Chapter 43 Let’s Wreck the Seiryuusai Festival with Evil Dragon! ④
Edited by: Kanaa-senpai
The Seal Dragon Festival—Fūryūsai—was, at least on paper, meant to honor the long line of Heads who had spent their lives sealing away the Evil Dragon. The Shiryuin Clan had poured centuries of blood into that barrier, generation after generation of Main Family Heads sacrificing their lives to keep it standing.
This whole ceremony was supposed to be their memorial… and yet, it had become something so much bigger. With over two thousand guests from across Japan and even abroad, the sheer size of it screamed how much sway the Shiryuin name carried.
"This year's guest list looks bigger than we expected," I muttered.
"Yes," my attendant said quietly. "Because of the recent craze for the Bloodline Purification Rite, even unborn babies have to be added to the guest registry."
Normally the Seal Dragon Festival only drew about a thousand people, but this year that number had doubled—because, by tradition, pregnant women counted as two.
And with the Bloodline Purification Rite spreading like wildfire among exorcists, the number of expectant mothers had spiked absurdly high. The children born from those close-blood unions radiated from their mothers like tiny sparks of power, and somehow every woman in exorcist circles of childbearing age—whether barely out of childhood or already past their prime—was pregnant.
Some even carried infants in their arms while sporting new swollen bellies beneath their kimono. It was a literal baby boom, the Rite's "success" flaunted in every glowing spiritual rank the newborns already carried like badges.
Beside me, Seiichi—the Branch Family Head—watched the gathering women with the same expression someone might wear looking at something rotten and crawling. He knew as well as I did that every single one of them had conceived through the Rite, and his face was pale like he was fighting back nausea.
"You good?" I asked softly. "I know. It's terrifying… but for those of us in the exorcist world, it's necessary."
"I understand," he said through his teeth. "But the fact that the Bloodline Purification Rite has reached even the Branch Family now… I can't call this anything but madness."
Festival lanterns strung overhead bathed the plaza in a blaze of warm light. The steady pulse of festival drums echoed, and the guests smiled, letting themselves sway with the rhythm.
But to Seiichi's eyes, the women swaying along were all heavy with sin, ripe fruit gone rotten. Dressed in bright silk, bellies bulging, arms wrapped around babies—they seemed perfectly ordinary to outsiders from the Financial World who didn't know exorcist ways, but to him it was an obscene garden of corruption.
As Branch Family Head, he was supposed to be the sane one, the rational anchor. And to someone like him, the Rite was something far beyond the threshold of morality, something grotesque.
Still… in this chaotic modern Japan, where the heavens themselves had gone unstable and chimimōryō [T/N: malicious spirits from Japanese folklore] roamed freely again, the Rite might actually be a miracle.
If you ignored ethics, it was almost too useful. The children born from it had the kind of spiritual potential you normally only saw once in ten years. The taboo at their roots didn't change the fact that they were prodigies—and in a world where power meant survival, nobody in the exorcist world could afford to pass up that advantage.
The fights against youma were life-or-death. If the Rite could lower the death rate of children from the great houses, then even if it meant inbreeding… no one would hesitate. Pure bloodlines directly tied to spiritual strength, so the prestigious families had sunk into it without resistance.
Personally, I didn't care how rotten they got, as long as they kept producing strong fighters to keep modern Japan from collapsing. Seiichi understood that too—he just couldn't stop it, even if it spread through the Shiryuin Clan's Main and Branch lines like a disease.
"Whether it's madness or not," I said, "any family that refuses the Bloodline Purification Rite will definitely lose their power."
"I know," he hissed. "But that someone like Mikoto-sama could have created such a disgusting art—!"
He bit off the rest of his words just in time. Outwardly, Main Family members outranked us, so the Branch Family Head wasn't allowed to speak ill of them. All Seiichi could do was swallow his words and glare, jaw tight.
"The Bloodline Purification Rite reliably creates prodigies," I said. "In a world that values strength above all, where power means authority… there's no stopping something like that."
The exorcist world was still stuck in a primitive structure where the strong ruled, where that was simply considered natural. You couldn't survive fighting youma without strength, and you couldn't organize warriors like that without building hierarchies of absolute force. If you didn't put the strongest at the top, the structure collapsed. It was just the obvious result of a world run on the violence of slaying and sealing monsters.
"Long time no see, Head-sama!"
"Mn—Minoriko, is that you? You've grown."
"I'm in my growth spurt! Minoriko's gonna keep growing bigger and bigger from here on!"
A bright voice cut through my thoughts, and I turned to see Raihou Minoriko dash toward me. Thirteen, wrapped in a yellow kimono that practically glowed under the lanterns, her skin tanned golden-brown against her soft black hair, eyes sparking with life.
She was the young daughter of a noble family famous for their ability to command lightning, and after her father had died fighting a youma, her grandfather Raizou had come out of retirement to lead their house again. She was also one of the potential brides the Shiryuin Clan had been watching, though to me—having known her since we were kids—she'd always felt more like a lively little sister than anything else.
Maybe that was why, after all this endless parade of decadence and corruption, she felt like a splash of cool water right to my face.
"…Hey, Minoriko. Don't tell me… you're pregnant too?"
"Yes! I'm sorry it took me this long to report, but… I, Raihou Minoriko, am now carrying the child of the current head of the clan—no, of Grandfather Raizou himself!"
"…what."
The word slipped out before I could catch it. Not the host's polite voice, not the priest's measured tone—just me. Just my plain, stunned voice. Minoriko beamed as if she'd just announced she'd passed an exam, her hand shooting up in a peace sign, eyes shining. My mind scrambled, trying to catch up, trying to arrange the pieces into something that made sense.
"You mean… you're pregnant with Raizou-san's child. Your grandfather's child."
"That's right! Thanks to the Bloodline Purification Rite invented by the Shiryuin Clan, I was able to safely receive Grandfather's baby!" She stroked her stomach with both tenderness and pride, her smile like a flower in full bloom.
I swallowed hard. "But… how? I mean, why him? Raizou-san, of all people…?"
The image of my grandfather loomed in my head, the man who embodied strictness itself, hard on himself and harder on everyone else. The thought of him breaking that unbending, old-fashioned shell… of him laying hands on his own granddaughter—it was impossible. At least, I'd thought so. Even if the Rite was spreading like wildfire, the Raizou I knew would never have…
But Minoriko only pressed a finger playfully to her lips, her other hand still resting over her belly. "It's a secret! All I can say is that neither Grandfather nor I could resist the charm of the Purification Rite."
"The charm of… bearing a strong child," I muttered, bitter heat in my throat.
"That too! But if a strong baby had been born, then Father's tragedy would never have happened!" Her smile didn't falter, but the shadows beneath it were real enough. She knew what it meant to be weak in this world. She'd lived it more than most, the endless funerals of the Exorcist families, the way the weak were erased by the jaws of yōma. She laughed now, but that laughter had been carved out of pain. It was because she understood that pain so deeply that she and Raizou had stepped across the line, into that taboo.
Talent meant survival. Bloodline meant strength. That truth pressed on every noble family like a curse, until this Rite—the so-called salvation—had become the most seductive poison. It promised hope, and dragged everyone into rot.
"Head-sama, it is time," one of the attendants murmured at my side. "The guests from finance and politics are waiting to greet you."
"…already?" I forced myself to nod. "Of course. I'll attend to my duties as host." Better to talk to normal people, the kind who measured worth in coin and favors, not in bloodline rites and incestuous pacts. I turned away, clutching to that tiny comfort, but not before Minoriko called after me, waving both hands like a child at a summer festival.
"The other bride candidates too! They're all pregnant—by their fathers or their brothers! So, Taneharu-oniichan, you should find someone in your own family and be happy too!"
Her voice rang out like some twisted blessing, a farewell gift as I walked away. My lips pulled into what must have looked like a smile, but it felt stiff, carved, fake, a mask plastered over my face. Behind it, my chest burned.
Yaten… hurry. Hurry and smash this insane festival to pieces. For the first time in my life, I prayed—truly prayed—for the end of a thousand years of tradition. For the end of this madness.
Notes:
• Seiichi – Branch family head, loyal but quietly disturbed by the clan’s decline. Cautious, more grounded.
• Mikoto – Eldest sister, beautiful, elegant, secretly obsessive and unhinged pure-blood supremacist. Wants to monopolize Inji’s “seed” to strengthen the clan.
• Minoriko – Cheerful 13-year-old Raihou heir; lightning talent; Inji’s childhood friend; pregnant with grandfather Raizou’s child via Bloodline Purification Rite
• Raizou – Stern elderly Raihou clan head; lightning Exorcist; grandfather of Minoriko; used Bloodline Purification Rite with her to preserve clan
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Edited by Kanaa-senpai.
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