--A nightmare sweeping through the Demon Slayer Corps!
A month has passed in the blink of an eye!!
During this month, the Demon Slayer Corps, an ancient organization that has been entangled with demons for hundreds of years, experienced for the first time what it means to be "a scholar encountering a soldier, unable to reason with him."
No, it should be said that the swordsman encountered a virus and was unable to use his strength.
The Demon Slayer Corps' eastern outpost is a hardcore outpost known as a concentration camp of tough guys, where even arm-wrestling bets involve the loser going to the back mountain to fight a black bear one-on-one.
At this moment, the atmosphere here is permeated with an indescribable... eerie... effeminate... sadness.
"Waaaaah... my little chick... why are you so unlucky..."
A burly man, 1.9 meters tall and with a muscular build, capable of knocking down a bull with a single punch, was holding a sparrow that had just died of illness, weeping uncontrollably, his heart breaking. o(╥╥)o
Instead of mocking him, his comrades around him, one by one, had red eyes, wiping away non-existent tears with their sleeves, and sobbed along with him.
"Captain... my condolences..."
"Yes, Captain, Little Chiu Chiu in heaven wouldn't want to see you so sad..."
"Waaaah... you don't understand... it's still so small... it hasn't even had a chance to taste the flavor of love..."
The entire stronghold was shrouded in gloom and despair; the air was thick with the bitter scent of a strong man shedding tears.
To the uninitiated, they would have thought they had just gone through a fierce battle in which they lost seven or eight pillars.
However, this is only the beginning.
Similarly, a bizarre and inexplicable epidemic is spreading at an alarming rate, like a virus, through the Demon Slayer Corps' various contact points and even ordinary villages and towns.
In some places, everyone seems to have rickets; they can't even hold chopsticks, let alone wield a knife.
In some places, everyone suddenly became a stutterer overnight, needing to break a complete sentence into eight parts.
"Enemy... enemy... enemy attack!! In... in... in the west... west... west!!"
"No... no... don't rush! Let... let me... let me catch my breath first!"
After they finished speaking, the ghosts, having eaten and drunk their fill, picked their teeth and strolled back to their hometown.
Even more outrageous, in a certain scenic hot spring town, everyone has gone crazy and fallen in love with doing handstands.
Eating, standing on one's head.
Sleeping, upside down.
Soaking in hot springs, and also doing handstands.
For a time, the entire town was filled with countless legs sticking upside down, a scene that could be described as the pinnacle of modern art and a model of performance art.
Panic, like the plague itself, spread rapidly.
Countless distress messages, like snowflakes, flew from all directions to the same place.
Butterfly Mansion.
That's right, thanks to this incident, the Butterfly Mansion, spearheaded by the Kocho Sisters and approved by Oyakata-sama Kagaya, has finally been built!!
This place has become a battlefield.
A hell on earth, a place without gunfire, yet more cruel and chaotic than any battlefield.
"Over here! The patient in bed number three has started barking like a dog again! Quick, get a sedative!!"
"Report! The patient in bed number seven insists he is a mushroom and refuses to drink water, saying that mushrooms only need photosynthesis!!"
"Ugh! Who replaced my lab report with a recipe?! Steamed sea bass?!?"
The nurse was like a spinning top, frantically twirling, running, and screaming in the crowded corridor.
Her beautiful eyes were bloodshot, and she was on the verge of exploding.
"Calm!!"
Kanae Kocho grabbed her arm and placed a cup of fragrant herbal tea into her hand, her face bearing a gentle, melting smile.
"It's precisely in times like these that we need to stay calm, understand?"
As she spoke, she gracefully sidestepped, dodging a spittoon filled with an unknown liquid that flew out of the ward.
"You see, as long as we have love in our hearts, the world is a garden everywhere."
She smiled, and then, with a precise kick, sent a patient who was trying to climb out of the window, claiming he wanted to rise to the top, crashing back into the room.
The movements were fluid and seamless, executed in one go.
Nurse: (O_O)
She silently took a sip of tea, feeling as if her values were being brutally trampled into the ground.
Deep within the Butterfly Mansion, in a specially modified special-grade laboratory.
The atmosphere was so heavy it was almost palpable.
Shinobu Kocho and Tamayo, these two women standing at the pinnacle of the medical world, have not slept for three days and three nights.
In front of them were hundreds of glass samples with different labels.
Each sample contained a different colored, eerily wriggling... viral liquid.
"No... it still won't work..."
Shinobu Kocho dripped a vial of freshly prepared, pale purple antidote into a petri dish containing the green virus.
The green virus paused only briefly before devouring the drop of antidote with even greater ferocity and violence, even giving a rather human-like "burp."
"Asshole!!"
Shinobu Kocho slammed her fist hard on the lab table, her face showing an unprecedented mix of frustration and anger.
"What kind of monster is this guy?!"
"His virus is constantly evolving! Every time we develop an antibody, it immediately produces a completely new and entirely different variant within twelve hours!"
"This is no longer within the scope of medicine..."
"Calm down, Miss Shinobu."
Tamayo's voice remained calm, but her beautiful eyes were filled with weariness and solemnity.
"Anger solves nothing. The only thing we can do now is to find his damned, ever-changing 'virus core' before his next 'evolution'."
"But we can't even find his people!"
Frustrated, the Shinobu Kocho scratched its head.
That bastard is like a ghost!
He never shows himself; instead, like a high and mighty god, he casually showers the world with his 'plague.'
Then, they watched with great interest how we poor wretches struggled and died in agony!
"He was even... laughing at us..."
Tamayo remained silent.
Because everything Shinobu Kocho said was true.
At the same time.
Thousands of miles away, in an unnamed town that had been completely swallowed up by the plague and had long since become a dead city.
Giyu Tomioka stood quietly atop the town's clock tower.
He stood there like a silent statue, for a full day and night.
It's been a month.
He chased after the demon named Yaoshi, running all over half of Japan.
He had been to Yokohama's port, abandoned mines, and countless villages like the one beneath his feet, shrouded in death.
Countless times, he had smelled that familiar, unique scent of Yaoshi, a mixture of herbs and putridity...
Countless times, he felt that he was only one step away from that bastard.
But each time, when he arrived, all that greeted him was devastation and the silent mockery left behind by that ghost...
The Yaoshi is too cunning.
He's like a top-notch counter-surveillance expert, never staying in one place for more than twelve hours.
He would even use wind direction and complex geographical conditions to mask the scent he left behind.
He's like an elusive shadow; you never know where he'll appear next.
For the first time, Giyu Tomioka felt a sense of unease.
His heart, which had never been turbulent for millennia, was stirred by a small flame of anxiety after a month-long, fruitless hunt.
He slowly closed his eyes and once again opened the "Transparent World".
His vision pierced through the walls and through the earth.
The tragic scene of the entire town was once again vividly presented in his mind.
His gaze swept across every inch of the land, leaving no suspicious corner unchecked.
Then he saw it.
In the town's only pharmacy.
Beneath a pile of scattered, trampled herbs.
Lying there quietly, was an extremely tiny object, shimmering with a metallic sheen...
Surgical blade.
That's not something that should exist in this country.
Its craftsmanship and materials both have a strong Western flavor.
Giyu Tomioka's eyes suddenly snapped open.
His figure vanished from the clock tower in an instant.
The next second, he was already in the pharmacy.
He bent down and carefully picked up the blade, smaller than a fingernail, with two fingers.
A faint, almost imperceptible smell of blood lingered on the blade.
It's not human blood.
It's the blood of a demon.
It's the Yaoshi's blood!!
Was he injured? Or... did he conduct some kind of experiment here that required the use of a scalpel?
Giyu Tomioka brought the blade to his nose and sniffed it gently.
A complex aroma, a blend of hundreds of different medicinal herbs, entered his nostrils.
But this time, he also smelled a completely new, faint scent he had never smelled before...
The scent of violets.
This is an extremely rare and precious perfume scent, found only in Western aristocratic salons.
Moreover, this perfume has extremely strict requirements for its storage environment in order to preserve its unique fragrance.
In this country, there is only one place that imports and uses this perfume in large quantities, regardless of cost.
That place, known as the "heart of the empire," was a place of extravagance and decadence...
Imperial Capital, Tokyo.
Giyu Tomioka's eyes instantly became incredibly sharp.
He finally caught that damned mouse, that slippery tail!
However, just as he was preparing to leave for Tokyo...
"Gah! Gah! Urgent intelligence! Urgent intelligence!"
"Bang!"
Another perfect face-slam.
"Giyu... no... something's wrong..."
Kanzaburo shook its nearly broken head and screamed in a mournful tone:
"Butterfly... Butterfly Mansion Urgent Report!"
"Yaoshi... that... that bastard... he... he's spread... a brand new... blue... virus!"
"All... all the poisoned team members... have all... all gone mad!"
"They... they said... they saw... the people they least wanted to see... they... they're... killing each other!"
Giyu Tomioka's hand, gripping the blade, suddenly tightened.
A murderous intent powerful enough to freeze one's soul suddenly exploded from his body.
He raised his head and looked in the direction of Tokyo.
All the anxiety in those blue eyes vanished.
Instead, there was a deathly stillness, like an abyss.