Chapter Six
Things were moving along in their own way—perhaps that was the most accurate way to describe what was happening in the Toga household. The older members of the family were growing increasingly distant from their own daughter, no longer able to ignore her "peculiarities." In all fairness, they felt a certain guilt and shame about their behavior, but found themselves unable to do anything about it.
Doma, meanwhile, was surrounded by a degree of overprotection that few long-awaited children ever know. The couple channeled every parental instinct into their younger child. It never reached any real extreme—Kaiyoshi and Kohaku were far from the kind of people who could deprive their daughter of anything material.
Brother and sister might have grown distant as well, were it not for one thing. Doma himself did not allow it—not in the slightest. It was common enough for a child who received more attention to become weepy and haughty, sensing his own advantage. That, however, had nothing to do with the Second Upper Moon.
Perceiving clearly where everything was headed, the former demon had moved swiftly to strengthen his relationship with Himiko even further than before. She had no objection. Having apparently nursed a grievance against her parents, the girl had found her solace in her sweet little "younger" brother. The owner of those diamond eyes had no intention of losing his source of warm feeling.
He had concluded that this was what people called attachment—that warm sensation in the chest. And he liked it. It could not compare, of course, to the love he felt for the Insect Hashira, but it would claim a confident second place. His parents would occupy third.
Doma was fond of the social world around him. No one drowned him in their problems. No one tasked him with searching for something undefined, somewhere unspecified. Peace and quiet. His parents, as Doma saw it, were decent enough people. His new mother did not use a useful child as a means of keeping her husband's attention, and his father did not stray—a blessing.
If this was meant to be his punishment for his sins, then Doma was prepared to have killed thousands more.
The problems lay in a somewhat different domain. Something strange was happening with the former leader of the Paradise Faith cult's body. By his first year he looked closer to a year and a half. He already had a full set of teeth, which appeared from the start to be permanent ones—and they were perfect.
His skin was growing paler and paler, taking on an unhealthy hue, and his rainbow-colored eyes had begun to visibly glow in the dark. It seemed the child's body was reaching toward its demonic original. His parents, seized with alarm, took their precious one to a doctor to consult on the matter.
No diagnosis was found, and no illness—save one. Congenital insensitivity to pain. Doma had suffered from this in his previous life as well. In this one it had been discovered when he scalded himself with boiling water and felt nothing but a mild warmth, with no visible reaction to speak of. His mother had been alarmed by the agonizingly reddened wrist, which stood out in stark contrast against his pale skin.
The doctor determined that the cause of these anomalies was the boy's body preparing itself for his future Quirk. As he explained, this sometimes occurred with certain Quirk types. Upon examination, and based on Kohaku's account, it was established that Doma possessed physical characteristics exceeding the average among children his age, as well as an abnormal regenerative ability by any human standard.
The child was anticipating what was to come—he already had a suspicion of where it was all leading. He was going to become an oni again. The only thing that saddened him, if only slightly, was having to part with the Sun. He had already grown accustomed to its warm and gentle rays against his skin.
As for his general role in the family structure of his household—he was something like a bridge, connecting Himiko to her parents. Through various hints and gestures, the boy drew his parents' attention toward her, to keep things from deteriorating completely.
What they could not accept was the disposition of the elder Toga, who persisted stubbornly in her efforts to obtain blood. They felt revulsion at that aspect of her and experienced something resembling shame when strangers observed the girl's peculiarities. What surprised Doma more, if anything, were the Quirks themselves.
They allowed a person to do the extraordinary: to drink blood without harm to the body while remaining fully human, to acquire tremendous physical strength comparable to a demon's, to produce flame, water, air, ice—and that was only the most elementary of examples. Eighty percent of the population possessed abilities like these.
This was what stirred the former demon, in his small way—the simplicity and efficiency of the very concept of these powers. By simple comparison, not every person could survive the process of transformation from human to demon. The whole affair was accompanied by unbearable pain that wracked the body entirely, and if the one who had received the blood of the demon progenitor or an Upper Moon was too weak, they might die from it.
But it did not depend solely on the physical vessel. Doma had not been remarkably strong before his transformation—just an ordinary person. And yet he had managed to skip past the phase of being a weak demon and become a member of the Twelve Demon Moons from the start, as the Sixth Lower Moon.
The leap up the ladder of rank that he had made over a century was astonishing. To rise to the Sixth Upper Moon in two decades, and then to the Second in the remaining eighty years—that was phenomenal. By comparison, Akaza had spent two and a half centuries climbing toward the position of Second Upper Moon, and had later been knocked down to Third by Doma's own efforts.
This was undoubtedly explained by Akaza's selectiveness when it came to his "meals." The owner of those beautiful eyes, by contrast, seemed to devour everything he laid eyes on. Particularly girls. Beautiful and young "specimens" had stirred in him, even then, something strange and very faint—but pleasant, nonetheless.
In any case, once he became a demon again, Doma intended to enjoy his sister's company for all of the eternity allotted to them. He would certainly turn her. There was no Muzan here who might stand in the boy's way.