Sakaki Yui, seventeen years old. Her only wish was to greet each tomorrow quietly, without ever being hurt by anyone. However, her daily life—corroded by domestic violence and isolation at school—is completely trampled by the trap of a human trafficking organization, and her body is sold into an illegal underground pleasure district. Amidst violence, drugs, and endless exploitation, Yui's heart disconnects from emotion to protect itself, transforming the very act of "living" into mere instinctua
The Corpse Flower Blooms at Night - Corpse Flower Blooms at Night, Episode 1: "The Day of Beginnings, or the End"
One
The alley smelled of damp concrete and cheap synthetic detergent. Murky rainwater dripped without pause through the gaps of a rusted fire escape.
Yui Sakaki simply watched as the droplets spread tiny ripples in the asphalt's hollows, only to vanish a moment later. For a seventeen-year-old girl, the world held no more brightness or color than that.
For as long as she could remember, the house had always been filled with the stench of alcohol and her mother's shrieking. The slaps that came in place of words, the glass bottles hurled at her—to Yui, these were the same as gravity or air pressure: an absurdity that was simply there, preordained. Even in her school classroom, it was as though a vacuum surrounded her desk alone. No one ever spoke to her.
What she wanted wasn't luxury or dramatic salvation. Just peace—to go unnoticed, to hold her breath, to greet the next morning in quiet. A small, gentle span of time like a patch of winter sunlight, one that hurt no one.
But the mechanism called fate crushed her modest wish with ease.
The night she couldn't bear it anymore and ran from home, the smile of the man who approached her in front of the station looked as warm as a disposable hand warmer pressed into her frozen fingers. She had no way of knowing what the stack of documents he made her sign at the office meant.
"This way, you can stand on your own too."
Behind his words lay a meticulously forged debt contract and a system for converting her body into cash. With every escape route sealed off, Yui was pushed into the basement of a nameless multi-tenant building. It was a waiting room for illegal prostitution, where the hum of fluorescent lights rattled her eardrums without end.
For the first few weeks, Yui's body kept screaming in refusal. Relentless violence, the hunger of being denied food, and the crude drugs forced on her to dull her thoughts. But the human mind possesses a strange capacity for adaptation.
Yui learned to detach her consciousness a few meters from her body, to look down at herself from a corner of the ceiling. The one being beaten was a doll that resembled her; the one being defiled was merely a vessel.
"It's okay. If I get through this, someday it'll be quiet."
She told herself this, processing the pain as a functional event. Her wish to simply live in peace had, before she knew it, been whittled down to the bare minimum of survival instinct: just don't die, just stay there.
Two
That night, what drifted through the room wasn't the usual cheap perfume and cigarette smoke, but a sterile odor close to disinfectant.
The customer who appeared was a man utterly out of place in that space. He wore a well-tailored dark navy suit, and his age could have been anywhere from late twenties to early forties. His sculpted features held no desire, no sadism—no human emotion of any kind. His glass-bead eyes coldly appraised Yui's emaciated frame.
The man made no move to touch her. He drew a slender metal case from his inner pocket and took out a transparent ampoule and a syringe. The liquid was clear as water reflecting moonlight.
"You'll just get a little sleepy."
His voice was flat as the hum of medical equipment.
Yui had no strength left to form words of refusal. Only the sensation of a cold needle piercing the skin of her upper arm registered, strangely vivid.
Seconds later, Yui's world wasn't plunged into darkness—it was cast down into roaring fire.
"A—gh, gwaaah—"
A scream she didn't recognize as her own surged up from deep in her throat.
The promise of sleep was a fatal lie. A ferocious heat coursed through her limbs, as though molten lead had been poured into her veins. Her marrow groaned as if exploding repeatedly from within, her organs wrung out like rags. Yui tumbled from the bed to the floor and dug her nails into the filthy carpet. Her fingertips split and bled, but the agony that dominated her body was so vast it drowned even that pain. Stomach acid and blood-mixed vomit from her lungs soiled the floor. The backs of her eyeballs burned, and her vision dyed crimson.
"Subject No. 72... compatibility rate, low."
The man didn't move a single step, looking down at Yui as she thrashed. He took out a notebook and calmly etched characters with a fountain pen. Not a single stroke wavered.
Yui's body arched backward beyond its limits. Blood vessels rose to the surface of her skin like a black tree diagram, and blood seeping from ruptured capillaries stained her whole body red.
Why was it always her? She had only wanted to live quietly. How much more did the world intend to grind her down before it was satisfied?
At last, after violent convulsions, all strength drained from Yui's body.
Her crushed lungs exhaled their final air and never inflated again. The frantic beating of her heart abruptly, completely stopped.
The man approached quietly and pressed two fingers to Yui's neck. After a few seconds of silence, he withdrew them.
"...A failure."
His tone held no disappointment, no pity. It was the flat confirmation of fact, like a piece of lab equipment breaking. He quickly packed up his instruments and left the room without even locking the door.
What remained was only the corpse of a girl smeared with blood and tears, vomit and urine. The wall clock kept ticking its inorganic rhythm. The air in that room had died completely.
Three
2:13 a.m.
The vibration of a late-night truck passing outside made the window glass tremble faintly.
Yui's right ring finger twitched.
It was not a reflex of rigor mortis.
Thump. The heart that had stopped gave a single, powerful pulse. As if on cue, the stench of death that had filled the room dispersed in an instant.
The ruptured blood vessels reconnected rapidly, as though being sewn together from within. The collapsed alveoli inhaled outside air like starving beasts, delivering oxygen throughout her body at astonishing speed. The ribs broken from scraping against the carpet snapped audibly back into place.
Beneath her skin, countless black thread-like things writhed. They destroyed flesh even as they reconstructed it into something stronger. Deep in Yui's consciousness, something burst open.
Slowly, Yui lifted her eyelids.
The ceiling she saw was utterly different from before. Every corner of what should have been a dark room was vividly visible, tinged with strange colors like ink dropped into hot water.
Deep within her eyes, at the border of her irises, a thin golden ring—one that did not exist in humans—quietly surfaced.
Four
The next morning, Yui sat on the waiting room sofa as usual.
The events of the previous night felt like an exceptionally bad nightmare. The stains on the floor had been wiped away by the shop staff, grumbling as they worked, but Yui herself bore not a single wound.
"Hey, Yui. Get in the room, now."
At the manager's rough voice, Yui answered "Yes" shortly and stood. Her body felt strangely light—as though gravity had been halved.
The customer who came in reeked of alcohol and slapped her cheek hard by way of greeting. Normally, it should have sent a shock through her skull and a sharp pain.
But all Yui felt was the dry fact that "a hard object made contact with her skin." Almost no pain. Even when the customer choked her and dug his nails into her flesh, Yui's mind was astonishingly cold.
(Oh. It doesn't hurt.)
Gazing at the customer's face, Yui thought about it as though it were someone else's problem. Even if the skin of her neck split and bled faintly, the moment the customer turned his back, the wound quietly closed.
"Well... I suppose this kind of thing can happen."
Yui abandoned any further thought. Her thoroughly broken mind forced even this abnormality into the framework of daily life, as "a new rule for surviving." As long as she could pass her days in peace, without making waves, she didn't care what happened to her body.
But the world would not let her remain in that stagnation.
As the night deepened, the city's scenery began to transform. In the gaps between buildings, in the shadows of neon signs, beneath the feet of passersby—distortions she had never seen before writhed.
From the back of a man in a business suit, a viscous black tentacle extended and crawled along the asphalt. Through the gaps in a schoolgirl's face, countless thin eyes stared at her.
Since ancient times, humans had called such beings "yokai" or "sorcery" and kept their distance. They mingled with the noise of the modern overcrowded city, and they were certainly there, breathing.
And they all, upon seeing Yui, parted the way as though afraid.
Five
The top floor of a luxury hotel. In a room with blackout curtains drawn, Reiji Kuze stared at the surveillance camera footage displayed on his tablet.
On the screen was the girl he had certainly "disposed of" the previous night—Yui Sakaki. She was walking through the daytime streets as if nothing had happened.
"...Impossible. That thing is alive?"
The fountain pen in Reiji's hand snapped with a crack. Ink stained his fingertips, but he paid it no mind.
That drug was a prototype of "Ishu"—a substance the organization had spent centuries reproducing, one that forcibly awakens non-human factors. In over seventy past experiments, humans who failed to achieve compatibility had, without exception, collapsed at the cellular level and died. Yui, too, had been confirmed to have no pulse.
"Not a failed compatibility... but a complete fusion, then."
For the first time, a light resembling fanaticism kindled in Reiji's glass-like eyes.
Meanwhile, Yui was walking through a dim alley.
She felt a "shadow" with clear malice approaching from behind. It was a starving monster that had lost human form.
The old Yui would have cowered in fear. But now, what welled up in her chest was a cold predatory impulse.
(Don't get in my way.)
I just want to live quietly.
Yui stopped and slowly turned around. Her golden eyes began to shine in the darkness of night, cruel in their beauty.
That the world itself—the world that had oppressed and tried to crush her—was already being devoured by a colossal monster. And that she was being dragged into the center of that battle. Yui still knew nothing of any of it.
("The Corpse Flower Blooms at Night" — Episode One, End)
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.