The night was as still as water. Mei sat kneeling beside Izumi Kiyowa, and for some reason, listening to him speak brought her a strange sense of peace.
"Mr. Rengoku has helped us a great deal, but you heard him—he wants us to join the Demon Slayer Corps and fight those demons alongside him. I know he won't force us, but refusing would leave us with a debt of gratitude. Whether he asks for repayment or not, it's a debt we must eventually honor."
Hearing this, Mei tilted her head slightly in confusion. "If he doesn't expect us to repay him, why should we go out of our way to do it?"
Kiyowa knew that Mei had never received a proper education. Combined with the way Gyutaro had been treated all his life, it was impossible for her to have received much moral guidance. As a result, her worldview and values were still largely unformed.
"When someone is good to you, even if they seek nothing in return, you should offer a corresponding reward. This has nothing to do with what the other person wants; it has everything to do with your own character and integrity. It's okay if you don't understand right now. I'll explain it to you slowly over time."
Mei remained puzzled. "But doesn't that just make things more difficult and exhausting for you? If they don't want anything, it's much easier to just do nothing."
Kiyowa didn't find her questions tedious. He simply answered in a gentle voice, "If I thought that way, I wouldn't have stayed here today. You saved me today and said you didn't want anything from me, but I stayed anyway, didn't I?"
"You... when you put it that way, I suppose it makes sense. Then I'll do that too from now on. Is doing that... the 'right' thing?"
"At the very least, if you ask your own heart, it's the right thing."
"I don't really understand, but I'll do whatever you do."
Kiyowa looked at Mei's earnest little face and nodded slightly before continuing. "If you were to join the Demon Slayer Corps and fight those demons... would you be afraid?"
Mei fell silent. Her personality was resilient and strong-willed, but she couldn't bring herself to say she wasn't afraid. She could still vividly remember how her legs had turned to jelly just looking at the fragments of those disintegrating corpses. To fight monsters like that... she truly felt a sense of dread.
After a long silence, she whispered, "I'm scared... but if I'm with you, maybe I won't be so afraid."
"Why?"
"I feel like you can protect me."
"What about your brother?"
"He can protect me too, but... the feeling I get from you is different."
As she spoke, Mei instinctively averted her gaze. In the moonlight, a faint blush crept up her slender neck.
Kiyowa didn't push the subject. He wasn't dense; he could sense that Mei felt differently about him. However, Mei was only about ten years old. Though his body was a younger version of himself, his soul was that of an adult. It felt a bit... inappropriate. He decided he would wait until she reached her "cardamom years"—her mid-teens—before even considering such things.
He changed the subject. "If that's the case, then I suggest both you and your brother join the Demon Slayer Corps with me. Yoshiwara is not an easy place to make a living. You know that better than I do."
Mei nodded, her voice growing heavy. "Yes... because of the scars on his face, Brother is often beaten and insulted for no reason. Even now that he's grown taller, people still bully him. He's very good at fighting now, so fewer people mess with him, but even if he can beat people his own age, he can't beat the adults.
"Last time, he went to collect a debt for someone. He got the money, but he was beaten until he was covered in blood. He wouldn't even use the money he earned to buy medicine; he just spent it all on the house. If things keep going like this, his body won't hold out. I tried to convince him to work at the timber mill instead. He was worried about leaving me alone at first, but I was worried about him too. If he kept collecting debts, I was afraid he wouldn't survive the year.
"But I didn't expect that even though he was so careful to hide his movements, those bastards still found out he was gone. If it wasn't for you, today I might have..."
Mei trailed off, her eyes reddening, though she didn't let the tears fall. Before Kiyowa could say anything, it was as if her emotions had finally found an outlet. She began to pour out the hardships of the past years like beans from a jar.
"I'm going to tell you some secrets, but you can't tell my brother. He doesn't want me to go into those 'houses.' He wants to earn enough money for me to leave this place. But I know that if I leave and go out there alone, I might just die one day. I'm beautiful; if I went to one of those houses, I'd be a top-tier Oiran.
"Those Oiran have so much money. I thought that when the time came, I'd go there myself to support my brother. I heard from the people there that you can start receiving guests around twelve. I planned to go when I turned twelve—no matter how filthy it was, as long as I could give my brother a good life..."
Mei paused and suddenly leaned a little closer to Kiyowa. She carried a faint, pleasant scent. Her voice was now choked and raspy.
"I know that after saying this, you might hate me. You might think I'm just like those women in the brothels. But I don't want to be like that. It's just that if I don't do it, given my brother's personality, we won't survive. Because a madam from one of those houses told me once—as soon as I'm a bit older, I must go to her house. Otherwise, even if my brother had ten lives, he couldn't stop them.
"She's the kind of person who can make that happen. She has so many thugs. My brother would never let them take me, but I don't want him to be beaten to death. If he dies, I don't want to live either... Originally, I didn't care much about what happened to my body, but...
"But after today, I don't want to live like that anymore. I don't want to go to those houses. I want you to take me and my brother away from here. I want to live. I want to choose a clean path."
Kiyowa watched as tears finally escaped Mei's eyes, crystalline droplets sliding down her cheeks. As the tears fell near him, they caught the moonlight. He felt a pang of heartache and a heavy sense of reality.
The Upper Moon Six of Yoshiwara—the life they had lived was far more tragic than anything he had seen in the manga. For a ten-year-old girl to say such things... was it precociousness? Or was she forced to grow up by a cruel world?
Demons ate people, but was this society any different? Even a hundred years from now, would the world stop devouring the weak?
Kiyowa didn't want to see that happen. Perhaps he would do something about it. But for now, he simply wanted Mei to be able to live as a human being.
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