Two years earlier, Taya Kingdom.
As usual, Aramaki patrolled the docks. The setting sun painted the sea gold and crimson as a merchant ship from the Pleasure District unloaded its cargo—or rather, more than a dozen young women filed down the gangplank. Most were scantily clad, wearing professional smiles.
Aramaki had planned to walk past as usual.
But then he saw her: the pleasure woman named A-Xin.
(A-Xin's name came from that Zone 11 film that inspired Ryokugyu's character design, where she happened to be the woman of Ryokugyu's prototype.)
She stood at the end of the line, her long black hair tied in a simple ponytail, a few loose strands stuck to her smooth temples with sweat.
Unlike the other women, she did not smile. She merely surveyed the unfamiliar docks calmly.
She was not tall and had a slender frame, but she held her back remarkably straight.
To Aramaki's senses, she was neither as delicate as a noblewoman nor as rough as a dockworker.
She possessed a distinctive resilience, like wild grass growing from the cracks between stones—seemingly fragile, yet capable of surviving the harshest conditions.
"Are you interested in women like that too?"
Seeing Aramaki stop, the dock manager leaned close and whispered in his ear,
"I heard they're all employees of the Pleasure District, sent to Taya to expand their business. Their base is a tavern in a small town outside the Royal Capital."
Aramaki nodded absentmindedly, but he committed the place to memory.
Over the following week, he happened to pass by that tavern much more often. Sometimes he was on his morning patrol, sometimes he was finishing work at dusk. He always glanced at the two-story wooden building from afar, occasionally seeing her hanging laundry at the entrance or hauling barrels of liquor.
Finally,