Kamon Kai has stopped waiting for death—he simply hasn't gotten there yet. Six months behind on rent, out of pills, and buried beneath the garbage of a life he no longer wants, he exists in a rotting six-mat room in the forgotten corner of Tokyo known as Haigami Ward. Every morning is the same: the stain on the ceiling, the ache of hunger he refuses to answer, the quiet hope that today might finally be the day his heart stops on its own.
Then the ceiling tears open.
A girl falls from nowhere—g
The ceiling was rotting.
No—it wasn't just the ceiling. The tatami mats, the walls, the air itself. Everything. Everything filling this six-mat room was dying, slowly but surely.
Kamon Kai lay on his back, staring at the stain on the ceiling with unfocused eyes. The dark water-damage mark looked like a human face, or maybe like spreading entrails. Two years since he'd moved into this room. The stain that hadn't bothered him at first now occupied most of his field of vision.
(Morning again.)
Outside the window came the clatter of a bicycle. The cough of an old woman carrying a supermarket bag. A crow cawing in the distance. The sounds of the living seeped in through the thin walls.
He didn't move a single fingertip.
The stain on the ceiling seemed to writhe, slowly. He tried to convince himself it was a hallucination, but the next morning the same stain was writhing again. He had repeated that kind of morning more times than he could count.
The memory of downing a handful of over-the-counter sleeping pills last night lingered as a bitter film at the back of his throat. He wasn't even sure whether he'd slept. There had simply been a stretch of time when consciousness had cut out.
(If I'm going to die, it'll be here...)
He closed his eyes with that thought. But his heart kept beating, regular as ever. His lungs demanded air, his stomach faintly complained of hunger. His body wanted to live. That, more than anything, pissed him off.
He sat up, wrapped in his gray sweatshirt. His bony shoulders gave a small crack. He pushed aside the empty convenience-store bento containers within reach, and the damp tatami clung to his fingertips. On the back of his left hand, an old burn scar surfaced. The skin, taut and shiny, caught the light—he stared at it for just a moment.
A summer from his childhood.
There had been a big fire in the neighborhood. He couldn't remember the details anymore. Only the memory carved into the skin of his left hand remained in his body, even now.
"Damn it."
A mirror propped against the wall reflected his face in the dim room. His long black hair, unkempt, coiled in tangles, bangs hanging over his eyes. Beneath them, pale, stagnant eyes. Sickly white skin. Protruding collarbones. The face of a twenty-five-year-old man for whom remembering the last time he'd eaten was difficult.
He couldn't leave this place—the Haigami Ward.
Haigami Ward. Located in the northeastern part of Tokyo, this ward had once been packed with wooden apartment buildings for factory workers. At the end of the Showa era the factories closed, and the people left. What remained was the reality of a "forgotten ward"—a forty-two percent elderly population, over seventy solitary deaths a year.
The apartment where he lived, Corp Haigami, was a forty-three-year-old two-story wooden building. Of its eight units, only half were occupied. His room, 102, was a single six-mat space with rent of twenty-eight thousand yen a month. He was six months behind on even that.
Inside the room, the garbage had formed layers.
Empty blister packs of pills lay scattered like silver flowers. Convenience-store bento containers, the remains of cup noodles, damp newspaper. All of it mingled together, giving off a smell close to rot. Breathing that smell, he felt as though he were slowly dissolving out of the world.
(If someone dies, they'll contact me.)
He thought that and looked at his phone. The screen hadn't lit since yesterday. The battery was dead. He couldn't be bothered to charge it.
In the corner, a tiny kitchen. The refrigerator was running, but inside was only half-rotten bottled water and moldy bread. Rusty-smelling water came from the tap. Maybe that alone was the only proof that this was still a place fit for a person to live.
He stood in the kitchen.
His body was heavy. Deep in his skull, the remnants of the pills dragged a syrupy drowsiness around. Without opening the refrigerator, he let his eyes fall on the dishes that had piled up in the sink over several days. The waterlogged sponge, the moldy drain—all of it was his life itself.
(It's all filthy.)
He thought so himself. But he didn't feel like cleaning. Even if he cleaned, it would just get dirty again. As long as he was in this room, the room would stay dirty.
He sat back down on the tatami and leaned against the wall. Closed his eyes. Behind his lids, the stain on the ceiling slowly changed shape. A human face. Someone's face. Maybe the face of an old person who'd died alone, someone he'd never met. It felt as though someone who'd once lived in this room was crying inside the wall.
(The pills ran out.)
The core of his body trembled. The herald of withdrawal, like a chill. His fingertips were cold and clammy. If he didn't take something soon, the nausea would become unstoppable before nightfall. But the blister packs were already empty. He had maybe three thousand two hundred yen left to buy more. How many days would that stretch? If only it would last until he died.
Yes—until he died.
Kamon Kai wondered why he didn't die. He lacked the courage to hang himself, the guts to throw himself onto the tracks. He just took pills every day, slept, woke, and stared at the rotting room and his rotting self. Continuing this state—too thin to call a life—was all he could do.
The air outside changed, abruptly.
A sensation like the pressure dropping, like his inner ears plugging up. Kai opened his eyes.
The stain on the ceiling was looking at him for the first time.
No—more than looking, it seemed to be calling. The black stain spread, oozing outward. As if rejecting any easy explanation like rain damage or damp, the outline of the stain began to split open, distinctly.
The air in the room screamed and tore apart.
—There was an enormous sound.
Something fell. No—rather than fell, it was more accurate to say the air itself burst and produced a human shape there.
With a heavy thud.
Golden hair.
Dazzling golden hair that reached her waist. It glowed like fire in the dim room.
Melissa Ars Samal Flamme collapsed onto the trash-strewn tatami.
She didn't move. Her golden hair spread across the mats, her unfamiliar garments in disarray.
She was breathing. Her shoulders rose and fell faintly. But her body had a thinness that didn't seem quite real—as if a single illusion had been forcibly stitched into this world.
He couldn't even stand. He just stared at her.
(...What the hell is this?)
A normal person would scream. Run. But his body was heavy as lead, and his mind, somewhere far away, murmured like a bystander: ah, so something happened again. After a moment, the girl raised her face.
Heterochromatic eyes. The right a burning gold. The left a cold silver.
Her gaze pierced him.
"...Clean this up."
Her voice was low, haughty, and utterly quiet.
He couldn't understand. He'd heard "clean." But why would a woman who'd fallen from his ceiling say such a thing? Before he could grasp the situation, the words seemed to carve themselves directly into his spine.
"...Didn't you hear me? I said clean this up."
Still lying down, Melissa pushed herself up onto one elbow. Her scorched, unfamiliar clothing. The golden embroidery had come unraveled, black soot clinging to it. A royal dress, perhaps. An ornament at her chest was slightly cracked.
Her skin was sickly white. Soot and dust clung to her porcelain cheeks. Even so, her features were inhumanly refined. She pinched up a piece of trash scattered on the tatami with her fingertips.
"What is this? Disgusting. Filthy. How can you stand living in this?"
"...Who are you?"
He finally forced out his voice. His throat stuck; a low sound came out. Melissa looked at him.
"Before you ask my name, do something about the filth of your own dwelling. Servant."
"Servant...?"
"Yes. You were lying there just now, weren't you? A person arrives, and you stay rolled over like a maggot. Aren't you ashamed?"
Her words were less sarcasm than pure bewilderment. This woman genuinely could not comprehend why a man would be lying around in this messy room. He didn't have the energy to talk back.
Only her overwhelming, almost uncanny presence was pushing up the stagnant air of the room. Since she'd fallen, even the stench of rot seemed to have thinned. No—the stench hadn't disappeared. Her aura was simply numbing his nose.
"Clean this up."
The third command. This time colder, in a tone that permitted no refusal. He moved.
He didn't know why. It wasn't so much that he lacked the will to resist—it was that the option of disobeying her words seemed not to exist inside him to begin with.
His body moved as if someone were manipulating it.
First, he grabbed an empty blister pack within reach.
The silver film was smeared with something like grease. He stacked the empty containers, threw away the disposable chopsticks, stuffed brown-stained clumps of tissue into a bag. Had he even been sorting burnable from non-burnable trash until a few minutes ago? No—he hadn't. But now his hands sorted the garbage without hesitation.
The burn scar on his left hand entered his vision with every motion.
Each time he grabbed trash with his sweaty hand, he remembered the heat of that childhood day. The night of the fire, held by his mother as he cried, staring at the white hospital ceiling. His mother had gripped his hand and repeated, it's all right, it's all right. Before long, his mother was gone. No note, no parting words, nothing.
His hand started to stall.
"Don't stop."
Her voice stabbed from behind.
He tied off the garbage bag mindlessly. He touched the old newspapers piled in the corner. The coldness of damp paper. When he moved the bundle, two dead cockroaches rolled out from behind with a dry sound.
Cleaning.
For some reason, the back of his tear ducts grew hot. It wasn't sadness. If he had to name it, anger. An old, feverish emotion he didn't quite understand himself.
He wiped the tatami with a rag. The water turned black and cloudy. Wring, wipe; wipe, wring. The same spot, over and over and over.
And each time, the air in the room changed, just a little.
The stagnant smell thinned. The damp air began, slowly, to move. The window wasn't open. And yet he felt on his skin a motion without wind. The dark stain on the wall seemed to have faded, just enough to be his imagination.
"...So you can do it when you try."
Melissa sat hugging her knees in the corner of the room.
She watched his work with interest. Appraising, looking down, dominating. The authority of royalty was steeped into the core of her body.
He looked at her again. Her shimmering golden hair seemed to emit its own light in the room without any. An oddly small, delicate body. But the power in those eyes was not that of an eighteen-year-old girl.
Her form grew thin for an instant.
Her outline wavered like something dissolving in water. The wall behind her showed through.
"...Hey."
"What?"
"You just started disappearing."
Melissa looked at her own hand for the first time. White fingertips. They had become faintly transparent.
She didn't change expression.
"I know."
"...You know."
"Yes. I have almost no power left. This place is close to that world, so I'm barely holding my form together."
"That world?"
"The country I came from. You don't know it? I suppose not. But never mind. For now, tidy your room. We'll talk after."
There was a strength in her voice that brooked no argument. He started to say something and stopped. After all, this was a woman who'd fallen from his ceiling. She couldn't be measured by common sense.
He kept cleaning.
He didn't know how many hours passed. Before he knew it, the floor of the room was clean. The garbage that had been scattered everywhere was gathered into clear bags, forming a small hill beneath the window. The stains on the tatami didn't come out completely, but they were far better than before.
With each motion, his skin grew red. He clenched his left hand and open
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