Ruined Shrine

Kurozawa looked up at the crescent moon, narrowed his eyes, and gradually slowed his pace.

Eight hundred meters was close.

Even though there was barely a proper path here and the mountain trail was rough and uneven, Kurozawa arrived in only a few minutes.

What appeared before Kurozawa was a ruined shrine.

The shrine was not particularly small, covering roughly a hundred square meters.

The Torii Barrier Gate before the shrine still remained.

This meant that the gate-like structure marking the entrance to the Divine Domain had turned dark brown. Its uppermost crossbeam had vanished without a trace, while the two supporting pillars beneath still stood firm. However, their paint was mottled and worn, with most of it already peeled away.

Beyond the Torii Barrier Gate, the shrine itself was also falling apart. Much of its round-log walls had been eaten through by insects, and large holes gaped in its doors and windows. Whenever the wind blew, they made a mournful whistling sound.

It looked weather-beaten.

The ruined shrine backed against a mountain wall. The waning moon hung above and behind the cliff, its light unable to reach this place. There were no candles or lamps inside either, leaving the surroundings pitch-black.

Kurozawa's eyesight was far better than an ordinary person's, but not so good that darkness posed no hindrance.

He stared intently, yet could barely make out the shrine's interior. Beyond the ragged holes in its doors and windows was nothing but blackness.

The shrine was quiet. Aside from the occasional wind and the rustling of insects, there were no other strange sounds.

It looked no different from usual. However, Kurozawa did not doubt Sakonji Urokodaki's words. If he said there was a demon here, then unless the demon had somehow learned it had been discovered and fled elsewhere beforehand, it had to be inside.

That was because Sakonji Urokodaki possessed a peculiar ability—an Enhanced Sense of Smell that surpassed ordinary people's by an unknown amount.

Within several hundred meters of him, no scent could escape his tracking, especially the creatures he had spent his life fighting.

Kurozawa was deeply envious of that ability.

Demons could disguise themselves, but their distinctive scent could not lie. It was a miraculous ability that could easily identify a demon.

He reached to his waist, took out a flint, and lit a candle to drive away the darkness around him.

Then Kurozawa moved forward, holding the candle in one hand while the other rested on the hilt of his Nichirin Blade. He stepped across the Torii Barrier Gate and walked toward the shrine one step at a time. The cold night wind howled as it poured through the ruined shrine's entrance and the holes in its windows and walls, sounding like ghosts and demons wailing.

At that moment, the moonlight blocked by the far side of the cliff happened to stop at the Torii Barrier Gate.

Before the barrier gate, the moonlight was clear and bright, frosting the ground with silver.

Beyond the barrier gate, darkness spread as silence filled the space.

As Kurozawa stepped through the barrier gate, light and darkness fell over him at once, as though he had crossed the boundary between the human world and the Demon Realm.

The moment he left the moonlight and entered the darkness, the surroundings abruptly fell still, and the air seemed to grow thick and sticky.

Kurozawa understood that it was because he was a little nervous.

He believed his strength was enough to face a Lower Rank, and that no other demon could do anything to him, but that was ultimately only theoretical.

Kurozawa did not want to be someone who only talked on paper. He needed experience—real combat experience. That was what he lacked most right now.

No matter how much he sparred with his junior brothers, junior sisters, and master, it could not compare to personally killing a real demon.

He let out a long breath and drove the tension from his heart.

Kurozawa did not linger. His figure completely disappeared into the darkness as he strode up to the shrine's entrance.

The shrine's doors had once been vermilion, but their paint was now so mottled that most of it had turned dark brown, scattered in patches like ugly scars.

Holding the candle out before him, Kurozawa looked around.

The ruined shrine was surrounded by mountain walls on all sides. Only the front opened onto the forest, and Kurozawa had just come from the path through those woods. There was nowhere else to hide and no other route to escape.

The only way out was the direction he was blocking.

"Is anyone there? I'm passing through and would like to stay the night."

"If I'm disturbing you, please forgive me."

Kurozawa knocked on the door politely.

At the barrier gate, he had been unable to confirm what was inside the shrine. But now that he stood at the entrance, his exceptional senses detected something unusual.

Breathing.

There was breathing.

Right behind the tightly shut door.

With a creak, the door opened.

An expressionless face appeared in Kurozawa's field of vision.

The two sized each other up.

In Kurozawa's eyes, the other man was middle-aged, a little over 1.7 meters tall—neither tall nor short—with thick brows, large eyes, and very white teeth.

His clothes had been kept clean. Though they were covered in patches, it was clear that he cared about cleanliness.

The middle-aged man looked up at Kurozawa, who was two heads taller than him. His expression remained blank, and he showed no fear toward someone as tall and powerfully built as Kurozawa.

However, when his gaze fell upon the Nichirin Blade at Kurozawa's waist, his pupils suddenly contracted.

A flicker of wariness flashed through his eyes.

"There's already someone here. It's inconvenient. Please find somewhere else."

With that, the middle-aged man tried to close the door.

However, a wall slammed into his face and knocked him straight back into the shrine.

No, it was not a wall. It was Kurozawa's muscular chest, hard as a solid wall, which had shoved the middle-aged man backward.

Taking advantage of the opening, Kurozawa squeezed into the room and shut the door behind him.

No matter how one looked at it, he was the one who seemed more ill-intentioned.

By candlelight, Kurozawa could see that behind the middle-aged man stood a Deity Wood Carving dedicated to the male fifth limb. It was over seven meters long and nearly one meter wide.

From the sheer size of that Deity Wood Carving, one could tell that this shrine must once have seen plenty of visitors.

It was said that worshipping it was a prayer for abundant harvests, a house full of children, and good health.

That was what people said, but even now, Kurozawa still could not quite understand such strange worship.

There were quite a few similarly bizarre shrines in other places as well.

The more people lacked something, the more they prayed for it. The candlelight drove back a patch of darkness, and Kurozawa vaguely saw a sizable snakeskin sack beneath the Deity Wood Carving.

Something was packed inside, stretching it into a rectangular shape.

A strange smell of fishy sweetness mixed with rust drifted into Kurozawa's nostrils—the scent of fresh blood.

There was no breathing from within that snakeskin sack. Kurozawa considered it and guessed that whoever was inside had only recently died.

Although he knew the other party had killed someone, Kurozawa felt no anger. His heart remained calm.

To Kurozawa, the death of someone who was not important to him would not affect him. Dying at a demon's hands was no different from dying in any other accident.

The Demon Slayer Corps' creed was to slay evil demons and protect the weak, even if it meant sacrificing oneself for ordinary people.

Kurozawa felt that he could only manage the first part. There was no hatred between him and demons; in truth, he did not hate them. He killed demons only because of their opposing positions.

"You!"

After sensing the power contained within Kurozawa's body from that intimate contact between chest and face, the middle-aged man's expression changed. Anger appeared in his eyes, along with deep wariness.

Knowing full well that the man was a demon and seeing him still desperately trying to hide himself, Kurozawa found him rather laughable.

His wariness toward demons vanished completely without him realizing it.

He glanced at the snakeskin sack, his gaze turning fierce. "This shrine is big enough. It's not as if it can't accommodate a second person."

"When you're out in the world, making things convenient for others is making things convenient for yourself. You didn't want to let me in—could it be because you have a guilty conscience?"

Clang! The Nichirin Blade slid an inch from its sheath, gleaming with cold light.

Combined with Kurozawa's 1.9-meter-tall, heavily muscled frame and his already sharply defined features, he looked rather fierce whenever he turned serious. Right now, he looked more like a vicious thug ready to murder and set fires.

"Then make yourself at home."

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