Gyokko lowered his head and looked at the stump of his left shoulder.
Bone, muscle, blood vessels-a clean cut.
He activated his demon core, and Muzan's blood surged through his veins toward the stump. New flesh had barely begun to sprout when it hissed, blackened, died, and crumbled into drifting black ash.
A second attempt. A third.
Every time, the new flesh rotted the instant it touched the air. Something seemed to be gnawing at the wound from deep within his soul. Even Muzan's blood could not fill that gap.
The two eyes on Gyokko's cheeks opened as wide as they could.
"Regenerate. Why won't it regenerate?"
He had never seen a wound like this in two hundred years. A demon's immortality, a demon's arrogance-both rested on that regeneration, which no tearing or burning could exhaust.
Now it had failed him.
Yaha walked forward across the scattered porcelain shards. His soles crushed the fragments of gold-inlaid glaze. Crunch, crunch, one step at a time.
"You call this art?"
He stopped two paces in front of Gyokko, his eyes lowered.
"I could slice meat with my eyes closed, and it'd still look better than your pile of sludge."
The mouth on Gyokko's forehead twitched.
He had lived for two hundred years. The people he had eaten could have filled a mountain. Lord Muzan had praised his work. The Lower Ranks had revered his methods. Even the prey he had turned into pots had died terrified of his craftsmanship.
Nothing had ever dared call his mastery sludge.
Some taut string deep inside his demon core snapped.
"Filthy human." His voice squeezed out through the mouth on his forehead, trembling. "You don't understand. You'll never understand beauty."
His remaining torso began to swell.
The malformed little limbs jutting from his body retracted inward.