Mist Breathing

Mist Breathing copies mist, drawing on the way fog hides everything within it, and turns that obscurity into the user's attacks. Most of its forms revolve around vague, baffling movements meant to throw a target off and cloud their perception. While performing the style, practitioners visualize themselves spreading and shaping mist around their blade.

Its only confirmed user, Muichiro Tokito, wears loose clothing that hides his arms and legs so his motions stay difficult to track, suggesting that other practitioners would also need to conceal their limbs to get the most from the style. Like Flower Breathing, Mist Breathing is not the invention of any Taisho Era Hashira and was established in an earlier age. A slayer bearing the same cloud-shaped Demon Slayer Mark as Muichiro appears beside Yoriichi Tsugikuni in a Sengoku-era flashback, though whether he founded the style remains uncertain.

Six original forms exist, with a seventh added by Muichiro himself. The First Form, Low Clouds, Distant Haze (Chapter 117), is a single high-speed frontal thrust, and the Second Form, Eight-Layered Mist, follows with eight cuts in rapid succession. The Third sweeps out a circular slash that can knock projectiles aside, the Fourth dashes in low to strike, and the Fifth, Sea of Clouds and Haze (Chapter 119), charges in a zigzag while raining down continuous cuts. The Sixth Form, Lunar Dispersing Mist, leaps forward and somersaults into a circular vertical slash that can cut down many foes at once.

The Seventh Form, Obscuring Clouds (Chapter 121), is Muichiro's personal creation. It manipulates the user's tempo, moving slowly at first then accelerating to blistering speed just before contact, so the wielder seems to vanish into fog. Used repeatedly, it leaves the target feeling buried under a thick layer of mist.

Muichiro Tokito, the Mist Hashira, is the only confirmed practitioner. Kokushibo recalls seeing Mist Breathing users in the past, and the cloud-marked slayer glimpsed beside Yoriichi may be an earlier wielder or founder. Together with Flower Breathing, it is one of just two branching styles outside the five fundamentals that no Taisho Era Hashira created.