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 16: "An Ordinary Terminus, or the Uniform Dystopia"
One
Ever since the day she had drained an ancient land god down to the very marrow, a strange change had come over Yui. Compared to before, she felt as though she could understand and process things "just a little more smoothly."
Back when she'd lived at her parents' house, she had been hopeless at schoolwork. Now it flowed into her head like a system processing logs. The correspondence course curriculum she'd fallen more than a year behind on was devoured in a matter of days—every assignment completed, and she was just about finished with the whole thing.
With the coursework done, Yui was required to attend the in-person schooling sessions—the mandatory face-to-face instruction days—in order to earn her credits.
Having once tasted the bitter resignation of being "kept at arm's length by everyone around her" at an ordinary school, Yui resolved to prepare meticulously this time, so as to blend perfectly into society.
"Naru. Search online for what they call a 'cosplay'—a government-approved, convincing-looking uniform. I require the complete semiotics of a student."
Her live-in companion Naru, shuddering at the thought—"Big Sister, your brain got so smart it's actually kind of warped...?"—nevertheless did as she was told and procured a navy blazer and a plaid pleated skirt.
On the day of, Yui, clad in a "counterfeit uniform" that faithfully mimicked a full-time high school girl's, cleared the exams and interviews flawlessly with her overclocked neural circuitry. Leaving the teachers bewildered with her inhuman answer speed, she departed the facility that served as the schooling venue.
Two
As Yui stepped into the dim alley behind the schooling venue, several men blocked her path. Dressed in well-tailored suits and wearing intellectual-looking glasses, they were scout men for the intellectual yakuza—specialists in the underworld who harvested "troubled minors."
They regarded correspondence high school students as "social weaklings burdened by negative circumstances that keep them out of full-time schooling—financial hardship, domestic violence, mental illness, and the like"—and were always on the lookout for a crack to exploit.
"Hey there, young lady. Nice uniform. But correspondence school means things are pretty rough for you, huh? Worried about your future and all that?"
"There's a good-paying job I know about. How about you just hear me out for a bit?"
Yui was stopped, and tilted her head a few millimeters. To her, these men's words were nothing but noise—but by a warped bureaucratic judgment that "refusing dialogue violates social norms," she allowed herself to be led along into a rented meeting room in a nearby mixed-use building.
Inside, the men presented Yui with a contract that, at first glance, looked perfectly legitimate and clean: "Talent Management & High-Income Part-Time Work."
"Just sign here, and all your 'circumstances' get solved."
But the men had made a fatal mistake about their target. For Yui, the greatest of all the failures she had accumulated in her past—that was precisely the massive debt she had been saddled with through a fraudulent contract just like the one in front of her now, and the resulting fall into her current employment at an illegal adult establishment.
Thanks to a deep resignation, Yui did not despair over her present situation. Now that she had become something inhuman, she simply accepted even the mechanical routine of this place as "maintaining daily life." But even so, one bitter lesson had been burned into her flesh: "To survive in society, without a bare minimum of knowledge, you will truly find yourself in trouble."
And now, having devoured a divinity, her neural circuitry was running in overdrive like a supercomputer. Her bitter past lessons and her invincible processing power had meshed together in the worst possible way.
The instant Yui laid eyes on the contract, she saw through at a glance the fatal deception hidden behind its polished formatting—the "massive penalty clauses," the "de facto physical confinement," the "logic funneling toward multiple debts."
Without changing her expression in the slightest, Yui stated the facts in a flat, even voice.
"...A question. Article 4, Clause 3 and the special provisions of Article 8 of this contract fall under Article 10 of the Consumer Contract Act—'clauses that unfairly harm the consumer's interests'—and are therefore void. Furthermore, the actual arrangement grossly violates the Investment Deposit Act and the Labor Standards Act. It masquerades as legal on the surface, but this document is a malicious fraud, or a slave contract premised on imprisonment unto death. I believe this is a very bad thing."
Three
The scout man's face, having had inconvenient facts pointed out to him as casually as AI-generated text, boiled bright red with rage. A correspondence-school girl he'd looked down on as an intellectual weakling had seen through the structure of their fraud with logic that would put a lawyer to shame. His pride shattered, the yakuza exploded and slammed the table, rising to his feet.
"You little bitch, don't get cocky...! I told you to shut up and sign!"
The man reached out to grab Yui by the collar—and that was the moment. Deep in Yui's eyes, the golden ring went colder and calmer than ever before.
"...No. That would interfere with my dismissal time. A clear violation of discipline."
From beneath Yui's feet, as if erupting from a bottomless abyss, countless black threads burst forth in an explosion, covering the walls and ceiling of the cramped meeting room in a mesh of netting. The overwhelming demonic aura radiating from the threads filled the room to saturation, and the pressure and violence the men had tried to project were shattered in an instant.
"Wha—hii, what the hell is this...!?"
Before the yakuza could even lose control of their bladders, Yui's palm caught the leader's face and slammed him into the long meeting table at a ferocious speed.
"It's feeding time."
The black threads that had torn through Yui's skin bound the men's bodies and began chewing through their minds and souls with tremendous force. The dregs overflowing from the men's brains—a mixture of "absolute terror at an unforeseen monstrosity" and "greed for petty cash"—became the finest honey, flowing down Yui's throat.
"Nn... ah, uaah..."
A wet, sensual sigh escaped Yui's lips. The chest of her counterfeit blazer heaved violently, and her body arched back sharply in pleasure. As the men writhed in "ghastly ecstasy as their thoughts and souls were sucked dry," Yui's golden eyes melted into unfocused depths of pleasure.
Several minutes later, the inhalation ended. In the room lay the yakuza, their mental dregs devoured without a speck of dust remaining. Yui tidily straightened her disheveled pleated skirt, looked down at the remains of the contract they had left behind, and declared coldly:
"People who cannot follow the law are vermin of society. Reflect on yourselves deeply."
She herself continued to take clients at an illegal adult establishment in the basement of Shinjuku, yet she criticized only the other party's illegal acts—their fraud—with righteous fury. Wielding that warped morality peculiar to the inhuman, Yui left the meeting room as if nothing had happened and walked home, flat and expressionless.
Four
Several months later.
Yui safely completed all her coursework and obtained her correspondence high school graduation qualification. She had acquired the "ordinary ticket" that Granny had spoken of.
But from the day after she received her diploma, that astonishing sharpness of mind—her sage mode—ended as abruptly as if it had been a lie.
Spread out on the kotatsu table with a notebook open, staring at a simple arithmetic drill, Yui muttered flatly: "...Huh. I don't know how to solve this." Her brain's processing power had completely regressed to its former dry, slightly clumsy state.
In truth, the brain activation from devouring the land god had been nothing more than a detonator. The extreme state of concentration—what people call "the zone"—had been produced by her fierce motivation, her burning desire to "become ordinary," being powerfully amplified by the divine energy she had absorbed. It seemed it had merely continued by some miracle. And now that she had obtained her goal, the graduation qualification, that special state of focus had snapped off cleanly.
"What, she just went back to normal. What a relief—if Big Sister had stayed like that, I wouldn't have stood a chance."
As Naru let out a breath of relief and offered a Super Cup vanilla ice cream, Yui accepted it matter-of-factly and began moving her wooden spoon.
Her period as a super-genius was over, but in her hands remained a single diploma. The demon lord who, at the center of the world's distortion, had protected that cheap, quiet "ordinary"—she would go on consuming another peaceful night in her six-mat room, flat and expressionless.
(End of Episode 16: "The Ordinary Endpoint, or the Dystopia of Uniforms")
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