Yukina’s memory of her mother was an indelible brand, a scar seared into her soul as deeply and irrevocably as a person’s first breath.

Her mother possessed narrow, almond eyes. A single, cold glance from them was enough to make Yukina’s heart feel as if it were being squeezed by an invisible, icy hand. She was a woman of tyrannical beauty, her elegance a weapon she wielded with devastating precision.

Yukina could still feel the polished wood of the floor beneath her feet on the day her mother brought a lacquer box of sweets to the children. “I have a number of sweets in this box,” she had announced, her voice as smooth and unyielding as polished stone. “Whoever guesses correctly may come forward and take one.”

Before the last syllable had faded into the silent room, a young Yukina, standing closest, had eagerly piped up, her small voice full of childish certainty. “Eight! There are eight! And they’re daifuku!” She could see them so clearly, eight perfect pink mounds dusted with white powder, nestled behind the transparent lid.

Her mother didn’t even grant her a glance. She lifted the lid, revealing the confections inside. “There are seven daifuku here,” she said calmly, her voice devoid of any emotion. “Whoever answers correctly may come forward and take one.”

Yukina froze, a wave of dizzying confusion washing over her. But… there are eight.

The first to react was Yukina’s only sister. Dressed in a violet kimono, she moved with the weightless, silent grace of a butterfly. She stepped forward, her head bowed. “There are seven daifuku.”

Her mother stared at her sister for a long, unnerving moment. If it had been Yukina under that intense gaze, she would have been trembling uncontrollably. But her sister simply stood there, her expression a perfect, unreadable mask of reverence.

Her mother granted her a daifuku.

With the precedent set, the other children from the branch families all echoed the lie—”seven”—and, one by one, received their reward.

Only Yukina remained, rooted to the spot, biting her lip so hard she could taste the metallic tang of blood.

Her mother’s gaze finally fell upon her, cold and heavy. “How many daifuku are there?”

“Eight!” Yukina didn’t dare look at her mother’s face. She fixed her eyes on the box, where only one sweet remained.

“Look at me.”

The command was absolute. Yukina forced herself to lift her head and meet those cold, almond eyes.

Her mother glanced around the room, and Yukina’s eyes followed. All the other children stood respectfully, clutching their sweets, not daring to move, their faces impassive.

Then, her mother picked up the last daifuku from the box and, in a single, delicate bite, consumed it. “There were only seven,” she said, her voice a final, crushing judgment.

Yukina would never forget the look her mother gave her in that moment. Whether it was contempt or simple, breathtaking cruelty, she could no longer say. She only knew that a profound chill had enveloped her, a cold that seeped into her bones and froze her heart solid.

Even now, years later, walking under the warm sun, the memory still sent a shiver of ice down her spine.

A maid led the way. Beside Yukina walked her cousin, two years her senior. After crossing a long, silent courtyard, the maid slid open the bedroom door.

The cloying, medicinal smell of incense immediately assaulted her nostrils, thick and suffocating.

Yukina looked with a storm of complicated feelings at the figure on the bed. The woman lying there was a stranger, a withered ghost inhabiting the shell of the terrifyingly beautiful mother she remembered.

“It hurts, it hurts so much! I need to pee, someone help me!”

A thin silk screen separated Yukina from the bed. The shadow of a maid flickered behind it, holding a chamber pot.

“It hurts, God, it hurts, it’s coming, get ready…”

Her mother’s agonized, animalistic wails filled Yukina’s ears, scraping at her nerves.

“Young ladies… if you would please wait outside for a moment,” a maid requested, her voice strained, ushering Yukina and her cousin into an adjacent room.

Yukina stopped the maid, her hand on the woman’s arm. “How is my mother’s condition?”

“The mistress is in good spirits, all things considered,” the maid replied, her eyes evasive.

“What did the doctor say?”

The maid shook her head, a small, fearful gesture.

“The doctor can’t do anything?!” Yukina’s voice rose with disbelief.

The maid’s voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. “The Mistress has not seen a doctor.”

“Why not!”

“The Mistress has contracted a strange illness,” the maid whispered, leaning closer. “She feels constant, excruciating abdominal pain and the urge to relieve herself, but nothing ever comes out. And her appetite… she eats constantly, as if she can never be full. And… she has not had a bowel movement in almost a month.”

“How can that be possible? Then why hasn’t she seen a doctor!” Yukina felt a surge of helpless, frustrated anger.

The maid lowered her voice even further, the words barely audible. “The Mistress has summoned a miko from the Ise Grand Shrine.”

“What did you say?”

“The mistress believes there is a yokai in her belly. A demon. She has asked a shrine maiden to perform an exorcism.”

“Absurd!”

Yukina was furious, but a profound sense of powerlessness washed over her. In this entire, massive Fujiwara clan, was there not a single person who could reason with her? But then she remembered her mother’s tyrannical will, a force that bent everyone to it, and she fell silent.

“Hungry, I’m so hungry!”

The cry, thin and desperate, pierced through the wall from the next room. Yukina couldn’t stand it any longer. Ignoring the maid’s protests, she pushed back into her mother’s bedroom. She saw her mother snatching rice balls from a maid’s hand and stuffing them into her mouth, one after another, with a desperate, frantic energy. Each was the size of a grown man’s fist. She ate twelve without stopping.

Yukina was horrified. She rushed forward to stop her, but a maid held her back firmly. “The Mistress has been like this for a month.”

Yukina was dumbfounded. Even a sumo wrestler would be full after five. Did her mother have a black hole in her stomach? She looked at her mother’s emaciated frame, like a dry twig that would snap at the slightest touch. The beautiful, formidable woman of her memory was gone, her face now the color of wet cement.

Not ten minutes later, her mother began to wail again. “So hungry, so hungry!”

A maid, already prepared, brought over a large bowl of chazuke—tea poured over rice—and began spooning it into her mother’s mouth with the mechanical efficiency of a factory conveyor belt.

Yukina felt numb. A terrifying thought took root in her mind: what if it was true? What if there truly was a monster in her mother’s stomach, a parasite stealing all the nourishment? How else could a person eat so much and waste away to nothing?

“The miko from the Ise Grand Shrine is here!” her cousin called out from the doorway.

Escorted by two maids, a woman in the white and red robes of a shrine maiden entered the room. To Yukina, she looked less like a maiden and more like an ancient witch from a dark fairytale. She was an old woman, perhaps in her seventies or eighties, her face a mask of deep wrinkles, like a cracked rock covered in moss.

A maid pulled back the silk screen. The miko stepped inside and began speaking to her mother in low, guttural tones.

Soon, the miko emerged. She lit a stick of incense on a nearby cabinet and ordered a maid to bring her a bowl of water, which she placed next to the burning stick.

Yukina stopped the maid. “I’ll do it.” She poured the water herself, placing it on the cabinet before stepping aside. She watched the miko with the cynical, detached eyes of someone observing a street charlatan, waiting to see what cheap tricks she would perform.

The miko clasped her gnarled hands together and began to chant, her voice a low, reedy drone.

Almost immediately, a bloodcurdling scream erupted from behind the screen. Yukina’s eyes shot to the bowl of water. The clear liquid began to slowly, impossibly, turn the color of blood.

Yukina was astonished. She had poured that water herself; there was nothing in it. How could it turn to blood?

With every line the miko chanted, her mother let out another piercing scream. The higher the miko’s pitch climbed, the sharper and more agonized her mother’s cries became.

As the miko finished with a final, high-pitched syllable that hung in the air like a death rattle—”Wuuuuu”—her mother suddenly fell silent.

The miko drew a short sword, no longer than a baby’s arm, from the folds of her robes. “There is a monster in her belly!” she declared, her voice filled with grim certainty.

Yukina found it laughable. She wasn’t sure if it was the miko’s dramatic tone or the absurdly childish word “monster.”

But her amusement vanished in a flash of pure terror. She saw it—a flicker of a black shadow, impossibly fast, darting across the room. She blinked, and it was gone. But she knew, with a certainty that chilled her to the bone, that she had seen it.

“Take this.” The miko gravely handed her the short sword.

Yukina took it, confused. It was heavy in her hand, a solid piece of unsharpened iron, no different from a crude, unfinished blank. “What do you want me to do?”

“Just dance with the sword.”

“Dance? How?”

The miko closed her eyes and did not answer.

Yukina frowned, her heart hammering against her ribs. Suddenly, she saw the black shadow flicker into existence again, silent and menacing. She gasped, and in the exact same moment, she heard the miko’s chanting rise in volume. To her horror, her own body began to move, to dance, entirely of its own accord, as if she were a puppet on invisible strings.

Her mother began to scream again, but this time, the thin, wailing cries of an infant were mixed with her own.

A strange, cold wind whipped through the bedroom, making the silk screens billow and snap like sails in a storm. The black shadow began to solidify, twisting and taking the form of a monkey-like creature with curling goat horns and sharp, glittering fangs.

Yukina screamed, a raw sound of terror, and the short sword flew from her hand, embedding itself deep into the wooden floor with a heavy thud.

At the same instant, the miko cried out and collapsed onto the floor, her robes drenched in sweat.

Covered in a cold sweat herself, Yukina frantically looked around. The shadow was gone. She looked at the collapsed miko with a newfound, terrifying sense of awe. “The monster… is it gone?”

The miko shook her head, speaking with great difficulty, her breath ragged. “The monster is too powerful. A male member of the family must wield the sword to drive it away.”

Everything that had just happened was so bizarre, so far beyond the realm of logic, that Yukina had no choice but to believe. It took her a long time to process the reality of it. Hearing the requirement for a male relative, she hesitated, then asked, “Must it be a male family member?”

The miko nodded weakly. Her cousin, understanding Yukina’s predicament, asked timidly, “Would my husband or my brother do?”

The miko shook her head again. “It must be a direct blood relative.”

“And if there are no direct male relatives to be found?”

The miko fell silent, but her silence was an answer in itself. Everyone in the room understood the dire implications. If the Old Mistress died, the Fujiwara family would be thrown into chaos. Her importance, her power, was absolute.

“We have to save the Mistress, no matter what!” her cousin cried out, her voice cracking with desperation as she pleaded with the miko.

“Without the Old Mistress, the Fujiwara family is finished,” a relative whispered, her voice trembling.

The house of Fujiwara is about to fall into chaos, another thought, her face pale.

Yukina’s mind raced, a frantic search through a barren family tree. The direct line was all female. The men had either died young or were long gone. Who could possibly drive out this monster?

Suddenly, an image flashed in her mind, sharp and clear: Yukishiro Haruka.

Could he do it?

It was a desperate, impossible gamble, but she had no other choice. With a deep breath, Yukina told them of Haruka’s existence.

The miko looked surprised at first, then fell silent, her wrinkled face thoughtful. After a long moment, she nodded. “It could work. The title, the name, is all that is needed. The monster is not human; it fears only the authority of the bloodline.”

Before Yukina could say anything else, she heard her mother’s weak, reedy voice. “Hungry, so hungry…”

The maids snapped back to reality and immediately moved to bring her food.

But her mother threw a tantrum, her voice surprisingly strong. “I don’t want you! Yukina? Yukina, are you out there?”

“I’m here, mother.”

“You bring it to me. Will you?”

Yukina ignored the tray of rice a maid offered her. Instead, she picked up a different plate, one holding a single, perfect daifuku, and slowly walked behind the screen to her mother’s side.

“Yukina,” her mother whispered, her voice laced with a pleading quality Yukina had never heard in her entire life.

“It’s time for your sweet.”

Yukina, her face a blank, emotionless mask, picked up the daifuku and held it to her mother’s lips. Her mother looked at her, her eyes clouded with a complex expression—was it regret, or guilt? The unshakeable tyrant of her memory was gone, replaced by this broken, dying creature.

Tears streamed down her mother’s sallow face as she ate the daifuku from Yukina’s hand. For a moment, the ravenous beast in her belly seemed to be sated by sorrow.

Suddenly, her mother’s hand shot out and gripped Yukina’s wrist. Her grasp was weak, fragile as a bird’s bones; Yukina could have easily pulled away. But she remained still, meeting her mother’s gaze calmly.

Her mother’s lips trembled, moving as if to speak, but in the end, no sound came out. Instead, she began to laugh, a low, hollow, rattling sound that chilled Yukina more than any scream.

“You must be careful of your sister.”

Her mother leaned closer, her breath smelling of decay, her voice a conspiratorial whisper that slithered into Yukina’s ear. “Lady Murasaki… she was the one who killed…”

Yukina’s eyes widened in disbelief. She thought she must have misheard.

Lady Murasaki was her sister’s formal name.

Her mother was saying that she… she had killed Haruka’s father with her own hands. But they had been so in love… it was impossible.

“Ah, daifuku.”

Yukina heard her sister’s light, musical voice from just behind her. She turned her head, her body stiff with a sudden, paralyzing dread.

Lady Murasaki stood there, smiling. She must have entered without making a sound. Dressed in a violet kimono, she looked like a beautiful, deadly butterfly. She glided forward, plucked the last daifuku from the plate—the one Yukina had brought for her mother—and ate it in a single, delicate bite. Staring at the now-empty plate, she smiled sweetly, her eyes crinkling at the corners.

“There are only seven daifuku.”