Wood Demon - Chapter 3

Chapter 3: The Sun’s Threat and a Hidden Sanctuary

The glowing blue rectangle of the System display still hung in the air before Jack, an ethereal, unwelcome ghost in the blood-soaked ruin of the small farmhouse. It offered its cold, factual pronouncements, but Jack barely saw it. His mind, a maelstrom of self-loathing and horror, couldn’t process another layer of alien intrusion. The images of the family, of what he’d done, were seared onto the inside of his eyelids, a repeating loop of his own monstrosity. He was a murderer, a monster, an eater of… He choked back a sob, the coppery taste still phantom-thick on his tongue.

Then, cutting through the suffocating fog of guilt, a new sensation began to claw its way into his awareness. It wasn’t emotional, not at first. It was a deep, primal, full-body wrongness. His skin prickled, not with cold, but with an urgent, insistent warning. The very air around him seemed to gain a subtle, predatory charge. An unreasoning, instinctual terror began to bloom in his chest, cold and sharp, unrelated to the carnage he had wrought, yet somehow even more immediate, more fundamental.

The sun.

The thought wasn’t even his own, not entirely. It was a screeching alarm bell from the newly installed demonic firmware running his system.

Sunlight.

`Sunlight Resistance: 0%`. The clinical words from that damnable blue screen suddenly blazed with terrifying significance. Zero. Absolute zero. No buffer, no leeway. Just instant, screaming annihilation.

Panic, pure and undiluted, seized him. He had no idea how much time he had. Hours? Minutes? The faint, pre-dawn glow he’d noticed in the forest earlier now felt like a ticking clock counting down to his execution. He lurched to his feet, his limbs still heavy with the unfamiliar power coursing through them, yet clumsy with a terror that was profoundly, instinctually his.

“Right, right, vampire rules,” he babbled, scrambling towards the shattered doorway, his voice a high, thin wire of hysteria. “Forgot about the whole ‘crispy critter at sunrise’ clause in the demonic contract. Always read the fine print, Jack, always!” He stumbled out of the house, away from the silent, accusing forms within, away from the tangible evidence of his damnation. He didn’t look back. He couldn’t.

The forest, which had been a hunting ground moments before, was now a terrifying, indifferent expanse he had to traverse before an unseen enemy arrived with the dawn. He ran. Not with the predatory grace he’d displayed stalking the farmhouse, but with the desperate, flailing energy of a cornered animal. Branches whipped at his face, roots threatened to trip his stumbling feet. Every shadow seemed too shallow, every clearing too exposed.

“Could use a little less ‘scenic nature trail’ and a little more ‘impenetrable doom cavern’ right about now!” he gasped, his lungs burning. The demonic stamina was there, he could feel it, a deep well of energy, but the panic was overriding everything, making his movements inefficient, wasteful. “Seriously, universe? Turn me into a monster, fine. Make me kill people, whatever, we’ll unpack that trauma later. But an allergy to Vitamin D? That’s just low. That’s just kicking a guy when he’s already feasting on the damned.” His jokes were becoming more unhinged, a desperate spray of words against the encroaching silence of his terror.

His newly enhanced senses were now a curse in a different way. He could almost feel the angle of the planet tilting towards the distant, hidden sun. He could smell the subtle ionization in the air that heralded morning. Or maybe that was just his imagination, cranked up to eleven by pure, unadulterated fear. It didn’t matter. The instinct was screaming, a deafening, internal siren: HIDE! NOW!

He clawed at the earth in a shallow ravine, loose soil and stones skittering away from his desperate fingers. Not deep enough. He tried to burrow under a thicket of thorny bushes, the sharp points tearing at his clothes, his skin, only to heal with that unnatural, disconcerting speed. Still too exposed. His mind was a frantic mess of half-formed plans and escalating panic. He felt like a cartoon character, scrambling for purchase on a cliff face, the ground crumbling beneath him.

Then, through a gap in the trees, he saw it. Or rather, felt it. An ancient presence, a colossal pillar of wood and leaf that dwarfed its neighbors. It was a tree, but more than a tree. It radiated a sense of immense age, of stoic endurance, its gnarled bark like the deeply wrinkled skin of some slumbering forest god. Its roots, thick as a man’s torso, spread out like the buttresses of a living cathedral, delving deep into the earth, gripping it with an unbreakable, timeless strength.

Drawn by an instinct he couldn’t name, Jack stumbled towards it. There was a density to the shadows beneath its sprawling canopy, a promise of deeper darkness. He circled its massive base, his hands brushing against the cool, rough bark. And there, nestled between two colossal, intertwining roots, was an opening. A dark, uninviting fissure in the earth, partially obscured by ferns and creeping ivy. It wasn’t much more than a burrow, really, perhaps the den of some long-gone animal. It smelled of damp soil, decaying wood, and something else, something musky and wild.

“Well, hello there, creepy hole in the ground,” Jack panted, a wild, desperate grin stretching his lips. “You’re not exactly the Ritz, are you? No turndown service, I bet. Probably a strict ‘no screaming in existential terror after 10 PM’ policy.” But it was dark. It was sheltered. It was away from the impending, lethal light.

With a last, hunted look at the lightening sky, a sky that seemed to be watching him with cold, cosmic indifference, Jack threw himself at the opening. It was a tight squeeze. He scraped his shoulders, his hips, his newly demonic body contorting to fit the narrow passage. Dirt and loose pebbles rained down on him. For a moment, he feared he’d get stuck, a demon wedged in the earth like a grotesque cork, half in, half out, to be incinerated by the dawn. The thought spurred another frantic, desperate wriggle.

Then, he was through.

He tumbled into a small, cramped space, the darkness absolute, a thick, velvety blanket that smothered the senses. He lay there, panting, his heart hammering against his ribs, the adrenaline slowly, painstakingly beginning to recede. The oppressive earth surrounded him, a welcome, confining pressure. The primal, sun-born terror that had driven him to the brink began to quiet, soothed by the profound, unbroken blackness. He was safe. For now.

He lay on the cool, damp earth of the cave floor for what felt like an eternity, his breath slowly evening out, the tremors in his limbs gradually subsiding. The cave was small, barely long enough for him to stretch out, barely tall enough to sit up in. The air was thick with the scent of ancient earth, of roots, of things that had lived and died in the darkness. It wasn’t pleasant, but it was blessedly, wonderfully devoid of sunlight.

“Home sweet hole,” he finally whispered into the darkness, the words flat, devoid of any real humor. He pushed himself into a sitting position, his back against a large, curving root that formed one wall of his cramped sanctuary. The silence of the cave was profound, broken only by the drip-drip-drip of unseen water somewhere deeper in the earth, and the frantic, ragged thumping of his own heart.

Now that the immediate, overwhelming threat of the sun had been deferred, the other horrors, the ones he had perpetrated, came crashing back with renewed, devastating force. The farmhouse. The family. The blood. His hands, still faintly sticky despite his frantic flight through the undergrowth. He could feel the phantom sensation of tearing flesh, taste the spectral echo of warm, coppery blood in his mouth.

He dry-heaved, his body convulsing, but there was nothing left in his stomach to bring up. Only the thick, cloying memory of his monstrous feast.

“Oh God, oh God, oh God,” he moaned, burying his face in his hands, his shoulders shaking. “What am I? What have I become?”

He forced himself to think, to piece together the shattered fragments of his new, terrifying reality.

Muzan Kibutsuji.

The name alone sent a shiver of cold dread through him. He wasn’t just some generic evil overlord from a bad dream. He was specific. He was real. And if Muzan was real…

“Then Demon Slayer is real,” he breathed, the realization hitting him with the force of a physical blow. The manga he’d read, the anime he’d binged – it wasn’t just fiction anymore. It was his world now. A world of demons who devoured humans, and Demon Slayers, skilled warriors who hunted and killed demons with sun-forged blades.

Hunted.

The word echoed in the claustrophobic darkness of the cave. He wasn’t just a monster; he was prey. That `0% Sunlight Resistance` wasn’t his only problem. There were people, trained, dedicated people, whose sole purpose was to eradicate creatures like him. He imagined them, their stern faces, their gleaming Nichirin swords, their breathing techniques that granted superhuman abilities. They wouldn’t care that he was new to this. They wouldn’t care that he hadn’t asked for this. They would see the demon, the killer, and they would act.

The terror that had briefly subsided in the safety of the cave returned, colder now, more insidious. It was the terror of the hunted, the terror of a future filled with nothing but fear, violence, and a constant, desperate struggle for survival. He was trapped. Utterly, hopelessly trapped. There was no way back to his old life, his old world, his old self. That Jack was gone, murdered in a dark forest by a creature in a fedora, and then again in a blood-soaked farmhouse by his own damn hands.

The translucent blue System screen flickered back into his awareness, its unwelcome light a faint nimbus in the otherwise total darkness. He glared at it, at the neat, clinical lines that defined his monstrous existence.

`Blood Demon Art: Plant.`

A bitter, broken laugh escaped him. “Plant powers,” he choked out, the sound raw and painful. “Fabulous. I can what, grow a particularly intimidating bouquet? Launch a surprise attack with aggressive begonias? Maybe bore the Demon Slayers to death with a lecture on advanced horticulture before they lop my head off. That’s my ticket to survival, right there. Fear my ficus!” The laughter died, replaced by a shuddering sob.

He was so utterly, profoundly alone. A newly minted demon, a murderer, stranded in a world actively designed to kill him, with no allies, no knowledge, nothing but a list of terrifying new abilities and a gaping hole where his soul used to be.

His hand, trembling, reached out in the darkness, brushing against the cool, solid curve of the tree root beside him. It was thick, gnarled, and ancient, a silent, unmoving sentinel in the earth. He pressed his palm against it, feeling the faint, almost imperceptible thrum of life deep within the wood. It was something solid, something real, in a world that had become a fluid nightmare.

“Hey there, Woody,” he whispered, his voice hoarse, the attempt at his old flippancy sounding hollow and pathetic even to his own ears. It wasn’t flirtation, not really; there was no charm in it, no playfulness. It was the desperate, slightly unhinged rambling of a man who had lost everything, trying to find any point of connection, any anchor in the storm of his despair. “You, uh… you see a lot of messed-up stuff from down here in the dirt? Get a lot of traumatized, newly-turned demons crashing in your root-cellar?” He patted the root absently. “Any hot tips for a newbie monster trying to avoid, you know, an early-morning, sun-induced cremation and a particularly pointy, Slayer-issue sword? Asking for a friend. Who is me. And is currently freaking the hell out.”

The root, of course, offered no reply, no comfort, no advice. It just was. Ancient, enduring, and utterly indifferent to the terrified, broken creature huddled beside it in the dark. And somehow, that profound, silent indifference was the only thing in this entire nightmare that felt remotely stable.

Jack leaned his head back against the unyielding wood, the terror still a cold, hard knot in his stomach, but the immediate, screaming panic had, for now, given way to a vast, desolate exhaustion. He was a demon. He was in the world of Demon Slayer. And he was going to be hunted. This was his life now. Or his unlife. Whatever it was, it was a horror show, and he was the unwilling star.