Chapter 220: Douma Is Helpless
"You've worked hard." Akira wrapped his arms around Shinobu, pulling her into a warm embrace. He gently patted her back, his large hand moving in slow, rhythmic circles to soothe the lingering agitation from her intense focus. Over her shoulder, he offered Tamayo a polite nod of greeting.
Once the adrenaline of her breakthrough finally settled, he carefully set her back on her feet.
"Alright, let's get some food in you first. You always forget to eat the second you step foot in that laboratory."
"I know, I know," Shinobu muttered, her cheeks puffing out slightly. She raised a hand to swat away his fingers as he affectionately ruffled her dark purple-tipped hair. "Honestly, how did you end up even more naggy than my sister?"
Akira simply chuckled, entirely unfazed by her swat. "That just proves how perfectly compatible Kanae and I are."
"Hmph!" Shinobu shot him an indignant glare. Suddenly recalling the silent treatment she had sworn to give him that very morning, she snatched the wooden food box right out of his hands. Without another word, she spun on her heel and marched toward the door.
She fully intended to find a quiet, secluded spot to replenish her drained energy, far away from a certain heartless jerk. She was going to ignore him for the entire day.
Or, at the very least, for the next few hours.
Her wooden sandals clicked sharply against the floorboards. Yet, after taking a few brisk steps, Shinobu noticed a distinct lack of pleading from behind. No attempts to make her stay, no sweet words of comfort. Her brow twitched in mounting irritation.
Just as she whipped around, fully prepared to scold him for being an impossibly dense block of wood, she crashed straight into a solid chest. Akira had been following her in complete silence, shadowing her steps so closely that she nearly toppled over from the sudden impact.
She stumbled back, tilting her head up only to meet his warm, deeply amused gaze. A faint dusting of pink spread across Shinobu's cheeks. She pouted, swiftly turning her back on him again and quickening her pace down the corridor, leaving behind nothing but a weak, breathless, "Hmph."
Yet, the very second her face was hidden from his view, the corners of her lips betrayed her, curling upward into a bright, genuine smile.
The heavy, deliberate thud of Akira's footsteps echoed right behind her—he was no longer even trying to hide his pursuit. Hearing that steady rhythm anchoring her steps, her smile only grew sweeter.
Back in the laboratory, Tamayo stood quietly amidst the glass vials and medical equipment, watching the young couple disappear down the hall. A fleeting trace of envy rippled through her gentle, violet eyes. It was quickly followed by a heavy wave of nostalgia and deep loneliness. But buried deep beneath that sorrow lay a dark, churning abyss of absolute hatred.
Once upon a time, centuries ago, she too had possessed a warm home. She had a husband who looked at her with that exact same protective devotion, and a sweet, precious child.
But her desperate, clinging attachment to her mortal life had blinded her. She had fallen right into Kibutsuji Muzan's deceitful trap. The price of her survival had been her humanity—and in her initial, uncontrollable bloodlust, she had slaughtered her own husband and child with her bare hands, tearing apart the very family she had wanted to live for. Countless innocent lives had followed in that waking nightmare.
Eradicating Muzan from the face of the earth was the sole, burning purpose keeping Tamayo tethered to this world.
Only after the Demon Lord was reduced to ash would she finally allow herself to face the crushing weight of her own sins.
"Lady Tamayo..." Yushiro's voice broke through the silence. Sensing the sudden, melancholic shift in her aura, the pale-haired demon stepped closer, his expression laced with worry.
Tamayo blinked, pulling herself from the dark depths of her memories. She offered Yushiro a faint, reassuring smile and shook her head slightly, signaling that she was alright.
She had personally turned him to save his life from a terminal illness, and in her heart, she had always viewed him as a child under her care. Yushiro, however, had developed an intense, unwavering romantic devotion toward her—a fact that caused her no small amount of quiet distress.
She had explicitly rejected his advances more than once, gently but firmly drawing a line between them, yet it did nothing to deter his fierce loyalty.
She could only sigh inwardly. Perhaps the endless march of time would eventually heal all of their lingering wounds.
Out in the sunlit courtyard, Shinobu had entirely, and quite selectively, forgotten her fierce vow to ignore Akira. Sitting on the wooden engawa, she happily nibbled on the carefully prepared dishes he had arranged for her. Between bites of warm rice and grilled fish, she eagerly launched into a detailed breakdown of their latest experimental breakthrough.
The culmination of their sleepless nights had yielded three distinct, highly potent chemical agents.
The first was a specialized toxin engineered to inflict massive, lethal cellular breakdown specifically tailored to the blood samples they had acquired from Upper Rank Three, Akaza. The second was a terrifyingly aggressive compound designed to force a demon's cells to age at an exponential rate. The third, and perhaps the most crucial, was a powerful inhibitor meant to drastically suppress demonic cell activity.
This final inhibitor, as Tamayo had carefully theorized, was crafted for one singular purpose: to counter Muzan's absolute last resort.
During critical, life-threatening moments, the Demon Lord possessed the cowardly ability to split his body into thousands of tiny, scattering fragments. Tamayo deduced that to achieve this, Muzan had to hyper-accelerate his cellular activity to an unmatched, volatile extreme. By forcibly detonating his own flesh from the inside out, the resulting biological explosion would scatter the pieces in every direction, guaranteeing his survival as long as even a single chunk of flesh escaped.
To permanently seal off this escape route, they had to violently suppress his cellular activity, locking it far below the threshold required for detonation.
Since the exact biological limit of Muzan's splitting mechanism remained an unknown variable, Tamayo had anchored her experiments using the baseline cellular activity of an ordinary human.
The latest refined batch of the inhibitor was a resounding success. It successfully crushed the cellular activity of Akaza's blood samples down to a sluggish crawl—slower even than a frail mortal. Although applying the exact same dosage to Muzan wouldn't yield such an exaggerated, paralyzing effect due to his overwhelming demonic density, it would absolutely be enough to jam his splitting mechanism.
After all, Muzan's physical durability was absurdly high; to violently burst that armor-like flesh from within required a massive, instantaneous spike in energy. The inhibitor would act as a heavy iron chain, dragging that energy spike down.
A pure lethal toxin. Accelerated aging. Splitting inhibition. And the ultimate cure to reverse demonization back to human form. The four apocalyptic horsemen of Muzan's demise were finally complete.
Akira leaned back, a dark, predatory glint flashing through his calm eyes. The bait was set. It was time to finalize their preparations to go fishing. Or rather, to go demon-fishing.
Time always possessed a cruel habit of slipping away in the quiet, unnoticed corners of the world.
In what felt like the blink of an eye, the harsh winter began to recede, making way for the early, biting chill of spring.
Far away, on the desolate outskirts of a nameless rural town, the remnants of winter stubbornly clung to the earth. Patches of dirty snow littered the dirt roads. The melted slush on the surface had refrozen into a treacherous, razor-thin layer of ice, gleaming like scattered diamonds beneath the pale moonlight.
It was well past midnight. The freezing temperatures kept the townsfolk locked tightly inside their homes, leaving the winding streets pitifully empty.
Crunch.
An exquisite, knee-high black boot stepped down, effortlessly crushing the frozen puddles into a spray of icy powder.
"Excuse me, young miss, might I ask you a quick question?" The owner of the boots paid absolutely no mind to the crunching frost beneath his feet. A bright, carefree smile plastered across his face, he leaned forward, adopting a tone he genuinely believed to be charming and approachable as he addressed a lone woman hurrying down the alleyway.
"Ahhh! It wasn't me! I didn't do it! I don't know anything! Get away from me!"
The woman shrieked the moment she caught a glimpse of his unnaturally pale, bloodless face. Terror hijacked her senses. Without even waiting for the strange man to finish his sentence, she dropped her basket and fled into the darkness, her wooden sandals clattering wildly in sheer panic.
"Oh my, why are people so terribly high-strung nowadays?" A soft, troubled sigh escaped the lips of the tall figure. "Even going by the most basic tenets of human courtesy, one should really let a person finish speaking before running off..."
Despite his complaining words, the brilliant, friendly smile etched onto his face didn't waver for a single microsecond. It was entirely fixed, proving that he didn't actually feel troubled in the slightest.
In truth, he possessed absolutely zero comprehension of what genuine emotion felt like. His entire existence was a hollow performance. He was merely imitating the colorful expressions of joy, sorrow, and annoyance based on a century of observing the pathetic humans he slaughtered.
Yet, from beginning to end, not a single spark of actual feeling ever breached the depths of his beautiful, captivating rainbow-colored eyes.
Paired with that deliberately maintained, overly cheerful smile, his presence radiated an exceptionally creepy, skin-crawling aura under the cold moonlight.
This hollow creature was the very target Akira and the Demon Slayer Corps had been hunting down for over half a year—Upper Rank Two, Douma.
Despite his theatrical complaints regarding the woman's rudeness, Douma made no move to chase her down into the shadows. Nor did the thought of tearing her apart to vent his frustrations ever cross his mind.
For one thing, the concept of anger was entirely foreign to his hollow core.
For another, the woman simply hadn't been very pretty. In Douma's twisted, grandiose view of the world, she didn't even meet the bare minimum requirements to be categorized as food. Naturally, there was no point in wasting calories on a chase. As the dignified Upper Rank Two of the Twelve Kizuki, he was an incredibly picky eater. He preferred his meals young, beautiful, and full of nutritious vitality.
However, the grueling experiences of the past few months had managed to accomplish a miracle. For the first time since his birth, Douma—a creature entirely devoid of empathy or sensation—was finally beginning to grasp a very specific, highly annoying emotion: helplessness.
Lord Muzan had handed down a strict, unyielding order for him to personally investigate any rumors regarding the mythical Blue Spider Lily. But as a demon, the sun was his absolute bane. He could only conduct his investigations under the cover of night.
And in this freezing, rural era, what sane human being was going to wander the streets at two in the morning to answer his questions? Especially in this biting, miserable cold.
He was suffering in silence, wandering the frozen streets like a lost child, but he absolutely dared not complain to his terrifying master.
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