Domain Expansion! Malevolent Shrine

Yaha casually raised his hands to his chest.

His ten pale fingers interlaced, their joints slightly bent, forming an ancient, uncanny hand sign.

The faint crackle of bones rubbing together rang clearly through the deathly still night air.

Pitch-black cursed energy erupted from beneath his feet.

The flagstones underfoot shattered across a wide area in a web of cracks. Heavy chunks of stone defied gravity, floating in midair and bobbing with the tides of cursed energy.

The surrounding air tore with the sound of something pushed beyond its limits.

Veins instantly bulged on the back of Kyojuro Rengoku's sword hand.

The scorching currents of flame around him were forcibly snuffed out. His Flame Breathing ground to a complete halt.

An indescribable, godlike pressure slammed into his chest. His leg muscles weakened against his will, and his boots plowed two deep furrows through the mud as he was forced backward.

Shinobu Kocho's throat tightened, her purple eyes contracting sharply.

The pressure sent a fierce sting through her airways. Unable even to maintain her grip on her sword, she had to retreat rapidly alongside Rengoku, barely finding her footing after putting dozens of meters between herself and Yaha.

This pressure far exceeded the limits of anything human.

Yaha slowly parted his lips. The scarlet light in his eyes tore through the surrounding darkness, and his low voice spread across the empty ruins.

"Domain Expansion."

"Malevolent Shrine."

The two brief declarations fell.

Immense cursed energy detonated before Yaha. The ground shook even harder, and great swaths of earth rolled outward to either side.

An enormous ancient shrine burst straight out of the ground!

Its base was built entirely from huge pieces of pale ox bone. Pitch-black eaves swept high at either end, and tattered strips of dark red cloth hung from its roof ridge.

The shrine, steeped in an eerie, forbidding aura, instantly filled the entrance to Blue Stone Town.

A dark red glow spread outward from the shrine, staining everything within a two-hundred-meter radius an impenetrable blood red.

There was no enclosed physical barrier around this area, yet an invisible pressure sealed off every direction.

In that instant, the world became Yaha's private slaughterhouse.

The new Lower Rank Four lay in the muck far away.

The instant its single eye caught sight of the shrine, all the blood in its body froze.

This was an attack from a higher plane, governed by absolute laws of guaranteed hits and certain death. The presence of a superior predator shattered its reason, and its shriveled legs could no longer muster the slightest strength.

It frantically tugged the strands of flesh and blood in its hands, forcibly dragging hundreds of townspeople toward itself.

The stiff-limbed townspeople were used as human shields, packed tightly before the new Lower Rank Four in layer upon layer of a thick human wall.

The new Lower Rank Four huddled at the very center.

Its shriveled chest heaved violently. Broken, terrified screams escaped its mouth as it tried to use these fragile human lives to block the destruction bearing down on it.

Yaha stood on the steps at the center of the shrine.

He looked down from above, casually raising his right hand and spreading his fingers slightly, like a god who held sway over life and death.

Within his domain, he established the most precise targeting rules:

Inanimate matter would receive indiscriminate grid-pattern slashes.

Anything containing demon flesh and blood would receive indiscriminate grid-pattern slashes.

Human bodies would be avoided completely!

His immense cursed energy completed this exacting allocation in an instant. Yaha gently pressed his fingers downward.

A skyful of invisible slashes descended.

The cursed techniques Dismantle and Cleave erupted throughout the entire two-hundred-meter radius!

The air split with a barrage of piercing shrieks as tens of thousands of blades descended at once.

Countless deep fissures scored the flagstones before the shrine. The dead trees on either side instantly became fine wood chips, and deafening sounds of dissection erupted throughout the domain.

The dark red flesh attached to the townspeople underwent the cruelest stripping imaginable.

Invisible blades swept rapidly along their skin.

The thick blood vessels and pulsing tumors were sliced into fine powder. The purplish-black blood had no time even to spatter before the intense friction of cursed energy vaporized it.

The townspeople's coarse linen clothes fell away in shreds, yet not even the faintest scratch remained on their skin.

Every thread controlling their limbs snapped.

Hundreds of civilians collapsed across the ground. They gasped for breath, still terrified, but completely unharmed.

Watching this, Yaha gave an almost imperceptible curl of his lip.

Wasting so much effort fine-tuning my cursed technique for these ants. What a damn nuisance.

The massive membrane of flesh hanging over Blue Stone Town stopped writhing without warning.

Countless slashes crisscrossed its surface. The defensive fortress the new Lower Rank Four had taken such pride in broke apart like tofu, neatly sliced into tens of thousands of cubes.

Then it became red dust drifting across the sky.

The night sky reappeared, and cold moonlight illuminated the wreckage strewn across the ground.

With the overhead barrier gone, the new Lower Rank Four's body was fully exposed beneath the slashes.

An invisible blade swept past, shearing away its right shoulder and leaving a cut as smooth as a mirror.

Its bulging lone eye widened in terror. It desperately stirred Muzan's blood within its body, trying to repair its mangled form through a demon's innate regeneration.

Fresh buds of flesh had barely emerged before they gave off a teeth-grating hiss.

Its cells rapidly deteriorated because its soul was damaged. The new flesh blackened in the air, died, and carbonized into shriveled ash that peeled away in the wind!

The law forbidding regeneration meant that no amount of cell proliferation could fill these missing pieces.

The slashes abruptly accelerated.

The new Lower Rank Four's vision began tumbling wildly. It saw its legs separate from its torso, saw its chest sliced into dozens of evenly sized chunks.

Its pain receptors were completely overloaded.

Watching its shattered body fail to heal, it was utterly submerged in the despair of being unable to regenerate.

"No! Lord Muzan-!"

One final, cracking wail squeezed out of the new Lower Rank Four's throat.

Hundreds of cursed technique strikes pierced its skull at once.

Its entire body fell apart in midair, ground into fine black ash by the frenzied slashes and scattered into the muck on the wind.

The words marking it as Lower Rank Four vanished into ash along with its ambitions.

Yaha lowered his right hand, and the blood-red glow swiftly receded like an ebbing tide.

The enormous bone shrine began to turn insubstantial, finally dissolving into wisps of black cursed energy that dispersed in the bitter night wind.

The sky returned to its original deep blue, and deathly silence settled over the surroundings once more.

Yaha stood at the very center of the ruins.

His chest rose and fell slightly. He exhaled a scorching breath, his face a little pale.

Opening a complete domain for the first time had placed an enormous strain on this human body. Waves of soreness ran through his arm muscles, and the blood vessels in his head throbbed.

Without betraying a thing, he activated the Reverse Cursed Technique within him.

Gentle cursed energy flowed through his meridians, instantly restoring his damaged muscle fibers.

He straightened and slipped both hands back into his pockets, standing proudly in the breeze amid the ruins without a single drop of sweat.

Kyojuro Rengoku kept one hand resting on his sword.

He looked at the civilians gasping for breath across the ground, confirming that every one of them was miraculously unharmed.

Rengoku slowly turned his head, his gaze fixed on the back of the black-clad youth at the center of the ruins. His Adam's apple bobbed with difficulty.

Such a means of annihilating countless demons without harming a single person completely overturned his understanding of swordsmanship and combat.

Farther away, Shinobu Kocho stood rooted to the spot, the fingertips gripping her Nichirin Blade trembling uncontrollably.

As she stared at the demon flesh reduced to black ash, the pharmacology and common knowledge she took such pride in were crushed to pieces.

She finally understood why this youth never needed to draw his sword.

Yaha slowly raised his head, his gaze seeming to pierce the dark curtain of night as he looked somewhere unimaginably distant.

The curve of his lips grew wider.

He knew perfectly well that the ultimate terror of having one's soul sliced apart inch by inch, unable to regenerate, must already have traveled through the new Lower Rank Four's lingering blood network, transmitted in full.

The Demon Progenitor hiding in a dark corner of the Infinity Castle.

Tonight, he was destined to sink into a long nightmare.