In a wooden apartment over forty years old, in a room soaked with mold, drugs, and vomit, a man named Kai Kamon spends his days staring at the ceiling, unable to die. With social phobia and drug addiction, he has fallen out of society entirely.
One night, the ceiling tears open, and Princess Melissa of the Flamme Kingdom falls through. Exiled from her world and stripped of all magic by a transfer spell, she collapses on the filthy tatami floor. She looks around the rotting room and gives him a
The ceiling was rotting.
No, it wasn't just the ceiling. The tatami, the walls, the air—all of it. Everything that filled this six-mat room was slowly, but surely, dying.
Kamon Kai lay sprawled on his back, staring at the stains on the ceiling with unfocused eyes. The darkened traces of rain leaks looked like a human face, or perhaps spreading entrails. Two years since he'd moved into this room. The stains he hadn't noticed at first now occupied most of his field of vision.
(*Morning again.*)
From outside the window came the rattling sound of a bicycle passing by. An old woman's cough, plastic supermarket bag in hand. Crows cawing in the distance. The sounds of the living seeped through the thin walls.
Kai didn't move a single finger.
The ceiling stains seemed to writhe slowly. He had experienced too many mornings in this room to not know this was a hallucination. The memory of last night—downing over-the-counter sleeping pills in one go—lingered as a bitter film at the back of his throat. He wasn't even sure if he'd slept. There had simply been stretches of time where consciousness had cut out.
(*If I'm going to die, it'll be here...*)
He closed his eyes, thinking that. But his heart continued beating with infuriating regularity. His lungs demanded air, his stomach complained dully of hunger. His body wanted to live. That fact, more than anything, infuriated him.
Kai pulled himself upright, wrapped in gray sweats. His bony shoulders made a small cracking sound. He shoved aside the empty convenience store bento containers scattered within arm's reach, and the damp tatami clung to his fingertips. On the back of his left hand, an old burn scar stood out. He stared at it for a moment—the skin pulled taut and gleaming.
A summer in his childhood. A fire that had risen from a neighborhood machine shop. The blast of heat that had wrenched him out when he'd failed to escape, and someone's hand slapping his back. He could no longer recall the details. Only the memory carved into the skin of his left hand remained in his body.
"Shit."
The mirror propped against the wall reflected his face in the dim room. His long black hair, unkempt, curled and fell over his eyes. Beneath it, pale irises sat stagnant. Bluish-white skin. Protruding collarbones. The face of a twenty-five-year-old man on which it was hard to find any memory of having eaten anything.
Kai couldn't leave this place called Haimori Ward. Located in the northeastern part of Tokyo, this ward had once been densely packed with wooden apartment buildings for factory workers. The factories closed at the end of the Showa era, and the people left. What remained was the reality of a "forgotten ward"—an aging population rate of forty-two percent, over seventy solitary deaths a year.
The building he lived in, Corpor Haimori, was also an old wooden two-story structure, forty-three years old. Of its eight units, only half were occupied. Kai's room, Unit 102, was a six-mat single room with a monthly rent of 28,000 yen. Even that, he was six months behind on.
Inside the room, garbage had formed strata.
Empty pill blister packs scattered like silver flowers. Convenience store bento containers, the remains of cup noodles, damp newspaper. All of it mixed together, emitting a smell close to putrefaction. Being in this smell made him feel as though he was slowly dissolving from the world.
(*If someone dies, I'll get a call.*)
He thought this and looked at his phone. The screen hadn't lit up since yesterday. The battery was dead. He couldn't muster the energy to charge it.
The small kitchen in the corner of the room. The refrigerator was running, but inside there was only a half-spoiled plastic bottle of water and moldy bread. The tap produced water that smelled of chlorine. That alone was the only proof that this was still a place fit for human habitation.
Kai stood in the kitchen.
His body was heavy. In the back of his head, the dregs of the drugs dragged around a thick, muddy drowsiness. Without opening the refrigerator, he dropped his gaze to the days' worth of dishes piled in the sink. The waterlogged sponge, the moldy drain—all of it was his life itself.
(*Everything's 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, this room would remain dirty.
He sat back down on the tatami and leaned against the wall. He closed his eyes. On the back of his eyelids, the ceiling stains slowly changed shape. A human face. Someone's face. Perhaps the face of an old person he'd never met, who had died alone. He felt as though someone who had once lived in this room was crying inside the walls.
(*Out of pills.*)
The core of his body trembled. A premonition of withdrawal symptoms, like chills. 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. As for money to buy more—he had, if he remembered correctly, only 3,200 yen left. How many days could that stretch? If only it would last until he died.
Yes, until he died.
Kai wondered why he didn't die. He lacked the courage to hang himself, the nerve to jump onto the tracks. He just took pills every day, slept, woke, and stared at his rotting room and rotting self. Continuing this state—too thin to be called a life—was all he could do now.
The air outside suddenly changed.
A sensation like dropping air pressure, like his inner ears were clogged. Kai opened his eyes.
The ceiling stains were looking at him for the first time.
No—it seemed less like looking and more like calling. The black stain spread, oozing. As if refusing easy explanations like rain leaks or humidity, the stain's outline began to tear open, clearly.
The air in the room screamed and was ripped apart.
—A tremendous sound.
Something crashed through the ceiling and fell. No—rather than falling, it was as if the air itself burst open and gave birth to a human form there.
*Thud.*
Golden hair.
Curling locks of gold and silver intertwined, reaching to her waist, blazed like fire in the dim room.
Melissa Ars Samal Flamme collapsed onto the garbage-strewn tatami.
She didn't move. She was breathing. Her shoulders rose and fell faintly. But her body had a thinness that somehow didn't seem of this world. As if a single illusion had been forcibly stitched into this reality.
Kai, unable even to stand, stared at her.
(*...What is this?*)
Normally, one would scream. Run. But Kai's body was heavy as lead, and his heart, somewhere far away, muttered detachedly: *ah, something's happened again.*
The girl raised her face.
Eyes of different colors on left and right. The right, a blazing gold. The left, a cold silver.
Her gaze pierced through Kai.
"...Clean this up."
Her voice was low, haughty, and very quiet.
Kai couldn't comprehend it. He'd heard "clean." But why would this woman who'd fallen from the ceiling say such a thing? Before he could even grasp the situation, those words resounded as if carved directly into his spine.
"...Did you not hear me? I said clean this up."
Still collapsed, Melissa raised her upper body as if crawling. Her clothes were scorched, unlike anything he'd ever seen. The gold embroidery had come undone, black soot clinging to it. Royal ceremonial dress, perhaps. One of the ornaments at her chest was shattered.
Her skin was sickly white. Soot and dust clung to her porcelain-like cheeks. Even so, her features were inhumanly refined.
She picked up a piece of the garbage scattered on the tatami with her fingertips.
"What is this? Filthy. Unsanitary. How can you possibly live in this?"
"...Who the hell are you?"
Kai finally forced out his voice. His throat stuck, producing a low sound.
Melissa looked at him.
"Before asking my name, do something about the filth of your own dwelling. Servant."
"Servant...?"
"That's right. You were lying there just now, weren't you? A person arrives, and you remain sprawled out like a maggot. Have you no shame?"
Her words were less sarcasm than pure bewilderment. This woman genuinely seemed unable to understand a man lying around in this messy room.
Kai didn't have the energy to talk back.
Only her overwhelming, almost freakish presence pushed against the stagnant air of this room. Since she'd fallen, the stench of decay seemed to have thinned. No—the stench hadn't disappeared. Her presence was simply numbing his nose.
"Clean this up."
A third command.
This time, it rang colder, brooking no refusal.
Kai moved.
He didn't know why. It wasn't so much that he lacked the energy to resist—it felt as though the option of defying her words had never existed within him in the first place. His body moved as if controlled by someone else.
First, he grabbed the empty pill blister packs within reach.
The silver film was coated with a greasy, oil-like grime. He stacked the empty containers, threw away the disposable chopsticks, and stuffed the brown-discolored wads of tissue into a bag. Had he, until a few minutes ago, even distinguished between food waste and non-food waste? No, he hadn't. But now, his hands sorted the garbage without hesitation.
The burn scar on his left hand flashed in his vision with every task.
Each time he grabbed garbage with sweaty hands, he remembered the heat of that childhood day. The night of the fire, crying in his mother's arms, looking at the white hospital ceiling. His mother held his hand and repeated: *don't be scared, don't be scared.* After a while, his mother was gone. No note, no parting words, nothing.
His hands nearly stopped.
"Don't stop."
Her voice stabbed from behind.
Kai tied the mouth of the garbage bag with an empty mind. He touched the old newspapers stacked in the corner of the room. The coldness of damp paper. When he moved the bundle, two cockroach carcasses 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 fully understand himself.
He wiped the tatami with a rag. The water turned black. Wring, wipe, wipe, wring. The same spot, over and over, again and again.
Each time, the air in the room changed, little by little.
The stagnant smell thinned. The damp air slowly began to move. He hadn't opened the window. And yet, he felt a windless movement on his skin. The blackened stains on the walls seemed—just barely, perhaps his imagination—to have lightened.
"...You can do it if you try."
Melissa sat in the corner of the room, hugging her knees.
She watched Kai's work with interest. Appraising, looking down, dominating. The authority of royalty was soaked into the core of her body.
Kai looked at her again.
Her glittering gold-and-silver hair seemed to emit light of its own in the lightless room. A strangely small, delicate body. But the power in those eyes was not something he could attribute to an eighteen-year-old girl. It was the color of someone who had carried a nation on her back—and lost it.
Her figure flickered for an instant.
Her outline wavered, as if dissolving in water. The wall behind her showed through, translucent.
"...Hey."
"What?"
"You just almost disappeared."
Melissa looked at her own hands for the first time. White fingertips. They were faintly transparent.
Her expression didn't change.
"I know."
"...You know?"
"Yes. I have almost no power left. This place is close to that world, so I'm barely maintaining my form."
"That world?"
"The Kingdom of Flamme. You don't know it, do you? No, of course you don't. But it doesn't matter. For now, finish cleaning your room. We'll talk after."
Her voice carried a strength that allowed no argument. Kai started to say something, then stopped. After all, this was a woman who had crashed through his ceiling. There was no measuring her by common sense.
He continued clea
Novelia is an AI-powered platform to read original light novels and fan fiction, create your own in just a few taps, and chat with the characters. New, illustrated episodes arrive daily — free to start.