Chapter 428: Spell Card
The billowing wave of displaced snow surged straight toward Tanjirō, and he flinched on pure instinct, trying to dodge — but the wave was simply too vast to escape.
Even uninjured, he'd never have managed to avoid it entirely. Wounded as badly as he currently was, there was no chance at all.
Best case, he'd get buried and manage to dig himself back out afterward.
Worst case, he'd get buried, and that would simply be the end of it — quietly becoming fertilizer for the ground beneath him.
As the wall of snow closed the last few feet, Tanjirō squeezed his eyes shut on reflex.
But seconds passed. Ten full seconds, even. And nothing happened.
The burial he'd braced himself for never came.
He forced his eyes back open, and by the moon's faint light, saw only a blanket of pure white snow around him, and a stretch of trees reduced to splinters and dust.
Just ahead, though, a patch of ground had been swept entirely clear of snow — presumably where that strange explosion had gone off moments earlier.
Something clicked in his mind, and Tanjirō turned quickly toward the unfamiliar young man standing beside him.
His view of Ryū had shifted entirely from moments before — now he looked at him the way one might regard something genuinely, unmistakably otherworldly.
He had no idea exactly what had caused that explosion, but he could guess well enough who was behind it.
Which meant this man had just killed a demon — one of those legendary, supposedly indestructible things.
He'd thrown everything he had at the thing and barely scratched it, and this stranger had shown up and finished it off almost casually. Wasn't that a little too unbelievable?
Tanjirō swallowed hard, forced himself past the pain, and managed, "Th-thank you, sir. If you hadn't stepped in, I'd probably be dead right now."
He genuinely meant that gratitude — but with the blood loss catching up to him, his head had already begun to swim.
Ryū let out a small, dry laugh and shook his head. "Looking after newcomers is basically a rule in the Dimensional Chat Group. When a newcomer runs into this kind of danger, it's on the veterans to step in."
Plus, there was the matter of the 100-Point reward, sure, though it wasn't exactly a huge sum.
Ryū added that last thought silently, keeping it to himself — no sense mentioning it directly to Tanjirō. Wouldn't do much for the poor kid's confidence, learning his life had been valued at a flat 100 Points and nothing more.
What Ryū actually said out loud, though, left Tanjirō thoroughly confused.
Dimensional Chat Group?
Newcomer? Veteran?
What did any of that even mean?
Tanjirō suddenly had the distinct feeling he'd just been swept up into something genuinely enormous.
Ryū spoke again. "I think you should probably brace yourself for what's coming — wouldn't want the shock to hit you too hard."
Tanjirō blinked, forcing down the pain, and asked, startled, "Shock? What shock?"
Ryū didn't elaborate much. Instead, he reached into the Dimensional Chat Group, asked Yukari for a healing spell card, and handed it over to the badly injured boy in front of him.
"Eat this," he said. "Then go check on your family — you'll understand what happened soon enough."
"Don't worry, it's not poisonous. Once you eat it, your wounds should heal up — might take a little while, though. Given the state you're in, I'd guess about a minute."
A minute? His injuries — healed in a single minute?
And this man, the one who'd just saved his life, was telling him he'd understand what had happened once he got home. Did that mean... something had happened at the house?
Tanjirō wasn't foolish. The implication landed almost immediately, and worry flooded across his face.
But he also knew his current condition wouldn't let him make it home on his own — trying anyway might well get him killed along the way.
So, gritting his teeth, he chose to trust the man who'd just saved his life, and swallowed the spell card whole.
He figured Ryū had no reason to want him dead. If the man had wanted that, he simply wouldn't have bothered saving him in the first place.
The moment he swallowed the card Yukari had passed along through Ryū, Tanjirō felt something genuinely strange begin happening to his body.
"Strange" was almost an understatement — his cracked and broken bones felt like they were rapidly, actively knitting themselves back together.
The bleeding wounds across his body began sealing shut in real time, the skin stitching closed, accompanied by an intense, maddening itch.
Tanjirō forced himself not to scratch at it, gritting through what felt, to him right now, like the longest single minute of his life.
Once that minute finally passed, the itching vanished entirely. His injuries were completely healed, every trace of pain gone along with them.
Watching the change settle over him, Ryū said, calm as ever, "Feeling better now? Since you're patched up, I can take you home directly."
"Just hope you can handle what you're about to see. Though — if it comes to that, you do have the option of keeping the bodies preserved. Once you're strong enough yourself, so long as your family's souls haven't been reincarnated yet, you could go straight to hell or heaven and pull them back out yourself."
Ryū genuinely had no idea whether this particular world actually had a heaven or hell in any literal sense, but he knew for certain souls existed here in some form — the source material had made that much clear more than once.
Tanjirō latched immediately onto one word in particular: "bodies." Freshly healed as he was, panic began creeping visibly across his face.
He knew exactly what that word implied. If this man — the one who'd just saved his life — was telling him there were bodies waiting at home, then...
That couldn't be right. Surely not. That kind of thing... surely something like that couldn't actually happen, could it?!
Whatever grim possibility had just occurred to him, it visibly overwhelmed him, his composure crumbling further by the second.
He bit down on his lower lip and pleaded, urgent. "If... if you could take me home right now, I'll pay whatever price you ask. I need to go back and see for myself what actually happened."
Ryū nodded, saying nothing more for the moment. He reached out and gripped Tanjirō's shoulder.
After a brief pause, he finally said, "You might find this a little disorienting."
Before Tanjirō could even ask what he meant by that, both their figures vanished from where they stood, instantly.