In short
At the end of Demon Slayer, Tanjiro loses his left arm and the sight of his right eye against Muzan, then the first demon turns him into a demon with his last act. The boy becomes the creature Muzan had been seeking for a thousand years, resistant to the sun, before the medicine prepared by Tamayo and Shinobu, then Nezuko’s voice, bring him back. He survives, becomes human again, and the manga’s epilogue shows his descendants a century later.
Contents
The end of Demon Slayer does something few shonen attempt. It lets its hero win, then takes away an eye and the use of an arm, and puts him through the very state he had been fighting for two years.
The last arc is also the manga’s densest, and you may have missed exactly how it unfolds if you read it in one go. This article goes through each stage, from the injuries of the final fight to the descendants in the epilogue. Our page on the hero of Demon Slayer in full opens this branch.
What happens to Tanjiro at the end?
| Stage | What happens |
|---|---|
| During the fight | the right eye struck, then the left arm lost |
| After Muzan’s death | turned into a demon by the first demon’s blood |
| In demon form | arm regenerated, resistance to the sun, loss of consciousness |
| The rescue | the last dose of medicine, injected by Kanao Tsuyuri |
| The trigger | Nezuko’s voice calling him |
| After-effects on the eye | sight permanently lost on the right |
| After-effects on the arm | an arm regenerated but withered, without sensation |
| After the battle | coma, then three months of care at the Butterfly Mansion |
| Final status | alive, human, retired from the Corps |
The summary fits in one sentence: Tanjiro wins and he pays. Demon Slayer gives him back neither his eye, nor his arm, nor his place as a fighter, and the story insists on this in its last pages.
The sequence unfolds over a few hours. Sunrise, the transformation, the rescue and the return to human form all fit into the same morning, and our article on the last fight against Muzan details what comes before.
What follows stretches over months. Care, convalescence and the return to the mountain take up the end of the manga, before a jump of a century.
He wins and he pays
Tanjiro ends the story alive, with a blind eye and a withered arm, in a disbanded Corps. Neither of these two injuries heals.
The injuries from the last fight
In Demon Slayer, the physical toll begins during the confrontation. Tanjiro’s right eye is struck during an exchange with the first demon, and the opponent’s poisoned blood makes the wound swell until it forms a mass over half his face.
The left arm comes next. Tanjiro loses it in the last minutes, pinning Muzan against a wall at daybreak, and finishes the confrontation holding his sword in one hand.
These two injuries are the character’s lowest point in Demon Slayer. He is on the ground, disfigured, amputated, and the sun is rising over a street filled with demon slayers’ bodies.
The rest of his body already bears the traces of the previous arcs. A long scar from the left shoulder to the chest left by Daki’s sashes, a mark under the chin from her brother’s sickle, and ribs broken more than once.
An eye and an arm
The right eye is struck then covered by the poison, and the left arm is lost at daybreak. Both happen before Muzan’s death.
You will also find the hero battered by his fights in three dimensions, in the complete Tanjiro Kamado collection and among the figures from across the series.
Tanjiro blade figure
His face marked with dark traces as after a fight, chequered haori open, a short blade in his fist.
View the product · €79.90The transformation into a demon
Muzan’s last act in Demon Slayer is a gamble. The first demon injects almost all the blood he has left into the boy’s body, to make him his successor and pass on his will to someone able to live by day.
The choice of target has a logic. Tanjiro is the brother of the only known demon who can bear the sun, his body is marked, and he is the last demon slayer to wield Sun Breathing, which makes him the best candidate of the lot.
The result exceeds Muzan’s hopes. Tanjiro becomes a demon who withstands the morning light, whom Muzan already sees as the king of demons, and without the slightest awareness of what he is doing.
Our article on Muzan Kibutsuji, the first demon details this thousand-year obsession, and our page on the series’ demons and their hierarchy places what the boy becomes in a few seconds.
The designated successor
Muzan transforms Tanjiro so that his will lives on. The boy becomes the sun-resistant demon the first demon had been seeking for a thousand years.
What does he become in this form?
The description of this demon is precise in Demon Slayer, and it is chilling. The mass that covered his eye disappears, his left arm grows back, and his wounds close one after another.
His face changes. His pupils become slits, fangs appear, and flame-shaped markings spread across his face.
The detail readers pick up on is the resemblance. These markings recall those of Upper Moon One, the other demon to have borne the Demon Slayer Mark before his transformation.
At the same time he loses everything that tied him to his own. The sword falls from his hand, and he attacks his companions in a torn uniform, with claws, whips of flesh and shockwaves.
Markings and fangs
In his demon form, Tanjiro bears flame markings, slit pupils and fangs. He no longer recognises anyone.
The medicine and the two voices
The rescue in Demon Slayer rests on a substance prepared in advance. Tamayo and Shinobu Kocho had developed a medicine able to make a demon human, the one that had brought Nezuko back a few hours earlier, and Shinobu had entrusted a last dose to Kanao.
The problem is getting close. Nobody can get near enough to the demon to inject it, until Kanao Tsuyuri uses the final form of Flower Breathing, at the risk of losing the sight in her remaining good eye.
The injection is not enough. Nezuko, who threw her arms around his neck from the start, keeps calling her brother, and it is this voice, joined by those of his companions, that brings the boy’s consciousness back into a body that no longer answered him.
Our articles on Tanjiro and Kanao Tsuyuri and on how to kill a demon in the series detail these two means, and our page on Nezuko Kamado and her transformation tells of her own return.
A syringe and a voice
Kanao injects the medicine at the risk of her last eye, Nezuko calls out to her brother. It takes both for Tanjiro to come back.
The one holding the syringe has her own section in the shop, the complete Kanao Tsuyuri collection.
Butterfly Kanao figure
Kanao in uniform, black bob held by a pink and green butterfly.
View the product · €99.90The permanent after-effects
The return to human form leaves two kinds of damage that Demon Slayer does not repair. The right eye no longer sees anything, and the boy says himself that it is only there for show.
The arm is the cruellest detail. The one he regenerated as a demon stays attached, but it looks like an old man’s arm, wrinkled and emaciated, and the boy no longer feels anything below the elbow.
He can barely move it. The strength has gone, which definitively ends the demon slaying career of a swordsman who held his weapon with both hands.
His face also keeps the mark. The brazier scar, now the Demon Slayer Mark, remains visible on his forehead, as our article on Tanjiro’s mark and its origin explains.
An old man’s arm at fifteen
The arm Tanjiro regenerated as a demon stays withered and numb below the elbow. He will never be able to hold a sword again.
Three months at the Butterfly Mansion
Demon Slayer’s final battle leaves three survivors in a coma, Tanjiro, the Water Hashira and the Wind Hashira. The series’ fanbooks state that nobody knew at first which of them would wake up, and the manga picks up three months later, at the Butterfly Mansion.
Nezuko, human again, takes care of everything during this period. She watches over her brother, mends the Water Hashira’s haori, and comes back every day to call him. Our article on Tanjiro and Giyu Tomioka follows the Water Hashira to these last pages.
The scene has nothing triumphant about it. Tanjiro takes stock of his arm and his eye, receives the swordsmiths, the Rengoku family and the former Sound Hashira, then goes to pay his respects at his companions’ graves.
The two surviving Hashira attend, for their part, the last meeting, where the Corps’ young leader announces its disbandment. Our article on which Hashira die in the series counts up the nine, and our page about the Hashira of the Demon Slayer Corps presents them one by one.
Coma, then three months of care
Tanjiro and two Hashira fall into a coma after the battle. The manga picks up three months later, at the Butterfly Mansion, where the survivors file past his bedside.
The end of the Demon Slayer Corps
Muzan’s death brings a consequence Demon Slayer deals with in a few pages. The demons disappear with him, since they descended from his blood, except Yushiro, whom Tamayo had turned herself, and the Corps loses its reason to exist.
The organisation is disbanded. The survivors go home, the headquarters closes, and an institution more than a thousand years old stops overnight.
The head of the family who led it, the last of a line struck by a curse, finds himself freed from this burden. His advanced age in the epilogue indicates that the family curse died out with the demons.
For Tanjiro, the disbandment settles a practical question. His arm prevented him from carrying on, and he no longer has to choose between his condition and his duty.
Every demon at once
The demons descended from Muzan’s blood. His death takes them with him, and the Demon Slayer Corps disbands.
The return to the mountain
Demon Slayer’s last Taishō sequence brings the characters back to the Kamado house. Tanjiro climbs back up his mountain with his sister, and the two boys of the trio settle in with them.
The scene is deliberately ordinary. They eat, they bicker, Zenitsu hovers around Nezuko, Inosuke understands nothing, and nobody talks about what happened.
The story places its real emotional epilogue here. The house emptied in the first chapter fills up again, with other people, which closes the loop opened by the massacre.
Our article on the Kamado family and its seven members comes back to this house, and our article on the Demon Slayer trio and its dynamic to its two new residents.
A house that fills up again
The house emptied in the first chapter fills up again on the last page of the Taishō era, with other people.
The sister who became human again keeps her demon silhouette in the complete Nezuko Kamado collection, the series’ plush toys included.
Sitting Nezuko plush
Sitting, pink kimono, reddish-brown haori and green bamboo muzzle, just as she went through the whole story.
View the product · €24.90The present-day epilogue
Demon Slayer’s last chapter jumps a century. The story finds itself in a modern Japan, with cars, phones and a high school, and shows a new generation bearing the faces of the Taishō era characters.
In today’s Kamado home, the hanafuda earrings and a sword are kept near a photograph, the one of Tanjiro and his companions gathered after the battle, young and smiling.
The device answers every question without a line of explanation. Readers guess who had children with whom simply by looking at the faces and surnames of the high school students.
The series’ dead also come back as lookalikes. High school students, police officers and passers-by have the features of the fallen Hashira, which is the author’s way of granting them the ordinary life the story had denied them.
A century later
The last chapter jumps to the present day. A photograph kept in the Kamado home shows Tanjiro and his companions gathered after the battle.
The descendants
Demon Slayer’s present-day generation is detailed by name. Sumihiko Kamado and Kanata Kamado descend from Tanjiro and Kanao, and the boy has the same stubborn forehead as his ancestor, late for school.
The other families follow. Zenitsu and Nezuko’s descendants bear the name Agatsuma, Inosuke’s is a botanist named Aoba Hashibira, and the Tomioka, Shinazugawa and Rengoku lines all reappear in these pages.
The detail that does the rounds on forums concerns the botanist. The descendant of a boy raised by wild boars ends up a plant researcher, and he is the one studying the flower Muzan sought for a thousand years, before letting it wilt by mistake.
Our article on the blue spider lily and its mystery tells of this flower, and our page on the directory of the series’ characters places each generation.
Two Kamado descendants
Sumihiko and Kanata Kamado descend from Tanjiro and Kanao. The series does not tell of the marriage, it shows the descendants, four generations later.
