Kabata Katsuki

The white marble of the corridor was shining brightly with dazzling white light. An old man in a red overcoat with a black pair of pants stood in the middle of the corridor as he had just come out from one of the rooms from his back on the right side of the entrance of the corridor. His face was filled with a short beard and mustache. His eyes were widened with shock as he had his head tilted down. Beneath, in his hands in front of his chest, he held a bunch of about a dozen papers which he was reading. They were white and had black ink scribbled on them in Japanese. Just as he was reading those papers silently in the middle of the corridor, a faint sound of the crying of a baby echoed through the corridor.

“Uwaaaaaa! Aaaaaaaaaaaa!”

He turned his head to his right, looking at the inside rooms of the corridor, with a T-intersection at the end after a dozen rooms away. Organizing the papers in his hands, he turned to his right and started to run toward the inside of the corridor, revealing the insides of the room in front of which he stood. A man lay there on the bed in the center of the room, his face not visible because of the doorframe, but his legs were visible. He had a dark red cloth like that of a monk on. Some people sat all around him in the room, kneeling down in despair, all of them having a bunch of papers and quills in their hands and inkpots beside them. They all had their heads tilted down and their eyes closed. The room had an open terrace on the other side, which was open and showed the sun setting and the sky half-black.

The former king entered one of the rooms running and then stood beside the bed where a woman—his wife—lay. The beautiful woman had her eyes closed in pain, her hair scattered all over the white soft bed. The man crouched beside the bed and held the right hand of the wife in shock.

“Ar-Are you all right?”

“I-I am…” She replied, her face all covered with sweat. She then softly opened her eyes, and turned to the nurse at the edge of the bed toward her feet. “Is he okay?”

The nurse, a woman who had a white cloth tied for her legs and another one for her breasts, stood up from the ground with the figure of a small newborn human in her hands. She was smiling as she slowly swung her in her arms, trying to stop the crying child.

“He’s perfectly fine!” Another one standing on her right said.

The one of her left too tilted her gaze at the newborn and stared at her with a little smile. She then turned to the man and said in a low voice, “It’s a boy, Ishida-sama.”

The king looked at the child, smiled softly, and said, “Keisuke… His name will be Ishida Keisuke.”

The queen’s dark glossy lips rose into a warm smile. “It’s such a good and strong name.”

“Just as a king should have.”

The queen turned her eyeballs up to her right questioningly. “What does this name mean?”

“‘Save’. It means to save someone.”

She then turned to the cries of her child again. “What a nice name.”

Suddenly, the king gulped in. As he sat crouched down, he turned his head down in despair. “The royal priest… has predicted… about the fall of the empire…” He then turned up to the child. “Our kid… must face many hardships… in the future, wife.”

“What?” She was shocked. She turned to his husband on her right. “What are you talking about?”

The king slowly turned his head to her. “He’s predicted all of it… about our deaths, about his hardships, and… about his killer.” He then tilted his head down. “Ishida Keisuke… is the king born with bad luck. He’d have to face despair all throughout his life, and we’d be pretty much not be with him, because… we’d be dead until then.”

“W-What are you talking about…?” His wife commented. “Tell me it’s not true!”

“It is… It came from the priest himself.”

“I’ve told you a million times not to believe that fake pretentious priest!”

“He… always predicts the future perfectly…” He then turned to the nurse, looking at the crying child in her arms. “For the next five years we’re alive with him, Imma take care of everything about how to deal with all this stuff when we’re gone. Even when I’m gone, Imma make sure whatever I do… would help him live long… and protect our empire.”

The queen too turned to her child. She then softly blinked once, moved her hands beside her body, moved herself up, slid her butts back, and sat up on the bed, with her back getting support from the wall on the back. She raised both her arms at her front silently, like she was asking for her child. The nurse walked to her left slowly in the middle of the cries of her child, stood on the left of the queen, and moved the child delicately to the arms of the queen. She folded her legs up as she moved the boy down and kept her on her lapse, softly rubbing his head with her left hand as she looked at her child. “You need to take care that even if we’re dead, our child… lives on happily ever after…”

“Uwaaaaaaaa!” The small boy shouted on the top of his lungs.

“I… I will…”

“At last, I’m the father of the child, and I gotta protect him.”

“It was this decision… and this day… that, after four years, led to the invention of The Seven Sinners Program.”