After celebrating Kanae's birthday, Kanzaki Kumo returned to his everyday routine, aside from his regular training to stay in shape and occasionally heading out to fulfill his duties as the Demon Slayer Corps' Mobile Support Unit.
Of course, apart from a handful of rescue missions, most of those outings were simply Kanzaki Kumo going out to unwind because being stuck at a bottleneck had put him in a bad mood.
After all, the Demon Slayer Corps had grown, and Kanzaki Kumo was not its only Hashira-level swordsman.
Moreover, adding proctors to the Final Selection had effectively reduced the number of people who lacked the strength but scraped through on luck, improving the overall standard of official swordsmen. Naturally, emergency calls for help had become somewhat less frequent.
Kanzaki Kumo's understanding of the Transparent World, on the other hand, remained stuck at that very last step.
As early as a year ago, he had reached the stage of "looking inward with his mind." If the Transparent World had a progress bar, he would already have filled fifty percent of it, or even a little more.
After that, he had slowly ground away at it over time, bringing it up to ninety percent.
Then, after Gyomei's pointers and that conversation with Shinobu Kocho, the progress bar had reached ninety-nine percent.
Success had seemed within reach, but several more months had passed since then, and the progress bar seemed to have frozen.
It was not quite frozen completely. Whenever Kanzaki Kumo calmed his mind and reflected on it, it still rose a little: ninety-nine, ninety-nine point nine, ninety-nine point nine nine... always just that little bit short.
For a moment, Kanzaki Kumo felt the same helplessness he had experienced in his previous life with a certain shopping app's "slash the price" promotion.
It