Doma's back pressed against the wall. The cold surface against him formed an ironic contrast with the demon blood collapsing inside his body.
Two meters in front of him, those two joined fingers still hovered three inches from his forehead. The density of cursed energy gathered at their tips made his irises contract reflexively.
He was going to die.
That realization surfaced from deep within his brain stem, as clear as words carved into bone. It was neither speculation nor prediction. It was instinct. His body, which had devoured over a thousand humans across hundreds of years, was telling him a fact-the thing before him belonged to no category of existence he understood.
Doma's right hand moved. His five fingers rose from his side, not to form a fist or defend himself, but to plunge into his own chest.
His fingertips sank through skin. Pierced his ribs. Touched the pulsing outer wall of the demon core on the surface of his heart.
Did it hurt? He didn't know. He had been born without the neural circuitry for pain. But the instant he touched his demon core, all the Muzan's blood inside him boiled at once, as though a fuse had been lit.
His blood vessels swelled. Muscle fibers twisted and bulged beneath his skin. Dark purple patterns appeared across his pale face, spreading from his eye sockets toward his cheeks. These were the "demon veins" that appeared only when Muzan's blood was forcibly overloaded and squeezed to its limit.
He was burning his own demon core.
"Blood Demon Art."
The voice squeezed out of his throat was no longer airy, no longer hollow. Every syllable carried shards of ice and a desperate resolve to stake everything.
"Rime · Water Lily Bodhisattva."
The tatami room's ceiling exploded.
It hadn't simply shattered.