The Climax of Holy Sacrifice (3)
"No, that's—"
"Just hold on a second. Don't say anything yet."
Yuria cut me off and fell silent, working through the situation on her own. After a long stretch of thought, her cowlick shot straight up in shock, and the fluffy fox-tail anal plug nestled in her rear gave a little twitch of its own.
"Cali… you were Artist Siwoo?"
"…Yeah."
I'd already spilled everything. Keeping up the lie any longer would have been stranger still, and it risked spawning some fresh, even weirder misunderstanding. So I simply nodded.
Her face only looked mildly curious, but her hair and that anal plug told a different story — she was thoroughly stunned.
"Honestly, the way you always worked so hard while hiding what you were actually doing… I did suspect you might be drawing manga under another name."
"So you did suspect…"
"But I never once imagined you were Artist Siwoo. Should I be calling you amazing, or… wait. Siwoo wasn't a girl?"
"As you can see, I'm a guy."
"I always thought Siwoo-chan was some cute little girl, so of course I assumed she was female."
…That brought back a certain sad misunderstanding I'd managed to forget. Still, she didn't doubt me or dig into any prejudices. She just nodded along faster than I'd expected, and that was a relief.
"Do Senpai and Orca know?"
"They do. Those two already found out."
"Figures. You seemed to work on stuff at the club sometimes. I guess I'm the late one."
"Ahaha… If you could keep it quiet too, I'd appreciate it."
"Of course I will. You don't want it getting out, right?"
"Yeah."
Even back when our club did that collaborative piece, she'd apparently already guessed I was operating in secret with some serious skill. Finding out I was a bigger deal than expected had just surprised her a little. No matter how carefully I tried to hide it, the fact that I was active at all had left traces. Keeping the truth from Yuria had mostly been inertia more than deliberate secrecy — I hadn't been rigidly careful about it. So it wasn't that big a problem. She wasn't going to blackmail me with the information. If anything, it would make concentrating on work in the club room easier. The only real catch was that every time I released a new title, Yuria would know it was mine while she read it.
"Anyway — so the actual Artist Siwoo who drew this, meaning you, Cali, has no idea what's going on?"
"Right. Which is why I'm completely thrown right now."
I'd just drawn a normal manga. Why something like this was happening was beyond me. The way mana was involved suggested a connection to magic, but even the people left with the tattoos on their bodies didn't know the reason.
Why is this suddenly happening now, of all times?
When only the previous work had been published, countless people had worn the womb tattoo stickers without a single problem. And Yuria had used a sticker she'd bought back then — the manufacturing process hadn't changed. It was the exact same product. The only difference was that everything shifted after Hwashin Wedding came out…
"So the cause is Hwashin Wedding?"
"…Probably."
But Hwashin Wedding was just an ordinary published manga. Yes, it revealed that the mark was a curse, and that some curses could be accepted by applying a tattoo sticker — but that was just setting. Story material. And yet people who read it had actually become able to accept the curse. Whether it truly mortgaged a piece of their soul, I couldn't say. At minimum, though, the lewd side effects that triggered when the curse activated were firing exactly as written.
"Ah — wait, no."
There was a flaw in that reasoning. I still couldn't be sure the phenomenon only hit people who'd read the new work. It might activate for anyone who applied a womb tattoo, whether they'd read it or not. Jumping to conclusions would be a mistake.
"I honestly have no idea how to handle this."
"Why do you have to 'handle' it at all?"
"What?"
"I've been wondering since earlier. Why are you trying so hard to fix this, Cali?"
"Because it's dangerous. It's a curse."
Yuria herself had just suffered firsthand from being exposed to it. Why was she so calm about this? Now that I knew I was part of the cause, looking for a solution was the obvious next step.
"Hmm. But the manga already told people what kind of power the curse has and what effects it brings. They stuck it on anyway. Isn't that on them?"
"…You could look at it that way, but there's also common sense. Who would ever think a simple sticker would turn into a permanent curse branded into their body?"
It might work as an excuse, but I couldn't seriously accept it. At the very least, I needed to find the reason and a way to keep it from becoming permanent. Experiencing the tattoo's effects was fine — that was free choice. Forcing a lifelong application just because someone tried it once was not the kind of reader participation I wanted. Liking my work for a little while shouldn't leave them with a brand that lasted forever.
"Ah. So the problem isn't the activation itself — stopping it should be free?"
"Exactly. I need to look into how to resolve that part…"
Finding a solution took priority over finding the cause. Of course, if I found the cause, the solution would probably follow, so both were worth thinking about.
"First I need a clearer picture of the situation. Whether this is happening to only some people, or to everyone."
Just yesterday I'd left the Academy to check how well the books were selling. I hadn't expected to be heading out again the very next day. I could have surveyed Academy students, but grilling classmates and upperclassmen I had to keep seeing every day with questions that lewd felt… awkward. Total strangers I'd never meet again would be easier.
"No — wait."
Outside the Academy, this was something I could just throw money at. Commission an investigation, dump the necessary funds into it. Almost nothing was impossible with enough cash. I'd have a clear picture of the current situation in no time.
And once I started pouring money in, the reports began arriving almost immediately. The details varied a little from source to source — partly because this was still the very early stage, and partly because the spread was accelerating by the day.
That inconsistency is data in its own right, though.
I went through every report carefully, piecing together exactly what was happening.
"Among the people who've worn the stickers continuously since day one, every mage still had the tattoo remaining even after temporarily peeling the sticker off."
I didn't understand the precise mechanism, but people who'd only recently applied one either hadn't triggered the phenomenon yet, or the effect was so faint compared to what Yuria and the others had experienced that it was practically nonexistent. In other words, you had to wear the womb tattoo long enough for it to enter an activation stage before the effect kicked in. Whether it was gathering mana or something else, at least it didn't cause problems the moment you stuck it on. That was something. The number of victims at this exact moment wasn't as enormous as I'd feared.
But that's only true right now.
Day by day, more people were reading Hwashin Wedding. The overwhelming majority of those readers were mages — and most of those mages already had womb tattoo stickers on their bodies. It wouldn't take long before a huge number of them fell under the curse's influence. Worse, as long as the wear period was long enough, every person with mana seemed to trigger it without exception. That meant the entire population of wearers was a potential target.
The one silver lining: longer wear time didn't make the pleasure any more intense. Once the mark darkened to the level on Yuria's body, it stopped progressing further even if the sticker stayed on. The delay was purely about activation.
"I thought that was the good news. Then the bad news showed up right alongside it."
I'd checked whether the same thing was happening to people who hadn't read Hwashin Wedding. Shockingly, if they'd been wearing the stickers continuously for a while, the curse took hold even without reading it. That was the part I'd desperately hoped wouldn't involve me — and of course it turned out the effect applied indiscriminately to everyone. What kind of principle even made that possible?
"At least the basic effects follow the Hwashin series settings exactly."
Each tattoo design and color carried its own distinct lewd side effect, and those were all applying as written. The power was still weak enough that it was hard to tell whether the effects were genuine magic or purely psychological — but a womb tattoo that could influence the mind like that was nothing short of a cursed lewd crest designed to corrupt people into lust.
"How am I supposed to fix this…"
One small comfort while I investigated: the rumors kept spreading the whole time. With word getting out like this, people would surely start avoiding the stickers out of caution. That had to be better than the damage continuing to grow unchecked.
Thinking that, I opened the report on that very point.
"…What the hell is this?"
The more widely it became known that the curse could actually take root on a person's body, the more passionately people who'd read Hwashin Wedding but hadn't yet applied a womb tattoo started applying them. Because once they believed their bodies could truly accept the curse, they became convinced this method might actually save Albedo…
Are these people insane!?