Muzan gasped as the illusion shattered. His eyes snapped open and he was back in the chamber, still wrapped in the root cocoon that had trapped him.
The bark pressing against his skin cracked and fell away. He could feel the thorns that had been draining his life force withdrawing, leaving small puncture wounds across his arms and torso. The cocoon split down the middle and he fell forward onto cold stone.
His body was weak. The tree had been feeding on him, though apparently not for long enough to kill him. His muscles trembled as he pushed himself up onto his hands and knees. Each breath came with effort, his lungs struggling to fill properly.
Around him, the chamber was filled with the muffled sounds of dying. Other prisoners were still trapped in their cocoons, their bodies withering as the tree drained them. Most were too far gone to save, reduced to husks wrapped in bark.
At the chamber's center, the grey-haired man stood on a platform near the tree. His arms were spread wide and his voice echoed off the stone walls.
"Ten years of devotion! A thousand offerings to nourish the sacred seed! Lord Jashin's promise made manifest!"
Muzan's vision focused on the tree. It was ancient and withered, its bark grey and cracked. But from its central branch hung something that looked completely out of place. A fruit, roughly the size of a small melon, with skin that shifted between purple and gold and deep red. The surface pulsed rhythmically, like a heartbeat made visible.
The tree had been feeding on all these people to create that fruit. Their life force, their chakra according to what the grey-haired man had said, was being concentrated into a single object.
Muzan tried to stand but his legs wouldn't hold him. The weakness from his disease had returned the moment he left the illusion. His heart stuttered in his chest, stopping for three seconds before jerking back into rhythm. The familiar coldness spread through his limbs.
He was dying. The tree had drained enough of his life force that his already fragile body couldn't sustain itself much longer. Maybe another hour before his heart stopped permanently.
But the grey-haired man didn't know Muzan had broken free. He was still focused on the tree, watching the fruit with religious fervor. His back was turned.
Muzan looked at the fruit again. His body responded to it in a way that bypassed conscious thought. The same way a drowning person reached for air, his entire being was pulling him toward that fruit. It contained concentrated life force stolen from hundreds of people. Life force his body desperately needed.
The thought of taking it felt wrong. Those people had been murdered to create it. Using their deaths for his own survival seemed like becoming complicit in the crime.
But Genzo had died to give him a few more moments of life. Was he going to waste that sacrifice by dying here in the dark?
Muzan started crawling toward the tree. His arms shook with each movement. His heart stopped twice in the time it took him to cross ten feet, each restart coming slower than the last. By the time he reached the base of the tree, his vision was blurring at the edges.
The grey-haired man was still speaking, caught up in his own words. "The convergence is at hand! Lord Jashin's blessing made manifest!"
Muzan reached up. His hand closed around the fruit and he pulled.
It came free from the branch with almost no resistance. The moment it left the tree, the pulsing stopped. Complete silence fell over the chamber.
The grey-haired man's voice cut off mid-sentence. He turned slowly, his expression shifting from ecstasy to confusion to recognition. Then his face twisted with rage.
"You." The word came out flat and cold. "You were supposed to be dead."
Muzan looked down at the fruit in his hands. It was warm against his skin, still vibrating slightly with contained energy. His body was screaming at him to consume it immediately.
"Put that down." The grey-haired man's hand moved to the scythe on his back. "That fruit is Lord Jashin's bounty. My reward for ten years of devoted service."
"You killed Genzo for this." Muzan's voice was barely a whisper, all the strength he could manage. "You killed everyone in my village."
"I killed a thousand people for this." The man smiled, showing teeth. "Your village was just the final contribution. Now give it back before I take it from your corpse."
Muzan brought the fruit to his mouth. His hands were shaking so badly he almost dropped it. The grey-haired man's eyes widened.
"Don't you dare—"
Muzan bit down.
The taste hit him first. Sweet and bitter and metallic all at once, so intense it overwhelmed every other sensation. The fruit's flesh dissolved on his tongue, breaking down into liquid that burned as it went down his throat.
Then the power flooded in.
It felt like swallowing the sun. Energy exploded through his stomach and spread outward through his entire body in a violent wave. Every cell ignited simultaneously. Muzan's muscles locked up and he collapsed, unable to even scream as the fruit's power tore through him.
His heart stopped. Not the usual flutter and restart, but a complete cessation as the overwhelming energy short-circuited every system in his body.
The grey-haired man was already moving, hands flying through seals. "You fool! You've consumed power you can't possibly contain!" His fingers completed the pattern. "Blood Release: Crimson Extraction."
The technique activated, invisible hooks sinking into Muzan's blood. The grey-haired man's expression was twisted with fury and greed. "I'll rip that power out of you along with every drop of blood in your body!"
The hooks pulled.
For a split second, Muzan's blood responded to the technique, beginning to move toward the surface of his skin.
Then the fruit's chakra reacted.
The power concentrated in Muzan's dying body recognized the external interference. It surged to protect its new host, flooding his blood with raw energy to reinforce it against the extraction.
The grey-haired man's technique pulled harder.
The fruit's chakra pushed back stronger.
Muzan's body became a battlefield between two opposing forces. His blood was being supercharged with chakra while simultaneously being ripped toward the surface. The pressure built exponentially, contained within a frame that was already at its breaking point.
The grey-haired man's eyes widened as he felt the resistance. "What...? This much power?" He tried to release the technique but it was too late. The connection was established and the backlash was already building.
Muzan's body began to glow from within. His veins lit up like lines of fire beneath his skin. The chakra had nowhere to go, compressed tighter and tighter by the conflicting forces.
"No..." The grey-haired man stumbled backward. "No, this can't—"
The chamber filled with light.
Muzan's body reached critical mass and detonated.
The explosion was cataclysmic. A sphere of raw chakra and pressurized blood erupted outward from where Muzan had been, expanding at impossible speed. The shockwave hit everything in the chamber simultaneously.
The grey-haired man was caught in the initial blast. His body disintegrated instantly, torn apart at a molecular level by the raw power washing over him. There wasn't even time for him to scream. One moment he existed, the next he was simply gone, erased by the force he'd tried to steal.
The ancient tree exploded into splinters. The withered wood couldn't withstand the pressure and shattered into thousands of pieces that were immediately vaporized by the expanding wave of energy.
The prisoners still trapped in cocoons were obliterated. The roots binding them disintegrated and then the bodies themselves were consumed by the blast. Their suffering ended in an instant, too fast for pain.
The painted circles on the floor were scoured away. The stone beneath them cracked and shattered, chunks of rock lifting into the air before being pulverized.
The chamber walls buckled. Cracks spider-webbed across ancient stone that had stood for centuries. Support pillars that had held up the ceiling exploded, reduced to rubble and dust.
The ceiling itself began to collapse. Massive slabs of rock broke free and fell, only to be caught in the still-expanding blast and shattered into smaller pieces. The destruction rippled upward through the underground complex, each level failing in sequence as the explosion tore through them.
On the surface, the ground shook. Trees swayed violently as the tremor spread through the earth. Animals fled in panic from the unnatural disturbance.
Then the ground collapsed inward. Where there had been solid earth, a crater formed as the underground chambers gave way. Dirt and stone and shattered wood all tumbled into the void, burying what remained of the temple complex.
The explosion finally exhausted itself. The expanding wave of chakra dissipated, its energy spent. Dust and debris began to settle, drifting down like snow over the devastation.
Silence fell over the forest. The crater smoked gently in the moonlight, a wound in the earth that would take decades to heal naturally.
Deep beneath the rubble, in a pocket of space that had somehow survived the collapse, something stirred.
What had been Muzan Kibutsuji was no longer recognizable as human. The explosion had torn him apart at a fundamental level, reducing his body to component parts scattered across the small cavity.
But the fruit's power was still active. It had integrated into every cell before the detonation, and now it refused to let those cells die.
A single heart began to reform. It appeared from nothing, tissue materializing in the darkness and immediately starting to beat. Blood vessels sprouted from it, reaching out into the empty space.
Bone fragments that had been blown apart began to move, drawn by invisible forces. They aligned themselves into something resembling a skeleton, though the structure was wrong. Too many joints. Extra ridges along the spine. The skull reformed with subtle changes to its shape.
Muscle grew along the bones, layer upon layer of dense tissue that was stronger than what had been there before. Organs appeared throughout the torso in configurations that made no biological sense. Seven hearts in total, positioned to distribute blood flow more efficiently. Five separate brain structures, networked together but each capable of independent function.
Skin closed over the exposed tissue, pale and smooth. The hands that formed at the end of long arms ended in fingers tipped with black claws.
The process took hours. The fruit's power worked methodically, rebuilding its host into something that could contain the energy it provided. Something that wouldn't detonate again from simple interference.
The new body was designed for survival above all else. Multiple redundant systems. Distributed consciousness. Enhanced senses to detect threats. The ability to regenerate from catastrophic damage.
But it was no longer human. The blueprint had been rewritten too thoroughly for that.
As dawn approached, the reconstruction finally completed. The body that had been Muzan Kibutsuji lay in the darkness beneath tons of rubble, perfectly still.
Then the eyes opened.
They glowed crimson in the absolute darkness, the only light in the buried cavity. The chest began to rise and fall as the lungs remembered how to breathe. The hearts beat in synchronized rhythm, pumping blood through vessels that had never existed before.
Consciousness stirred. Not unified thought, but fragmented awareness spreading across the five brain structures. Each one processed different information, trying to make sense of sensations that were completely alien.
The body sat up slowly. Movement felt strange, muscles responding with strength and coordination that the original Muzan had never possessed. The hands flexed, claws extending and retracting as neural pathways learned how to control them.
Memory came in pieces. The hut. Genzo dying. The cave. The illusion of a perfect life. The fruit. Then pain and light and nothing.
The body looked around the cavity, crimson eyes piercing the darkness easily. Stone and dirt surrounded it on all sides. The space was maybe six feet across, barely enough room to move.
Above was tons of collapsed earth. Below was solid bedrock. The explosion had created this pocket by chance, a bubble of空air in the wreckage.
The body stood, head tilting as it processed the situation. It needed to reach the surface. The air down here was stale and would eventually run out.
The hands pressed against the stone ceiling. The muscles in the arms tensed, testing the resistance. The rock was solid, compressed by the weight of everything above it.
But the body was strong now. Stronger than any human had a right to be.
The claws dug into the stone. The arms pulled downward, and cracks appeared in the rock. Chunks broke free, falling into the cavity. The body continued working, tearing through the compressed rubble piece by piece.
Progress was slow but steady. Hours passed as the body excavated upward through the collapsed chambers. The distributed brains worked together, calculating the most efficient path and coordinating the movements needed to clear debris.
Sometimes larger pieces fell, threatening to crush the body. But it moved with inhuman speed to avoid them, or simply let them hit and regenerated from the damage. Broken bones reset themselves. Crushed organs regrew. The body kept moving upward.
Eventually, the rock gave way to dirt. Softer material that was easier to move. The body dug faster, claws scooping away earth and pushing it down into the space below.
Light filtered down from above. Not much, just a faint glow that suggested the surface was close.
The body pushed through the final layer of soil and emerged into moonlight. It pulled itself out of the hole and collapsed on solid ground, chest heaving as the lungs worked to process fresh air.
The forest surrounded it. The crater was massive, easily a hundred feet across. Scattered fires still burned at the edges where the explosion had ignited dry brush. The ground was torn up, trees toppled in a rough circle around the epicenter.
The body lay there for several minutes, letting the distributed consciousness stabilize. The fragmented thoughts began to coalesce, finding synchronization across the five brain structures.
Awareness sharpened. The body was no longer just reacting to stimuli, but beginning to think coherently again.
Memories surfaced with more clarity. Muzan remembered who he was. What he had been. The disease that had defined his entire existence.
He sat up slowly and looked down at himself. His clothes were gone, destroyed in the explosion. His body was lean and muscular in ways it had never been before. His skin was pale, almost luminescent in the moonlight.
He held up his hands and stared at the black claws extending from his fingers. These weren't human hands. The proportions were wrong, the fingers too long, the nails transformed into weapons.
He touched his face and felt the same wrongness. The bones beneath the skin had been restructured. His features were sharper, his jaw stronger. When he ran his tongue over his teeth, he felt fangs that hadn't been there before.
What had the fruit done to him?
Muzan stood on legs that didn't tremble or give out. His hearts beat strongly in his chest, all seven of them pumping blood through a body that felt like coiled power waiting to be released. No coldness in his limbs. No numbness in his extremities. No stuttering stops and starts.
The disease was gone. Completely and utterly burned away by the transformation.
But so was his humanity.
He looked up at the moon and found his enhanced vision could make out details on its surface that should have been invisible at this distance. Could see the individual branches of trees a hundred feet away. Could track the heat signatures of small animals fleeing through the underbrush.
His hearing picked up sounds from impossible distances. A stream running somewhere to the east. Wind moving through leaves half a mile away. The breathing of something large hiding in the forest.
His sense of smell was overwhelming. He could identify dozens of different scents, categorizing them automatically. Burned wood. Disturbed earth. Blood soaked into the soil. And underneath it all, the scent of living things moving through the darkness.
The distributed brains processed all this information simultaneously, each one handling different sensory inputs and feeding the results back to the others. It was disorienting and natural at the same time, like his consciousness had expanded to fill a larger space.
Muzan tried to speak and found his voice was different. Deeper and rougher than before.
"What am I?"
The question echoed across the empty crater. No one answered.
He looked down at the hole he'd dug to reach the surface. Somewhere far below, buried under tons of rubble, was the grey-haired man's body. Or what was left of it. The man who had killed Genzo. Who had sacrificed a thousand people to create the fruit that Muzan had consumed.
That man was dead. Erased by the explosion. And Muzan had been reborn as something that shouldn't exist.
He didn't know if Genzo's sacrifice had been worth this. Didn't know if becoming a monster was better than dying as a human.
But he was alive. That was something. Maybe the only thing that mattered.
Muzan heard movement in the forest. Multiple sources, approaching from the same direction. His enhanced senses picked up details automatically. Five people moving together with coordinated precision. Their breathing was controlled, their footsteps deliberate.
Shinobi.
They were still far enough away that he could run. His new body was fast, he could feel that in the way his muscles coiled with potential energy. He could disappear into the forest before they arrived.
But something kept him standing there. Some instinct that had been woven into his new biology during the transformation. A hunger he didn't fully understand yet.
The fruit's power had rebuilt him to survive. But survival meant more than just not dying. It meant acquiring resources. Growing stronger. Eliminating threats.
And the approaching shinobi smelled like prey.
Muzan's consciousness fragmented slightly as the distributed brains began operating with different priorities. Part of him recognized the danger of fighting trained warriors. Part of him wanted to run and hide until he understood what he'd become.
But the largest part, the part connected to the deepest instincts woven into his new biology, wanted to test this body. To see what it was capable of. To feed the hunger that was growing with each passing second.
His hands flexed and the claws extended fully. His muscles tensed as he faced the direction of the approaching footsteps.
The rational part of his mind was screaming warnings. He'd never fought anyone before. Had no training or experience. These were professional killers who would destroy him.
But the instinctual part didn't care about rational concerns. It only knew hunger and the drive to survive and grow stronger.
Muzan's eyes began to glow brighter in the darkness as the beast lurking beneath his consciousness started to surface. By the time the shinobi arrived, he would be ready.
Whether he wanted to be or not.