Chapter Text
It was a boy, young and strong wearing the tattered remains of a uniform similar to the Demon Slayers of my time. Staining it was blood that belonged to neither him, nor any animal, and sticking from his side was a small syringe. Despite the distance between us, I could see how his lungs heaved and how his muscles frantically tensed and relaxed with each lagging step he took. His body was reacting negatively to his breathing, just like the members of the Corps from my time who had tried to learn my own.
He slowly shambled out from the treeline with his head down, dragging something behind him. After a moment or two, his nose twitched, having picked up on a scent. He stopped walking, and with a loud groan, raised his head to the clearing where I stood. He had a mark that resembled my own running down the top left corner of his forehead to the bridge of his nose, with another rising up from the right side of his neck up to his cheek.
From his earlobes dangled a pair of familiar earrings. They were still intact, only now stained red by the blood of whatever being he had killed before now. The sight of them told me that Sumiyoshi had done exactly as he'd promised.. and that here, centuries after my demise had I found myself intertwined with the Kamado family again.
Sumiyoshi's descendant stood before me, cloaked in the same aura of malevolence as that man from back then. What's worse, were his eyes; pink with vertically slit pupils similarly to that of a cat's. Beholding him was unnerving, and the feeling of overlapping emotions radiating off of him like a thick, toxic gas made my heart ache.
My failure to kill Muzan Kibutsuji had negatively effected the lives of countless. That fact alone is the sole reason why I had continued to search for him for the rest of my life, up until the end. But throughout my long life, never once had it occurred to me that my mistake could one day come to hurt them as well.
With wide eyes, I looked back over my shoulder at the series of graves resting away from the house in the distance. They were a family of charcoal sellers, isolated in the mountains with nobody close by that could protect them. It's no wonder the boy became a Demon Slayer.. he had likely been the only one to survive. And with the Sun Breathing technique at his disposal, it was only a matter of time until that man came for him.
The deaths of his entire family, his servitude to the Demon Slayer Corps, and eventual transformation into the very thing he made an oath to destroy..
It was all my fault.
I could not help but shed a tear as I looked back at the sole survivor of the family I had let down. Kamado looked at me with a mixture of contempt and fear, twitching and trembling as he beheld me. His veins bulged unnaturally on his forehead and his breathing began to burn visibly like the flames of the sun. He tossed his item into the shrubbery behind him as I clenched the handle of my blade and bled it a bright, crimson red.