…carrying Roy's reflections on "life," on "the world," and on the whole set of questions every "human" must face—life and death, the living and the dead, and everything in between…
Roy decided he was going to give this world's "natives" a shock from an "outside world"!
Genjutsu came from self-cognition…
And what's inside my cognitive world?
There was the dream tunnel… the familiar Sea of Cognition… and standing on the horizon, those doors—each one stamped with different patterns, each one representing a different themed world…
Strictly speaking…
I am the door. The door is me. I am… Mr. Door.
"Creak—"
As scarlet flooded the boy's eyes, the three black tomoe rotated slowly. Roy sank into his focus, lifted his gaze to the fake "Ging," his lips moving as he silently spoke:
"Genjutsu: Unlimited Void…"
Inside his cognitive world, the wooden door leading to the Demon Slayer world—its lintel hung with a demon mask—split open with a thin crack. Then it widened… half-open… until it burst fully wide!
With his own aura as the support, Roy bore the entire Demon Slayer world. A thought flickered—and through imagination, he tried to "become" every formed and formless thing within it…
Then he compressed everything—every flower and blade of grass, every tree and stone, every person and demon, every house and pond, every cloud and sun, every meal and every sleep—into 0.01 seconds of a single, dense worldview.
And then he hurled that worldview through the Sharingan—straight into the fake "Ging."
From nearly a hundred meters away, the fake "Ging" stared at Roy with wary dread—then in the next instant his eyes met Roy's scarlet, three-tomoe gaze.
His body stiffened.
He went blank.
"Chirp—"
A swallow cut through the rain curtain and dove.
Within churning fog, the fake "Ging" blinked—and the world flipped.
He didn't know what had happened. He only knew he'd looked at Roy—and suddenly he'd become a white birch tree.
He struggled violently, trying to move his limbs. Leaves shivered and the trunk swayed, rustling… and he startled away a woodpecker that had been perched on him, pecking at bugs.
"Tap… tap… tap…" the woodpecker flew off into the rain.
He saw it—lost, bewildered—then tried to think: Why am I here? Why am I a tree?
His awareness wavered.
When he came back—
He was a rock.
"Drip, drip…" rain washed his surface—cold and damp—miserable beyond words. He tried to sneeze from the chill and realized, with sinking dread, he couldn't even do that.
Panic surged. He fought again.
His consciousness lurched—
Now he was a woodcutter, wearing a straw hat, an axe at his waist, hurrying to gather firewood before nightfall. He crouched by a stream and saw a stranger's face reflected back.
And with that face came a whole life—children, wife, joys, worries, sorrows—everything—flooding his mind at once until he snapped, dropped the wood, and bolted, sprinting madly to escape.
He hadn't even run a hundred meters—
His awareness buckled again.
He was the sky.
A dense black storm cloud.
Above him, the blazing sun. Inside him—boom! thunder rolling, lightning snakes writhing.
He "opened his mouth" and roared—KRAK!—a bolt struck a hunting wolf below. Foam spilled from its mouth as it convulsed and collapsed.
He stared, numb—
Then became rain, pouring down.
Then a woman washing clothes at a village pond.
Then a mule—whipped by a merchant—screaming as it ran.
Then a man-eating demon, sneaking into a house and biting through a throat—feeling blood erupt.
Then a demon slayer, chasing demons alongside Hashira.
Then Gyōmei Himejima. Then Kagaya Ubuyashiki. Then Muzan Kibutsuji, cowering in a directionless Infinity Castle—seeing the same familiar face that terrified him so much he wanted to die on the spot…
It's him—he's the one I fought—he's the one who threw me into this world!
As Muzan, clutching his chest, teeth grinding, he finally understood—
And then his consciousness lurched again.
Nakime. Kokushibō. Dōma. Gyūtarō. Tengen Uzui. Muichirō Tokitō…
He was like a foreign soul trapped in the Demon Slayer world, forced to cycle endlessly, unable to escape, helplessly accepting the Demon Slayer worldview Roy had slammed onto him.
His awareness drifted, got lost, drifted again—sliding toward collapse.
"Buzz…"
The eye technique, driven by aura, continued grinding on.
…
Hunter Association.
Wing noticed that the fake "Ging" had suddenly stopped moving. His gaze slid to Roy—then the moment he met Roy's scarlet three-tomoe eyes, fear surged up so sharply he stumbled back two steps, until a small hand braced his back.
"Don't panic. He isn't targeting you," Bisky steadied Wing.
At this point, she didn't even need Netero to explain—those three tomoe in Roy's eyes told her enough.
And this wasn't the famed Scarlet Eyes either.
It was a pair of eyes that had never appeared before… rarer than some gemstones.
Bisky's amber eyes rippled. She glanced at Netero. "Old man—see anything?"
Netero took the newly refilled tea, almost forgetting to drink. His eyes—weathered, calm, usually unmoved—were locked to the screen, a rare gleam burning inside.
He swept his gaze across the footage. It wasn't only the fake "Ging" frozen.
Across the separated battle spaces—fake "Razor," fake "Gotoh," fake "Elena," and that elephant-body tapir-faced beast—when Roy revealed the Sharingan…
All of them seized up.
Eyes rolled back.
They went slack and blank.
"People only freeze like that under a massive ideological shock," Netero said. "Heh… it's not that they don't want to move—they can't."
"An ideology…" Wing repeated, rolling the word around.
Bisky grabbed the tuft of his hair and rubbed it. "He means cognition, dummy."
Bisky narrowed her eyes at Roy's eyes. "They froze because they saw something outside their comprehension…"
"Outside comprehension?"
"Yeah."
…
Inside the undersea ruin church—
With fake "Razor," fake "Gotoh," fake "Elena," and the "Tapir" all locked up—
Real Gold, real Razor, Gotoh, and Elena all jolted and immediately noticed their opponents glitching like computers crashing.
"What's going on?"
Elena, circling the tapir-thing, snapped out first and seized the opening—she drove a button wrapped in Ten through the tapir's body.
Fog churned.
The "tapir" dissolved into mist.
Elena's vision flashed—
And she dropped out of the pocket space back into reality.
"Pop… pop… pop…"
Gold, Razor, and Gotoh each fired a Nen bullet, deleting their fake counterparts.
The illusion broke.
They returned to the real space and, instinctively, all turned toward the same figure—the not-so-tall but unnaturally upright silhouette ahead.
"Gotoh…" his eyes were scarlet, three tomoe turning. Gotoh hurried toward Roy—then stopped dead the instant he met Roy's gaze.
"Looks like his work," Gold said quietly. "Do not touch him."
Gold pressed down his hat and stood aside, scanning the surroundings, trying to find whoever was behind all this.
Elena had already raised Controlled Whole and expanded En to map the ruin.
Razor and Gotoh took left and right positions, forming a protective wedge behind Roy.
…
Hunter Association footage now showed only Roy left inside the pocket world, slowly turning that Sharingan, savoring the feel of Unlimited Void.
He cast En, split a Heart-Worm, and sent it along the causal thread to drill into fake "Ging's" heart—
But fake "Ging" detonated with a bang!
The Heart-Worm went up too—burned to ash.
Roy froze.
The panel flashed:
[Monster Codex opened…]
[Detected: a strand of "post-mortem Nen" from a "phantom beast." Extracting racial talent…]
[Note: Tapir (post-mortem Nen)… Rank: A]
[Manifest aura: B- (780,000/1,000,000)]
[Potential aura: A (5,640,000/10,000,000)]
[Evaluation: only a trace of post-mortem fixation remains; strength < one ten-thousandth of its living state]
Roy's throat tightened—alarms screaming.
He dropped out of the pocket space and snapped back to reality.
He and Gold, Razor, Gotoh, Elena all looked forward at the church's front—
A skeleton, and beside it a huge elephant corpse, sat quietly behind rows of pews like they'd been watching the whole time.
Pfh! Two sickly green flames ignited in the skeleton's empty sockets.
Then a voice—old, heavy with years—washed over them:
"Forgive Little Eight… it only didn't want you disturbing my sleep…"
The floor trembled. Pews rattled.
Before anyone could react, the skeleton gently touched the elephant corpse as if calming it—
And in the next instant, with a vast, ancient elephant call—
The thousand-meter dome of the church seemed to come alive.
It "opened its mouth"—
And spat Roy, Gold, Razor, Gotoh, and Elena out like intruders.
"CRACK—" the carved stone doors slammed shut.
Just before the seam sealed, Roy met the skeleton's gaze through the narrowing gap.
The green fire flickered, burning the boy's face deep into memory.
And a final sigh echoed directly in Roy's mind:
"Ai… I met your elder brother…"
"Does that mean… you failed in the end too?"
Roy's pupils shrank hard.
The doors were already shut.
Then the entire church began to fade, like someone was erasing pencil with a rubber—matter turning into emptiness under a reverse-conjuration trick.
Until it vanished completely.
Gold, Razor, Gotoh, Elena stood in the deep sea—stunned, speechless.
Then—
The protective membrane that had been holding back the ocean collapsed. Water roared in.
Gold snapped back first. He grabbed Elena under Aqua-Avoidance and shouted, "This isn't the time to freeze—up, now!"
Razor shot upward like a fish.
Gold followed.
Gotoh yanked Roy. "Young master, move!"
Roy was still chewing on "Ai… elder brother… failed," seeing flashes of Nanika and Alluka's switching faces in his mind. He inhaled sharply and rocketed upward with Gotoh.
On the way up, the panel pinged:
[Tapir talent extracted…]
[Reverse Conjuration: convert matter to emptiness; invert conjuration and bring physical objects into the cognitive world…]
[Conditions…]
~~~
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