Yaha stood above the cellar.
With his hands in his pockets, he swept his gaze over the small, trembling figure below.
Cold moonlight fell across the side of his face, and black curse markings flickered into view at the edge of his collar.
The boy in the cellar clamped both hands over his mouth so tightly that his knuckles turned white. Tears streamed down his dust-covered cheeks, washing two clean tracks through the grime.
He stared at the young man looming above him and even held his breath.
Yaha's brow slowly furrowed.
Sukuna's instincts made him find such fragile life uninteresting. Even that faint breathing seemed irritating, and he wanted nothing more than to turn around and leave.
But the next instant, the memory of that snowy night two years ago flashed unbidden through his mind.
The collapsed roof beams. Tsutako's pierced shoulder. And that stifling helplessness of being able to do nothing but wait for death.
He clicked his tongue in irritation. The sound rang especially clearly through the silent ruins.
Yaha bent down, pulled his right hand from his pocket, and reached straight into the cellar. He seized the boy's ragged collar and hauled him upward.
He easily lifted the boy's body out of the cellar with one hand. The boy flailed in midair, too terrified to make a sound.
With a casual toss, Yaha threw the boy onto the flat ground beside the cellar.
The boy rolled twice across the dirt. When he stopped, he had only a few scrapes-not a single broken bone.
Yaha looked down at him and slipped both hands back into his pockets.
"Keep your mouth shut and stay right here." Yaha's voice was cold and hard, thick with impatience.
"Make one more sound, and I'll cut you into cubes just like all this wood around you."
The boy bit his lip and nodded frantically.
Gray-white dawn light crept across the horizon.
A rush of footsteps came through the thin mist outside the basin.
Six support personnel in black uniforms rushed into the village. The character for "hidden" emblazoned on their backs stood out in the dawn light. After receiving a call for help from a Kasugai Crow, they had traveled through the night to tend to the wounded.
The lead Hidden Corps member had barely stepped past the half-ruined torii at the village entrance when he froze.
The five people behind him stopped in turn.
The center of the village had become an eerie stretch of flat ground. There were no intact houses, nor any of the deep craters they had expected a battle to leave.
Every building, every tree, even the bluestone paving on the ground had been sliced into a grid of perfectly uniform cubes.
The cut surfaces were smooth and level, reflecting the morning light like mirrors.
The leader crouched and touched a severed section of stone pillar beside his foot. There was not the slightest grainy roughness to the cut. It was so smooth that it sent a chill down his spine.
An oppressive presence still lingered in the air, making their very souls tremble.
These were not marks that any sword technique or Blood Demon Art could have left. It was as though some unknown, inhuman monster had treated this entire space like a block of tofu and sliced it into pieces with an invisible net.
The Hidden Corps members swallowed hard, their fingers trembling around the short swords at their waists.
Yaha emerged from deep within the ruins.
He held the boy by the back of his collar with one hand. His military boots struck the wooden cubes with dull, steady taps.
The Hidden Corps members immediately drew their short swords, staring tensely at this young man who wore a Corps uniform yet radiated an intensely dangerous aura.
Yaha walked up to them. When he was three steps away from the leader, he let go and simply tossed the boy over.
The leader scrambled to catch him. The boy clung to the man's clothes, his body still shaking.
With his eyelids half lowered, Yaha swept his gaze over the Hidden Corps members' rigid faces.
"Don't die on the way. Too much trouble."
He left them with those icy words, turned, and followed the path he had taken back out of the village, the hem of his black uniform fluttering in the morning breeze.
"Thank you, big brother."
The childish voice came from behind him, thick with tears and a stuffy nose.
Yaha paused for a moment.
The sole of his military boot scraped softly against the gravel. He did not look back. With both hands still in his pockets, he strode into the gradually dispersing morning mist.
Several days later. Demon Slayer Corps headquarters.
Kagaya Ubuyashiki sat upright on the tatami in a traditional Japanese room. Sunlight filtered through the courtyard's leaves and fell across the neatly covered low table before him.
The purple lesions on his face had already spread to his eyes, leaving his vision severely blurred.
His wife, Amane, knelt beside him, holding a newly received battle report in both hands.
Two sheets of different paper lay side by side on the table.
The one on the left was the confidential letter Sakonji Urokodaki had sent half a month earlier. The one on the right was the mission report the Hidden Corps had just submitted.
Amane read the Hidden Corps report word for word in a gentle, steady voice.
"The basin village where Lower Rank One was located has been reduced to a grid of ruins. The Lower Rank demon was annihilated, leaving no trace of regeneration."
"Independent Corps member Tomioka Ye Yu rescued the sole surviving civilian from the highly poisonous fog and emerged completely unharmed."
Amane finished reading and set down the paper. A long silence settled over the room.
Kagaya Ubuyashiki raised a hand and gently brushed his pale fingertips over Urokodaki's confidential letter.
"Erratic in conduct, inscrutable in temperament, and utterly dismissive of rules." He softly repeated Urokodaki's assessment, his tone holding no reproach, only contemplation.
His fingers moved to the Hidden Corps report.
"Yet amid poisonous fog capable of melting a swordsman, he protected a civilian who had no means of resisting."
Kagaya Ubuyashiki slowly opened his eyes. A gentle light, perceptive of the human heart, gleamed in his unfocused pupils.
"Some terrifying monster beyond all reason does indeed lie dormant within that body. Urokodaki saw its cruel, arrogant side."
"That is a warning sign dangerous enough to make anyone in authority order his elimination."
"But the Hidden Corps report reveals another layer beneath that demon's mask."
A faint smile appeared on Kagaya Ubuyashiki's lips.
"Amane, do not interfere with him. Let him bear the shackles of this monster and shatter this nightmare that has lasted a thousand years."
Amane bowed her head slightly and acknowledged his instruction.
At the same time. The Infinity Castle.
Interwoven wooden buildings hung upside down in midair. Layer upon layer of paper doors stretched into an endless abyss.
Muzan Kibutsuji stood before a laboratory bench. He wore an immaculate black suit, and his pale face held not a trace of color.
The bench was covered with all manner of vessels.
Muzan's right hand hung frozen in midair. The fragments of memory Lower Rank One had sent back just before his death replayed over and over in his mind.
Purple poisonous fog. A young man in black.
He had drawn no sword. Used no Breathing Style. He had merely lifted his fingers with casual indifference.
Flesh had instantly been sliced into countless cubes. The moment newly sprouting tissue touched the air, it gave off the foul stench of charred, dead flesh.
That hollow sensation of a soul being gouged away, of flesh unable to heal, had traveled through their blood connection and reached Muzan's nerve endings with unmistakable clarity.
Regeneration was impossible.
The law the demon race took such pride in had been brutally torn apart by that young man alone.
Muzan's chest heaved violently. It was as though he once again saw the man from four hundred years ago who wore sun-disc earrings, and that single slash that had severed every chance he had of survival.
He did not even notice that the flesh of his entire right arm was writhing wildly from some instinctive terror.
Several mouths filled with fangs split open uncontrollably on the back of his hand, gasping for air.
A thousand years.
Ever since Yoriichi Tsugikuni's death, he had never again experienced this shuddering sensation called fear.
That thing that could sever regeneration had to die.
Muzan turned his head toward Nakime, who sat on a high wooden platform.
"Investigate."
Muzan's voice echoed through the vast, empty Infinity Castle, carrying a bone-deep chill and a barely perceptible note of hysteria.
"Find that thing that can sever regeneration!"
"Send the Upper Ranks. Those Lower Rank fools would be useless against him. They would only be throwing their lives away."
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