I stepped onto the porch.
The wood didn’t creak beneath my boots.
In fact, it made no sound at all.
I frowned, resting my thumb over the hammer of the Sun-Spitter.
My combat instincts were vibrating, picking up on a subtle, sickening wrongness in the atmosphere.
It didn’t feel like the heavy, crushing gravity of an Upper Moon.
It felt slippery.
It felt like the air itself was out of focus.
I pushed the shattered remnants of the front door aside and stepped into the main lobby.
It was dark, lit only by the pale, grey light filtering in through the snowstorm outside.
The interior was massive, featuring a grand wooden staircase leading up into the shadows.
Abandoned luggage, broken ceramics, and torn garments littered the tatami mats.
But there was no blood.
No ash.
Just empty clothes.
“Hello?” a voice echoed.
I stopped.
The voice was faint, trembling, and sounded like a young woman.
It came from the top of the grand staircase.
“Is someone there?
Please…
I’ve been hiding for two days,” the voice called out again, followed by a quiet sob.
I didn’t answer.
I didn’t rush up the stairs like a heroic protagonist.
I slowly drew my moss-green katana with my left hand, keeping the shotgun leveled with my right.
I took a step forward, placing my boot on the first wooden step of the staircase.
The moment my weight shifted onto the wood, the world tilted.
My stomach lurched violently into my throat.
The laws of gravity simply ceased to exist for a fraction of a second.
The grand staircase warped, elongating and twisting like a ribbon caught in a whirlpool.
I didn’t fall up, and I didn’t fall down.
I fell sideways.
I hit a wooden floor hard, rolling to absorb the impact.
I sprang to my feet instantly, crossing my sword and my gun.
I was no longer in the lobby.
I was standing in a long, perfectly straight hallway lined with identical paper doors.
There were no windows.
The air was stiflingly warm, smelling strongly of old incense and rotting meat.
I looked behind me.
The hallway stretched into infinity.
I looked ahead.
The exact same infinite corridor.
“A Demon Slayer?” The voice didn’t come from a frightened woman this time.
It was a wet, gurgling sound that seemed to emanate from the paper walls themselves.
“How disappointing,” the voice mocked.
“I prefer the merchants.
They carry more fat.
You look wiry.
Stringy.
Too much muscle, not enough marrow.” “I’ve been told I’m an acquired taste,” I replied evenly, my eyes scanning the featureless corridor.
“Show yourself, freak.” “I am everywhere, little swordsman,” the voice laughed.
“Welcome to my inn.
I am Kairo.
My Blood Demon Art allows me to fold the space within these walls infinitely.
You will walk these halls until you starve to death, and then I will simply drink what is left.” Spatial manipulation.
I hated tricksters.
It reminded me of Trafalgar Law’s annoying ‘Room’ ability back in the Grand Line, but at least Law had the decency to stand in front of me while he scrambled my geography.
I walked toward the nearest paper door on my right.
I kicked it open.
Instead of a room, the doorway opened into the exact same hallway, looking directly at the back of my own head.
I was standing ten feet away from myself.
I frowned.
I raised the Sun-Spitter, aimed at the ceiling, and pulled the right trigger.
KABOOM!
The twelve-gauge roared, spitting a cone of sunlight-infused iron sand upward.
The shrapnel tore through the wooden ceiling.
A split second later, the floorboards beneath my feet exploded upward as the exact same spread of iron sand tore through the ground, shredding the fabric of my hakama pants and grazing my calf.
I hissed, stumbling backward.
The spatial loop was spherical.
If I shot up, the bullets came from below.
If I shot forward, they came from behind.
“Ahahaha!
Did you just shoot yourself?!” Kairo’s voice echoed, booming with malicious glee.
“How pathetic!
The Corps must be truly desperate to send a whelp with a toy gun!” “Alright,” I whispered, breaking the shotgun open.
I ejected the spent shell, ignoring the stinging burn in my leg.
I slammed a fresh shell into the chamber.
“Math it is.” The walls of the corridor suddenly bulged.
The paper sliding doors ripped open, and a dozen grotesque figures spilled out into the hallway.
They were humanoids, entirely composed of a pale, wax-like substance.
They wore the shredded clothes of the merchants who had vanished.
They had no eyes, just gaping maws lined with needle-like teeth.
Flesh-puppets.
“Play with my guests, Slayer,” Kairo sneered.
“Let’s see how long your stamina lasts.” The wax-puppets lunged, their movements entirely silent but unnervingly fast.
I didn’t retreat.
I slid forward, my center of gravity skimming the floorboards.
Ittoryu (Single Sword Style): Twister.
I spun like a top, the moss-green blade cutting a perfect, devastating circle through the air.
The cheap, mass-produced wax bodies offered zero resistance to the Nichirin steel.
The front wave of puppets was sheared in half at the waist, their upper torsos hitting the floor with wet, heavy thuds.
But they didn’t bleed, and they didn’t turn to ash.
The severed halves immediately began dragging themselves toward me by their fingernails.
More doors slid open.
Two dozen more puppets poured into the infinite hallway, blocking me from the front and the rear.
I couldn’t shoot them without the buckshot looping through the spatial warp and hitting my own back.
I couldn’t cut them all before exhaustion set in.
The demon was fighting a war of attrition from the safety of another dimension.
I needed a bridge.
I stomped my boot down squarely on the back of one of the bisected, crawling wax-puppets, pinning it to the floor.
It shrieked, thrashing wildly.
These things were created by the demon’s blood.
They were an extension of his power, intricately tied to the spatial loop that kept this corridor intact.
I knelt down, grabbed a thick handful of the pale, waxy flesh from the puppet’s shoulder, and forcefully ripped it free.
I brought it to my mouth.
It tasted like old candle wax dipped in battery acid.
I chewed twice, ignoring the sickening texture, and swallowed it whole.
The Iron Stomach roared to life.
It wasn’t the explosive, world-shattering surge of power I had felt from Akaza.
This was a completely different flavor of demonic energy.
It was cold, sharp, and highly cerebral.
The black veins didn’t crawl up my neck.
Instead, my pupils violently dilated, completely swallowing the irises.
My vision hitched, stuttered, and then shattered like a broken mirror.
The infinite, perfect hallway vanished.
The Devourer’s Physique had forcibly metabolized Kairo’s Blood Demon Art, granting me a temporary, crude synchronization with his spatial frequency.
I was no longer looking at the illusion.
I was seeing the architecture of the Blood Demon Art itself.
The infinite corridor was actually a massive, spherical cage made of overlapping wooden beams.
The wax-puppets weren’t independent creatures; they were attached to thin, translucent strings of demonic energy that pulsed with a faint, sickly purple light.
And I saw where all the strings led.
Hanging upside down from the center of the spherical cage, camouflaged perfectly in the dark rafters that my normal eyes couldn’t perceive, was Kairo.
He looked like a massive, swollen tick with the face of a grinning old man.
“What…
why are you looking up?” Kairo’s voice trembled, the arrogant mockery vanishing instantly.
“You can’t see me!
The loop is absolute!” “Your loop is cheap,” I growled, my voice vibrating with a low, demonic resonance.
I didn’t raise my sword.
I raised the Sun-Spitter.
With the spatial frequency temporarily mapped in my brain, I could see the exact curvature of the warped gravity.
I didn’t aim at Kairo.
I aimed at a seemingly empty patch of the wooden wall to my right, calculating the exact trajectory of the spatial fold.
“Die, trickster.” I pulled both triggers simultaneously.
KABOOM!
The massive recoil drove me back a step.
The double-barreled blast of sunlight-infused iron sand tore into the wall.
It vanished into the spatial fold, perfectly bypassing the looping parameters I had analyzed.
A split second later, the buckshot exited a spatial tear directly behind Kairo’s head, entirely outside his field of vision.
The iron sand slammed into the demon’s bloated body with catastrophic kinetic force.
Kairo shrieked in absolute, unadulterated agony as the sunlight ore detonated inside his thorax.
The explosive impact blew him completely off the rafters, severing his connection to the infinite loop.
The spatial Blood Demon Art shattered like glass.
The infinite hallway dissolved, dumping me violently back into the dusty, ruined lobby of the waystation.
The wax-puppets melted into foul-smelling puddles of grey sludge.
Kairo hit the lobby floor hard, thrashing wildly, a massive, smoking crater blown through his abdomen.
“No!
My inn!
My beautiful trap!
How did you bypass the space?!” I walked over to him slowly.
The cold, cerebral high of the spatial buff was already fading, my vision returning to normal as my Iron Stomach aggressively purged the waxy flesh from my system.
My baseline stats reasserted themselves, leaving my legs feeling like lead.
“I’m a very good guesser,” I said coldly.
Kairo raised a trembling, clawed hand, trying to weave another spatial portal to escape.
I didn’t give him the time.
I stepped inside his guard, drawing the moss-green katana in a single, fluid, merciless arc.
The green steel flashed in the dim light of the lobby.
Kairo’s head detached from his bloated body, hitting the tatami mats and rolling into a pile of abandoned luggage.
His eyes widened in shock for a fraction of a second before his flesh began to bubble and disintegrate into a pile of grey ash.
I stood over the fading remains, breathing heavily, the cold mountain air rushing back in through the shattered front doors.
A familiar, metallic chime echoed in the back of my mind.
[System Notification: Target Eliminated.
Low-Tier Spatial Demon (Kairo).] [Calculating Existential Energy yield…] [Yield: 15 Units.] [Total Resurrection Protocol Progress: 185 / 100,000 Units.] I swiped a hand through the air, shattering the blue holographic screen before it could fully materialize.
Fifteen units.
It was a pathetic haul compared to the sheer volume I needed to rewrite the laws of death, but it was progress.
I wiped the green blade clean on the demon’s dissolving kimono, sheathed the katana with a crisp click, and broke open the Sun-Spitter to reload.
The mountain pass was quiet again.
I walked out of the ruined waystation, stepping back into the howling blizzard.
I had survived another round of the Will of the World’s deadly script, I had successfully field-tested the Devourer’s Physique without a Hashira to bail me out, and my Iron Stomach was ready for the next course.
Somewhere out there in the dark, the Upper Moons were waiting.
And I was going to eat every single one of them.