ARC TIMELINE
All 10 arcs of the TV anime in order: 63 episodes, every death, demon reveal and breathing style debut.
Final Selection
Tanjiro Kamado sells charcoal to keep his family fed. He comes home one day to find all of them slaughtered except his sister Nezuko, who has been turned into a demon and lunges at him in the snow. Giyu Tomioka arrives to execute her, watches her shield her brother instead, and stays his blade. He sends the pair to his old master, Sakonji Urokodaki, on Mount Sagiri.
Two years of training follow. When Urokodaki finally says Tanjiro is ready if he can split a boulder, two masked children appear: Sabito, who beats him bloody with a wooden sword, and Makomo, who patiently corrects his form. Only after Tanjiro cuts the boulder does he learn they were spirits of Urokodaki's students, every one of them killed at Final Selection by the same demon. Nezuko sleeps through all of it, changing in ways nobody understands.
Final Selection asks one thing: survive seven days on a mountain full of captive demons. Tanjiro meets the Hand Demon that killed Sabito and Makomo, hears out its grudge against Urokodaki, and takes its head with the first Water Breathing form of the series. He walks away with a black Nichirin blade so rare nobody can tell him what it means, a Kasugai crow, and his first mission.
First Mission
The Corps sends its newest swordsman to a town in the northwest where girls keep vanishing at night. The culprit is the Swamp Demon, which drags victims into a pocket of marsh and splits into three bodies when cornered. Nezuko wakes from her long sleep and fights beside her brother for the first time, kicking one of the bodies across the road, and whatever Urokodaki whispered into her sleep holds: humans are family, demons are the enemy.
The mission ends with all three bodies destroyed and a pattern set. Tanjiro presses the dying demon for anything about Muzan Kibutsuji and gets only terror in response. He kills demons without hating them, and he pities them at the end. Both habits will define every fight after this one.
Asakusa
In Asakusa, Tanjiro picks the scent from his family's murder out of a crowded street and follows it to a man in a fedora holding his human daughter. Muzan Kibutsuji, the first demon and the maker of every other one, has been living as a husband and father. Cornered by nothing but a boy staring at him, Muzan scratches a passerby and turns him into a demon on the spot, then walks away while Tanjiro wrestles the thrashing victim.
Two demons pull him out of the aftermath: Tamayo, a doctor who broke free of Muzan's control, and her devoted assistant Yushiro. Tamayo wants to cure demonhood, and Nezuko's strange, sunlit-sleeping blood may be the key. The alliance barely forms before Muzan's hunters level the hideout: Susamaru, who throws temari balls that shear through walls, and Yahaba, whose eyes steer arrows of force. Tanjiro bends Yahaba's own vectors back to behead him, and Tamayo's art of deception coaxes Muzan's name out of Susamaru's mouth. The curse in her blood does the rest. It is the arc where the enemy stops being wild demons and becomes a system with a king.
Tsuzumi Mansion
On the road south, Tanjiro collects Zenitsu Agatsuma, a Thunder Breathing swordsman who cries, clings, and begs to die quietly right up until he faints, at which point he becomes lethal. Their mission is a mansion where a drum sounds and the rooms rotate. Its master is Kyogai, a former Lower Rank Six cast out of the Twelve Kizuki when Muzan decided his Blood Demon Art had stopped growing.
The mansion splits the group. Zenitsu, asleep on his feet, cuts down the Tongue Demon with Thunderclap and Flash to protect the box on his back, never knowing it holds a demon. A fourth fighter crashes through the walls: Inosuke Hashibira, boar-headed and self-taught, who fights everything on sight. Tanjiro reads Kyogai's rotating rooms, tells the discarded demon his art was incredible, and takes his head. The arc closes in a safehouse under a wisteria crest, with the three-man team that will carry the rest of the series eating dinner at the same table.
Mount Natagumo
The trio walks into a mountain draped in webs, where a corps unit has already been wiped out. The Spider Family rules Natagumo: a Mother who moves corpses like marionettes, a Son and Daughter and Father built for killing, and at the center Rui, Lower Rank Five, a child demon who assembled a family out of terror and borrowed blood. Zenitsu takes a spider's poison and beheads the Son asleep, six dashes in a row. Shinobu Kocho, the Insect Hashira, ends the Daughter in seconds with poison instead of a blade, and Giyu removes the Father with one stroke.
Rui takes Nezuko hostage in a cocoon of threads that cut steel. Out of forms and out of time, Tanjiro reaches for the dance his father performed every New Year, and Hinokami Kagura burns through the threads while Nezuko's Exploding Blood ignites around them. It is the emotional peak of the season, and it still fails: Rui saved his neck by severing it himself. Giyu's Dead Calm finishes what the siblings started.
The aftermath cuts deeper than the fight. Rui's memory of the parents he killed follows him into the ash. Then Shinobu arrives with orders, and Tanjiro wakes up under arrest, because the Corps has finally noticed the demon in the box.
Rehabilitation Training
Tanjiro is dragged in front of the nine Hashira to answer for traveling with a demon. Most of them vote to kill Nezuko where she stands. Urokodaki's letter stakes three lives on her record, and Sanemi Shinazugawa tests it the direct way, stabbing her through the box and holding his own blood in her face. Starved for two years, she turns away. Kagaya Ubuyashiki, the soft-spoken head of the Corps, rules that the siblings are an asset.
Recovery happens at Shinobu's Butterfly Mansion, where the training is humiliating and the nurses are children. Tanjiro grinds out Total Concentration: Constant, holding his breathing around the clock until his stamina stops being human, while Zenitsu rages and Inosuke sulks. Kanao Tsuyuri, Shinobu's Tsuguko, beats him in every drill and flips a coin to make her smallest decisions. Far away in the Infinity Castle, Muzan answers his first Lower Rank loss by executing the rest of them, keeping only Enmu, who gets fresh blood and a train.
Mugen Train
Flame Hashira Kyojuro Rengoku takes the Mugen Train case: forty people missing, a demon aboard. The seven-episode arc retells the film with a new opening episode from Rengoku's side of the ledger. Enmu, Lower Rank One, puts the whole train to sleep and sends hired humans into the passengers' dreams to destroy their wills from the inside. Tanjiro gets the cruelest version: his family, alive, at the table. He cuts his own throat in the dream to wake up.
By the time the passengers stir, Enmu has fused himself with all eight cars, and two hundred people are riding inside his body. Tanjiro and Inosuke dig the neck bone out of the engine and cut it, and the train dies mid-track. Then Akaza, Upper Rank Three, lands out of nowhere and offers Rengoku a place among the demons. Rengoku declines, holds him through a mortal wound until dawn drives him off, and dies at sunrise with every passenger alive. Set your heart ablaze is the inheritance Tanjiro carries out of the wreck.
Entertainment District
Months later, Sound Hashira Tengen Uzui pulls the trio into Yoshiwara, where his three wives went undercover and stopped reporting in. Disguised as serving girls, the boys work the houses until the threads pull tight around Warabihime, the district's star oiran, who is Daki, Upper Rank Six. She harvests the district's people with living sashes and stores victims in bands of cloth.
The fight escalates in stages. Tanjiro pushes Hinokami Kagura until his heart nearly stops. Nezuko transforms into an awakened form that overwhelms Daki and nearly costs her what is left of her humanity, stopped only by a lullaby. When Daki's head comes off and she keeps laughing, her brother Gyutaro climbs out of her back: the real half of Upper Six, and the pair only die if both necks fall in the same moment. Uzui fights through poison with a hand gone and an eye out. Zenitsu and Inosuke take Daki, Tanjiro and Uzui take Gyutaro, and both heads land in the same breath.
The dying siblings argue in the rubble until their shared memory plays out: the slum, the debts, the brother who became a demon so his sister would not die alone. It is the first Upper Rank defeat in a hundred years, and it costs the Corps a Hashira, because Uzui retires on the spot.
Swordsmith Village
Gyutaro's death drags the surviving Upper Ranks in front of Muzan for the first time in a century, and two of them get an errand: erase the hidden village that forges every Nichirin blade. Tanjiro is already there, waiting on a replacement sword and burning through Haganezuka's patience. So are two Hashira, Muichiro Tokito and Mitsuri Kanroji, and a training doll called Yoriichi Type Zero, built three hundred years ago with six arms because two were not enough to copy the swordsman it imitates. Inside the broken doll sleeps a rusted blade from the same era.
Hantengu, Upper Rank Four, splits when beheaded into four emotion demons, then a fifth made of pure hatred, while his true body, small enough to hold in one hand, runs. Gyokko, Upper Rank Five, turns swordsmiths into fish-tank ornaments until Muichiro, freed from a water prison by his returning memories, awakens his Demon Slayer Mark and invents a new Mist form to take him apart. Mitsuri's mark surfaces holding off the hatred demon's wooden dragons. Genya Shinazugawa eats demon flesh to fight, and his brother is a Hashira who wants him gone.
The arc ends on a trade. Dawn catches Nezuko in the open, and Tanjiro has one stroke that can reach Hantengu's fleeing body. She shoves her brother toward the kill. Hantengu dies, and Nezuko burns, and then she is standing in the morning sun, whole, the first demon to conquer it. The words she says next are her first full sentence in the series.
Hashira Training
Nezuko in daylight changes the war. If Muzan devours her, the sun stops being his cage, so the hunt is now for one girl. The Hashira meet, compare notes on the Demon Slayer Marks that surfaced in the village, and open a joint training program: every corps member cycles through every Hashira's regimen, from Uzui's stamina drills to Muichiro's sword work, Mitsuri's flexibility bootcamp, Iguro's blade handling, Sanemi's endless sparring, and Himejima's boulders. The arc slows down on purpose. Giyu refuses to train anyone until Tanjiro digs the reason out of him: he never passed Final Selection, Sabito died saving him, and he has never believed he earned his title. Himejima's past surfaces too, the blind monk who lost his temple children to a demon and went to prison for fighting it bare-handed.
Then the show stops training. Muzan finds the Ubuyashiki estate. Kagaya, already dying, greets the demon his family has hunted for a thousand years, tells him they share a bloodline, and detonates the mansion with himself and his wife inside it as the opening blow of the final battle. Tamayo's art pins the regenerating Muzan long enough for the Hashira to converge, and then the ground opens under every one of them. The season ends with the entire Corps falling into the Infinity Castle. The story continues from that drop in the Infinity Castle films.
The TV anime ends with the Corps falling into the Infinity Castle. The story continues in the Infinity Castle films.