One of the men then brought forward a vessel resembling a sake cup, shallower and smaller than the previous bowl. A fleeting glimpse of the contents revealed a red liquid shaking back and forth.
The man forced the girl lying down on the mat to drink the liquid.
The girl’s eyes sprang open the instant she swallowed it, and she began to claw at her chest, groaning like an animal. With growls and gurgles slipping out of her mouth, she pressed down on her chest, inverting her body before cowering into a ball.
She clawed at the mat, scratching at it until the dirt beneath was visible.
“No dice, eh?”
“Nah, this might actually work out.”
Unconcerned with whispering men, the tormented girl groaned in pain even louder. All of a sudden, there was an explosive bang.
One of the dirt walls of the building collapsed.
“See, it worked. Her psychokinesis is stronger than it was a second ago.”
The child didn’t look at the collapsed wall at all, continuing to moan, cower, and pant heavily. However, the color began draining from the child’s hair, turning from black to white.
The men stared at the girl coldly and discussed her situation with utter detachment.
“Might be able to use her as she is now, but we should probably wait a bit longer next time, yeah?”
“Best to wait and see… Good for you, girly. You might get the chance to work hard for the Miyakoujis. Next up.”
The setting changed again.
This time, both the place and the people were completely different.
Now Miyo saw a tatami room. A highborn, well-to-do woman in a short-sleeve kimono was crying nonstop.
In front of her, a young child of about two years lay asleep on a mattress. There was a small bulge of skin on the child’s forehead, like a horn. Their face was pallid, and they were completely still. The occasional tremble of their eyelids showed there was still life in their chest.
“How long does my child have…?”
“Won’t even make it to ten, I’m afraid,” the man opposite the woman said, his brow wrinkling in sadness. Judging by the tools spread out before him, he appeared to be a doctor.
“No!” The woman’s weeping intensified. Outside the room, servants looked on, gossiping with one another.
“Poor thing, born an aberrant like that.”
“Dying before ten? It’s so unfair. Just how powerful was that curse?”
“A curse? I heard that aberrants will be born no matter what, so it’s got be divine punishment.”
“Giving birth to aberrants all while there’s fewer and fewer Gift users and arts practitioners—talk about cruel irony.”
“Aberrants.” “Curse.” “Divine punishment.” These words flew back and forth. The scene changed over and over again, and the last thing Miyo saw was…
“’Tis unfortunate, but it’s best to give up on ’em.”
…the child with a horn, who the doctor had said would never make it to ten. Some other person was taking the child away, and their mother broke down and cried, her face twisting in despair.
When Miyo had finished speaking, the mood in the room was so heavy as to be suffocating.
Komon had a stern look on his face, its color gone, and Kiyoka listened to Miyo speak with bated breath.
“…Um, were all the children who lost their lives Miyakoujis?”
“That they were.”
Komon bit his lip hard enough to draw blood, holding his head in his hands and barely managing to get his words out.
“Miyo, what you saw, without question, were scenes from the Miyakoujis’ past, along with several aberrant Miyakoujis.”
“Aberrant Miyakoujis…”
Miyo could tell that Komon was doing everything he could to maintain his composure as his face went pale.
Miyo still didn’t know what exactly the words meant or the true meaning behind the nightmare she saw. Still, when she imagined what it would be like if the family she was born into, the family she needed to be responsible for, had that sort of sordid past…
She couldn’t begin to fathom Komon’s agony.
“It’s our family’s eternal sin and shame. The others said as much, but this ain’t something to bring up to an outsider, branch family or no. Still, I can’t say the Kudous and the Earth Spider are completely unrelated, so I’ll tell you everything I know.”
Kiyoka spoke up, a stiff look on his face.
“I have heard about the aberrant Miyakoujis before. They’re failed Gift-users who are occasionally born to people in the Miyakouji line.”
“Failed.” She had heard the same word in the dream.
However, Miyo had never heard of aberrants, despite being born into a family of Gift-users. Typically, one was either able to awaken their Gift or not. In other words, aberrants must have been born only to the Miyakoujis.
“…Aberrant Miyakoujis are born with a small horn on their forehead. They’re extremely short-lived, and although they can use supernatural abilities, they sacrifice some of their vitality each time they do so, destroying their bodies…,” said Kiyoka.
“You hit the nail on the head. They’re also evidence of our sins.”
Continuing from where Kiyoka left off, Komon gradually began to relate everything to them.
“See, this whole thing started with the Earth Spider. Way back in the past, during a time when the Earth Spider was wreaking havoc in the old capital, the Miyakoujis, once a noble family famed for producing Gift-users, began researching methods of strengthening Gifts and Gift-users. Their goal was to defeat the Earth Spider with their enhanced abilities.”
How could the Miyakoujis give birth to more Gift-users? And what did they have to do to make their Gifts more powerful?
Gradually, the Miyakoujis looking into these questions began to mix their ends and their means together. Somewhere down the line, they lost sight of the fact that Gifts were meant for exterminating Grotesqueries, becoming obsessed with creating the strongest Gift-users for their own sake.
Since humans were the only living creatures with the capacity to wield Gifts, one could only research Gifts by conducting tests involving human beings.
Naturally, this led to the Miyakoujis carrying out experiments on live human subjects.
They administered drugs mixed with Grotesquerie agents to Giftless Miyakouji children, thinking it would force them to manifest Gifts. They also carried out procedures on children with weak Gifts in an effort to strengthen their abilities.
The Miyakoujis repeated this over and over, even when failure claimed the children’s lives. Yet as far as they were concerned, everything they were doing was morally justified.
“Then what I saw in Izuko’s dream…,” Miyo said, instinctively covering her mouth in horror.
Komon nodded weakly.
“Those must have been scenes of actual experiments.”
Apparently, the research got so extreme that some individuals cut ties with the family, disgusted that the Miyakoujis found nothing wrong with these inhuman acts.
“The Kudous are the descendants of those who left the family back then.”
“…Does that mean my own family is complicit in the Miyakoujis’ sins?”