Sunlight Met in the Mud
After working a few more days, I felt it with absolute clarity. I was receiving at least three customers a day.
The point where my memories broke was always midday, yet the next fragment would surface at midnight. If it kept happening like that, even a fool would have realized it. I still couldn’t pinpoint exactly when it had begun, though.
In the end, it seemed my body was quite the profitable commodity. That was why Arto kept sending so many customers up to me. He could sell a virgin at a high price, after all. The condition of a whore’s body—nothing more than a consumable—hardly mattered.
Even so, I couldn’t go downstairs and complain to Arto.
In this place, a mere prostitute who talked back to the pimp holding absolute power would receive nothing but a beating in return.
Instead, I attempted to reset the daily usage limit of Kaira’s Secret Diary by using Time Rewinding.
At first I was delighted, convinced I had stumbled upon some brilliant trick and wondering why I hadn’t thought of it sooner. But it didn’t work.
Time Rewinding could restore wounds, memories, broken machines, and even the stains on a bedsheet, yet it refused to reset the remaining number of uses on the secret diary.
It was strange. The spell wasn’t even complex—just a beginner’s magic that someone of my skill could cast with a mere gesture.
I prepared and tested other spells as well. Their usage counts reset perfectly. Had I been on an adventure, the discovery would have been enormously useful in its own way… but right now it was a function I had no need for.
In the beginning I had even tried to improve the secret diary so I could use it multiple times. Yet with customers constantly arriving and forcing me to abandon whatever I was doing in order to spread my legs, I had neither the time nor, probably, the ability to succeed. Though I had named it after myself, it was really nothing more than a slight modification of the original spell, Taerei’s Memory Preservation.
Mervin’s words rose in my mind.
If you try to avoid the price of interfering with causality, you will only suffer even greater consequences.
The secret diary, which wrapped memories inside a shell of time, was itself an interference with causality. That was why even the power to manipulate time could not rewind it. I forced myself to accept the explanation, however clumsy the hypothesis.
Instead of refining the magic, every time a customer left I would sit with hollow eyes and draw a single charcoal line on the blank pages of a white magic book. At least I could record how many men I had taken each day.
When I later opened the book, I saw days when the lines exceeded ten. Whether ten men had taken me at once or I had been taken ten separate times, I could not tell. After all, I had no memory of it.
The days of shattered memory stretched on for months.
Living only by the fractured pieces was not something a sane mind could endure for long.
I no longer knew if I was still sane. I had no confidence in the answer. I was certain that no one could last long inside time broken into shards without losing their mind.
If I went mad, the brothel would discard me. I would wander the streets with a ruined spirit until someone who recognized me dragged me to the gallows.
Perhaps because embracing men here had given me the faintest attachment to life, I no longer wanted to end that way. I had to hold on to my sanity somehow.
My sense of time was completely destroyed, so I couldn’t be certain, but it felt as though I had been living as a prostitute for nearly half a year.
At first I had expected to be arrested at any moment, yet somehow I had avoided capture. Perhaps my choice had been correct after all. The choice that this brothel was the safest place to stay while searching for my mother.
The longest job I had ever held in my life was no longer hospital wizard, hero, or tool-shop owner. It had become prostitute.
I could not remember the last time anyone had called me Kaira. In this sewer where I sold smiles, stories, my body, my virginity, and my memories, I simply continued to exist.
Every time I received a customer, I never forgot to ask—casually, with tears in my eyes—whether they had seen a girl of twelve or thirteen who resembled me in a neighboring brothel. I told them I was searching for my sister.
Not a single customer ever gave me the answer I longed for. They would say they didn’t know, or tell me to stop talking nonsense and shake my hips harder.
Or perhaps I had received a proper answer once, only for the memory to evaporate when I rewound time.
…And then I met him.
It was morning, when the night’s work was nearly over. The moans from the other rooms down the corridor had all fallen silent. Believing no more customers would come, I had tidied the bed and was turning pages of a book by the hazy amber glow of the lamp and the violet light of dawn seeping through the window. That was when I heard the soft creak of the door opening.
The last customer of the night, no doubt. Another man coming to erase my memories.
Work was work. I closed the book, rose from my seat, and greeted him with a bright smile.
“Welcome!”
“Ah… hello. It’s good to see you again, Miss Karin.”
The man greeted me timidly, stuttering, yet as if we were already acquainted. He was painfully thin, dressed in ragged but not entirely laborer-like clothes. A sparse, rough beard. The hesitant posture of someone who had come to buy a woman but lacked any confidence.
Again. So despite his appearance, he was a customer who had taken my virginity at least once before.
I kept the professional smile fixed on my face and explained calmly.
“It’s been a while since anyone remembered my name. I’m sorry. Did the master tell you I’m a wizard when he sent you up? The restoration magic that returns virginity—if overused—destroys the mind and shatters the heart… So I don’t remember any previous visits. I always live by overusing it, you see.” I offered a suitably plausible lie.
The man looked stunned. Whether he believed me or not didn’t matter. What he wanted was my body, my hymen, and the sight of my face twisting at the pain of that insignificant membrane tearing.
I smiled faintly and beckoned the man who simply stood there.
“Don’t just stand there. Come sit down. I’ll prepare.”
Only then did he walk over and sit beside me. The hard wooden bed creaked heavily.
“Then… you’ve forgotten everything?”
He asked a strange question.
“Forgotten? What do you mean…?”
“Miss Karin took my virginity… Have you forgotten even that?”
Aha.
Now I understood.
There were many young men who saved three silver coins—and the additional half-silver per set time—to lose their virginity. Naive boys who thought that if they were going to spend money on such a meaningless experience, the other party should be a virgin too.
It was a foolish notion, but I could sympathize while remembering my past life. Thanks to them, I had earned money. He must have been one of those customers.
I offered a slightly pitying smile and answered softly.
“Yes. I forgot. It must have been a precious first experience. I’m sorry for ruining the memory. If you’re disappointed, I can refund part of the fee—”
I stopped mid-sentence. The man sitting beside me had suddenly pulled me into a tight embrace.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry! Miss Karin… I had no idea at all. I… I—!”
I couldn’t comprehend what was happening. I simply widened my eyes in confusion and squirmed a little.
“Y-yes…? Um, what are you trying to say…?”
“It’s my fault your memories were erased, Miss Karin. I thought it was just the price of the magic reagents. I never imagined it meant forcing you to do something like this. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry!”
What is this…?
I smiled bitterly. A kind customer. Someone who didn’t belong in my world. Still held tightly in his arms, I spoke calmly.
“You don’t need to trouble yourself over it. This is simply how things are.”
“But how can anyone toy with a person’s mind and memories like that…”
Drawn by his purity, I asked almost involuntarily.
“Customer… may I ask your name?”
“I’m Iskil. A playwright! Though nothing I write ever sells. Still, this year His Majesty is selecting people to organize the imperial theater company, so I must prepare…”
I returned his embrace, wrapping my arms around his thin but firmly muscled torso.
“Sir Iskil. If you’ll allow it, could you embrace me even though I’m no longer a virgin? The three silver coins… I’ll return them.”
Considered as the price of not shattering a young man’s dream, it was cheap. After all, I hadn’t begun this work to earn money, but to gather rumors while hiding and search for traces of my mother.
Iskil suddenly released me and stared directly into my face. Confusion, surprise, joy, and gratitude tangled together in his eyes.
“Then, Miss Karin…”
“Yes. I want to remember you.”
“Miss Karin, Miss Karin…!”
Tears poured down his slender cheeks. To cry so openly despite being a man. Well, he had said he was a playwright; with such a tender heart, it made sense he would pursue literary dreams.
…Yet despite crying so unmanly, like a girl, Iskil eventually could not contain his excitement. He practically tore off my camisole and began sucking fiercely at my breasts.
Iskil, who licked every inch of me from the crown of my head to the spaces between my toes, covering me in saliva, finally violated my sex with greedy violence.
His movements were so terribly clumsy that I felt no pleasure at all. Though judging by his expression, he seemed to be enjoying himself in his own way.
Well… it’s fine. Let’s not think too deeply.
While letting Iskil thrust as he pleased, I stared blankly at the ceiling now bright with morning sunlight and thought that if I had saved one young man’s dream, that was enough.
That was how I gained a proper regular.
He was the kind of regular who might as well have been robbing me of three silver coins each visit—an optional existence at best. But I liked him. The fact that someone like him existed in this gutter, and that seemingly pure person.