The mountain air was thin and crisp as Doctor Haruhiro Tsukishima moved through the dense cedar thickets. It was deep into the night, the moon casting long, skeletal shadows across the forest floor. He wasn't hunting for the Blue Spider Lily tonight; he already had boxes of the luminous flora safely stored back at his clinic. Instead, he sought common wild ginger and mountain yams to restock his everyday medicinal tonics.
As he reached a darkened ravine, the natural symphony of crickets abruptly cut to silence.
From the shadows came a sound that didn't belong to the forest—a wet, tearing noise followed by a low, guttural rasp. Haruhiro's high-ranking officer instincts, dormant for nearly two decades, surged to the surface. His hand instinctively went to his belt, his fingers closing around the checkered grip of a modern-style pistol he had purchased through a black-market merchant for self-defense. In this era of rising unrest, a doctor traveling alone at night couldn't rely on prayers alone.
"Show yourself," he commanded, his voice dropping into a combat-ready flatline.
He expected a bear or a desperate bandit. Much to his horror, the creature that stepped into the moonlight was a monster—a grey-skinned, distorted mockery of a human with elongated limbs and eyes that burned with a predatory, iridescent hunger.
Before Haruhiro could process the sight, the creature lunged with impossible speed.
Haruhiro drew and fired. The sharp bang of the pistol echoed through the trees, a thunderous report that shattered the mountain silence. But the monster moved with a sickening fluidity, dodging the lead as if it could see the trajectory. In the blink of an eye, a clawed hand tore through Haruhiro's side.
The force of the blow threw him against a cedar tree. The pain was absolute. He looked down to see a fatal wound—his midsection was shredded, blood soaking rapidly through his white doctor's coat.
Is this it? Haruhiro wondered, his vision swimming. I survived a modern battlefield, I survived a rebirth, I even survived cancer... only to die to a ghost story in the woods?
"No," he spat, blood bubbling in his throat. "I refuse to die. Not like this."
In that moment of sheer, primal desperation, his biology responded to his will. The concentrated elixir in his veins—the essence of the Blue Spider Lily—reacted to his spiking adrenaline. Unknowingly, Haruhiro triggered his dormant powers.
His blood didn't just leak out; it surged. The crimson liquid hissed as it touched the cold steel of his pistol, wrapping around the barrel like living, pulsing vines. The metal groaned and shifted, the mechanical parts fusing with his biological essence until the firearm looked less like a machine and more like a transformed relic of bone and iron.
The monster lunged again, its jaw unhinging to finish the kill. Haruhiro didn't aim with his eyes; he aimed with his pulse. He pulled the trigger.
There was no mechanical bang of gunpowder. Instead, a bolt of condensed crimson energy tore through the air, hitting the monster dead-center. The creature didn't just bleed; it disintegrated into ash before it even hit the forest floor.
Haruhiro stared at his hands, his breath coming in ragged gasps. The fatal wound in his side was already knitting itself shut with a sickening, wet sound. He checked the pistol; the magazine was empty of lead, yet the chamber was glowing with a faint, blue-red light.
His eyes widened as the realization hit him. The weapon was using his blood as ammunition.
"Just like Gabriel..." he whispered, his voice trembling as he remembered the game from his past life. "Just like the Crisol: Theater of Idols mechanics."
He had wanted a slow life as a healer, but the universe had finally forced him to finish the game he had left incomplete. He wasn't just a doctor anymore; he was a soldier in a theater of idols, and his own life-force was the only thing keeping the gun loaded.
******
The clinic was silent, save for the rhythmic dripping of a faucet and the heavy, mechanical breathing of Haruhiro Tsukishima. He had locked the heavy oak doors, the memory of the forest monster still burned into his retinas. He wasn't a man prone to panic—his years as a high-ranking JSDF officer had cauterized his fear response—but what he had seen defied every law of biology he had studied as a doctor.
He sat at his heavy oak desk, a sterile basin and a series of glass slides laid out before him. It was time for the most important "invasive procedure" of his career.
Haruhiro took a lancet and made a precise incision across his palm. As he watched his blood—thick, vibrant, and pulsing with a faint, cobalt undertone—he began to monitor his own physiology with cold, military precision.
"Heart rate stabilizing... cellular regeneration at 400% of human standard," he noted, his voice a low rasp.
As he drained a significant amount into a graduated cylinder, he felt the familiar, cold lethargy of blood loss. But then, something miraculous happened. His bones began to hum. He felt a searing heat in his chest and thighs—his bone marrow was reacting. Under the influence of the Blue Spider Lily, his hematopoiesis had become hyper-active.
His body was generating new blood at a rate that defied nature. The more he "spent," the faster his system worked to replenish the magazine.
"I'm not invincible," he whispered, looking at his pale hands. "If I spend too much at once, the marrow won't keep up. I'll hit 'empty' before the reload finishes." It was a delicate, dangerous balance of resource management.
He turned his attention to his tools. Beside his medical bag lay the sawed-off shotgun he kept for home defense and a heavy surgical knife made of high-carbon steel.
He reached out, letting his blood coat the cold iron of the shotgun. Just as in the forest, the metal groaned. The wood of the grip darkened, turning into a substance that felt like petrified bone. The barrels widened, and the firing mechanism fused with his own biological essence. When he gripped it, he didn't feel wood and steel; he felt an extension of his own nervous system.
It was no longer a firearm. It was a Blood-Ammunition Catalyst, capable of shattering a monster with a single, crimson-laden blast.
Next, he touched the knife. The blade didn't change shape, but it hummed with a high-frequency vibration. The edge became so sharp that it seemed to part the very air around it. It was a tool that could now cut through demon flesh as easily as a scalpel through gauze.
Haruhiro looked at the transformed arsenal on his desk. To any other man, this would be a call to heroism or a descent into madness. But Haruhiro was a man of simple, stubborn goals.
"I don't want to be a hero," he said firmly, wiping the blood from his palm as the wound closed instantly. "I don't want to be a 'Slayer' or a 'Soldier' again. I just want to be a doctor who can't be killed."
He had seen the horror with his own eyes—the grey skin, the hunger, the impossible speed. If the world was going to be populated by monsters, then Doctor Tsukishima would simply become the most dangerous thing in the forest, if only to ensure his slow life remained uninterrupted.