Volume 9, 1: Fill with [email protected] Shinobu(2/3)
“No fair!! You’re bringing up the still-unexplained Ver. 39 power for this!? That’s Hyakki Yakou’s secret weapon. Don’t even think about using it against an amateur high school boy!!”
“I-it was self-defense. It doesn’t count.”
This was clearly an impossible no-win scenario, but passion was boiling in my gut with nowhere to escape. I couldn’t stand it anymore, so I started hitting the tatami mats while curled up on the floor.
“No fair!! No fair!! I’m dating what might as well be the epitome of beauty, so why can’t I have any kind of fun with her!? Wahhhhhhhhhh!!”
The Zashiki Warashi grew confused at my unexpected reaction.
“Sh-Shinobu? C’mon, it isn’t worth crying over, is it?”
“It is!! Even boys are allowed to cry sometimes!!”
“You’ve been through a war between Hyakki Yakou and the Aoandon and you survived that hellish zombie outbreak, so what in the world is going on inside you now?”
“The perfection created by the bizarre triple seven of beautiful, sexy, and virgin is within reach, but I can’t do anything with her!!”
The Zashiki Warashi grew even more flustered.
Her mature-looking face blushed like a child’s.
“A-ahem. Shinobu, try not to shout personal information concerning virginity so loudly. ..But I see you do admit that I am beautiful.”
“I wouldn’t date you otherwise!!”
“I’m a little irked by how quickly you said that, but I’m also a little ashamed that it makes me happy..”
“If you have even the slightest pity for this pathetic boy with tears and snot covering his face, then open your body to me, Yukari-san!!”
“(Angry)☆ You know, Shinobu? Do you really think anyone would be stupid enough to give up their virginity out of pity?”
“Then at least use your hand! And while you’re at it, use your long hair too!!”
“Shinobu, I don’t quite follow. Use my hand for what?”
“Eh? Well you take this like this, and..”
“..!? Don’t pull that from your pants with that puzzled look on your face!!”
Part 8
I decided to calm down for the time being.
I was inside the Zashiki Warashi’s room, napping in her futon. I was lazily wearing the same clothes whether I was asleep or awake, so I may have quit the courtship dance now that I had a girlfriend.
The sexy Youkai climbed under the covers with me as if it were completely normal.
Sleeping in the same bed mode: on☆
“Hey, Zashiki Warashi. Where exactly is your line between yes and no?”
“Th-this is a Youkai trait of mine. So this is fine! At the very least, it’s a tradition that I’ve followed for over three hundred years!!”
“Ehh!? Then what was that earlier!? You’re touching me! You’ve got all sorts of body parts touching me now! If this level of contact is okay, then let’s go a little further!! Can I touch you? Those things are just gonna go to waste, so can’t I touch them!?”
“Shinobu. Squirm any more than this and I intend to drive my knee right into your balls.”
Her cold voice sounded serious, so my balls shriveled up a little.
You’re kidding, right? The passion is leaving me!? You have got to be kidding! M-my adolescence is willing to give in to oppression!? C’mon, Jinnai Shinobu! Don’t let this get to you!!
Meanwhile, the Zashiki Warashi was acting like a cat curled up on the porch.
This was the most relaxing position for her, but that was why she didn’t want my unnecessary ideas getting in the way.
“Ahh, this reminds me of old times..”
“You make that sound like there’s a problem with who I am now.”
“Reflect on your actions before saying that. Yes, you were so pure back then. What happened to the Shinobu that climbed into his ‘Nee-chan’s’ futon because he was afraid the lightning would steal his belly button?”
“D-don’t be silly! I had no choice but to do that because that ‘Nee-chan’ was so afraid! I was being heroic!!”
“I knew you’d never come over unless I set it up that way. You were clearly about to cry but trying to act tough, so I put together that plan. And call me Yukari.”
Talking about the past only caused my passion to wither away even more. Was she intentionally creating a mood that prevented a certain part of me from making a major comeback!?
The napping Zashiki Warashi pulled out (my) smartphone from between those breasts she was tormenting me with and she began swiping her index finger across the screen.
“Checking through the online news from bed is such bliss.”
“It’s easy to forget you’re an Edo-period Youkai when you say things like that.”
If I complained now, she would crush my balls, so I called it quits for the time being. I was waiting for my next opportunity, though!! With no outlet for certain feelings, I lay face down with the Zashiki Warashi as we pressed our cheeks together and looked down at the smartphone screen.
“
?”
“Not much interesting news.”
“At times like this, you just have to visit a cat picture site.”
We amused ourselves looking at a cat stretched out on its back in front of a stove or a cat sticking its head inside a cat food box. Our Nekomata could be even more thoughtful than a human like me, so she didn’t show off this defenseless side much. She was technically a deadly Youkai, so I was afraid of what would happen if she got high on catnip.
..The Nekomata, huh?
I casually pondered that Youkai’s name.
At the same time, a Youkai slipped in through the slightly opened sliding screen.
The Nekomata walked over to the intimate couple (with one of them boiling over on the inside) and gave us a scornful look.
Then she spoke.
“So how long are you going to keep up this farce?”
Part 9
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Part 10
I slowly narrowed my eyes while lying next to the Zashiki Warashi.
“What is it, Shinobu?”
The Zashiki Warashi only looked confused.
No, I was pretty sure she really did understand.
I thought back over the news I had seen here and there during the day: the TV, the newspaper, the banner ad, and the online news. I thought back over all of those articles I had seen.
“Due to the global panic caused by the chaos surrounding the world’s government bonds, the American dollar, the European euro, the Chinese yuan, and other currencies are continuing to crash. The rise in value of the relatively stable Japanese yen continues to accelerate, so rates for the yen are shooting up.”
When had this started?
Oh, right. It had already begun by the time I somehow managed to end the zombie outbreak in neighboring Bozen City, returned to the thatch-roof house with the Zashiki Warashi, and started dating her.
There were two types of Zashiki Warashi.
The type that preferred wearing a white kimono brought fortune and the type that preferred wearing a red kimono brought ruin.
And my “Nee-chan” – that is, Yukari – had the insane power known as the Ver. 39. That overwhelming power to bring ruin was too much for even the Ver. 40 to restrain with her ability to manipulate the destiny of the entire world.
The dollar and the euro were crashing, but it was far worse than that.
How had this happened and what was happening? Apparently not even Madoka understood it. All I can explain are the actual phenomena.
It all began with something known as government bonds.
I don’t actually know that much about it, but government bonds are apparently something like a special bank account. People place their money inside it by buying government bonds and the gathered money is used to keep the government operational. The money people deposit there gains interest at a set rate. From what I can tell, you get more interest than in a normal bank, but you can’t take the money out as easily. The government asks you to buy the bonds and uses the interest as an incentive. Basically, when the government takes on debt like that, it’s called a government bond.
But the value of these government bonds is apparently determined by some extremely complex calculations. A stable country with lots of assets and resilience provides little interest for their bonds and a country that could undergo an economic collapse at any time and really wants to gather money will provide huge interest for their bonds. Of course, if they actually go under, you lose both the interest and the money you gave them, so I don’t think many people want to buy bonds from that kind of country.
Ultimately, countries prefer to have valuable bonds with low interest but high stability. People feel comfortable buying up their bonds, so the government can easily grow quite rich.
The value of government bonds is not just a problem for that one country. It also influences friction with the neighboring countries. The calculations are difficult for amateurs, so there are specialized rating agencies that provide a simple rating for people, such as AAA or Default.
The problem is that the major credit rating agencies (e.g. Globe & Ingot or Gold Web) tend to be in America.
Ever since those credit rating agencies were established, America has never fallen below the AAA rating at the very top. Even after the fall of the Big 4 and the IT bubble bursting, they never dropped down even once. After all, if the value of their own country dropped, the credit rating agencies themselves would lose money.
And recently, a few countries that America found inconvenient had their ratings drop. I have no idea how much of this is only rumors and it might all have been mere coincidence, but everyone who saw it had the same thought:
Can we really trust American credit rating agencies like Globe & Ingot and Gold Web?
Shouldn’t we make our own, more trustworthy investigative agency?
That much was natural enough.
But the problem came when several new credit rating agencies popped up around the world and began releasing completely contradictory ratings.
Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, North America, South America, the Middle East, Oceania, etc.
This did not cleanly break the world up into economic blocs. It wasn’t that organized. Everything was mixed up like a marble pattern.
The value of 100 yen was only meaningful if everyone agreed that was 100 yen.
If what Person A thought was 100 yen was just 10 yen to Person B and 1000 yen to Person C, they could not settle things at the register. An argument would break out over something as simple as buying a rice ball.
That was the current situation.
The American credit rating agencies like Globe & Ingot insisted that America had a AAA rating, the European Triple Roses said the same about the European nations, and the Chinese Pengjia Gongsi..did they even use the alphabet? Regardless, they wanted to give China the highest rating. Meanwhile, they liked to give enemy countries or countries they disliked the lowest rating of Default.
historical
Simply put, the value of every country’s bonds was thrown into a black box. One list said it was AAA, but another said it was Default. With several if not dozens of contradictory lists, no one knew what was accurate. If layer after layer of colored cellophane was placed over the scenery, no one could say what color it had been originally. It was like carefully going through all the data and then having even more paperwork thrown at you, until it was all diluted by the sea of data.
To us, government bonds were something like a bank account that earned a different sort of interest, but they were really another name for national debt. When their value could not be determined, it directly affected the trust in the yen or dollars that country used.
The world economy was going to grind to a halt.
Or should I say the central driving force had already stopped and it was only coasting on momentum now?
“Will the government begin printing new money? Could there be a one million yen note?”
But there were apparently some exceptions.
The world’s bonds and currencies had died because of the contradictory reports from the different credit rating agencies. With some saying “The dollar is the best!” and some saying “The dollar is trash!!”, no one knew who to trust or how to deal in that currency.
But there was another possibility.
There were countries that had not been the target of any of the credit rating agencies and thus every agency gave similar ratings for them.
Those countries had been mocked as no real threat, but that lack of caution meant they were not highly rated by anyone yet not considered in default either.
So despite all the colored cellophane covering the map, there were air pockets were not even a single layer of cellophane had fallen.
There was no chaos there.
But in all things, the value of scarcity was important.
Humans liked to put a price tag on everything. Even safety and stability could be a special weapon if there was little enough of it.
Costa Rica, Iceland, the Solomon Islands, etc. Those countries had been left behind by the prideful center of the international economy, but that was exactly what had allowed them to remain as the few untouched regions. Those untouched countries had constructed their own network and dealt safely in bonds. They had kept their data in motion. Why? Because it was magic. Despite the global panic, the value of their bonds remained unchanged and they made secret dealings within a field that outsiders could not touch. That ended up looking so very desirable to the people who could only watch.
It was just like an online auction or an affiliate advertising program.
They worked everyone up as much as they could and tormented them as much as they could.
They intentionally placed strict purchase limitations on their bonds so foreigners from outside their network could not touch them. That created a restricted holy ground which allowed the value to skyrocket. It was just like a smiling young lady in a prestigious girl’s school.
And after the value of their “invisible product” had risen and risen and risen as far as it would go, what would happen if they finally sold it “outside”?
It was the simplest form of alchemy in the world. It was a magic trick.
The seller enjoyed a return of one hundred or even one thousand times their initial investment and, once they calmed down, the buyer was disappointed with the surprisingly “normal” bonds they held. Their own country’s currency was treated like trash and they had sold off their jewels and cruisers and whatever else to obtain this last thread of hope, but they could only grieve when they discovered it was not worth what they had paid.
Only those who had begun the process profited.
It was as simple as attaching a false report of authenticity to a UFO video and then selling it.
And once they had a taste, they could not stop.
People could make all the accusations they wanted on online message boards and rating sites, but no individual opinion could stop the magic at this point. Even if someone did post the truth, no one believed it. It was just like the yen and the dollar which were relatively stable despite actually being buried in debt. That was just how much people trusted the prestigious girls school that was the closed network.
Intellectual Village vegetables may have been the same thing.
The brand was more important than the actual product. It was enough to stamp out any complaints or dissatisfaction.
Thus, people around the world continued seeking that network. They wanted to use it more than they wanted to destroy or equalize it. They wanted to join the seller side of that magic trick to infinitely raise the price of bonds. Government bonds were national debt, so there were purchase limitations and fail safes. Simply put, if foreigners monopolized the bonds, they could influence national policy, so bonds were made so the country’s own citizens had priority in buying them. That meant only the countries in the network should have been able to make free use of that magic trick. But everyone still wanted to find a loophole that allowed them to be one of the sellers.
Now, a question: what country did the world’s seven billion people think they had the best shot at slipping inside of?
The answer was Japan.
That strange country had a fair amount of money and made decent contributions to society, yet it had still been underestimated.
In other words, people wanted inside that network which could infinitely raise the value of government bonds like a pure prestigious girls school, and Japan looked like the back entrance with the weakest security. That carefree country was obsessed with the ultra high-quality brand-name Intellectual Village vegetables, but they did not track what happened to the fruit seeds they exported. The rest of the world was annoyed that, with textbook English and some knowledge of the internet, the average middle school girl could carry around a brand-name bag and shop around for a summer home, but they still wanted to take advantage of that carefree national character. It could be borrowing someone’s identity, a false marriage, or anything else. They wanted to use that lax country’s lax system to gain Japanese citizenship and slip inside the much more strictly managed network. They wanted to make as much money as they could before their trick was discovered and then they would run off with their newfound riches. It apparently isn’t actually that simple in reality, though.
The blessings of that network and getting inside it were simply that important.
It was an issue of dreams, just like all the young people who move to the big city despite knowing the risks.
It was a bond rush.
It was an insider dream.
People like Madoka may have actually calmly taken a step back from all that. She had said something about growing sick of the ridiculous commotion and searching out liquid commodities that did not fluctuate as much as gold or platinum.
Whatever the case, things had gotten crazy.
I’d heard that satellite photos of the earth showed the city lights noticeably spreading only at those various air pockets.
Everyone who took part in the alchemy had gone crazy, from elementary school kids to the presidents of investment companies. In the city, people apparently waved stacks of cash around to hail a taxi and it wasn’t uncommon for people to burn their money for light. Health-oriented convenience stores were spreading around the world while exclusively selling Intellectual Village vegetables. And yet that meant the prices were at thirty thousand yen for a bunch of grapes.
That was why I wasn’t seeing anything of my parents or my grandparents who had supposedly retired. The Jinnai Brewery had primarily been served at classy restaurants in Gion or Askasaka, given as gifts at international summits, or provided as an offering at the Ise Shrine, but we’d been thrown into complete chaos with orders coming in from convenience stores, online stores, and discount stores.
The consumption had risen to abnormal levels.
In this age, everyone could buy Japan’s finest sake as easily as a can of beer or a carton of juice.
“Our surefire money management technique is to take advantage of the rising yen by buying up the American dollar!!”
But the network had been built on the sacrifice of something else.
What was with the multiple credit rating agencies? Why were the lists of ratings so contradictory? I didn’t know as much about money and economics as Madoka, but was that really possible? I mean, you could probably give a bit of an edge to your own country and its allies, but would you really rate it the opposite of the truth? Could you? And I’m not asking if you could punch the numbers into a mysterious calculator and get that answer. I’m asking if a list of nonsense numbers could really mess the world up like this.
A hole had opened somewhere in the giant bucket that was the world and that had created this unnatural situation. We were in one of the air pockets and thus benefitting from it, but not even we understood it. We knew what was happening, but we did not know what the root cause was.
How was this any different from riding a plane that was leaking fuel?
Who could rest easy just because it was still airborne for the time being?
We didn’t even know if the plane had been sent from our side of the ocean or the other side of the ocean. I felt that Japan and the rest of the air pockets that created the network were being manipulated, but what would the other people think when they saw all those celebrating people while their own bank accounts were rendered worthless and the company they had served for many long years broke off contact with them?
Gigantic conglomerates were dropping like flies and the international online shopping companies that had ruled the world’s goods distribution were on life support. What had become of the Big 4 goes without saying. Major corporations with a proud history of traditions dating back over a century were bought up on a whim by startups run by middle or high schoolers. Even the defense industry was no exception despite its support by government and civilians alike. The people left standing in front of the ATM in stunned disbelief were seeing blizzards of money on TV.
They had no idea how it worked, but they continued gaining more and more money with their “magic trick” and irresponsibly carried around so much money their wallets were going to burst. The world was slowly headed toward disaster.
Her arrival brought fortune and her departure brought ruin.
That Zashiki Warashi in a red yukata lay happily next to me as my girlfriend.
But she still held the power of the Bloodstained Zashiki Warashi.
“Will the IMF really respond to a conspiracy theory? After the unnatural rise of the yen during the ratings chaos, the Western nations are worried that Japanese investors were involved in the crash of the American dollar and the European euro. Are the joint military exercises in the Pacific and the South China Sea really a naval blockade meant to intimidate Japan?”
That was what had happened.
Japan had long since been sealed off by sea and by air.
There was more than one way to take advantage of the network.
As I already explained, they could gain citizenship in a country with more lax management and profit from within the network.
But there was another way.
Governments could force conspiracy theories onto the network as a means of redirecting their own citizen’s anger toward them.
Japan was only 38% self-sufficient in food. Even if we began consuming all of the Intellectual Village vegetables domestically instead of using them to obtain foreign currency, that figure would only rise by at most 10%. Japan’s population had risen to 150 million and various countries were applying intimidating pressure to starve out that increased population and fix this abnormal situation.
Japan had not been behind the rise of so many credit rating agencies, but we were the world’s villain, we were the air pocket, we were the network.
Just the month before, hadn’t we been looked down on as a country that could not stand on the world’s center stage no matter how much money we had? And they thought we had put together this grand conspiracy?
The reckless creation of credit rating agencies once the other countries could not trust the American ones like Globe & Ingot or Gold Web had been something all of them began on their own.
The various air pockets that had arisen had only been a result of that.
And Japan had just been one of those.
We had been the convenient member of the network that everyone had looked down on as too lax.
We were like the color white at the center of a sheet displaying the three primary colors.
We were the unnatural hole of light in the middle.
When people heard some experts claiming this should not have happened based on how it had all started, they had begun to think there was more to this and that had led to the threats and intimidation.
This made them feel better.
If it had happened naturally, there was no way to fix it. It would be their own fault and they could not calm everyone’s anger. That was why they had wanted a villain. They had wanted the dream of revealing an invisible system and returning everything to normal.
But there was nothing they could do.
Japan was only one part of the network and the network as a whole had had nothing to do with the initial cause. They may have taken advantage of the situation partway through, but it was the entire population of seven billion that had hit the economy’s stop button.
The value of the bonds had risen on its own and someone tempted by all that money had come up with the magic trick. That had led to the entire network growing rich and Japan had just so happened to be one of those nations.
In truth, the winners didn’t care what it was that had caused the simultaneous rise of so many credit rating agencies which had thrown the world economy into chaos.
They were not going to stop just because someone told them to.
For one thing, they did not know what they should stop doing or even what was happening.
Or at least, that was the case for 149,999,999 of them.
As her boyfriend, I was the sole exception.
No one knew which country would lose it and attack first. It was entirely possible a ballistic missile would fly in and blow away the capital. But no one knew how to solve the problem. Erasing the Japanese Archipelago from the map would not erase the problem. Nevertheless, they continued treating us like the source of all their problems and only placed more pressure on us.
And the daily partying only escalated as if everyone was trying their best to not face that strange fear head on.
There wasn’t much else they could do, but that champagne tower of partying only brought even gloomier looks to the eyes of the other countries.
Definite ruin would eventually arrive from somewhere.
But whoever pulled the trigger, the black box created by the credit rating agency chaos would remain. After all, Youkai were immune to physical damage. She would not die even if nuclear missiles poured down like rain. In fact, the contaminated land would only make it harder to find her, so an age of unending starvation and thirst would begin and seven billion people’s lives would come to an end.
This was what Majina, former leader of Hyakki Yakou, had most feared.
The Zashiki Warashi was out of control, the economy was in tatters, and the world would shrivel up and die.
The Zashiki Warashi in the red yukata with her Ver. 39 power was enough of a monster to cause trouble on this level while just sitting there.
I swear to you that she had no intent to destroy mankind.
In fact, she wasn’t even aware she was actively harming people.
But..
That was exactly why there was no persuading her to stop despite being the original “unnatural cause”. Since she didn’t even know she was doing it, she could not consciously switch it off. Even if I explained it to her, she w-->>