Since he'd confirmed that there were demons in this town—and they probably weren't weaklings—Dan Lei was suddenly interested.
So Dan Lei had Ono Yunako take him to the town's main water source to collect a sample.
Dan Lei was fairly familiar with pharmacology. The moment he got his hands on the water, he realized something was wrong with it. It wasn't a plague; someone had deliberately poisoned it.
The poison was very subtle, though. Given the medical standards of a town in this era, it was understandable that people had mistaken it for an epidemic.
A conventional, righteous protagonist would have followed the water upstream to find the source of the poison, solved the townspeople's drinking-water problem, and only then gone after the demons.
But Dan Lei didn't want to go to that trouble.
He wasn't someone who cared only about efficiency, and being a Longevity Species in this life had made him a little slow-paced.
But Dan Lei hated doing things that could lead to problems he had no interest in dealing with later—especially if they were a huge pain.
Finding the source of the poison would take who knew how long.
And once the water supply was restored, the demon in town who seemed to have some tricks up its sleeve might go into hiding for a while.
After all, the plan to attack a town involved poisoning its water. There might be more than one demon here, and hunting them down afterward would take even longer.
Besides, if any escaped, then leaving a town he'd supposedly cleared with demons still lurking in it would be embarrassing even to Dan Lei.
So Dan Lei chose a much more direct approach.
After collecting the water sample, Dan Lei went to the town mayor and made it clear that he would report the sample and what had happened here to the district government. If things went quickly, relief water could arrive as soon as tomorrow.
Dan Lei didn't ask the mayor many questions. Whether or not he was a demon's informant, a demon would definitely learn about Dan Lei through someone in the town government.
So as long as Dan Lei headed toward the district government as usual, a demon would come to stop him.
Then he could find out from the demons themselves what was really going on in this town.
After saying goodbye to the mayor, Dan Lei immediately set off at an ordinary person's running pace toward the district government.
But he'd barely made it three kilometers beyond the town when the sun began to set, and he sensed that something was wrong with his surroundings.
As mentioned before, the town was surrounded by dense forests with canopies that blotted out the sky. Demons could attack people even in broad daylight here.
And now, the forest was far too quiet.
At some point, the birds and insects had gone silent. Even the natural sounds in a modern residential garden were louder than this. Meanwhile, the demonic presence was growing stronger.
Kojiro Sasaki didn't need to warn him. Dan Lei already knew the demons had arrived.
Without breaking stride, Dan Lei spoke to his Heroic Spirit through telepathy.
"Kojiro, stay on standby for now. Only step in if I really can't handle it."
Kojiro Sasaki had no objections. This was Dan Lei's journey of growth; he only needed to step in as a safety net.
Besides, in his view, the demons approaching weren't qualified to threaten his Master.
Dan Lei couldn't pinpoint their exact locations using his own senses, so he kept running and pretended he hadn't noticed anything.
That would make the demons attack him and reveal themselves.
Sure enough, as Dan Lei ran through the forest, a tree root by his foot suddenly came alive and grabbed his ankle, sending him tumbling to the ground.
Then vines shot out from every direction and bound Dan Lei to a tree. A woman's silhouette slowly emerged from the trunk. A gaunt demoness clad in bark hugged him from behind and said,
"What a poor bastard. Sent out on an errand, and now he's going to die out here. He's so young, already a high-ranking official in the district, and pretty handsome, too."
As she spoke, a male demon with bat wings beneath his arms and fangs in his mouth—looking just like a vampire—dropped from the sky.
"Wifey, stop getting worked up over every handsome man you see. Your hubby's thirsty. Let me have a couple of sips before we decide how to eat him."
With that, the male demon eagerly lunged at Dan Lei, who seemed to have been knocked unconscious.
But as the demon rushed at him, Dan Lei softly murmured, "[Water Breathing: First Form - Gusty Wind Modification]."
The bat-winged demon was instantly torn into large chunks of meat midair. Looking back at the space he'd just passed through, Dan Lei saw bloodstained streams of water crisscrossing the air.
Still bound by the tree demon's vines, Dan Lei spoke openly.
"Honestly, a scrawny piece of wood like you should give up on attacking people. Wouldn't you be better off just living on photosynthesis?
[Water Breathing: Sixth Form - Ice Modification: Polar Vortex]."
The moment Dan Lei finished speaking, the demoness felt as if she weren't hugging a person but a block of ice. Frost was already spreading across her body.
Dan Lei was using modified Water Breathing techniques.
With the Sustainer Dragon Clan's innate ability to control water, he could already make water do all sorts of things.
He used True Qi in his meridians to generate water, his Magic Circuits to cool it, and the Cloud Chant Technique to control it. How about a whirlwind of ice-cold air at seventy degrees below zero?
The branches binding Dan Lei instantly froze brittle. He gave a slight tug, and they shattered into pieces.
The demoness hugging him from behind broke into several pieces, too.
The male and female demons had now become frozen chunks of meat. Dan Lei looked at them and said slowly,
"So it looks like you two are the only ones who came to attack me. A tree demon and a bat demon—not a bad pairing. And you became demons as a married couple? Or did you get married after you became demons?"
But the two demons' mouths were frozen shut, and they couldn't speak.
Seeing this, Dan Lei apologized, then burned off each of their mouths with a fireball before continuing,
"You should still be able to regenerate your mouths. Just tell me what's really going on in that town, and I'll make sure you suffer less."
As he spoke, Dan Lei took a bottle of mercury he'd bought in the city out of his backpack and poured it onto the ground. Then he used a stream of water to shape it into a Magic Suppression Array.
Inside the array, all the demons' magical activity would be suppressed. In practice, that made it harder to use their Blood Demon Arts and drastically slowed their healing.
Kibutsuji Muzan himself was a bully who picked on the weak and feared the strong. Naturally, demons transformed by him weren't exactly known for their courage.
Once they felt their supposedly limitless immortality slipping away, they'd tell him whatever they could to stay alive.
Sure enough, after their mouths regenerated, the two demons experienced their immortality vanishing. Then they watched as Dan Lei used a Magic Extraction Array to drain their bodies until they crumbled into ash. Both of them broke down.
And so began the question-and-answer session.
Dan Lei soon learned that the demon behind the attack on the town was Sickle Leaf, Lower Rank Three—one of the Lower Rank demons purged by Kibutsuji Muzan after the Mount Natagumo incident in the original story.
He had gathered four demons, including the tree demon and the bat demon, to attack the town. He was also the doctor who had claimed the water supply was contaminated.
The complicated setup was mainly meant to prevent the plan from drawing a Hashira's attention right from the start.
The Lower Rank demons all knew that unless a Hashira showed up, ordinary members of the Demon Slayer Corps were just walking meals. They had nothing to fear from them.
Dan Lei also learned something else: his appearance had made Sickle Leaf suspect that outsiders were starting to question why the town had been cut off from all news. So the attack would begin tonight—or, rather, it had already begun.
Before you continue