Pygmalion Is Planting Seeds - Chapter 10

The basement, layered with tiles, always felt chilling whenever I entered it. It was quite hard to believe the sweltering heat of the night, right above our heads.

Placed on the stainless table was, yet again, another corpse.  One of a boy who looked to be in grade school.

It wasn’t me who attacked him. I only noticed him lying near a riverbed, close to his death after getting run over. Though it was I who performed the finishing blow.

[Admin: So you just killed him.]

His tiny body, which got sent flying, was covered by the underbrush, which made it hard for one to discover at the beginning of dusk.

The yellow T-shirt he was wearing was dyed in blood and his mouth was continuously spluttering blood bubbles.

I surveyed my surroundings; no one was around. I put my left foot on the boy’s shoulder and stamped on his head with the right one, making use of my weight and twisting his neck. I felt a dull sensation transmitted through the sole of my shoe. I placed my hand under his nose and made sure he wasn’t breathing. I then contacted Erisa and asked her to meet me near the riverbed.

“I think we can carry him without calling for the Mogura this time.”

Putting on her usual cool expression as she stood before the boy’s corpse, Erisa’s voice sounded to be a bit excited. According to her, “the meat of this approximate age tastes the best”. Maybe she was happy to acquire it without needing to share half of the body with the Mogura.

However, what distorted her cold expression were my few words brimming of determination.

“You want to set Iruse Misaki free? Are seriously saying this?”

Erisa who was reading a thick book during the free time of the dismantling process switched her view and raised her eyebrow.

“I already told you, the Shishikuibana don’’t–”

“They do! There is a way to turn them like us… Turn them human. You don’t have to hide from me anymore, I know everything.”

I peered through Erisa’s bewitching eyes.

Only the sounds of the flesh and bones, being ripped and dismantled resounded in the basement room.

Looking as if she gave up, Erisa made a huge sigh and closed the book between her hands.

“Where did you hear about it?”

“I saw the real thing at Ando’s home, the Shishikuibana walking and talking. I also heard about you showing him the means to do it.”

“What a good-for-nothing man. Was he a snake in his past life?”

“Apparently, Ando’s was right.”

“Yeah, I can’t deny it. But I wouldn’t recommend it either. The burden you will have to carry is in a whole other league from the one you know.”

“I have the resolution for anything that could happen.”

“This ‘resolution’ you’re saying sounds very cheap. You don’t understand the meaning of releasing a life.”

“You too don’t understand how much I long for Misaki to be revived. After witnessing all that stuff in Ando’s apartment, giving up became impossible for me.”

We glared at each other like we were enemies for a while, but Erisa was the first to eventually avert her gaze and leave her seat.

“Shall we have and old talk?”

Erisa opened the vault beside the wall and took out an old looking book with a small hasp on its edge.  It looked like a diary, its bindings were worn out from frequent use.

“Once upon a time, a father and his daughter lived in a cheap lodging apartment. The father had a habit of turning violent due to drinking. The mother hated this bad habit of her husband, so she met a new man outside and ran away. The aim of the father’s anger and barbarity were directed at his daughter as a result. Every night, he drank alcohol, hit the little defenseless girl and kicked her flying. There was not a single day when the little girl’s bruises completely disappeared…”

Erisa inserted a small key into the lock. By rotating the key, a faint snapping sound reached my ears.

“But despite her situation, the girl kept growing without falling into despair. She possessed a beautiful appearance that could make any girl envy her and any boy attracted to her. She became a flower that drew harmful insects, which were no one but her father. Crossing the line of hitting and kicking, his violence was upgraded to sexual desires for his daughter. nevertheless, this upgrade started long before her body developed into one of an adult woman. And so, her graduation took place when she was still ten-years-old.”

The sound of the book pages turning overlapped with Erisa’s calm voice.

“On her thirteenth birthday, the horrible father of hers met a dog’s death. He was stabbed in the stomach while having a quarrel about something ridiculous at the bar. Because of the alcohol, blood didn’t stop gushing out, making it too late for the ambulance to arrive. The deceased father was buried and his daughter didn’t accept his bones.”

Erisa halted her words and faced me.

“Kuuya, could you guess what happened to the daughter after she was left alone?”

“Something like, she was finally set free and was able to walk on her own life path?”

“Wrong. The girl followed her father and took her own life.”

“Why would she do that? She was finally released from her father’s chains!”

[Pr: This is a JP novel, stupid shit like this happens all the time]

I unconsciously raised my voice.

“In the girl’s mind, despite her father’s passing, she was still bound by him. Getting kicked and assaulted by her father was her daily life and her ‘raison d’être’ . They were living in an indispensable co-dependence. Maybe her soul died at the moment her father was gone, and she became empty from that day until her suicide.”

Erisa stopped flipping the pages.

“Following that incident, a dilettante who knew about the story took in the girl’s body illegally using his money. He wanted to employ her corpse for a certain experiment he was working on.”

“Experiment? You mean….”

“The Shishikuibana, revival of the dead.”

The girl and the dilettante man’s identity started to become clear. But, I didn’t feel like I was the one who’s supposed to reveal it.

“I don’t want to speak about what happened next.”

Instead of talking about it herself, Erisa handed me the open book.  In that book, the struggling days of a man cultivating the Shishikuibana were written down. He went through deep suffering and despair, using countless human corpses to finally establish a legitimate method of cultivating the Shishikuibana. The gradual disordering of his handwriting was apparently because he lost his fingers along the way. One day, the man was taking a walk in the neighborhood when he encountered a little girl walking unsteadily before leaning on a fence, exhausted. The little girl didn’t seem to mind her dirty worn out clothes, with her sight wandering and eyes blank. Her thin cheeks showed that she was bereft of a proper source of nutrition.

The man took the girl along with him home and nursed her. He offered her a bath, a meal and ordered the maid to repair her clothes. Although he knew that she was still young, the man couldn’t deny her breathtaking beauty. His impression of her looks was written as, ‘The living treasure of heaven sent by the almighty God’.

From that day, the man started to frequently meet with the girl.

The little girl eventually opened up her heart and deliberately informed him about her personal situation.

Knowing that she was abused by her father, the man felt compassion towards her.

‘I want to rescue this little girl from her father’s prison’, it was written

‘I want to rescue this little girl from her father’s prison’, 

His main reason for this wasn’t because of the girl’s beauty. He had a young past where various matters led to him tearfully break up with his wife who secluded herself with his child. Soon after, he heard that the child committed suicide.

He saw in the little girl the figure of his daughter who passed away without receiving the least bit of warmth and affection from her parents. But he was wavering. He could easily predict the little girl running away from him if he tried to separate her forcefully from her father.

Carrying on with his unclear worries, the man kept on meeting with the girl for half a year, when one day, a funeral was held in the neighborhood.  He took a peek at the inside of the house and saw the little girl wearing her school uniform standing still.

A few days later, he was notified that she committed suicide.

Because of the remorse left in him, the man used his wealth and personal connections to obtain the girl’s body.

‘I regretted it. I had to rescue her as long as I was alive. Even if I was going to be known as a demon, even if I was going to fall to hell after my death and even if she was going to slaughter me after I resuscitate her. Her death is my fault. I’m nothing but a cowardly criminal. My hand is covered with blood and mud. If I can’t escape the path of eternal punishment, then I shall pile up my sins even more. After all, there is no water that can purify my very first sin.’

‘I regretted it. I had to rescue her as long as I was alive. Even if I was going to be known as a demon, even if I was going to fall to hell after my death and even if she was going to slaughter me after I resuscitate her. Her death is my fault. I’m nothing but a cowardly criminal. My hand is covered with blood and mud. If I can’t escape the path of eternal punishment, then I shall pile up my sins even more. After all, there is no water that can purify my very first sin.’

He planted the seed in her head while holding on to those emotions, brought her up by offering her flesh and blood, whispered his words overflowing with love to her and cut the root. He revived her not as a flower in a pot, but as his new human daughter.

Following the page mentioning him reviving the girl, the book became full of his delighted words until the end.

“Why did he stop writing here?”

“Because he wasn’t able to write anymore. Several days later, he sacrificed his body for the girl. He entrusted everything to his faithful maid and fell into an eternal sleep with a satisfied expression. His grave was his daughter’s stomach and the tomb is this old diary he left behind.

The daughter didn’t know that she was eating her step father’s flesh until later.”

Erisa gently pulled the diary from my possession and pressed it against her chest.

“It could be said that he raised the Shishikuibana as a form of atonement for his passing daughter. He wanted to make up for it by creating a new life from the Shishikuibana, despite knowing that his act defies God’s will. Or at least, that’s the idea you receive after reading this diary. The daughter inherited her father’s track and continued to offer the Shishikuibana to those who needed it, as if she was chasing after him.”

Erisa showed a gentle smile, just like the breeze that makes a flower’s petals dance.

“You know, it was my stepfather who gave me the name of Erisa. I forgot about my former one.”

It was the first time she showed it to me, her plaintive smile.

“So, you mean you were a Shishikuibana?”

“You’re as dull as usual, Kuuya. Can’t you at least realize something as obvious as this? Relating the Shishikuibana’s eating habit and the “cannibalism” I conduct?” Erisa pushed her hand against her lightly puffed chest.

“The Shishikuibana revives to its former appearance. It doesn’t rejuvenate nor does it age. As you can guess, my physical age stopped at thirteen years old.”

Knowing about Erisa’s background story, I somehow got the reason behind her lack of facial expressions. Her earlier severe life was more than enough to ruin her emotionally, and she was still affected by the same character. Even if that’s not the case, she ate her stepfather. The person who brought her back from the realm of the dead.

“There’s a maid mentioned in the dairy dismantling your father’s body, is she perhaps….”

“Yes, that’s me. Master gave me a strict order to do so,” wiping her hands after being done from the boy’s dismantling task, Kanade answered me with a bright smile.

“Kanade was both the maid and the assistant of my stepfather. She’s the only one who takes care of chopping up the bodies for the sake of his research and separate the meat from the bones for the Shishikuibana. In the end, he entrusted her to look after me as his last order. It’s quite possible that he taught her the process of dismantling because he was planning on sacrificing himself for me from the very start”

“That’s right, every day, Master brought with him a new corpse. Thanks to him I was able to learn new things. The extraction of blood, The correct way to remove the joints and the appropriate method to cook every single part. Thanks to master, I am now able to be useful for Miss”

“When he ordered you to dismantle a body for the first time, didn’t you refuse or try to run away?”

“Why should I think about something like that?” Kanade displayed a puzzled expression looking like a confused child.

“This girl’s morals are not functioning. She doesn’t recognize killing a person or dissembling a corpse as a wrong action. Something seemed to have happened in her past, but I don’t know the detail and I didn’t investigate about it. Her unique turn of mind was her qualifying asset for getting chosen by my father.”

The mystery of Kanade’s smooth skills was finally solved. She was dealing with human flesh long before Erisa was revived as a Shishikuibana. Thanks to her uncommon pattern of thinking, she was able to cheerfully fulfil her job as if she was playing with flowers. Her unwavering sincerity allowed her to be the perfect maid for Erisa.

“That was the truth behind me eating human flesh. The flesh is the factor connecting Shishikuibana and life. Thus it represents the only food allowing me to maintain my existence. The Shishikuibana’s constitution is constantly crumbling apart. Even at this very moment while I’m talking to you, my body is steadily approaching death. Therefore, Consuming human flesh is the sole way to regenerate my dying cells.”

“Is human flesh the only food you can eat? What’s going to happen if you stopped eating it?”

“I do eat different things, but that’s just in order to satisfy my tongue and appetite, it doesn’t help to maintain my body. If you cease providing the body with human flesh for a long while, your limbs will gradually start to rot from the tips then they will be accordingly torn off.

“The internal organs will dissolve like a decaying fruit. Next will be the end, no matter how much flesh you eat at that stage, it’s going to be too late. I need to run with all my might if I want to remain. As a life form, I’m bound to feed on human flesh for the rest of my life, until my life span comes to an end.”

“The rest of your life…”

“If only the Shishikuibana had a sly nature and enough physical strength to slaughter humans under the cover of night, then it would be much easier to guarantee our necessary food. Unfortunately, besides the fact that we consume flesh, our strength and intelligence are the same as an ordinary human, which I find to be unfair.”

Kanade was standing in the kitchen preparing Erisa’s dinner. She threw into the pot, cabbage, potato, onion, shallot, pieces of celery and human fingers. Today’s menu was the nightmare tasting home-made pot-au-feu. The secret ingredient was the nail’s dirt.

“Of course, Iruse Misaki is no exception.”

Erisa continues.

“It would be extremely irresponsible of you to turn her into a human and then tell her, ‘you’re free so now so go live your own life’. Releasing her means that you have to keep supplying her with human flesh exactly as you were doing so far. Of course, it’s up to you, whether you will force her to pay the cost of the food.”

“I told you I can handle it. I’m staying together with Misaki for her entire life and I wouldn’t let her soil her hands. Nothing will change; I will kill people to keep her alive if I have to.”

“You really have changed. To kill people. I wonder where did he go, that boy who had a pale face after witnessing Ando’s delivered corpse.”

[Pr: The author probably axed him cause his readers were complaining]

Erisa, resting her cheeks on her hand, held an amazed expression.

“Anyway, I will approve of it. I’ve already stated to you before, those who made it this far, wishing to fully revive the Shishikuibana weren’t that many. However, that majority chose to abandon the Shishikuibana because they couldn’t bear the constant sins of snatching away another’s life. If not, the deed of casually and cautiously murdering others only increases the small responsibility you previously own and makes it even greater. Considering this huge burden you will need to take, I wouldn’t really recommend you to–”

“You are opposing Misaki’s resuscitation, not because of those cliched ideas like burden or responsibility, but because of another reason.”

“What could you mean by that?”

“Isn’t it because it’s dangerous?” Erisa indifferently gazed at me.

I had this belief from a while ago.

Probably, Ando didn’t succeed at completely brainwashing the Shishikuibana.

I recall the eyes of his Shishikuibana when I was leaving.  Those were not the eyes of seeing someone off, nor were they the eyes of fear.

They were the eyes of resenting and hating Ando.

“If I told you it’s dangerous, will you give up reviving Iruse Misaki?”

“You’re not denying it, are you? Come to think of it, you didn’t deny knowing Misaki’s whereabouts when I asked you for them too. Erisa, you are naturally someone who doesn’t lie.”

“Don’t get the wrong idea. I didn’t say it was dangerous. If you cut the root, the Shishikuibana will acquire an ego and begin moving independently, meaning that you gave birth to a new life. It’s the same as recreating someone’s life once again. Needless to talk about flesh, you will have to carry both her past and future as well. That’s the resolution I’m implying.”

“It’s not a problem. Such a thing is not worthy to be called as resolution and that’s because I love Misaki.”

[PR: Funnily enough, he never considers her feelings.  For all we know, she’ll come back, tell him fuck you and kill herself once she finds out ise-whatever is dead]

Mentioning the word “love”, Erisa’s weakly blushing face held no fever. She froze her sight on me for a moment then gave up saying, “the phrase, young love makes you blind was true after all”.

“This is indeed a difficult path for a high school graduate to walk through, but if you’re willing to choose it that badly, then I don’t have the right to stop you from doing so. It wouldn’t matter to me either way if you get swallowed up to the depth of the swamp. But let me tell you one thing, Kuuya. No matter how cruel the end could be, don’t avert your eyes from it and face it without regret.”

“What do you mean?”

“Reality is not as sweet as you think, that’s what I mean.”

Those obscure words she unveiled gave me an anxious feeling.

She’s bad at lying, but on the other hand, she takes a long time before revealing the entire truth.

Perceiving my disturbance, Erisa brought back her usual cynical grin.

“A famous coach of a boxing champion said the same thing, ‘Don’t desire for too much. Corruption starts from that point’.”

Following it with a whispering voice, she said, “Although, this expression doesn’t hold any significance for the current you.”