Again. This has been another one of my storiews I've left on the backburner for a while. Please forgive the delay with this update. It might be a while before the next one so maybe read the original ROTEN to tie you over for a while. For now though, please enjoy this chapter!


Chapter 4: Stain your Self

Ugly.

Wretched.

Abhorrent.

Corrupted.

Grotesque.

Monstrous.

Those would be words I would be using more often than not from now on. Words that I would be forced to describe myself with from now on. Words that people would surely cry out – among some more colourful vocabulary – if they could see me.

Although I am a feaster of human souls, those creatures I once acquainted myself with are blessed in a way. For they will never have to confront the horrid menace that will rip apart their existence and snatch their life. It will be a painful, but swift death of ignorance. Autopsies would label it under 'spontaneous body rupture' or merely 'unknown.'

I wish I could weep at what I am now.

But the tears no longer shed. Not when hunger drives my will every day.

How many had I eaten now? It sounds so trivial now. Humans were petty things to be eaten now. They provided me with sustenance and filled the empty hole where my heart had abandoned my cause. After Yamada and the woman, I had my fill from an oafish businessman leaving a bar. I would have called him 'Yopparai' for his drunken totter – his real name mattered to me no more. Yopparai filled my bloated belly for the remainder of that first night.

By the second day I had taken three more lives – or rather three more meals. A pair or old men jogging in their early morning routine gave me a much needed breakfast hit. Then I had to wait until sunset for my next opportunity to feed; that came in the form of a delinquent spraying graffiti under a lonesome bridge. Even that boy didn't really deserve my punishment, but he had been chosen as prey for that night.

The more I ate, the less I began to feel guilt or remorse for what I had done. Do people really shed tears for the cow they ate last night? Do they build a shrine in honour for the chicken or pork that was sacrificed in order to fill their bloated stomachs? Do they ever think twice before picking that lobster in the window – wrapping his fate within the acids of their stomachs? I doubt it.

That's what humans – or perhaps more accurately – their souls, had been demoted to for me. These two-legged cattle roaming in their train-tracks of life, were the livestock ready and at my disposal like a gigantic platter. A grotesque and gluttonous way to put them but alas that was their reality, a reality only I was unfortunate to know.

By the third night I had eaten five more. By the fourth night eight. By the fifth night ten had featured on my platter. By a weeks passing, I had just about devoured enough to fill a community hall.

These sort of figures would be considered a massacre in the eyes of the concerned public. But they had no idea that all these mysterious and often violent looking deaths were all connected by the thread of my drool.

What the hell was I saying? This was how I thought and reacted now. A blood-lusting killer, a senseless cannibal.

But I am a beast. I am a behemoth that walks the nights. This was my punishment handed down by the Shinigami. Forever caged inside this form, cursed to live and feed on the lives of innocents. Perhaps those legends about river monsters that suck on the souls of children were not so fanatical after all.

By the close of the second week, I stopped counting.

The hole in my heart was persecuting me with pain. I knew that meant it was time to go foraging again for more souls.

One of the things I began to notice through my unconscious playing with food was that I could extract the souls from humans before eating them. This saved a rather violent looking death for the human and prevented the otherwise less desirable scenario of a panic-stricken public. Once I had mastered the technique with my bone-thin, probe-like claws I could at least offer my meal enough respect of keeping their physical body relatively intact through death. Of course I had robbed them of the pleasures of an afterlife, much like the one onee-san is surely enjoying, but this was as much compromise as my soul-addicted self could offer for now.

That was, until I met another creature who was looking for souls.

The hollow had a spiny body which rode all the way down to a legless tail. His upper body was much broader than his lower parts, and had thick, grey, tendon like arms. Whilst this creature was as wretched and monstrous as myself, at least his bony white face seemed more conceptual: pentagonal shaped with a sharp pointed nose and tubular white dreadlocks for hair I imagine. A lower jaw stretched from underneath his mask-like face and revealed a pair of tusks. How he could physically contain those long and precarious instruments was something only an expert of our kind could know. But as he was yet the only other 'lowly hollow' I had come across, I was still very much in the dark about these creatures

He slithered around on his tail, like a standing snake, searching the streets for some delicious souls. As difficult as it was with this bloated form, I tried to remain concealed from his sight as he ventured into the sleepy suburbs of Kanagawa, finding a soul that would fill his empty chest for one more night.

There's that biological principle where the prey who dwell at the bottom of the food chain are numerous and that their predators reduce in number until you reach the apex predator – the king who sits atop the food chain alone. I wonder just how many of us hollow even exit if this rule applies to us? If we're born from those humans whose souls have been left to rot on earth, then surely there must be a lot of us. But what happens to the humans we eat? Do they get digested, replenished and returned to the ecosystem of living and dead souls? If we just keep eating humans won't we eventually run out of stock before they can breed more of their kind ('their kind'...I suppose I really am no longer human...)

I always wondered if lions eat other lions in their pride when there are no more gazelles. Or if wolves savaged each other to get through a harsh and desolate winter.

What would a hollow taste like anyway?

His back is curled down as he takes up his meal. His vertebrae stare at me like a row of threatening needles. I guess this creature had evolved with a useful defence mechanism.

But I could see the remainder of his back is made of supple flesh. I could use my weight to my advantage and take down this lanky beast.

With this, I was living not only in a world beyond mankind, but a social order beyond mankind's. This was the world of 'hunt or be hunted', 'kill or be killed', 'devour or be devoured'.

Why then, had I not anticipated that this prey would turn around and, unlike the human fodder, fight back?

Swipe.

"GRAOW!"

Shit.

The creature had some strength contained in those arms as he now had me pinned to the ground, his jaw dislocating and lowering with drool oozing from his tusks. The beasts drool felt hot against my deformed equivalent of a face. I cringed in irony at this monster.

He had just as much as much stake to live and thrive in the jungle of undead as I had. He was pumping as much adrenaline through those mutated veins as I was. Whatever his cause or purpose – it surely must have been as just as mine.

No wait...

Negako-nee-san...

My sister...

I still.

Just for a little longer I must...

Kick.

Push.

Leap.

Thrust.

Stab.

Wrench.

Kill.

Three moves, three pulses of blood throughout my body. Three agonising glimpses, teetering between prosperity and destruction.

I had won my meal for tonight.

But as I peeled back that shell of a mask and scooped out this hollow's remains with my proboscis-like beak, I knew that the next night, or the following nights from here on out, may produce a different outcome.

It was for this reason that I enjoyed my dinner tonight. The soul of a hollow seemed to nourish that empty void far more than a meagre human soul ever could.

If I had any more doubts about my form, they were sealed within my stomach by dawn.

"Well, I thought I was in for a double job today but I guess you already took care of that half."

My most satisfying meal had only just finished before I was interrupted by a human voice. But humans cannot see me, which means that voice must belong to-

I turn and discover black robes flowing in the morning breeze. As the glint of a katana invades my eye, the man who sent me to Hell offers me a winking smile.

"Yo! Looks like you turned into that lowly hollow afterall, Miss."


Yumeko has devoured what will surely not be her first and only hollow...That all of course depends on what this latest encounter has in store for her. Will the man who cut her soul chain and drove her to become a ravaged devourer of souls - the 'lowly hollow' - be any more forgiving for the Mourning Bird this time around? Find out in the next chapter!