Thanks for the upload and the translations. I enjoyed this version of the temple as well as the feral Shou (it's a refreshing change considering the usual Shou).
You're welcome. I just feel like it's such a waste for this doujin to not get uploaded so I took the chance.
I want to upload some new stuff but I've got to take care of the YoumuvsByakuren by kage houshi that I uploaded. But it's just too hard for me to translate. I think I need some pro like Moonspeaker or glasnost for that. I wonder how I can ask them for help...
A big "G" up in the sky typically seems to work for glasnost. Moonspeaker, being a intelligent translation program escaped from a DARPA lab finds projects based on his own internal algorithm. Your best bet is simply to ask.
Shou may be the catalyst for this comic, but Byakuren is the centerpiece.
I was confused at first. While using corpses as fertilizer undoubtedly altered the biology of the crops, they were only vegetables and fruits at the end of the day. How could they satisfy Shou's biological and spiritual need for flesh? But then I read to post #1246597 and it dawned on me. It wasn't just about Gensokyo running on symbolism and meaning and such. Byakuren actively put her magic into the soil and the plants. This should be seen as an extension of her bizzare and confusing doctrine. Though you'd think that she had stopped obsessing over immortality and prolonging her life after being unsealed from Makai.
(After going through Ten Desires and Symposium of Post-mysticism, I can't help but to feel that Miko and Byakuren, despite their hostility to each other, are similar in so many different ways, not least their double standards. But I guess that Miko's ability to hear people's desires also somehow makes her own desires and ambitions more "understandable" to a normal person than Byakuren's dream.)
As for Shou, I know that she and Byakuren are neither hermits nor ordained monks but act more like Buddhist priests who follow the Middle Way, you'd think that after centuries of meditation and acting as the avatar of Bishamonten, Shou would've had a better handle of her carnivorous instinct. She is not that different from the yakshas of the Eight Legions who serves Buddhism under Bishamonten. These yakshas can't reach enlightenment in their current lives -- only humans, devas and brahmas can -- but they still have to observe the five precepts so that they will eventually reincarnate as humans. I don't know if what Shou and Byakuren did count toward that, or was it a case of skimming the rules?
Though like Nazrin said in post #1245533, it may well be the case that Gensokyo itself brings out the primal beast in all yokai. It makes for an interesting implication to how other yokai like Mamizou might've had acted differently and had different temperament when they still lived in the outside world.
Either way, the big question remains the same: Is Byakuren helping her followers, or is she damning them?
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