Chapter 15

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The flow of the story in the prequel "Sad Tale of a Fox Child" to "Firefly of the Dark Night (Yamiyo no Hotaru)" is as follows.

The youkai fox, who had been torn to pieces by the exorcists who guarded the capital, somehow survived by splitting her own soul into dozens of pieces. While the incarnations were devoting themselves to cannibalism in and around the capital, there was one special incarnation that was separated from the others. That is herself as a 'half-youkai', the source of her existence.

She was Kitsuri Shiroki. She wasn't just a simple half-Youkai. To be more precise, she was an extremely rare half-youkai who had reached the status of a calamity youkai.

This is something that Azuma Hibari would not have expected. Well, in the beginning, there are not many half-youkai, and half-youkai are persecuted by humans and easily eaten by youkai.

 Besides, very few half-youkai have ever become full youkai, let alone calamity youkai, nor have there been any reports of what would happen to such a being if it were to split its body. More than anything else, Azuma Hibari, as a half-youkai of a monster raccoon, can see through the lies and acts of her opponents, which is why half-youkai was able to escape from her grasp.

Well, as a matter of fact, the white fox girl, Shiro, has not lied in any way, nor has she harbored any evil thoughts. She is essentially just an innocent half-youkai child, stripped of her viciousness as a calamity youkai, without the memory of her own past atrocities.

At the same time, however, she is undoubtedly the offspring of the nine-tailed fox, Kitsuri Shiroki. Therefore, the other incarnations knew where she was. Although the rest of the incarnations had initially planned to leave this pathetic incarnation behind...

As a half-youkai, this root incarnation holds the memories and consciousness of a girl, but the other incarnations, which are youkai, are distant from her. For them, who have literally overcome difficulties to the point of vomiting blood and have become vicious youkai, the vulnerable, cowardly, whiny, and weak self that they used to be when they were simply exploited and oppressed is just a shameful part that they would like to get rid of. Normally, they would have had no problem taking this opportunity to detach themselves from this very existence and leave her to die in the wild somewhere. In fact, in the novel, she was recently split and her consciousness and memory are still vague, and as a result of her careless wandering around the new city at night, she is found by hoodlums and executed by them. Originally, she should have died there.

However, in the current situation, when the half-Youkai girl, who was subjected to the same unjustified malice as in her childhood when she first killed a person, was about to die, she was saved by Azuma Hibari and became a new resident of the orphanage... that was the beginning of a new tragedy.

Anyway, think about it. Which is more useful as food for the youkai who are trying to regain their power, a human or a half-youkai? Especially when there is the head of the orphanage, who at one time was the head of the Onmyo Dormitory for various reasons. Such a person would be more interesting for the incarnation that was once thrown away.

And then, the bad luck piled up. Azuma Hibari had been peace-struck, but that's not all. Well, to be precise, it is also true that she was not thinking well since she was targeted based on her observation of those misfortunes and circumstances, but from the perspective of a third party who knows the whole story, the tragedy was indeed the result of a series of bad luck.

The conditioning of the boundary specified by Azuma Hibari was long pointed out in the comment threads and discussion sites as a mistake made by too much peace of mind, and it was criticized, but it became less so after the settings were further disclosed in the subsequent fan books and other external works. It turned out that her behavior in 'Firefly of the Dark Night (Yamiyo no Hotaru)' and its related works were not based on a carefree mindset, at least not as much as some people in the community had suggested.

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