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 14: "The Offering of Abundance, or the Mystery of the Unmanned Stand"
One
"Get your own food for today. But absolutely do not kill anyone, and make sure you don't leave a mess behind. Understood? If you don't understand, then all your vanilla ice cream rations starting tomorrow go into my stomach."
The tone was flat, like a homeroom teacher reading off homework assignments at morning homeroom. Sakaki Yui hadn't even bothered to adjust her loungewear, her lower half still tucked under the kotatsu, scraping the surface of a Super Cup ice cream with a wooden spoon in perfectly regular strokes. Deep within those golden eyes there wasn't a shred of the Demon Lord's majesty that supposedly ruled the world—only the minimal administrative procedure of "peacefully digesting today's ice cream" flowing through them with calm indifference.
Naru, having been quite literally unceremoniously tossed out the apartment's iron door by this same Yui, was wandering aimlessly through the dim back alleys of Shinjuku.
"What is with that woman...! She's supposed to be a Demon Lord but she's way too picky about how fast the vanilla ice cream disappears! And telling me not to leave a mess behind—as if she's peddling her non-human life hacks!"
Shaking her white hair in the night breeze, Naru stared at her own slender fingertips with a pouting face. From between her nails, white threads occasionally peeked out and vanished, as if responding to her hunger. The depths of her innards were still burning hot as ever. Ever since being shown that overwhelming difference in rank, her brain had been scorched by fear and envy toward Yui, and though she had resigned herself to being an unpaid housekeeper scrubbing floors, her predatory instincts as a living creature had hardly disappeared.
The Shinjuku night was filled with all kinds of "sediment" given off by humans. Exhaust fumes and cheap perfume, mixed with suspicion toward others and carnal desire—a distinctive stench. If she went to the illegal brothel where Yui worked, "safe livestock" prepared by the Ginsei-kai would be supplied systematically, but today of all days she had to secure prey on her own or forfeit her ice cream rights.
"Anyway, I need to find the best possible food that'll satisfy that woman and get back to that six-mat apartment..."
As Naru muttered and stepped into a back alley lined with damp garbage bins where not even neon light reached—
"Hey, hey, look at this. A white-haired lost kid at this hour?"
"Little lady, what shop are you from? Or are you a runaway? We'll give you something nice, so come over here."
Suddenly, three men appeared from the dim shadows. Their greasy faces wore lewd grins, and they reeked of alcohol. They were a typical group of petty crooks scraping together pocket change at the bottom rungs of the underworld. In their eyes, Naru appeared to be nothing more than a slender, defenseless girl.
Naru stopped walking and slowly turned back to face the men. Her golden eyes glittered distortedly in the darkness of the night.
"...Strange people. Are you talking to me?"
"Who else would we be talking to? Keep running your mouth and you'll get hurt—"
The instant the man in the center reached out to grab Naru's slender shoulder, the laws of the world flipped upside down.
—A cru/ch, the sound of flesh and bone colliding with abnormal hardness echoed.
"Hii...!?"
The man screamed because his wrist had been completely "locked" by grip strength that couldn't possibly belong to a human girl. Naru's slender five fingers easily made the bones of the man's wrist creak and groan like porcelain.
"The ones who'll get hurt are humans."
Naru's lips twisted into a cruel crescent moon. From beneath her skin, countless "white threads" erupted in explosive undulations. It was the beginning of the hunt. Naru grabbed the man by the collar with the same casualness one might snap a piece of paper, and pulled him toward her body.
"Agh... a, aaaah...!"
The man's face was instantly drained white with terror at the unexpected monstrosity. His two companions, their legs giving out, clung to the concrete floor, shaking uncontrollably without even the ability to scream. An overwhelming sense of helplessness dominated the alley—the helplessness of humans before a true "monster" that transcended even the concept of violence. Naru peered into the man's fear-twisted face and pressed her wet lips against his nape.
"Nn... a, uu..."
From the girl's throat leaked a muffled yet lewd sigh. The sharp fangs visible in her mouth leaped past the man's flesh and pierced directly into his spiritual marrow. In that instant, the torrent of "utter terror of death" and "greed to survive" that overflowed from the man's mind melted into thick, hot nectar that slid down Naru's parched throat.
"Haa... nn, nnuu...! Delicious...! After all, humans' raw fear is the best...!"
Naru's white limbs arched back grandly from pleasure. Her white hair clung to her forehead with the man's cold sweat and her own lewd saliva, and her golden eyes had completely melted into unfocused depths of pleasure. The white threads beneath her skin undulated madly, and she increased the speed of her suction to devour every last drop of the man's psychic energy.
However, in the midst of that climax, Yui's cold, correct argument crossed Naru's mind.
"If you eat it all at once, a corpse will remain. Cleaning up a corpse is truly a hassle."
"Tch... that woman's face keeps popping up and I can't suck with all my might...!"
Naru clicked her tongue in annoyance and tossed the man, now completely unconscious and limp as mud, behind the garbage bins. She also sipped a moderate amount of fear-sediment from the remaining two, leaving them incapacitated with their legs given out. This way they wouldn't die, and there'd be no need for cleanup.
Exhaling a breath that still carried lewd afterglow, Naru was about to leave the scene when she suddenly sensed a strange "presence" at the very back of the alley.
In a hollow in the wall, an old coin locker stood alone. Around it, a heavy miasma had settled, as if years of human grudges had accumulated there. It was a "dark unmanned vending spot" in Shinjuku used by underworld figures for non-face-to-face transactions of stolen goods and illegal drugs, and at the same time a spiritual hotspot.
Naru noticed an unbelievably "delicious presence" leaking from the gaps in the locker and her eyes sparkled.
"What is this...? Inside, there's incredibly rich, concentrated human malice packed in...! It's like the premium seat at the shop (brothel)—the best possible meal!"
Two
Naru stepped forward to the locker. From the gaps in the rusted door, a viscous fog of grudges overflowed so densely it was almost visible.
"With this, even she won't complain. But..."
Naru tilted her small head. Through her life with Yui, she had halfway learned about human social norms.
"When you take something from a human shop, you have to pay properly. Otherwise you become a thief, and a troublesome organization called the police comes."
Yui's words, always spoken in that flat tone, replayed in her mind.
"If you pay money, you can take what's there... I see, so it's shopping."
However, for the sheltered Naru, the definition of valuable "money" was fundamentally different from humans'. What occurred to her was the highest-value substance generated from her own body.
"Hmph, from a human perspective, some paper scraps issued by a nation should be thousands of times less valuable than a part of my power."
Naru lightly cut the skin of her slender wrist with a sharp claw, as if self-harming. With a face that showed no sign of feeling pain, she let a translucent liquid ooze from the wound. It was a "crystal of alien blood (curse-mass)," formed when the white threads beneath her skin condensed at ultra-high concentration and crystallized.
With a clink, a beautiful yet ominous crystal shining with a faint golden light rolled out onto Naru's palm. It was a mass of non-human magical power with such overwhelming density that it could instantly drive a human mind insane and completely distort the surrounding spiritual magnetic field.
Naru forced the crystal into the locker's coin slot. The metal gears screamed under the abnormal curse-power, but Naru paid no mind and flung open the unlocked door.
"Time to eat!"
What was stored inside the locker were antiques with cursed histories, thoroughly soaked in others' hexes, that unscrupulous brokers had concealed, along with countless illegal drugs that had absorbed humans' emotions of ruination. Naru opened her mouth wide and inhaled the exquisite fog of grudges rising from them, filling her chest.
"Nnnn...! Aah, it's so thick it numbs my head...! The best souvenir!"
Naru, basking in satisfaction, closed the now-empty locker door and merrily headed home to the apartment. Without the slightest imagination of what kind of tragedy the "payment" she had left in the locker was about to cause.
Several minutes after Naru left. The "crystal of alien blood" left behind at the dark unmanned vending spot had begun to melt the locker's iron casing from the inside, turning it to sludge.
The translucent spiritual energy emitted by the crystal exploded outward as invisible waves, spreading across all of Shinjuku.
To all the low-ranking demons and apparitions lurking in the darkness, it was an "exquisite fragrance" that robbed them of reason.
"Oooooo..."
"Gigi, gigigigigi!"
From the bottoms of manholes, from the gaps between mixed-use buildings, from the back alleys of late-night Kabukicho, hundreds of low-ranking demons came crawling out at once with bloodshot eyes. The apparitions, affected by the abnormal spiritual energy radiating from the crystal, became completely feral and began surging toward the center of Shinjuku, drawn solely by that light.
The city's spiritual magnetic field breached its critical point in an instant. The air physically twisted, streetlight glass shattered one after another, and the night sky became covered in ominous purple clouds. Spiritually sensitive humans collapsed foaming at the mouth on the spot, and even ordinary passersby who could see nothing began to panic from the "indescribable chill and madness" that suddenly struck the city, fleeing and screaming.
It was a near-spiritual-pandemic uproar caused by one girl's ignorance of the world.
Three
Meanwhile, in the cheap six-mat apartment.
Yui was vaguely watching the late-night news program on the TV. The announcer was reporting in a tense voice: "Currently, in certain areas of Shinjuku Ward, an unexplained mass hysteria and large-scale power outage are occurring—"
From outside the apartment window, unpleasant crawling sounds—skittering, gigigi—could be heard approaching. The low-ranking demons drawn by the scent of the crystal Naru had brought had finally begun swarming around the apartment where Yui and Naru lived.
"...You're noisy."
Yui pressed the remote and turned off the screen. The golden rings deep in her eyes were cold and calm.
Her precious quiet late-night hours were being defiled by the wingbeats of disgusting insect-like apparitions. More than anything, because of this commotion, her route to the nearby convenience store to buy tomorrow's Super Cup was completely blocked.
Just then, the ill-fitting iron door swung open with a bang.
"I'm home! Big Sister, I found amazing food!"
Naru returned home with a beaming smile, grudges dripping from the antiques clutched in both arms. But the moment she sensed the overwhelming "coldness" of the air drifting in the room, Naru's smile froze.
Beneath the skin of Yui, who had slowly crawled out from the kotatsu, hundreds of thousands of "black threads" were writhing at a density Naru had never seen before.
"Ah... B-Big Sister...?"
"Naru-san."
Yui's voice didn't even contain anger. There was only violence as the movement of absolute mass.
"Hii—"
Before Naru could even finish her short scream, Yui's palm covered Naru's face head-on. A speed like a natural disas
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.