The village smelled of absence.
It was a cold, hollow scent that Tanjiro Kamado, with his unnaturally sharp nose, found deeply unsettling. It wasn't the metallic tang of demon-spilled blood, nor the simple quiet of an abandoned settlement. It was the smell of things that had never been.
"Something's wrong," he said, his hand resting on the hilt of his Nichirin Sword. He stood in the center of the village square, where a well sat silent and a single child's doll lay half-faded in the dirt. "I can't smell a demon. I can't smell anything."
"Maybe it was here and left!" Inosuke bellowed, kicking at a loose stone. "Probably got scared of the great Lord Inosuke!"
Zenitsu, meanwhile, was trembling behind a stack of firewood. "The sound… it's all wrong. It's like the silence has teeth. I want to go home…"
Tanjiro walked toward a small house, the paper screens on its doors oddly blank. He slid one open. Inside, a family's dinner was set on the table, still warm. A pot of rice steamed gently. But there were no people. And worse, he could smell the faint, lingering scent of a mother, a father, and two children. The scents were there, but they were being… thinned. Diluted by the moment.
On a nearby wall, a child's drawing in charcoal depicted a smiling family of four. But the figure of the father was violently scribbled out with thick, black ink that seemed to pulse with a coldness that had nothing to do with the night air.
This wasn't a demon's work. This was erasure.
Suddenly, from the forest's edge, a figure emerged. It was tall and unnaturally thin, dressed in the formal robes of an old-world calligrapher. Its skin was the color of parchment, and its face was a smooth, featureless canvas. In its hands, it held a massive calligraphy brush, the bristles dripping with an ink so dark it seemed to absorb the moonlight.
The Redactor tilted its head. No words appeared in the air. Instead, it painted a character onto the air itself—a single, flowing kanji.
[無]
Mu. Nothingness.
The character drifted slowly toward Zenitsu.
Zenitsu shrieked, drawing his blade in a flash of terror-fueled instinct, but the kanji passed right through it. His breath hitched. The memory of his grandfather, the feel of the Thunder Breathing forms, the sting of a thousand failures and the one moment of triumph—it all began to feel distant, like a story he'd once heard about someone else.
"Zenitsu!" Tanjiro yelled, a wave of cold terror washing over him.
He moved. "Water Breathing, Second Form: Water Wheel!"
He leaped, his sword carving a circular slash through the air, aimed directly at the Redactor. But his blade met nothing. The robed figure didn't dodge; it simply was no longer where it had been, reappearing ten feet away without a single wasted motion, as if the space between had been edited out.
Nezuko burst from her box, her small form growing to its full combat size, eyes blazing with pink fire. She charged, her claws ready to tear the calligrapher apart.
The Redactor saw her coming. It calmly dipped its brush in an inkstone that floated beside it and painted another character.
[靜]
Sei. Stillness.
Nezuko froze mid-stride, held fast not by a physical force, but by an absolute command. She grunted, her muscles straining, the veins on her forehead bulging as she fought against the conceptual lock.
This was its mistake.
The Redactor's featureless gaze fixed on her. It seemed to recognize the contradiction she represented: a demon who protected humans. An error in the narrative. It raised its brush, preparing to correct the flaw.
Colorless text, the same that had plagued other worlds, finally bloomed beside it.
[Correction: Sentimental anomaly detected.]
[Action: Revert subject to base demonic classification. Erase familial bond.]
It began to paint a new symbol over Nezuko's heart, a complex character that meant 'sever'.
Tanjiro saw not only the action, but its meaning. He saw Nezuko turning on him, all humanity gone. He saw the bond they shared—the one thing that had kept him going—being unwritten.
"NEVER!" he roared, a fire lighting behind his eyes that had nothing to do with anger.
His breathing changed.
He let go of the rigid forms of Water Breathing. He abandoned the patterns he had learned and embraced the rhythm he had inherited. His father's face flashed in his mind—dancing from sunrise to sunset, a prayer in motion.
Hinokami Kagura. The dance of the Fire God.
He exhaled, and the air itself seemed to turn to summer.
"Raging Sun!"
He unleashed a looping slash, but this was different. The blade was wreathed not in simple flames, but in the pure, undeniable light of dawn. The fire didn't just burn; it illuminated. It was the fire of truth against the ink of lies.
The fiery arc slammed into the [Sever] character, and instead of exploding, the symbol simply burned away, dissolving like a lie exposed to the light.
Nezuko was freed. She didn't hesitate. With a guttural roar, she ignited her own blood, a wave of brilliant pink flame washing over the Redactor.
Blood Demon Art: Exploding Blood!
The flames weren't designed to burn flesh, but to burn away demonic arts. Against this Redactor, they burned away its rules. The calligrapher shrieked, a sound like tearing paper and cracking ink sticks, as its authority was scourged by the demon it had tried to unmake.
Staggering, its robed form smoking, the Redactor turned its full attention to Tanjiro. It saw the sun in his eyes, the source of this defiance. It prepared a final, absolute edit.
[ERASE SOURCE. NULLIFY SUN.]
But Tanjiro was already moving, his feet tracing the steps of the dance. His sword became an extension of the sun itself. The power flowing through him wasn't just his. It was the accumulated hope of every Sun Breather who had ever lived, a story that refused to be ended.
"Thirteenth Form."
He wasn't just repeating a pattern. He was performing all twelve forms in a single, fluid, unbroken sequence, a relentless cycle of sunrise and sunset. He became a vortex of solar fire, a living, breathing testament to life's endurance.
His blade finally connected with the Redactor.
The sun's fire did not cut it. It did not incinerate it.
It purified it.
The inky darkness was peeled away layer by layer, revealing the pale, featureless parchment beneath before that too turned to ash, not with heat, but with overwhelming truth.
The Redactor dissolved into nothing, leaving behind only the cold night air and the lingering scent of ozone. The fades in the village stopped. Color seemed to bleed back into the world.
As the last wisp of the creature vanished, a single, flickering character of ink fell to the ground. Tanjiro, panting, knelt beside it. As his finger grazed the substance, a vision flooded his mind.
He saw a boy with no magic, swinging a colossal black sword that drank the darkness. He saw him yelling, screaming his defiance against a colorless sky. He felt a kinship—a shared role as a fundamental contradiction fighting to protect his world.
A soft chime resonated in his ears. A faint, watery-blue screen shimmered before his eyes, its text as alien as the creature he'd just fought.
[Sun Breathing has demonstrated Anti-Canon Authority.]
[Classification: Primordial.]
[Synchronizing User: Tanjiro Kamado.]
[Welcome to the Gate.]