Moonlight rippled. The curtains at the top of the gold-and-silver pavilion hung in disarray.
Shin's arm was braced beside her ear, the two of them breathing the same air.
The clarity of the Saint's Corpse let him hold desire at bay — but in the same moment, a weight like the pull of fate poured into his mind at the point of contact, like a tide flowing in.
He hadn't forced himself on Yachiyo. Rather, in this moment, Yachiyo had completely opened the sealed, dust-covered chambers of her heart to him.
"My dear… mm—"
Yachiyo lay still beneath him, her hair gently dishevelled, her eyes no longer languid as before but filled now with a grief so saturated it could not dissolve.
As skin met skin and heat mingled with heat, as her defences fell to their lowest point, Shin fed her the St. Trina's Nectar and linked their sleeping minds — and in the most direct, unmediated way possible, he witnessed the memories that belonged to Yachiyo.
— Or rather, to "Kaguya."
The girl in those memories was virtually identical to the NEET princess in the group chat. Or rather — she was her.
She was the Moon Princess, the deity who commanded the power of "Eternity," the only being in the entire Lunar Capital capable of suppressing "impurity."
And with the cruel irony that only fate could arrange, the Hourai Elixir that generated impurity in the first place was something her own power of eternity had been used to create.
So Kaguya had been exiled.
Cast down from the heavens into the mortal world, sealed within bamboo as her punishment. But Kaguya didn't mind. She intended to find her own amusement in the dust of the human world.
The bridal selection? A way to pass the time.
The Five Impossible Tasks? An opportunity to watch these pitiful, ridiculous mortals embarrass themselves.
She had expected to run through her usual routine — toy with every suitor, wait out her sentence, then put on the Feather Robe with all the enthusiasm of a tool being picked up for its purpose, and be taken back to the Moon.
She had lived through this story many times. Every hundred thousand cosmic cycles, she lived it once — after all, she was an eternal, ageless goddess.
But this time, the story was different.
One day, a peculiar young man who had absolutely no business being part of her story turned up in her bamboo forest — accompanied by a Fairy Knight in full armour.
"Are you the legendary Kaguya-hime who's supposed to be impossibly beautiful?"
The young man and the fairy cut open the bamboo and set her free. Kaguya was curious about where they had come from.
She heard about the "chat group" from them, and snorted that it sounded like a cheap plot device from a third-rate story. But whatever else she might say about it, at least she was finally seeing something genuinely new.
No bewitchment. No hidden scheme. For the first time in her many repetitions of this story, the legendary Kaguya-hime chose not to follow the script — chose not to be found by Taketori no Okina, and instead turned toward these two strangers from elsewhere.
In a ramshackle bamboo hut outside Heian-kyo, they had hot pot and sang songs, trading stories about all the marvels and curiosities the stuffy old gods of the Lunar Capital had never heard of.
It didn't take long for Kaguya to realise this young man was genuinely different.
He was powerful — and yet he looked after the weak.
And he was willing — on the basis of a throwaway joke she'd made about not wanting to go back to the Moon — to travel the length and breadth of the country with his companion to track down those ridiculous Five Impossible Treasures.
He brought back the Buddha's stone begging bowl. He retrieved the jeweled branch of Hōrai. He took the jewel from a dragon's neck. He completed, piece by piece, the tasks that belonged to her story.
"Here, take them. With these, if those Moon people come to take you back, you can resist them."
"And if I'm not mistaken, that Yagokoro Omoikane should be on your side, right? Shouldn't be a problem."
Kaguya thought that this young man and his companion were genuinely interesting.
If only I could also be in that "chat group," she thought. To travel across infinite worlds and seek endless possibilities — rather than sitting in this one universe watching it cycle through heat death and rebirth, over and over again.
And so the story unfolded as it was meant to. When the Lunar Capital's emissaries descended on their five-coloured clouds bearing the supposed divine mandate, what greeted them was a rebellion Kaguya had been quietly plotting.
She didn't see the Yagokoro Omoikane the young man had spoken of — but the three of them fought together, and it was a brilliant, radiant battle.
The young man and the Fairy Knight held the front line. The fairy, taking her dragon form, roared and shattered the clouds. The young man's iron fists crushed the ceremonial headpieces of the envoys.
Kaguya wielded the treasures the young man had gathered for her, sending those high-and-mighty emissaries scrambling back in disarray — crawling and stumbling all the way back to that pale, cold satellite.
They had won.
Afterward, the three sat around a bonfire, thinking this was what "a perfect ending" looked like — thinking this was the story's new conclusion.
What they forgot was that this land, in the end, belonged to the gods. It was their garden, and the rules were theirs to make.
That same night, as they celebrated, a cold, vast, contemptuous sound came rolling down from the moon above — ancient and distant, as if it had echoed through all of eternity:
[KAGUYAHIME — RETURN AT ONCE!]
No mortal could understand the power behind those words.
The entire Japanese archipelago froze in that moment as though trapped in transparent amber.
It was the power of the divine authority, belonging to one of the Three Noble Children, second to none.
And accompanying that contemptuous sound, a vast pillar of pale divine light came crashing down from the surface of the Moon.
Something in the deepest void of space had moved to intercept it — blocked off the overwhelming majority of it. But the thousandth part that leaked through was still enough to break this world apart.
No earthquake. No tsunami.
When that sliver of light swept across the land, the food disappeared.
Rice stalks turned to ash. Fish and shrimp dissolved into nothing. Every living creature — birds, beasts — vanished in that instant, utterly and completely.
The gods had not killed. They had simply revoked this land's capacity to sustain human life.
The divine light hadn't touched the three of them. But the hunger and terror it left behind blanketed the mortal world like a shroud.
The young man and the Fairy Knight could have ended it there and gone home. But the young man insisted they stay.
He said: if they could hold out for fifteen days, support would arrive.
Fifteen days without food or water — what mortal could survive that?
Kaguya watched. She watched those humans who had once praised her beauty turn to devouring one another. She watched Heian-kyo, the great imperial capital, become a blood-soaked hell.
And so Kaguya considered, at length, returning to the Lunar Capital — asking Lord Tsukuyomi to lift this punishment.
Even if it meant being used again as a tool to scour away "impurity" for uncountable ages, until the sun collapsed—
But the young man, who had somehow sensed what was in her heart, made a decision she never could have anticipated.
The young man was an undying Ultimate Being. His flesh held the potential for infinite regeneration and harboured energies beyond imagining.
That young man — that absurdly, stupidly kind young man — picked up a short blade, opened his own throat and body, and offered himself as an inexhaustible source of nourishment — distributing his own flesh and blood as food to those starving, wretched people.
"It's fine, Kaguya. I can't die anyway. It hurts for a moment and then it passes."
The look on the young man's face as he smiled — that expression moved Kaguya's heart more deeply than any divine punishment ever had.
She realised she had fallen for this young man. Perhaps it was those handsome features. Or perhaps it was that quality in him, as constant as the moon itself, that never changed.
He converted his flesh and blood into grain and game, distributing it to the starving. He saved a piece of the world.
His flesh regenerated without end — like the immortality Kaguya had drunk from the Hourai Elixir, but without the impurity that made it fatal to consume.
But then, things took a turn she had not foreseen. Kaguya found she had overestimated human nature — and overestimated the young man's limits—
The memory plunged into its deepest layer, and stopped.
Shin's eyes snapped open. His gaze returned to the divan.
Despite the Nectar, Yachiyo's arms were still wound tightly around his neck, quietly insisting to him that everything that had just happened between them was real.
He went still.
He finally understood why there was no hostility in Yachiyo's eyes — only love.
It wasn't humanity she wanted to destroy. She wanted to destroy the cause that would lead the young man toward tragedy — because if she selfishly refused to return to the Lunar Capital and tried to steal a life in the mortal world by his side, that tragedy would follow.
She had even accounted for the possibility that he wouldn't agree — and had sealed away her other self. That way she could follow the emissaries back without a shred of longing, and the disaster that came after would never happen.
There were still gaps, of course. In the deepest layer of Yachiyo's dream, she appeared not to be a member of the chat group. And then there was the question of why — in what was clearly a Touhou-adjacent world — the Yagokoro Omoikane who should have stood with Kaguya in her rebellion was nowhere to be found.
"My dear…" The sleeping Yachiyo murmured.
Dreams had woven through each other. In the aftermath of that intensity, the Nectar having slipped into her unguarded, Yachiyo's icy tears fell on Shin's chest. She pressed herself against him as though she wanted to dissolve into his body.
Shin was silent for a long time.
[Spreading Witch Factors (temp account)]: @Moon Princess
[Spreading Witch Factors (temp account)]: Your Highness, you can stop sitting in that bamboo now.
[Spreading Witch Factors (temp account)]: I think you already know what to do.
To be continued…
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