Necessary Corruption Interlude: Yina 1 (Patreon)

A little insight into what one of Lord Takanori's retinue thinks of him and the current situation

Necessary Corruption
Interlude: Yina 1

-VB-

She was born an orphan from one of the few cities of the Land of Rivers. Her mother died giving birth to her, and the sweatshop owner who had employed her mother kept her as a “payment for debt.”

Her first memory of her life was threading a string through a needle. She didn’t do it fast enough, and the matron in charge of her and other little boys and girls beat her as an example for being too slow.

She threaded a hundred needles that day. Got no breakfast, ate little for lunch, and starved through dinner as punishment for being too slow.

She worked from sun up to sun down until she became thirteen.

They sold her to one of the lord clans.

Yina thought she would be taken to a room and raped until her new owner was satisfied. That’s the horror stories all of the girls kept hearing. The really unlucky ones were the stories about girls forced to serve multiple men and choking to death.

She was lucky. Too lucky.

She came into the service of the Takanori Clan, who were the more upright and virtuous of the noble clans. The man who bought her, Washimoto, called himself the head servant of the Takanori Clan. He taught her how to act in front of nobles, how to serve them, and if it came down to it, how to pleasure them. He never forced anything on her. All instructions were verbal with pictures.

She got good food, good futon, and good work. Even when she made a mistake, they didn’t beat her for it. Instead, they scolded her with words and encouraged her to do better. The hidden threat was that incompetent ones would be fired, and Yina saw a few get fired.

Her survival was on the line. She never made another mistake since then.

Years later, when the young master now made into a lord called her in one night when he had never done so before, she thought that she would have had to give herself up to survive. She was old enough that he might even make her his concubine and force her to give him child after child.

Her coworkers and friends had always told her that she was beautiful. She knew she was beautiful, or at least, prettier than the others.

Instead, he offered her power.

“You’ve loyally served the clan for five years, Yina.” He knew her name.

“I want to reward you for that,” he said as he extended two hands, though kept apart. One hand held a pouch of coins. She could hear it. The other was empty. “If you choose the bag of coins, then that will be just that: your reward for your loyal service up to this point. You would go back to your room and return to being a servant of the Takanori Clan. On the other hand, if you take my empty right hand, then I will make you into something beyond your current self. I will make you strong.”

Coin… coin came and went. She had seen it too many times to not know it.

She grabbed his empty hand and then fainted.

When she woke up, she came to see that she was now truly strong. He gave her power over shadows. Well, she called it the shadow because that was how it appeared on the surface, but in truth, it allowed her to travel to a world without people.

With it, she served under Lord Takanori as one of his spies. She had heard much in her so far brief service, but wanted it to last longer.

She even got permission from the lord to enact some revenge on the old matron. She made good use of her power and some creativity her lord had. He even helped design a rather cruel barb that would hurt going into the belly button but hurt so much worse coming out.

She relished in torturing and killing that old woman, abuser of hundreds of children. She made an example of her in the dead of the night and left her corpse to sway in the wind for all to see the next morning with the words “I am an abuser” carved into her back.

Yina honestly did not know how long it would have taken a normal person, peasant or lord, to gain a power like this. To buy a power like this. She knew that she owed a tremendous debt to the lord, even if he never mentioned it or called on it.

Hell, she knew that if her lord wanted, he could call up on her debt to ravage her body, and she would happily let him. Though she, a peasant, would never be acknowledged nor any children he would father with her, she knew that he would take care of them.

But that was if he ever saw her that way. She too did not… yet.

For now, she found herself babysitting the woman her lord did fall in love with.

Beautiful, she was not. Pretty, maybe, but it was an attraction that bore from being weak and yet cuddly.

Honestly, Yina thought her lord could do better than a widow. A pretty widow, but a used woman nonetheless.

…

Maybe that was her lord’s thing? If that was the case, then she supposed that her good lord was afforded something odd. No one was all good.