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Sometimes no matter how far you run, you can't escape. Yukiya learned that lesson two months after returning home to Taruhi. As you may recall, he had decided to leave the kin'u's business at the end of his term, and while the crown prince seemed willing to let him go, he may actually have just been giving the boy a break before swooping in and recruiting him again. Given how cunning he was, it seemed like he was just giving Yukiya a break without letting him know. It also showed how ruthless he could be: he wouldn't let a good servant like Yukiya leave him, but he also knew better than to make it too obvious, especially since the boy had recently gone through the whole fiancee fiasco that had driven him to ruthlessness in the first half of this season.
Our vacation is over, and I can’t say I’m sad about it. (Although we’ll get another installment in a few weeks while the Olympics take place before Yatagarasu airs.) The story wastes no time in jumping right back in, taking us back to the giant bloodthirsty ape-like creatures we ended episode thirteen with. It’s a gruesome reintroduction to the series, with the obvious implication of child deaths, and the fact that it’s happening up north is unsettling—not just because that’s where Yukiya lives, but because the kin’u are tracking a strange new drug tied to dangerous mutations in that yatagarasu. The drug, called “sagecap,” appears to cause rabies-like symptoms at first glance, though crows can’t get rabies. But in addition to the foaming mouth and aggression, yatagarasu under the repeated influence of wormwood are also trapped in crow form, transforming into crazy birds that seem unable to control any aspect of themselves—they are the lowest form of both humans and crows, lacking the intelligence of either.
Of course, the tricky question is whether the apes and the crows poisoned with sage have the same addiction. The apes’ insatiable appetite for human flesh (we haven’t seen them eat anyone in crow form) may be a reduction of some aspect of their carnivorous nature, while the crows’ aggression is something altered by the drug. Sage and sage are both members of the mint family, as is catnip, which seems to have some significance. We all know that catnip can cause temporary behavioral changes in cats, and sage can be used as a hallucinogen, so the name “sagecap” is hardly a random choice. The dealer seems to have been assigned to the disenfranchised, with stories of him first appearing in the Central amusement park; We see him selling to a prostitute who's desperate for another dose of the drug in this episode. But she also seems to be looking to buy sage at a legitimate pharmacy, which also suggests that it or parts of it might have real medicinal uses—or at least, she assumes they do or that sage is a legal ship medicine rather than a street drug.
What does all this have to do with Koume and Jihei, the two new characters we meet this week? Koume may be a survivor of the ape-ravaged house, but she and Jihei could just as easily be involved in the sage hat business somehow. Hopefully we’ll find out more after the Olympics when episode 15 airs, which might give Yukiya enough time to realize that if he thinks he can get away with using the “stupid second son” act, the only person he’s fooling is himself.
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YATAGARASU: The Crow Who Chooses No Master is now streaming on Crunchyroll.