Kobe Hikaru did not go straight back to Kaede's Village.
Instead he turned east, walking the ridgelines of Totomi Province — he had decided to make one full circuit around the Kanto and only then come back to Musashi Province, to Kaede's Village.
He had two purposes.
The first, of course, was to forge sword intent.
What hammer and anvil could not produce had to be sought with a blade.
He needed to truly learn the sword.
Not the brute-force steamrolling of raw muscle. Not relying on the overwhelming control of the Transformation of the Spirit-Chasing Archer to swing a blade fast, accurate and vicious and call it done.
He had to begin from technique.
From the most basic systems of swordsmanship — the ones humans had piled up out of blood and sweat, invented so that skill might make up for what strength lacked — and from there understand what a single blade could actually do.
Only then would he be qualified to reach for the sword intent that lay above it.
The second was to find some trace of the Demon Slayer Corps and the Nichirin Sword.
Totosai's directions had been hopelessly vague — some mountain north of the Kanto — a range barely narrower than saying nothing at all.
But he had the scrap of cloth as a token, so at least he could prove where he came from once he met them. And asking along the way would surely turn up a thread eventually.
He sent another message through dread to Kaede's Village, telling Kikyo he would be gone a while longer.
The reply came fast. Short. Cool.
"Stay safe."
"Come back soon."
And then — "I miss you too."
That last line came through much softer than the first, as if the volume had been deliberately lowered somewhere in transmission.
Kobe Hikaru smiled when he received it, and felt settled.
Even though he could sense her at any moment — even though he could watch Kaede's Village every hour of every day, could see Kikyo going about her ordinary life.
And Kikyo could feel his gaze at any moment too.
Ten thousand miles apart, yet living as though they shared each morning and evening… and even so, both of them savoured that feeling of someone waiting behind them.
Then he took to the road.
…
From that day on he barely stopped walking.
North out of Totomi, into Mino, across Hida, through the northern reaches of Shinano Province under the Takeda clan's control, and on to Kozuke, then Shimotsuke.
Finally south again, back to Musashi.
A full circle. A thousand miles and more of walking.
That was the route he had chosen for himself.
And all along it, he issued challenges.
Every dojo, every school, every private academy he passed — if it hung out a sign advertising instruction in swordsmanship, he went in.
No yokai aura.
No bone spikes, no blood mist, no lightning, and certainly not the ninth-layer Asura transformation that had come with Recasting's overflow.
Only a Muramasa at his hip, plus a straw hat and rain cape he had lifted from some nobleman's house on the road.
After the Blood-Fire Mutation had forged his heart of Asura, his appearance had changed again — his pale skin was no longer the grey rot of a corpse, but the whiteness of a living man who had long gone without sun.
Clean features, sharply defined, the look of a seventeen- or eighteen-year-old samurai with loose-hanging hair and a cold, brooding air about him.
The whites of his eyes were still lacquer-black and his pupils still scarlet, but if no one looked too closely — with the hat on, or indoors in dim light — it could just about pass for some rare disease of the eyes.
He could set foot in human settlements now.
The first dojo was in a riverside castle town in Totomi Province.
Its master was an old samurai past fifty who practised the tachi techniques of the Tenshin Shoden school.
Tenshin Shoden, also known as Katori Shinto-ryu.
Founded over a century ago in the late years of the Kamakura shogunate, its core principle was the three-powers structure of heaven, earth and man — upper stance, middle stance and lower stance corresponding to heaven, earth and man, and from those three every variation of attack and defence unfolded.
Put plainly, it broke every movement of tachi work down into permutations of three basics: cutting downward from above, slicing across from the middle, sweeping upward from below.
Simple. Solid.
Nothing flashy, but clean and decisive, and formidable in its own right.
Still — three moves.
Kobe Hikaru put the man on the floor in three moves.
There had never been any suspense.
And he did it using the man's own techniques.
Within the space of three cuts he had memorized the entire flow of force, the footwork that supported it, the way the centre of gravity shifted.
A cutting-down technique the old samurai had ground out over thirty years, and Kobe Hikaru had it fully dismantled in three strokes.
Yes. This was his idea of study, too.
Not kneeling and begging a master to teach him, but feeding war on war, fighting his way along the road.
For a yokai with the soul-hunting archer's gifts and the Keen Eye Transformation, whose hand-strength, eyesight and control all ran far past human limits, this was simply the correct method.
Everything could be copied whole.
He kept walking.
The second dojo was in Mino Province.
A young samurai ran it and called his style Kage-ryu — strange swordwork, fond of feints.
Which was exactly what Kage-ryu was.
It had been created several decades earlier by a swordmaster named Aisu Ikosai, and stood alongside Shinto-ryu and Nen-ryu as one of the three great source traditions of the sword.
Its core principle was go no sen — never strike first; wait for the instant the opponent showed an opening and counter along the shortest possible line.
Its lines were sly and endlessly variable, leaning on feints, false movements and misdirection of the eye to bait the enemy into moving first. Brutally practical in a real fight.
And yet.
Kobe Hikaru needed only two moves.
Faster than before.
And once again he used the other man's own techniques.
The third, the fourth, the fifth…
In half a month he challenged seventeen dojo. Not one defeat — and not one where he failed to take his opponent's techniques for himself within a handful of exchanges.
From the simple to the complex, the sword of Kobe Hikaru — which had once been nothing but brute force — began to change enormously.
More variations. More techniques.
He still had no complete grasp of sword intent, but he was in no hurry. As a yokai he learned frighteningly fast; in a mere half month he had covered ground that would take a normal swordsman ten years, or several times that.
He was not rushed. He had no need to be.
And in the middle of all this he even had spare time…
For purging yokai. For slaying Demons.
Across the Kanto, demonic fiends ran rampant.
His Night Parade of a Hundred Demons already covered three provinces, but the territory beyond that was vast. Border regions, remote mountains, deep forests and river valleys still swarmed with wild yokai and stray Demons who answered to no power at all.
Whatever he met on the road, he cleaned up in passing — or folded into his own hundred demons.
Twenty-three Demons in Musashi Province, twenty-one in Tono.
Even counting the small fry under Tono's command, it came to fewer than a hundred demons.
Numbers like that were, frankly, not enough.
Of course.
Besides yokai, there were also those that were not yokai at all — the vengeful Demons tied to the Demon Slayer Corps, and more to the point tied to Kibutsuji Muzan. They were rare, but with Kobe Hikaru deliberately hunting for them, he found them.
The undying demon created by Kibutsuji Muzan was neither yokai nor demonic fiend, but a human mutated by infection with a special blood.
It possessed near-limitless regeneration, and its only weakness was sunlight.
He met one.
The Demon hid in a cellar, never emerging by day, coming out at night to devour travellers on the road.
Ordinary samurai could not cut it down.
Hack it into pieces and the pieces crawled back together.
But Kobe Hikaru could.
Blood-Fire Mutation.
The yokai fire running through his veins poured into the blade, and the edge of the Muramasa glowed a dull red. It was not sunlight — but in practice, sufficient heat plus a sustained burn was enough to disrupt a Demon's regeneration, and it worked better than bone spikes did.
With the Soul-Seizing Never-Missing Hand locking the target, he loosed what looked like a single stroke and delivered dozens of cuts, reducing the Demon to particles like dust.
Under those conditions, unless Kibutsuji Muzan himself arrived in person, no amount of recovery mattered.
Raw numbers had overridden the mechanic.
The Demon collapsed into ash mid-scream.
Not as clean as the sunlight of the Nichirin Sword he remembered — but good enough.
Vengeful Demons in this blended world had always been that way. They did not fear ordinary injury, but they dreaded heat that surpassed nature, and gave anything associated with it a wide berth.
The trouble was that beings who wielded such power were either high-tier spellcasters, onmyoji and sorcerers with special arts, or high-ranking yokai — the chieftains among yokai.
There were not many of them.
And Kobe Hikaru happened to be one.
After that he ran into four more.
Each one was handled the same way.
Blood-fire, Demon-slaying.
Through it all the Muramasa's blade soul grew more and more restless — every time he cut down a Demon, the dull red light along the edge burned a shade brighter than the time before.
The blade was still eating.
Devouring the fragments of will that spilled loose in combat.
Waiting for that last piece of the puzzle.
And when there was no fighting to be done, Kobe Hikaru still did not idle.
He had not brought the Banryu along; he had handed it off to the hundred demons to carry back to Kaede's Village.
Sakasagami no Yura still hung at his waist, though, and Dokuko's reverse scale still rested against his chest.
He talked to them as he walked.
Sakasagami no Yura had been in a foul mood lately.
Because Dokuko's reverse scale had already climbed to eighty in favourability — and although Sakasagami no Yura could not perceive anything called favourability, she could clearly sense the intimacy that dead thing's inner spirit showed toward Kobe Hikaru.
So the comb rattled and clattered at his hip, loud enough to startle the birds out of the nearby trees.
But.
Sakasagami no Yura's favourability had all but stalled once it reached eighty-eight.
Kobe Hikaru had no leads on that for the moment. He could not force it, and he was not anxious about it; he simply carried on as usual.
Dokuko's reverse scale, by contrast, was far quieter.
Miasma drifted faintly around his chest, and each time he channelled yokai power into it the dark green patterning across the scale's surface lit up, poison mist seeping from its edges to form a thin toxic barrier half a foot out from his skin.
Its favourability climbed steadily.
Eighty-one. Eighty-three. Eighty-five.
Its direction differed from Sakasagami no Yura's — the reverse scale did not want passion, it wanted immersion. Dokuko were cunning by nature, cold-blooded, yet fiercely territorial; once they grew used to something, there was no going back…
Odd, perhaps, but the logic held.
What it needed was long, unbroken, gradual seepage, like river water wearing away a stone wall.
That was something Kobe Hikaru excelled at.
He had patience to spare.
Half a month.
At last Kobe Hikaru set foot in Shinano — the seat of Takeda clan rule, the domain of the Tiger of Kai, that man spoken of in the same breath as Uesugi Kenshin.
In that span he had challenged seventeen dojo, killed five Demons, and cut down countless stray yokai.
Sakasagami no Yura's favourability: eighty-eight.
Dokuko's reverse scale: eighty-seven.
The cracks in the Muramasa's blade were still there — but the dull red glow along their edges had more than doubled in depth since half a month ago.
The blade soul was swelling.
Waiting.
And Kobe Hikaru was waiting too.
Waiting for the moment when everything would fall into place of its own accord.
…
"The number of Demons has been dropping very quickly of late."
Kyoto.
It was daytime, and yet in the innermost depths of a courtyard as gloomy as deep night — depths that reached almost underground — a cold, rasping voice spoke.
Kibutsuji Muzan, dressed in a gaudy kimono, opened scarlet human-demon eyes and looked at the figure opposite.
That figure had a pale face as well.
Only, compared to the dissolute bandit woman of their first meeting, the elegant, plain-coloured kimono and loose black hair now gave her rather the bearing of a young nobleman.
Yes — a young lord, not a young lady.
And she was, unmistakably, that same woman bandit whom Muzan had turned into a Demon at the brink of death. Onigumo.
Events had proven Kibutsuji Muzan's choice correct. This one was superb material for a Demon: malice toward the entire world packed into her chest, obsessions of terrifying depth, astonishing adaptability, and cunning beyond measure. Barely a month since her turning, and she had already eaten a good many people — every one of them the daughter of a powerful Kyoto family.
She had staged accident after accident, and not one person had noticed anything amiss.
Eat humans. Grow stronger.
That was a Demon's road to survival.
And Onigumo had, beyond any doubt, become very strong indeed.
Strong enough that she could fairly be called the mightiest vengeful Demon under Muzan, with no rival for the title.
She had also become the only Demon trusted deeply enough to attend at his side.
Now, hearing Muzan's words, Onigumo's expression did not shift; that pale, handsome face merely offered a perfectly calm smile.
"Ah… it seems your plan will need to be accelerated, my Lord."
It was the plan Kibutsuji Muzan had already been turning over even before he made Onigumo a Demon.
And in this recent stretch of time, on Onigumo's advice, it had been translated into concrete action.
"By engineering one blood feud after another, we manufacture human material steeped in hatred and murderous obsession toward the whole world, then turn them into vengeful Demons and grant them blood surpassing that of ordinary Demons."
"The number… around twelve. Named after the Twelve Kizuki, and divided into Upper and Lower Moon."
Onigumo recited it back to him.
This was indeed the plan Muzan had undertaken at her suggestion.
Create twelve vengeful Demons powerful enough to match chieftain-class high yokai — and only then would she dare to make another move against Kobe Hikaru, against Kikyo, against the Shikon Jewel.
Kikyo, who could borrow the power of the sun, had to be removed.
And she badly wanted the Shikon Jewel in her hands, to see whether the thing could help her overcome sunlight.
But before Onigumo could finish speaking —
"No."
Muzan shook her head, and on that feminine face the red lips curved into a smile. "Eleven."
Onigumo blinked, and then heard the woman across from her speak again.
"Do this well, and you will become… the head of the Twelve Kizuki."
Before she could react, Muzan rose, her features and bearing turning utterly bleak in the shadows.
"Go… I await your good news."
Onigumo watched her superior's figure vanish in an instant, leaving only a few wisps of a bloody smell behind.
Then she came back to herself, and that pale face broke into a soft laugh.
"Head of the Twelve Kizuki, is it…"
"What a shame, Lord Muzan. What I want is rather more than that… and I won't be giving you any chance to lay a hand on Lord Hikaru, either. Lord Hikaru and the Shikon Jewel will both belong to me alone."
"What do you think, Lady Tamayo?"
The woman — the female Demon — turned toward another patch of shadow.
From within it came another woman's cold snort, thick with irritation and disdain.
Onigumo only laughed all the harder, doubling over with it, without a shred of dignity left.
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