Even after Muzan’s presence vanished, his words still clung to the lattice gaps of the Infinity Castle.
“Yoshiwara, the graveyard, the riverbank. The three are definitely connected.”
Kokushibo rolled those words over the tip of his tongue, then quietly let them fall away. They had no taste. Not blood, not moonlight. Too shallow to be a clue, too noisy to be one.
Slowly, he rose to his feet. His scabbard tilted without a sound, and the darkness seated on the floating railings drifted along behind his heels. Nakime’s biwa gave a brief twang of a single string.
The door of the Infinity Castle opened thinly, like the far side of the moon.
“Yoshiwara, the graveyard, the riverbank...”
Repeating them once more, Kokushibo finally shook his head.
There was no Blue Spider Lily at any of those coordinates. His six eyes already knew that. No—what knew it was the memory of the body’s owner.
This was not the scent of prey that had been hunted and ground down over centuries. The trace left by that flower was older, shallower, and more stubborn. It was so faint it was almost invisible, like moonlight that had not yet fully faded at dawn.
He kicked off from the Infinity Castle and descended into the night.
§§§
The moon tilted, and the wind carved away the outline of the mountains.
Kokushibo first headed to a shabby apothecary on the outskirts of Yoshiwara. There had been a report that the artificial dye Daki had once offered as a “blue flower” was recorded in the apothecary’s ledger, along with its source.
The shop was already abandoned. Inside, only a broken scale and a bundle of damp paper remained. Kokushibo opened the ledger. Crossed-out writing. Awkward pressure from the pen. It was fake.
The ledger repeated the name of a medicinal herb, Tsukireisou, dozens of times, but the ink had dried with far too much consistency. A forgery copied all at once.
Besides, Tsukireisou only leaves its fragrance in the first breeze of dawn. The scent Daki had described lingered through the whole night. It did not match. Just as he was about to close the ledger, a short passage slipped from between the pages.
“Three peaks form the scabbard, and one peak forms the blade.”
“When the moon tilts westward, the scabbard swallows sound, and the blade opens its beak...”
The handwriting was clumsy. Yet, like some subtle sage’s prank, old mountain names had been scribbled into the spaces between the lines.
“Mount Kumotori...?”
The writing was wrong. Someone had mistaken “Mount Kumotori” for “Daitasan,” then lightly overwritten the correct name. The scraped end of the letters was faintly blue. A trace of dye seeping through.
Kokushibo folded the ledger in half.
“The scabbard and the blade...”
He touched the sheath. Until the blade comes out, the sword swallows sound. Sound is the scabbard’s responsibility. When the blade parts the sky, only then does sound open its beak.
Three peaks for the scabbard. One peak for the blade.
What came to mind was not the trembling of a mountain range stretching east and west, but its shape. The way to read mountains and rivers as a sword. The body’s owner had once read them that way. With a soldier’s eyes, terrain; with a craftsman’s eyes, wind; with a warrior’s eyes, ridges.
He set the ledger down and cast his gaze outside.
Yoshiwara’s red lanterns trembled in a single thread of wind. The western edge of that trembling overlapped with a contour line that had risen thinly against the night sky. A contour he had seen before. The mountain ridge Yoriichi’s back had formed beneath the full moon.
“...Kumotori.”
The name reached the tip of the body’s tongue first. His mind followed a beat later. Instinct had snatched at a place name that had nothing to do with the Blue Spider Lily, and he knew it immediately. Even so, he was drawn to it.
It was not memory. Only instinct. A pull toward shape.
Yoriichi’s afterimage overlapped with the mountain ridge, the stride of someone walking upward without ever looking back.
Even if the Blue Spider Lily was not there, “my instinct” was heating his heart, insisting that he had to go there.
Kokushibo looked up at the moon once, then moved on.
§§§
The road toward Okutama was like a long-folded scabbard.
The night river hid its sound, and the forest kept its beak shut. As he brushed past the old highway beyond the village, Kokushibo stopped for a moment.
In the air, the handle of the Big Dipper pointed west. The wind ran contrary to the river’s flow. There was a “blank space” created by a night arranged like this.
That blank space was the mountain’s entrance.
Along the roadside, a faint steam rose. A hot spring deep in the valley.
The faint scent of humans lingered there. Someone had passed by recently. Kokushibo bent his knees slightly and picked up a tuft of fur crushed between the grains of dirt. Ordinary deer fur. But another scent lay over it.
Oil-free, the acid of fear seeping from the spine, silk cord. Someone who seemed to belong to the Demon Slayer Corps.
He let the deer fur fall and followed the slope of the road. Three lightly angled footprints all headed the same way. Light, quick feet, not putting strength into the heels. They were either children who had not properly learned breathing, or children who had learned it only shallowly.
As the darkness deepened, the outline of the ridge became clearer. After three overlapping humps, one peak rose like a blade. The ledger’s passage whispered again. Three peaks for the scabbard, one peak for the blade.
“The scabbard swallows sound... and the blade opens its beak.”
As he muttered it, a very thin metallic sound came from beyond the forest. The sound of a sword tip brushing nettles. Human presence could not lie.
Kokushibo stopped, lowering his waist only slightly as he swept his gaze left and right. Crossing the path the wind had taken, he placed his weight at the point where the sound bent. That was the place where the beak would open.
“Stop!”
Two shadows sprang from the trees. Young voices. Yet the ends of those voices trembled as if cut short. It was courage shouted through fear, the kind taught by training.
He had thought there were three. There were only two. The third must have stayed behind to ambush him.
Kokushibo’s six eyes took in the shape of the blades in the children’s hands. Cheap swords issued by a training hall. But the wear on the scabbards was honest. Traces of hands that had drawn them every day without skipping.
The tiny cracks near the base of the blades revealed a habit of failing to keep the wrists straight.
“Cut off the escape route!”
The child on the left shouted and swung. The child on the right moved first. The body was faster than the mouth. The two did not look at each other, did not trust each other, and yet they moved together.
Kokushibo did not draw his sword. He pressed the earth with his heel, the moss with his little toe, and the air with his knee.
With a craftsman’s handwork, but a warrior’s speed.
The moment the left child’s blade scraped the darkness, Kokushibo slid his right foot back an inch and bent his waist at an angle. What flowed between blade and body was not space, but time. He knew how to push time aside.
The child’s sword tip spun uselessly through the air. In that opening, Kokushibo’s fingertips touched him lightly.
The child’s wrist snapped back like a spring. No scream came out. Kokushibo had drawn an invisible line in front of his Adam’s apple.
The child on the right lunged in. His footwork had already been exposed.
His shoulder came forward before his knee. His eyes spilled fear before his shoulder did. Kokushibo placed his left hand lightly on the ground and rose at once. Only the space he had passed through rang with wind.
“It seems you’ve learned breathing. Judging by the way you use it... Thunder Breathing, perhaps...”
Kokushibo’s six pupils flashed with a chilling gleam as he bared killing intent toward the children.
“That breathing... who taught it to you?”
With that one sentence and that killing intent, the children’s bodies froze for an instant. Their breathing rhythm collapsed, and the sound of their chests tightening was so clear it seemed audible.
In the children’s bronchial tubes, their breath caught with a sharp, stifled sound. Kokushibo’s killing intent had circled their throats once and twisted the beat of their breathing.
Only then did the children, seeing the characters for Upper Rank One clearly etched in those six eyes, finally show expressions of fear.
They could not easily force out even a single word.
The pressure was like swallowing the air itself. The children could not take a single step and stood there with pale faces, frozen in place.
Anyone who used breathing would surely become one of the Demon Slayer Corps’ fighting strength.
Perhaps one of these children would become a future pillar.
“...I can’t let them live.”
And yet Kokushibo did not draw his sword. He only slowly closed his large hand over the hilt, then stared endlessly at the frightened children with his gleaming six eyes.
The children’s breathing grew thinner and more unnatural by the second.
Kokushibo hesitated for an instant. Just an instant.
The lowest pair of his six eyes trembled faintly, then settled.
Without removing his hand from the hilt, he turned the grain of the earth over once with the tip of his foot.
Boom—!
The suffocating pressure changed direction. Ahead of the children, a thin path of wind opened in the darkness. The leaves parted, sketching the shape of a way to survive.
“...Only this once.”
“Be grateful. Right now... I judge your talent and find it a waste to take your lives.”
Kokushibo pointed to the path opened by the pressure of his scabbard.
“Go. Go and become stronger.”
That way, you will become my stepping-stone.
With that, Kokushibo moved into the darkness, leaving the children behind.
Behind him, several loud sets of footsteps began to flee. The children were grinding their teeth, wiping away tears, and running without being able to say a word.
Kokushibo did not cut them down to the end. Just before the wind closed, their figures were swallowed by the forest.
Silence.
All that remained was the faint trembling of branches that had bent and sprung back.
Then, from below the ridge, an echo returned.
Thud, thud, thud.
From beneath the ridge, the deep bass of a freshly forged iron hammer striking stone rose in succession.
Kokushibo tilted his head slightly. It was not the sound—rather, the texture of the presence had changed.
A man cut through the darkness as fallen leaves rustled aside.
A rope around his waist, torn hemp cloth over his shoulders. No firewood, no sword in his hands. And yet the tips of his feet were changing the rhythm of the wind.
At that moment, Kokushibo’s six eyes began to tremble in an almost unnatural way.
“...This presence, this breathing...?”
A scream seemed to bloom from every cell in his body.
“That is far enough. Who are you?”
The man who had appeared in an instant before him stopped and said those words. That breathing was too familiar. There was no disorder in it.
The look in those eyes turned toward him was deep. A faint red that lingered long after the charcoal fire had gone out.
Kokushibo’s six eyes narrowed at the same time.
There was no grammar to that breathing. And yet the rhythm did not break.
There was only the scent peculiar to humans—sweat, earth, ash. And yet his killing intent could not swallow the presence.
It was strange.
It felt like an empty place. The center of a “nothing” that would make you scrape only air if you drew your sword.
He faced a bizarre sight, as if Yoriichi’s afterimage were being projected into reality.
“――Goooo...”
Instinctively, Kokushibo began to exhale in a long breath. This breathing method, which made every cell in his body internalize fear, was Yoriichi’s.
Sun Breathing.
Nothing else. And yet something was slightly different. Something strange, as if Sun Breathing had been transformed into something else.
“It seems you have business with me. Since the place is like this... perhaps we should move somewhere else.”
Kokushibo’s hand drifted a little away from the hilt.
For a moment, he listened to the other man’s breath.
Breathing that never broke, and yet somehow felt “empty” for something that should have been the grammar of the sun.
“Very well.”
A brief assent. Kokushibo’s toes slid half a handspan to the side. He had not withdrawn his hostility, but neither did he mean to draw his sword.
“Lead the way.”
Holding the scabbard tightly, Kokushibo exhaled roughly.
The other man also seemed to notice Kokushibo’s state.
“...Very well. Please follow me.”
Following the path guided by the man, Kokushibo slowly began lifting his feet and walking after him.
His once-still moonlight began to churn.
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