Every story features a nonhuman female lead and a human male lead.
Story One: [Fourteen Finger Bones] Lovecraftian Elder God
The evil god misplaced fourteen of its finger bones.
My blindly obedient, mad, foolish believers, one of you has stolen them.
Lovecraftian female lead vs. fanatical, deranged priest
/Corrupted believer, your god is watching you/
Story Two: [The Silent Siren] Deep-Sea Monster
In their efforts to conquer the sea, people have always been accompanied by fear, as if the moment they leave the land, they lose all their courage.
Siren: people use this word to describe every monster in the ocean, with a human face and bird's body, a human body and fish tail, or a human head and eight arms.
On a stormy night, a duke sailed through those waters. The figurehead used to ram enemy ships was carved into a siren with a human torso and two tails.
Lightning, pale as death, struck the sea. In that instant, he saw a real siren.
They floated on the water, or clung to the reefs with their claws as they gazed into the distance. Then they turned their necks to look at the huge ship.
Their expressions were cold and inhuman, yet their eyes seemed to brim with tears. Their mouths hung half open, then slowly closed. Sirens could not bewitch anyone beneath the lightning.
The great ship plowed through the raging waves, and the sirens vanished beneath the sea.
Only one remained.
She followed alongside the ship, her cold gaze fixed on the figurehead, the double-tailed siren carved from a massive tree trunk.
The duke murmured, "Do you think she's curious?" The first mate said nothing.
The deck fell silent. The duke broke the long silence: "Bring her aboard."
/For years afterward, people whispered that the duke kept a monster in his castle, feeding it on living humans/
Story Three: [Medusa's Shield] Snake Woman
The shields of the expeditionary army were all carved with Medusa's face, in the hope of gaining the power to intimidate their enemies.
It turned out that humans could not borrow courage from monsters.
Their army broke, and the victors pursued them relentlessly.
The severed limbs and blood on the battlefield attracted a monster: a snake woman.
A knight fell from his horse into a pool of blood, watching his enemies and comrades turn into stone statues.
The snake woman slithered toward him, and he raised his shield without thinking.
There was no Medusa on the shield. A skylark was carved in the center.
She seemed to make a tiny sound, like an insect, or perhaps a fledgling.
It was something she had never seen before.
The towering monster stopped. She took his shield, held it up to look at it for a while, then turned and slithered away.
Her thick tail swept across the grass and dragged the knight along.
Story Four: [The Eternal Mades] Giant Creature (Huh?)
One day, according to legend, people in the Middle Ages opened their eyes to find themselves walking through a forest of rusting steel.
Life underwent a fantastic transformation. Under certain conditions, humans would turn into a kind of creature: enormous, slow, animal-like, and long-lived.
The odds were about one in every 2,700 people. Humans called them Mades.
Theme: Promoting harmony, honesty, and kindness
