The light in the Infinity Castle was always purple.
Nakime's biwa fell quiet.
Deathly silence returned to the great hall.
Muzan sat on the raised dais, crushing the slender-necked experimental flask beside him in his grip.
Broken glass pierced his palm. Demon blood seeped between his fingers, forming thin, dark-red streams that flowed down the stone armrest onto the floor tiles.
He was replaying Akaza's memories.
For the seventeenth time.
The moment the arrow left the bowstring froze in his mind.
A dark-red trail, a scorched brown mark, then white light that swallowed everything.
That devastating Annihilation Type punch, bearing centuries of faith in martial arts and powerful enough to shatter a mountaintop, had been as fragile as soaked window paper before that arrow.
An eye suddenly bulged beneath the skin of Muzan's left shoulder.
Then came his collarbone, the gaps between his ribs, and the side of his neck.
His flesh swelled slightly. His skin stretched open, and the eyes rolled, closed, then forced their way open again.
Seven eyes, twelve, twenty-one.
They densely covered every part of Muzan's body, twitching neurotically before all fixing their stares in the same direction.
At the dark-red afterimage in Akaza's memories.
"Open." Muzan ground the word out, his voice extremely low, carrying an almost imperceptible tremor.
He recognized the shape of that word.
He had lived for over a thousand years, read countless ancient texts, and seen that long-incomplete compendium of Cursed Techniques.
One blurred line in the compendium described it as the King of Curses' primordial flame, which warped space and burned away the laws of reality.
He had always thought it an exaggeration.
A false legend, mythologized and inflated by history.
But now that legend had pierced his strongest Upper Rank's faith in martial arts, burned Akaza into four pieces,