Chapter 15

  The ending of Rose of Versailles had me going into Michiko’s Innate Domain to have a long, good cry.

  Strictly speaking, I was grieving the demise of Marie Antoinette herself.

  These days, my tears came out all too easily. Michiko’s Innate Domain had spoiled me. Made me less able to suppress my sadness. But maybe that was fine.

  “These are good tears,” Michiko crooned.

  I stopped crying to look up at her face. We were hugging on my bed as per usual when she said that. Usually, the only thing she’d say was ‘hush, child’ and ‘it’s fine’. Those seemed to be her only lines.

  I knew that cursed spirits were able to recite speech in the process of utilizing their cursed technique, though this speech usually had a strict pattern, one that Michiko had adhered well to.

  This was different, however. This was a change in the pattern. Then again, two weeks hadn’t passed since last time I had come to renew my cursed energy control. Maybe this was because I had changed the pattern.

  “Why?” I asked her.

  “Because you’re crying for others,” she said. “Good tears.”

  “Michiko… are you… are you intelligent?”

  She giggled, shaking her head. “I fear I’m not, my dear. They said I never had use for any.”

  “Who?”

  She sighed. “Everyone.”

  Was she recalling her past?

  Moreover, how could a curse be this cognizant?

  Was this a feature of all vengeful spirits?

  “Michiko, do you hate me?” I asked her. “For… for keeping you alive? Not letting you pass on? For always telling you what to do?”

  She shook her head, grinning brightly. “I’m afraid I loved you dearly.”

  “Afraid?”

  “Yes. You wish to hurt. I’m afraid I can’t hurt you by telling you that I hated you. Because that isn’t the truth.”

  I sobbed, hugging her tightly. “I’m sorry!”

  She rubbed the back of my head. I felt her wizened fingers brush my hair gently as she did, and it drew out more tears from me. “Hush, my dear. You did nothing wrong.”

  “I should have protected you!”

  “I should have protected you, my dear.”

  I cried even more, all thoughts of the Rose of Versailles almost completely forgotten.

  000

  “You’re a cursed spirit,” I said to her once I finally calmed down. “That means you’re evil.”

  “I am a curse,” she nodded. “As for being ‘evil’… I don’t know. Perhaps.”

  “What does it mean to be a curse if not to be evil?”

  “Someone who cries must feel cursed, although not evil,” she said. “I find tears to be quite satisfying. I think, to be a curse, means to be hungry for negativity. I see no need to slaughter anyone, unless they threaten you. I love you, Teira-chan. So much that I just want to eat you up,” she pinched my cheek and leaned over to kiss my forehead. I closed my eyes and sighed in contentment. “I love your courage. I love your strength. I both love, and revere, your pain. Because where you hurt and find reason to go on, I faltered.” She put a hand on her chest. “I gave up, Teira-chan. I lived in a death-like state. But when I served you, someone so strong and powerful, I found a reason to go on. But I failed you, Teira-chan. I failed you. I could not protect you. I died. But you gave me a chance to serve you once more. And I will not fail you again.”

  “But… what do you want?”

  “I want what you want.”

  I frowned. “And what do you think that is?”

  She shook her head. “I cannot say, my dear.”

  “You can’t lie to me,” I told her. “It’s part of our vow, and it’s still holding strong. I can feel it. So answer again. What do you think that is?”

  “I cannot say because I don’t know. And this does not bother me.”

  “Is it because you think I’ll do something evil?” I forced myself to ask her.

  “I cannot say what evil is,” she said. “I don’t know. But I am certain that whatever you do, I will be proud of you.”

  I didn’t believe her.

  Therefore, I needed to test this conviction of hers.

  “Can I tell you about Rose of Versailles?”

  Her eyes lit up. “Of course!”

  000

  Three days after reaching Kanazawa, with four kamakiri steadfastly putting in the work, I had Reproduced into enough cursed spirits that I had increased my stores by thirty percent.

  Twenty-five million Juchū and some change.

  Of course, on my way to Kanazawa, I had hit the small towns of Komatsu and Hakusan, giving them a thorough deep-cleaning of every bottom-feeding Dog-grade and Fly Head that I could get my hands on.

  My next destinations were south. Awara, Sakai, and Katsuyama. Then west, to Shirakawa.

  Then all of Ishikawa prefecture would be mine.

  I planned to keep my exorcising in-prefecture until all of the Association were done for. The Association of Cursed Experts—the clans that yet remained—were all based in the Hokuriku region of northwestern Honshu, the main island of Japan.

  The Shiba were somewhere here, in Ishikawa.

  The other three clans had their own prefectures: Niigata, Toyama and Fukui.

  We even had their exact locations, for when a new summit was about to occur. I had calculated how many Juchū it would take to create a signal bridge of Daughter Bugs to all the different clans, and then compared it to how many cursed spirits I could expect to reproduce through on a daily basis.

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  Six days to reach the Ogura clan. Five for the Kagae. Four to reach the Mori clan, and two to reach the Shiba clan—

  “Please, clan head Teira-sama. I have heard dire news of our finances. You must let one of us secret historians inform you, or we shall starve!”

  I snapped back into my own body, seated where I was on the ‘big chair’. I turned to one of the attendants while noting the face of the young woman that had pleaded to me. “Summon Hibana Izumi, the one from the Beetle family.”

  As much as I despised the very idea of capitalizing off of the same history that had plunged me into so much misery…

  …we really were tight on cash, and I had no ideas at all on how to fix it.

  000

  We discussed in my private room. Not Michiko’s Innate Domain, of course. Just my private room. Hibana Izumi was pretty in the same way that all Hibana girls of age were—through much effort and care. Though nowadays, as the make-up shortage was beginning to become worse and worse, a lot of girls had taken to just moisturizing instead.

  The situation was “dire”.

  We still had food enough to last us a year if we were ever to be besieged. The shelf-life of white rice and soy sauce was really something to behold.

  Before we began, I put my gourd of sake between the two of us and looked at her seriously. “Let’s make one thing clear, Izumi. I don’t appreciate the fact that this history is secret. Not one bit. And you would have me swear a binding vow to keep it secret as well. That truly does disgust me.”

  She gaped in panic. “No, no, you misunderstand, clan head!” she said, shaking her hands at me. “The only bit of truly restricted knowledge is the details behind our Maximum Technique: Fertilization!”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Oh. Why?”

  “Because when a Fertilized Juchū reproduces within a host body, it is very difficult to control exactly how many Juchū—“

  “Before we get into that, what was the point of the lie that the Reverse Cursed Technique would square the number?”

  “That was a folk myth. One enforced by Kenzo’s Reproduction of his Juchū, which only happened to roughly square his total number by coincidence. He did not correct this misconception due to the binding vow that stilled his tongue.”

  “But I never swore a binding vow. I just figured it out.”

  “I… surmised that, yes,” Izumi nodded deeply. “In any case, when a Fertilized Juchū Reproduces within a host body, due to how difficult it is to control the exact number of resulting Juchū, this technique became a secret. After all, the strain to the soul and to the mind was enough to kill many Hibana curse experts who attempted the same thing, thinking that they would become successful. This tendency was so pronounced during the early Heian era that the leaders of the Hibana during that day were forced to suppress this knowledge permanently, by way of binding the clan to a vow of silence. Those who knew could never pass on their knowledge. Except for us secret historians.”

  And the Reverse Cursed Technique was necessary to keep one’s brain non-liquefied after the sudden jump in Juchū. Or, if your host was still even vaguely alive, the damage from the resultant soul-clash would need to be healed somehow.

  I frowned at that last part. Was it really that common for people to be using living hosts that soul damage was such a factor in the first place?

  “Why does Juchū Reproduction damage the soul?” I asked as some suspicions of mine began to form.

  “It damages the mind, and in turn, the soul. This can be perceived by sufficiently advanced curse experts who are able to sense the contours of another’s soul.”

  “What if the host body being used is dead?”

  She furrowed her eyebrows. “Well, of course they would be. It is impossible to use living hosts…”

  I blinked. Okay.

  Then a soul-clash wasn’t the reason for the soul damage. Juchū sensory overload could damage the soul.

  “Do people just…” I was about to ask ‘have five souls’ but I had a feeling that she would be equally stymied as I was.

  By now, I had already made the connection that it had something to do with my ‘accursed’ quintuplet birth. Whatever it had done, it had made my soul extremely resilient.

  Apparently to the point that Reproduction hadn’t even necessitated that I use the Reverse Cursed Technique to heal myself.

  “Did you know that Hibana was the Swarm Queen?” I asked her, frowning.

  “N-no, I did not. That… that goes against all our knowledge. We believed Genmon to be the clan founder, and the first to master the Juchū technique.”

  “Genmon was Hibana’s son.”

  “Yes… so you’ve mentioned before. I accept that fact wholeheartedly, clan head.”

  Even if she didn’t, her children would. That was enough for me.

  “Anyway, you said something about our money problems.”

  Izumi nodded. “Yes, clan head. Thanks to your miraculous appearance, we stand to regain much of the respect that we lost in the two hundred years since Kenzo’s reign. You have the ability to create lasting products from our Juchū. Using the Reverse Cursed Technique, you can access the Curse Technique: Reversal, which will allow you to create permanent substances produced from your Juchū. The ones that we made the most money from were cursed silk, and poisons. Cursed silk has all the properties of regular silk as well as extreme durability, and it may be used as material in cursed tool creation. Poisons are especially high sellers. With practice and skill, you may even be able to bottle cursed poisons that directly corrode cursed energy, and even cursed techniques. However, the true power of this skill… is in the creation of a Bath.”

  “For cursed tools?” I asked, sitting up.

  “Yes, indeed. Using the kodoku ritual, you can actually condense a substance that is so poisonous and cursed that it may bless cursed tools far faster than average. Within only a hundred and eight days!”

  Three months and change, from ten months and ten days.

  As great as this news was, it still bothered me how long I had taken to hearing them out in the first place.

  I wasn’t as nakedly resentful of the history of the Hibana clan as the day of Sosuke’s Betrayal anymore, and now that I had calmed down, I felt a little silly, just throwing away such a potent resource out of hand.

  I shouldn’t have done that, of course. There was no cure for regret, however.

  “Alright, then we shall spin silk and I will worry about the poison,” I said. “Do you still retain the skills necessary to process the silk? And exactly what form would you prefer my Juchū to take for this silk-manufacturing enterprise of ours?”

  Izumi was happy to explain.

  000

  The forces of the Hibana clan and the Shiba clan did battle once more in the forest.

  I had brought eight kamakiri, because they had brought ninety fighters.

  And the first sneak attack had failed.

  I clicked my tongue.

  From my room, I controlled my Juchū on a battlefield seven miles away. The Shiba clan curse experts roared and began to fight in earnest while my kamakiri darted around the forest, looking for easier prey.

  The Onryō unit had not been representative of the Shiba clan’s strength at all. That annoyed me.

  Rumormongering. Propaganda. And now that I thought about it, the only reason they had sent them specifically was probably because they thought we were defenseless, and they might have wanted to jack up the reputation of the Onryō without actually putting them through any particular risks.

  Bastards, the lot of them.

  The battle dragged on for minutes. I lost no kamakiri whatsoever—they were too fast and agile to be pinned down and harmed by any of the Shiba dogs—and they steadily lost fighter after fighter. Most to the kamakiri. Some to poisoning.

  “Gather up!” one lieutenant shouted. “Formation four—AAARGH,” he screamed in pain as one singular Juchū Parasitized him and then very quickly injected a poison into his cervical spine. He swatted it away, but he was too weak to break it. Once it finally broke? The payload had been delivered.

  The same chorus could have been heard all over the battlegrounds. In truth, the kamakiri were only half of what made me deadly.

  Slice, thrust, stab.

  I saw my kamakiri stab into one man’s intestines. His twisted expression was agape and terrified.

  I saw another one run away in terror at the bugs chasing him. One caught him in the back of his skull. It inserted poison right into his brainstem. Paralytic poison.

  “Oh god, oh please, oh please, oh no!”

  One man that I had been chasing had tripped over his feet. The Juchū crawled underneath his clothes and started Parasitizing his cursed energy. As they did, I prepared them for an injection.

  Of paralytics.

  Today, I would kill no one directly.

  No. I would Reproduce into them while they were alive, thus maximizing my yield of Juchū.

  I tilted my head all the way back at the strain, jaws clenched tightly. No matter how many times it happened, feeling my soul fracture never got easier. It was a sort of agony that one couldn’t get used to.

  I took a gulp of my sake. I needed more weights to my Reverse Cursed Technique to make this game worthwhile.

  My kamakiri managed to cripple the last of the fighters.

  Ninety curse experts…

  Ten minutes afterwards, the entire forest were replete with hosts for my Juchū.

  The Shiba clan had lost.

  And tonight? I would feast.

  An attendant changed the record, to a song called ‘Early Summer’.

  It was a purely instrumental jazz song made here in Japan, composed by a certain someone known as ‘Ryo Fukui’. A non-sorcerer with an excellent grasp of music.

  As I enjoyed the thrilling keystrokes of the fast-paced song, the last few Shiba clansmen fighting me were being penned in. I challenged them to fight me with just one kamakiri.

  ‘Early Summer’ began to catch its stride.

  They met the kamakiri one on one, as I had indicated.

  Two exchanges.

  Three.

  Four. The first man fell to a slice to his Achilles heel. My four-armed kamakiri jumped up and down jubilantly.

  And so it went, one after another.

  One after another.

  Until they were all down. Then, I began implanting my bugs.

  The bridge to the Shiba clan compound was only another day away.

  Tomorrow? They would be done.