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Early spring of the second year. The cherry blossoms hadn't opened yet when a piece of news spread through the city and caught everyone's attention.
A scholar had discovered an unknown exotic flower , one suspected to be the legendary bloom described in ancient texts. The Blue Spider Lily.
Legends about the Blue Spider Lily stretched back through the ages, countless and tangled. Its medicinal value remained unknown. That didn't stop the public from talking. It became one of the hottest topics of the season.
Ambitious men took notice too, heads lifting, already calculating how to ride this strange flower to power and profit.
But anyone who dug deeper would find the same dead end: the so-called Blue Spider Lily existed only as ink on newsprint. No one knew where the flower actually was. No one knew the name of the scholar who had supposedly found it.
No one, except Muzan Kibutsuji.
I waited in a quiet rural courtyard. A few days, nothing more , and then he came, stepping out of the first dark edge of nightfall.
No stars tonight. Only a vast silver moon hanging in the sky, pouring clean white light across the ground and pulling the shadows long.
Long enough to carry me back to another night, long ago. I had waited just as patiently then.
"Are you alone?"
Muzan wore Western formal dress, hat low over his face. He glanced at me from beneath the brim with the same contempt he'd always had for me, the same bone-deep disdain he'd never bothered to hide.
I came back from the memory. I set down my teacup.
"It seems the temptation to become a perfect being is stronger than simply not fearing the sun."
"There's no rush to find Nezuko Kamado," Muzan said, cold and flat. "I can do that after I obtain the Blue Spider Lily. You think that because you no longer need to fear my erosion, you're qualified to stand against me?"
"Not at all , how could I be so arrogant, young master?" I answered in an easy, unhurried tone, as if we were catching up over old times. "Don't you think tonight's moonlight is beautiful? It makes me nostalgic."
I meant the night he had no guard against me. The night I tried to take off his head with an axe.
The memory of my betrayal was clearly carved just as deep in him. Veins rose on his face in an instant. The look in his eyes went cold and dark.
He didn't explode. He simply held his lofty posture and said, "You are as foolish as ever. You could have taken the Blue Spider Lily for yourself first, then come for your revenge."
His words came fast and sharp. "Instead, to earn the approval of those humans, you used it as bait to lure me here. Even after a thousand years, your heart is still this soft. That's why you remain so weak and so useless ,"
I watched him quietly. He slowed. Then stopped, visibly unsatisfied by my silence, by the fact that none of it had landed.
I smiled at him, bright and easy. "After all these years, young master , you've learned to tell jokes."
Something in Muzan snapped. He was in front of me almost before the thought finished forming, sharp nails extended.
"Are those your last words?"
"No," I said. "Tonight is your death."
BOOM ,
The veranda beneath me exploded into fragments. The blast tore outward from the house in every direction.
The pain of being shredded hit my entire body at once , and with it, a dense swarm of tiny iron barbs, driving into every piece of torn flesh.
Muzan and I were blown apart by the same high-powered explosives. Almost simultaneously, we both clawed back to consciousness and began pulling ourselves together.
The difference: he was watching for me. I was using the chaos. While he worked to reconstruct his body, I was already threading my flesh and blood into his.
This had been Kagaya's suggestion. His original plan.
I had refined it. I was going to use this moment to erode Muzan from the inside.
Thick smoke swallowed everything. We couldn't see each other, but we both knew exactly where the other was. We both knew exactly what the other was trying to do.
His cold laughter drifted through the haze. He wasn't rejecting my flesh and blood , he was pulling it in, actively consuming the pieces of me I'd sent into him.
He was confident. In the end, he believed, I would be the one devoured.
If he had made that choice on that night long ago , if he had simply decided to eat me then , he would have been right. I would have had no power to stop him.
But there is no going back to then.
The shriek of blades cutting air split the night from two directions at once.
Muzan grunted. An outside force scattered the smoke and dust, and the moonlight reclaimed everything.
Gyutaro's sickle had punched through both of Muzan's arms at the shoulder blades. Daki's sash had taken his legs at the waist.
In the fraction of a second that he was divided, Tamayo rushed in and drove her left hand into his rapidly regenerating chest.
"You —"
Muzan's face twisted. His fingers tore through skin and closed around Tamayo's skull, crushing her head in his grip. "What are you holding in your hand!"
Tamayo laughed. I had never seen her like this , never seen her lose herself so completely. The laughter was wild and sharp and uncontrolled.
"You're finished! What I'm holding is the medicine to turn you back into a human! Muzan! You will die here tonight!"
Yushiro's Blood Demon Art could conceal objects completely. And demons can control their own breathing and heartbeat , they can go perfectly still, perfectly silent, close enough to touch without Muzan ever sensing them.
So Tamayo and the others had been hidden inside this estate all along. The remaining Hashira and the hand-picked Demon Slayer Corps elites were positioned further out.
"Sister —"
Daki sprinted toward me. I felt the danger before I understood it.
"Get back! Don't come near me!"
A powerful force wrenched me forward. My newly regenerated left arm snapped off. Muzan swallowed it in one motion.
I met his blood-red eyes and understood: he was going to devour me. I was one of the original demons, and he needed my strength to fight back against the medicine Tamayo had planted inside him.
At the sharpest edge of that moment, I started laughing. I didn't hear Daki screaming.
My world went quiet. The earth, the sky, the trees, the air , all of it dissolved.
What remained was the body in front of me, transparent now, and inside it: multiple hearts, multiple brains, each one visible and clear.
Ah.
I finally see it.
Muzan's expression broke. He opened his bloody mouth, trying to force back up the flesh he'd just swallowed.
I finally did the thing I had dreamed of for longer than I could name. I drove my fist into his face with everything I had , whether what came out of my throat was a scream or a roar, I couldn't tell.
"You like eating people so much — then eat! Eat until you're full!"
Eat. Eat. Take it all down, and be grateful for it.
Then give me this body of yours.
In that moment, I understood what I had finally become , what I had finally surpassed him to become.
The Ancestor of Demons.
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