"These monsters are truly repulsive... to think they can directly manipulate my own memories..."
Li Ke could roughly guess the nature of these worm-like entities. They clearly possessed a bizarre psychological ability that allowed them to manifest within a target's consciousness, seamlessly wearing the face of a 'familiar acquaintance' drawn from the victim's mind.
However, Li Ke was absolutely certain that they lacked the capacity to fully read his memories. Had these parasites possessed true telepathic extraction capabilities, they would have known it was a fundamental impossibility for him to ever tolerate a woman he had repeatedly shared a bed with hooking up with another man!
Furthermore, reflecting on the intense mental sequence he had just experienced, his fabricated interactions with 'Tifa' were actually hollow composite illusions, stitched together from fragmented physical memories of his encounters with Shinobu and the other women he had historically claimed.
The parasites could likely sense superficial fragments of his thoughts, but their fidelity was severely limited. To be entirely precise—
"They only manifested because my own mind wandered to the concept of 'Cloud'."
Li Ke narrowed his eyes in realization. The exact moment he caught sight of the false Tifa and began recalling his historical conquest, a stray thought had briefly crossed his consciousness right before the blond youth abruptly materialized out of thin air.
"If I took Tifa for myself, doesn't that mean Cloud is going to end up a lifelong bachelor?"
He had indeed harbored that exact, fleeting thought for a single microsecond, and only then did Cloud smoothly spawn into the environment.
This indicated that the parasite had targeted him as its primary host from the very beginning, systematically mutating and duplicating itself by absorbing his erratic thoughts and internal hypotheses.
Had he not broken through the illusion and immediately cleaved both monsters into slag, the structural head-count of his traveling convoy would have continuously expanded with fictional entities. What would have happened to their collective sanity after that required no explanation.
"These things are cognitive parasites that feed exclusively on human memories and thoughts. Compounded by those matter-erasing invisible voids from earlier, these anomalies are vastly more troublesome than the high-tier female demon I slaughtered in the city."
If his rigid personal possessiveness hadn't exposed the logical inconsistencies within the false memory matrix, Li Ke suspected he would have been slowly, systematically hollowed out by these memory-eating worms without ever realizing it.
He smoothly sheathed his massive greatsword back onto his spine, shifting his gaze toward his companions, who had all successfully snapped back to structural reality.
"What a truly terrifying monster!"
Mai Shiranui pressed a hand against her chest, her expression incredibly strained. She found herself temporarily unable to meet Li Ke's eyes, her heart weighed down by a sudden surge of intense guilt because she had failed to place unconditional trust in his actions during the initial strike.
However, Shinobu Kocho maintained a dark, brooding countenance, vocalizing a chilling hypothesis that instantly plunged the entire camp into dead silence.
"If these entities operate on this level... then how can we verify that there aren't any hidden monsters currently standing right here among us?"
Her point was undeniable. Since these parasites could systematically blind their perception and force them to completely ignore the sudden, illogical insertion of fictional characters, how could they empirically guarantee that one of the individuals currently standing in their tight circle wasn't a 'suddenly materialized monster' itself?
In an instant, the psychological atmosphere across the stream bank underwent a suffocating shift.
Everyone began eyeing one another with deep, underlying suspicion. No one could offer a definitive baseline guarantee anymore, simply because the empirical evidence of their vulnerability had just been violently demonstrated right in front of them!
When a person's own internal memory archive can no longer be trusted as an absolute source of truth, maintaining standard operational cohesion becomes a near-impossible task. If more of these anomalies materialized during their upcoming march, how on earth were they supposed to differentiate friend from foe?
Li Ke carefully retrograded his mental timeline, meticulously scanning the structural layers of the artificial memories the parasite had attempted to graft onto his brain. As he dissected the data, he isolated several glaring systemic flaws.
Within the narrative the monster had engineered for him, his romantic intersection with 'Tifa' had been absurdly idealized and cinematic. Furthermore, the fictional woman had enthusiastically championed his pursuit of a massive harem without offering a single shred of natural resistance.
Not only that, but every single historical memory involving Cloud had progressed with an absolute, frictionless convenience that completely defied the gritty reality of actual human relationships.
They had supposedly attended school together, roughhoused as kids, wreaked havoc as teenagers, pranked neighbors, gawked at beautiful girls on the street, and spent thousands of hours playing video games. A deep, unbreakable bond stretching across decades.
Li Ke pressed his lips together in a tight, thin line. If his primal protective instincts hadn't violently triggered an internal red flag—and if he didn't currently possess high-tier item counters capable of literally resurrecting the dead—he honestly wouldn't have dared to swing his blade with such merciless conviction moments ago.
Because the initial psychological overlay had been terrifyingly authentic!
It was only now, as the shattered parasitic influence withered away, that the artificial brilliance fading from those memories exposed their true, hollow architecture. He could clearly perceive the systemic fabrications and the clumsy narrative padding stitched into his mind.
Had he lacked that biological anchor, this cognitive infection would have systematically derailed his sanity for an exceptionally long time.
But by mentally running a structural comparison between the parasite's engineered fiction and the gritty reality of his actual life experiences, Li Ke calmly vocalized his definitive conclusion.
"The artificial timelines these monsters graft onto our consciousness contain absolutely nothing but pure, unadulterated pleasure. They are completely devoid of basic human nuances like genuine shame, bitter resentment, raw fear, or even a single stretch of mundane, boring daily life."
Li Ke addressed the group, his voice cutting through the heavy air.
stripped of the creature's cognitive cloaking matrix, the narrative logic was laughably artificial!
The fabrication was so utterly detached from reality that it didn't even account for basic biological friction. In that false timeline, his intimate first encounter with 'Tifa' had depicted her smiling through the entire experience with absolute, frictionless bliss!
That was a biological and psychological impossibility!
And most critically of all—
He, Li Ke, was fundamentally an ordinary man! Every ordinary human being inherited a unique set of psychological flaws, behavioral blind spots, and moral compromises. There was absolute zero chance he could ever operate with the pristine, cinematic perfection engineered within that false memory!
He understood the true, unfiltered nature of his own character better than anyone else.
He could never exist within a reality where he made absolute zero mistakes, left zero regrets, and faced zero emotional friction.
It was a statistical impossibility!
Human beings inherently stumble and falter.
The only entities incapable of committing a systemic error are omniscient, omnipotent gods!
As Li Ke's declaration echoed across the stream bank, the group fell into a brief, meditative silence before a collective wave of relief swept through their frames.
"What a truly repulsive, vile breed of monster... Li Ke, do you think someone is deliberately targeting us from the shadows?"
Mai Shiranui spoke up, her teeth visibly grinding together in pure irritation. To empirically verify that her own presence wasn't an illusion, she had just been forced to deliberately retrograde her internal archive to the exact, excruciatingly intense physical memory of when Li Ke had aggressively claimed her body from behind. Re-experiencing that raw mixture of sudden physical overload, internal conflict, and reluctant surrender sent her baseline temper spiking through the roof, causing her to glare at Li Ke with intense, unprovoked hostility.
"Without a shadow of a doubt. The mastermind behind this timeline is explicitly trying to fragment our psychological cohesion and completely mess with our heads!"
Li Ke replied, his own expression darkening with intense rage. First, the enemy had deployed an untouchable, matter-erasing anomaly to drive Tanjiro straight into his perimeter. Then, even after successfully identifying and dismantling the subsequent threat, the fallout forced his companions to manually dredge up their most vulnerable, emotionally taxing memories just to verify their sanity—a mechanic explicitly engineered to sow underlying discord among allies.
If this wasn't a calculated, highly coordinated psychological warfare strategy orchestrated by the hidden architect of this disaster, Li Ke would happily eat his own greatsword.
Reaching into his storage space, he snapped out his dimensional tracking map, his eyes locking onto the ominous supernatural signatures painted across the parchment.
The skeletal, faded silhouette representing the high-tier female demon remained completely dark. The remaining two prime entities, however, were actively radiating power.
The chaotic mass of continuously writhing tentacles was shifting with a restless, parasitic hunger. Meanwhile, the towering, colossal titan—whose skin and biological mass appeared to be forged from pure, deep-space starlight beneath a tattered, pale yellow robe—pulsed with an eerie, rhythmic radiance.
Li Ke carefully calculated their current geographical coordinates against the tracking matrix, instantly locking onto a chilling operational reality.
His party was currently positioned remarkably close to the perimeter of the yellow-robed titan!
"This specific bastard right here... is almost certainly our grand mastermind."
Li Ke's brow furrowed tightly into a grim scowl. If he were to map these anomalous entities directly to the conceptual architecture of the Cthulhu Mythos, this robed cosmic horror was an unmistakable proxy for Hastur, the King in Yellow. Conversely, that shifting mass of absolute primordial chaos on the opposite side of the continent was either a localized manifestation of Azathoth, or a comparable Outer God.
However, it was highly improbable that these were the actual, undiluted Outer Gods. Had an absolute entity like Azathoth truly physically manifested in this coordinate zone, this entire universe would have been violently erased from reality long before his arrival, rendering his dimensional deployment completely pointless. It was vastly more logical to deduce that these anomalies were severely weakened, compressed iterations—or perhaps minor cosmic avatars—just like the high-tier female demon he had put down in the entertainment district.
Of course, there was always the distinct possibility that they were merely localized parasites evolutionary miming those cosmic archetypes. Whatever the case, Li Ke couldn't establish a baseline verbal dialogue with these horrors anyway, meaning his operational parameters boiled down to a singular, undeniable truth:
"If I put this bastard in the dirt, the systemic crisis in this sector will be cleanly resolved."
Indeed, Li Ke chose to execute a direct frontal breach.
He had barely crossed into this entity's operational perimeter before being slammed by two sequential waves of highly irregular enemy forces explicitly engineered to fragment his convoy's mental stability. If he didn't exploit his current momentum to forcefully crush this son of a bitch right now, and instead chose to march into the heavily populated central headquarters of the Demon Slayer Corps, the dense concentration of human minds would invariably trigger a catastrophic mass-infection!
A single tactical misstep under those conditions would guarantee a total party wipe.
Conversely, launching a direct siege against the entity's lair carried its own inherent structural risks, but gauging by the baseline combat performance of the female demon he had previously slaughtered, the enemy's raw physical defenses shouldn't be entirely insurmountable.
"What is our immediate directive, Li Ke?"
Mai Shiranui and Shinobu Kocho were entirely out of tactical options. Every single catastrophic scenario running through Li Ke's mind was equally apparent to them, causing Shinobu's complexion to turn incredibly grim.
"The central headquarters of the Demon Slayer Corps is no longer structurally secure," Li Ke declared, his eyes scanning the terrain. "Mai and I lack intimate familiarity with the security layout of that sector, and we cannot empirically guarantee whether cognitive parasites capable of violently rewriting human memories have already breached the perimeter. Therefore, my executive decision is to bypass the outpost entirely and launch a terminal strike to completely eliminate the prime anomaly ruling this zone!"
Li Ke tightly gripped his tracking map, his eyes locking onto the pulsing yellow matrix to cement his tactical resolve.
"But according to the mapping parameters... that entity's core coordinates are still a full day's march from our current position..." Shinobu remarked, looking up from the parchment, unable to suppress the hesitation in her voice.
Once again, she was forced to confront the harsh, unyielding reality that her current combat capacity rendered her little more than logistical baggage in a high-tier divine conflict. Even the usually optimistic Mitsuri Kanroji possessed enough situational awareness to deduce that they were currently operating as a massive structural liability to his offensive output.
"A minor logistical issue."
Li Ke casually drew the massive greatsword from his spine once more.
With a fluid, low-frequency rotation of his wrist, a violent torrent of high-density flames instantly cloaked the steel edge.
"We will simply incinerate our way through!"
Li Ke was entirely certain that the dense, ancient woodlands flanking their path harbored an immense colony of unseen parasites specifically engineered to continuously blind and manipulate his sensory network. Since the environment itself was actively weaponized against them, the most logical counter-strategy was to systematically reduce the entire ecosystem to absolute ash!
After all, in the current apocalyptic landscape of this shattered Japan, the wild frontiers were completely devoid of innocent human life anyway.
"I suppose that is our only viable path forward..." Shinobu let out a slow, heavy sigh. She understood the staggering ecological fallout a wildfire of this scale would inflict upon the geography, but conventional military protocols were utterly useless against a conceptual cosmic threat. In moments of systemic crisis, one was strictly required to execute extraordinary measures to secure survival.
"First priority—blindfold the mounts immediately!"
Li Ke issued the command, violently swinging his arm outward. Massive arcs of destructive fire erupted from his palm, streaking through the canopy like localized meteors and violently igniting the surrounding timber line.
Shinobu and the rest of the vanguard acted instantly, utilizing strips of dense travel linen to completely secure the horses' eyes, preventing the beasts from throwing themselves into a blind panic.
The moment they secured their seats back in their saddles, Li Ke executed another massive, sweeping arc with his flaming greatsword, unleashing a catastrophic wall of fire that systematically turned the surrounding forest into a roaring inferno!
"Advance!"
Spurring their mounts forward without a single fraction of delay, Li Ke forcefully pushed his Observation Haki to its absolute mechanical limits, mapping out every microscopic shift within the burning valley.
Furthermore, he actively triggered the internal circulation of his specialized Blood-Qi Mystic Arts, forcefully overclocking his biological systems to maximize his raw kinetic output.
And yet—
"Li Ke? Why on earth are you riding at such a reckless speed?"
A familiar voice echoed through the crackling of the blaze as a childhood friend from his previous life, Huang Rong, effortlessly drew her mount parallel to his warhorse. Li Ke's eyes widened in brief astonishment before his expression hardened into cold steel. Without uttering a single word of dialogue, his greatsword tore through the air in a savage, merciless horizontal slash, cleanly bisecting both the false Huang Rong and the crimson mare beneath her!
The exact microsecond the steel cleaved through their forms, the human illusion violently dissolved, transforming into the bloated, grotesque carcass of a cognitive parasite before bursting into a cloud of shimmering golden motes that seamlessly fused back into his flesh.
"So the systemic feedback loops are actively working!"
Li Ke let out a cold, venomous sneer. The massive surge of physical stamina restored by the golden energy was instantly weaponized and channeled straight back into his offensive output. A towering wave of violent Red Dragon Fire expanded outward, engulfing a vastly wider perimeter of the mountain range.
But right as the draconic flames tore through the illusionary terrain, the visual feed entering Li Ke's eyes began to rapidly stutter, violently twitching and fragmenting into a distorted, static-laced display like a modern television screen suffering from a total loss of signal frequency!
"There really is something fundamentally wrong here!"
Witnessing the spatial visual grid glitch so violently, Li Ke's tactical resolve hardened instantly. He began unleashing torrents of Red Dragon Fire in every direction as if his energy reserves cost absolute zero stamina. The howling mountain winds seemed to actively bend to his command, violently whipping the blazes across the landscape, turning the entire region into a shifting sea of thermodynamic destruction.
Clouds of shimmering golden motes continuously rose from the incinerated soil, streaking through the smoke straight into Li Ke's chest. The constant spatial feedback loop immediately replenished his energy reserves, leaving his muscles feeling progressively more overclocked and potent by the second!
His raw survival instincts screamed that his brute-force clearing strategy was completely correct!
As the flames surged and billowed, they rapidly engulfed the surrounding hillsides, abandoned mountain hamlets, and dense valleys. The choking blanket of thick black smoke and cascading white ash, propelled by the gale, completely sealed off the sector.
The closer Li Ke drew to the primary yellow matrix illuminated on his tracking map, the more violently the visible geometry of the world began to warp and twist before his eyes!
However, the exact moment the galloping convoy cut past a sharp three-way fork in the road, the dimensional space within the acute angle of the intersection violently ruptured. Out of the literal geometry of the junction, a pack of grotesque, shifting entities made of pure black slime and twisting tentacles abruptly manifested. While their physical frames mimicked the baseline running gait of mountain wolves, they possessed absolute zero canine features—they were merely four-legged abominations forged from anomalous matter.
Without wasting a single syllable on dialogue, Li Ke aggressively swung his greatsword, venting a massive torrent of Red Dragon Fire directly into their path.
Yet, the microsecond the intense heat was about to make contact, the pack of monsters violently vanished from physical existence, only to instantaneously erupt straight out of the tight, acute angle formed between Shinobu Kocho's sword-guard and the hilt of her blade!
This conceptually impossible mode of spatial locomotion caught Li Ke completely off-guard, locking his physical frame into a heavy recovery lag. A split second later, a savage anomaly clamped its jaws violently onto his right shoulder, while the remaining beasts seamlessly materialized out of various sharp angles along his own body armor and joints, tearing their teeth into his flesh!
Right as Li Ke's frame was about to be violently torn apart by the pack, two brilliant, blinding arcs of Nichirin steel cut through the smog. Simultaneously, Mai Shiranui enveloped her entire body in a roaring shroud of ninja fire, launching herself forward like a meteoric battering ram to forcefully blast the monsters off his torso.
But Li Ke's heightened combat perception immediately registered a chilling truth—their tactical intervention was entirely futile!
The exact microsecond the blades were about to slice through the targets, the anomalies effortlessly used the acute spatial angle formed between the incoming steel and Li Ke's skin to instantaneously teleport away. The sudden evasion caused Shinobu and Mitsuri's descending blades to nearly cleave straight into Li Ke's own torso instead.
By that same token, the moment Mai executed her burning body-slam, the specific creature she had targeted vanished into the dimensional fabric.
Unable to abort her immense kinetic momentum, her elbow slammed violently into the chest of Li Ke's blindfolded warhorse. The crushing force instantly snapped the beast's neck, violently throwing Li Ke off balance as the horse collapsed beneath him.
"Li Ke!"