Flowers Wilt, Weeds Thrive

We should be wary of meeting our heroes, but what if that hero is a vast unknown city?

Within the sodden gloom of a Wamono cloister, novice Yuuki-Hana has only one thing on his mind, obtain any illicit information about the taboo Scorned World kept at bay by the cloister's massive barrier walls.

As punishment for obtaining the forbidden name of the Scorned World, Yuuki is sent to confront a karmic abomination secretly imprisoned in the forgotten depths of the cloister. The creature instead presents him with an impossible opportunity-escape. His desire to experience this mysterious city, find out why he was abandoned at the cloister as a newborn, and potentially still become who he could have been is too strong to heed the obvious dangers.

On the other side of the barrier walls, Mimi Barakuda goes rogue from her mercenary sisterhood, setting in motion events that could bring the precarious brutal power dynamics of the shunned decadent metropolis to the brink of complete chaos.

In this first book in the Scorned World series, the city contorts and intertwines Yuuki and Mimi's lives in bizarre and dangerous ways, even its life.