Spiritual power and demon-qi — two fundamentally different kinds of extraordinary force that defined this age.
Three months had passed since Kōbe Hikaru transmigrated into this world. He was no longer the newcomer — or rather, the new corpse — who had first woken up in a pile of bodies.
By now, he had a solid grasp of the basics.
Demon-qi was born from the murk and corruption drifting through heaven and earth, fed by the resentment of living things. It was the foundation upon which all demons survived.
The force itself was cold and rotting, shot through with an instinctive hunger for destruction and tangled up with every manner of craving.
When it circulated through a demon's body, it naturally eroded reason, amplified desire — turning the weak bloodthirsty and driving the powerful to madness.
Kōbe Hikaru was a living — or rather, unliving — example of this.
When he had first become a Ghost Warrior, his head had been flooded with an urge to kill. He'd nearly started gnawing on the bodies strewn across the battlefield.
Fortunately, he wasn't a true newborn demon. He was a transmigrator, his complete human memories and consciousness preserved intact by the system. His willpower had been strong enough to crush that primal instinct and drag his reason back from the edge.
But the influence rooted in biological resentment had never fully disappeared. Its most telling symptom: despite being a corpse, he still experienced all manner of desires, and the instinctive responses driven by demon-qi — if anything, no less present than when he'd been alive.
Dead, yet alive in all the ways that mattered. That was precisely what made something a demon — both supernatural and strange. And yet, not truly alive, either.
Spiritual power was the complete opposite.
It arose from the pure belief of human beings — a force devoted to the preservation of order.
Clear. Luminous. Carrying within it a quality that could purify almost anything.
Humans who cultivated spiritual power went by many names — Demon Suppressors, Onmyōji, Sorcerers, Shrine Maidens — but beneath the varying titles, the essence was the same.
The purer a person's conviction, the stronger their spiritual power.
They were, without exception, the natural predators of demons.
Spiritual power held an innate supremacy over demonic beings — like boiling water poured over ice, like blazing sunlight burning through a bank of shadow.
Even a glancing brush from spiritual power would send searing agony ripping through a demon's body, as though a brand were being rolled across bare skin.
Which was precisely why, when Kōbe Hikaru sensed that distant thread of spiritual power, his first instinct had been wariness — not excitement.
"Here they come."
He stood on the hilltop. The crimson demon's mask on his face betrayed nothing. Only those blood-red eyes moved, locking onto the distant horizon.
The vast tide of demon-qi had closed to within visual range.
An ocean of grey-green murk came surging over the mountains, churning and roiling, threatening to stain the entire night sky a sickly, turbid color.
Within that murk, countless black specks swarmed and shifted — moving fast, filling the air with a deafening chorus of shrieks and howls.
Those specks were demons.
Small demons.
Individually weaker than even the five Blue-Skin Fiends from before — pure cannon fodder, the lowest of the low.
Kōbe Hikaru narrowed his eyes and attempted to count.
One, two, three… ten… thirty… fifty…
"Damn."
He gave up.
Because there was no counting them.
At minimum, three or four hundred, packed together in a dense, writhing mass — from a distance, they looked like one enormous smear of grey-green sludge, pulsing and crawling.
This was the largest gathering of demons he had witnessed since arriving in this world.
Even the great battle three months ago — the one that had killed him on arrival — hadn't produced anything close to this number.
"What the hell is this, a full-scale Night Parade of a Hundred Demons?"
Kōbe Hikaru stared at the all-consuming swarm, and felt his scalp prickle.
Individually, they were all small fry. But even ants, given enough numbers, could bring down an elephant.
He held absolutely no illusions about being able to fight three hundred-to-one. If he got dragged into the middle of that, he'd almost certainly be swallowed up, drained of demon-qi, and torn to shreds.
But his attention quickly shifted away from the swarm itself.
Because he had just noticed where that thread of spiritual power was coming from — the dead center of the horde.
Kōbe Hikaru's gaze cut through the layered mass of demon silhouettes and landed on a single, incongruous figure at the heart of it all.
A person.
An old man.
At this distance, even Kōbe Hikaru could only make out a vague outline. The old man wore grey-white robes. His frame was hunched. His left hand seemed to be clutching something; his right arm swept back and forth in continuous arcs — and with every swing, a ring of light detonated outward, blasting back the small demons pressing in from all sides.
Spiritual power poured off him in waves, blazing bright even against the darkness of the night.
But that light was already very faint.
Fainter by the moment.
Like a candle guttering in the wind — liable to go out at any second.
Kōbe Hikaru could see it clearly. The old man's situation was dire.
His movement was slowing. His spiritual power fluctuations were weakening. The wounds on his body appeared to be mounting by the second.
He was fighting and retreating simultaneously, pressing toward some destination, but the demons around him only grew denser — threatening to swallow him whole.
"Hand it over!"
Shrill cries cut across the distance, carried to Kōbe Hikaru's ears on the night wind.
"Old man, just hand it over!"
"Everyone who came out of that pathetic village with you is dead! What are you still holding on for?"
"Give it up and we'll let you die quick — something like that isn't for humans to hoard all to themselves!"
"Your granddaddy's in a generous mood tonight — maybe we'll even leave your body in one piece!"
Mockery, threats, howls — all of it crashing over each other in waves. Whatever the old man was carrying in his hand, those demons wanted it badly enough to be insufferable about it.
The old man said nothing. He just gritted his teeth and kept moving.
He seemed to have a clear destination in mind.
Kōbe Hikaru traced the direction of his retreat. The way ahead was rolling mountains.
Further along, if his sense of direction wasn't off — a human settlement somewhere beyond several more ranges. A small domain he vaguely recalled was called Musashi.
He was still turning this over in his mind when the blade in his hand abruptly shuddered with far greater violence than before.
The entire sword was vibrating, emitting a deep, resonant hum — the sound of a starving beast whimpering in the back of its throat, desperate with want.
Kōbe Hikaru glanced down at the system panel.
[Cursed Blade — Muramasa: Large quantities of prey detected.]
[Current Mood: ECSTATIC.]
[It conveys a message of fierce intent: 'I want.']
"Cool it."
Kōbe Hikaru pressed a hand over the hilt. He felt exactly like someone trying to calm down a rabid dog.
"That's three or four hundred out there, not three or four. If we just charge straight in like idiots, we both end up dead."
Muramasa ignored his reasoning entirely and kept shaking.
[Cursed Blade — Muramasa indicates it does not care.]
[It believes: dying in the middle of a pile of prey is, in its own way, a kind of romance.]
"…"
Kōbe Hikaru was silent for a moment.
Is there something wrong with this sword's brain?
And besides — you're a sword. How exactly are you going to die? I'M the one who dies! ME!
He stopped arguing with the blade and redirected his focus to the distant battlefield.
The old man's condition was deteriorating rapidly. His spiritual power was nearly spent. The ring of light that had been repelling the demons was shrinking, dimming — growing smaller and darker with every passing second.
The surrounding demons had noticed. Their assault intensified. Their mocking screams grew louder.
"The old man's almost done!"
"Charge! First one to grab it keeps it!"
Kōbe Hikaru watched this unfold and fell into a brief silence.
He was weighing something.
Move in, or stay back?
From a purely practical standpoint — the swarm was enormous, but individually they were all scraps. As long as he was careful, hit-and-run, staying mobile — the risk was manageable.
And if he used them to feed the sword… even a tenth of them…
He glanced down at the panel.
[Cursed Blade — Muramasa: Current Affection: 16]
[Next threshold (30) unlocks: Bond Dialogue (II), Special Ability (I)]
Affection 30 — that was when the first special ability unlocked.
That was the thing he needed most, right now, more than anything else.
Raw sharpness improvements alone weren't going to be enough to establish a foothold in a world crawling with demons. Only by unlocking special abilities could he genuinely pull ahead of ordinary yokai.
Three to four hundred small demons — quantity had a quality of its own. More than enough to push the affection rating up to 30.
As long as he stayed disciplined — didn't let himself get encircled, kept trading movement for space and space for time — there wouldn't be a problem. And if things turned south, his [Shadow Step] would get him out without much trouble.
Setting the practical side aside entirely, from a moral standpoint…
Well. He was a demon. Morals were somewhat above his pay grade. His motivations were purely self-interest — at most, seasoned with a lingering human instinct that refused to let him look away.
There was also the matter of whatever those demons had been shrieking about — some kind of treasure. That part had piqued his interest considerably.
In the months since his arrival, he'd wandered through the wreckage of battlefields where humans and demons had clashed, and managed to scavenge odds and ends here and there — but something genuinely worthy of the word treasure, something that demons themselves would scramble over each other to seize? That, he'd never come across.
And his system was in dire need of exactly that — something that qualified as a true treasure.
On top of everything else, those demons were unbearably loud. Their screeching was giving him a headache.
When he laid it all out like that, there was really nothing left to debate.
Time to eat.
Kōbe Hikaru rose to his feet and drew Muramasa from his hip.
The blade caught the moonlight. Cold silver fire ran along the edge.
"I need to grind affection points either way," he said. "Saving someone on the side costs me nothing."
Demon-qi surged through his legs. His silhouette vanished from the hilltop in an instant.
[Shadow Step].
A heartbeat later, he had already materialized at the base of the hill — and launched himself headlong into the oncoming tide of demons.
"Move!"
____
________________________________________
If you want more chapters, please consider supporting my page on (P). with 50 advanced chapters available on (P)
👻 Join the crew by searching Leanzin on (P). You know the spot! 😉