Parasitic Inanimate gods // Reincarnates - both good and deplorable // A hermitical order holed up inside massive stone cloisters sealed from the outside by gargantuan barrier walls // A metropolis fought over by pseudo-religious gangs run by insane individuals with all too real god complexes // A gang of all-female ruthless mercenaries in Mary-Janes and pigtails //

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.

This is the world of Hinodé Wards if you actively live in it or the Scorned World if you are a member of the Wamono Order. Flowers Wilt; Weeds Thrive, is the first in what I plan to be a series of novels collectively called The Scorned World. It will be published on *1 June 2025**. The following are teasers from the novel.*

“She took her small molding knife and began slicing a precise incision on the back of her right hand, neighboring several older ones roughened with coagulated blood. The accumulated mesh of scar tissue grew permanent scab gloves on both her hands. She ordered that they never be touched while under Masao’s knife for her various modifications.”

“The demon chill summoned invisible icy needles up from underneath Yuuki’s skin, each one striving to be the first to pierce his flesh and into the heavy cloth of his kimono. His meagre body heat spirited away into vaporous puffs disintegrating just as they form, casualties in the incessant war with the juggernaught of dank. The trickster steam trails led him to an all too familiar door that never not judged.

Yuuki’s memory had long ago lost the exact number of summons he’d received to the Master’s cell, but this cloistered world never allowed him to forget its dripping tears and numbing stone. Except old Disciplinarian Hégo’s cell tainted with the sour scent of ancient monk, the Master’s was the most warmth-phobic stone cube in the cloister: his only world.”

“Mimi’s quick, shallow breaths deadened the mechanical thunka-thinka thunka-thinka strangled by organic melancholic groans of the viscerdenn racing her toward Pinku Station. The half-beast half-machine mass transport, moaning up out of the tunneled depths for a brief reprise, klickity-klacked sighed from the bloat of half-digested commuters futilely attempting en-masse to squish out the miasma of their chronic mind-assassin disease of the corporate day-to-day only to be reinflicted the next morning. Their stale condensed exhalations slither in thousands of tear trails down the grotty windows. She has no time to indulge in her usual schadenfreude of the human masses. Her focus must stay on remaining alive.”

“Only darkness.” His heart beat about three times faster than normal. The gleamers only lit him, exposing him to whatever was lurking within the gloom. “It is only darkness. All in my mi—,” A cold slick sensation crept down the back of his neck, wet and viscous. He instinctively reached back to wipe it off. A hard textur-less surface froze him to almost the stone that engulfed him. His hand, in defiance of his mind, began to jitter its way around the shape. Whatever he was touching tapered to a point. A raspy almost sub-sonic growl vibrated the blackness surrounding him. The tapered object resonated in sync with the demonic purr.”