# [What will your OC do? :: The White Death of the Taishou Period](https://www.reddit.com/r/KnY_OC_Community/s/ZLOnb239CX)

***CONTENT WARNING: Mentions of serious illness, death, injury, and xenophobia.***



**Heibyakurui 病白累**

病 (hei) "sickness, evil influence, disease"

白 (byaku) "white, blanch"

累 (rui) "trouble, evil, accumulation"

*Demon Character influenced by the Yuki Onna youkai legend...*

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The Tuberculosis Demon, Heibyakurui, resembles that of a petite middle-aged Japanese woman dressed in a traditional white kimono whose long sleeves resemble the wings of a white moth. Her eyes are narrow and red with pink sclera, her pupils slit and surrounded by pointed marks, her lashes thick. Her eyebrows are shaven as two small dots, and there is a mark in the middle of her forehead resembling the shape of a fan. Beneath her eyes are two marks that used to serve as a second pair of eyes, but were gouged out. Her nose is pointed and so are her ears. Her skin is pure white, lips painted with a bright red ink strip. Her hair is blanched as white as snow, pulled back into a bow knot held in place by two glistening silver ear picks and an ornate red comb. On her feet, she wears woven grass sandals which are tied with red silk.

*Heibyakurui has a distinct loathing of foreigners.*

The demon believes that industry is the end of all things, that it ruins the natural order, that it brings about the end times for her people through disease and decay. Time and time again, foreign influence seemed, to the demon, to be the root of true evil. Fearing change and resisting transformation, Heibyakurui respects the familiar and casts aside anything deemed too strange or too radical. A new face is a new disease. A new machine is a new way to wage war.

Ships and boats are of particular interest to her. Instead of bringing in food and fish, they’ve come hauling people… people riddled with disease, unbeknownst to them that it would create an epidemic of Tuberculosis across all of Honshu, Japan. As a human, Heibyakurui was one of its many thousands of victims. The young woman was once a nurse, working tirelessly in the early nineteenth century treating similar victims of the disease. At the time, there was no cure. She would sit bedside as the people she cared about succumbed while the cold, remorseless roar of industry continued outside her windows, choking the one world she knew and loved in dust and decay.

It is from this deep-seated resentment of a changing human landscape that drives Heibyakurui to kill her victims and bring an end to what she believes to be the ultimate farce. Up until this point, Heibyakurui has been preying upon the foreigners who dock in harbors or haul in on trains, cursing them with Tuberculosis.

In the night, Heibyakurui spends her time crying out to the moon. Heibyakurui’s voice is soft and wispy. She never directly speaks to anyone, only to herself, muttering lamentations like, “Get them away, we don’t need them, we never needed them,” or “we don’t want it anymore, make it go away, make the world go back to the way it used to be…”

**Blood Demon Art: White Death...**

Heibyakurui’s Blood Demon Art is her retribution, to eradicate all the pests who dared try take away all she once held dear. From the moth-winged sleeves of her kimono, tiny spores of mold, mildew, and dust fly far, covering the ground and entering the lungs of her victims to ravage them from the inside out. Her power to choke the lungs from afar and control airborne partials both viral and bacterial is what makes this demon such a threat to the Corps whose abilities usually hinge on lung capacity.

Before succumbing to her Blood Demon Art, some victims experience a pleasant floral scent or the taste or smell of sweet candy. This is a holdover from when she was human – as a nurse, she would present her patients with flowers and sweets to comfort or distract them from the dreadful reality of their illness. Those who die from her Blood Demon Art show exactly the same acute symptoms as those who are fatally ­ill with Tuberculosis as their lungs are torn apart rapidly by spores and other particles, manifesting as severe pain in the lungs, blood and sputum coughed out, extreme fatigue and bodily weakness, and chills.

As a demon, Heibyakurui is physically weak and easily slain, but her insidiousness in stealth and in the slow, creeping methods in which she kills her victims is far-reaching and long-lasting. She is not a fighting demon, so she understands the importance of slipping away unnoticed or blending in with a crowd. When the red comb in her hair is removed, her hair becomes black, colour returns to her skin, her kimono is shed, and she appears remarkably human. However, there are two aspects of her that is unmistakably demonic to the particularly perceptive Corps member: the trinkets in her hair hum with a demonic energy and she retains the same red mark on her lip.

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# SLAY THE DEMON!!

The Tuberculosis Demon: Heibyakurui 病白累