I, Nice Nature, Am an Umamusume and a Shrine Maiden! [1] & Synopsis

She had transmigrated into Nice Nature—the Umamusume whom people in her previous life had jokingly called the “Bronze Collector.”

Only then did she discover that this world of Umamusume was not merely plagued by supernatural phenomena—her family was, in fact, an exorcist lineage that had maintained a shrine for generations.

With no cheat abilities, and no outstanding racing talent of her own, Neicha—the family’s sole heir and its thirty-third-generation shrine maiden—had no choice but to give up on pursuing a racing career.

Then her mother took a huge loss on the stock market and ran up an enormous debt. To repay it for her, Nature had no choice but to step onto the racetrack.

Who could have expected her Debut Race opponent to be Tokai Teio?

And so, convinced Teio was a monster she could never beat no matter how hard she tried, Neicha decided to phone it in during the race.

But then, in broad daylight, an actual demon appeared on the racetrack!?

The race could be lost. The demon had to die!

In the end, after Neicha successfully exorcised the demon that had appeared on the racetrack, she discovered that she had somehow won the race—and even outrun Tokai Teio!?

“No, wait, dude!?”

“How does that make any sense!?”

As everyone knows, the world of Umamusume is home to the Three Goddesses.

And since this was a world where gods existed, the existence of certain demons, monsters, ghosts, and the like was perfectly reasonable too.

Naturally, the appearance of those things had given rise to people in related lines of work.

Shinto priests, shrine maidens, exorcists, nuns, onmyoji, Daoist priests, monks, feng shui masters, Copano Rickey, and Matikanefukukitaru.

On the surface, this world of Umamusume seemed peaceful.

But in the shadows, generation after generation of supernatural ability users and exorcists worked in unknown corners of darkness to preserve the everyday lives of this world’s ordinary people, and of the beautiful, sprite-like Umamusume who could bring hope to others through running, pouring out their youth and sweat as they chased their dreams with everything they had.

They were the ones doing all they could, sparing no effort to maintain peace and stability across the countries and regions of this world.

They were the ones who kept all the mysteries and supernatural things that existed in this not-entirely-scientific world hidden away.

…

“You can see us, can’t you? You can see us, can’t you!”

“She can see us! She can see me!”

Japan, Hokkaido, a remote cemetery somewhere.

Countless evil spirits, grotesque in appearance and gruesome in death, came flying, rolling, or skittering on all fours.

Like Lickers from Resident Evil, they sprinted at full speed on hands and feet after an Umamusume girl running ahead of them—a girl with a pair of ears and a tail unlike any ordinary human’s, beautiful reddish-brown hair tied into fluffy twintails, and a red-and-white shrine maiden outfit.

The bay Umamusume dressed as a shrine maiden was drenched in sweat as the pack of evil spirits hunted her from behind.

Unable to help herself, she wore an expression that was three parts terror and seven parts furious resentment, grinding her teeth as she kept shouting, “I’m dead, I’m dead, I’m dead,” while still occasionally looking back to curse at them in such impeccably elegant Japanese as, “You dead bastards, if you’re already damn dead, then hurry up and reincarnate already!”

[SUBDUED FRONT RUNNERS]!
[SUBDUED PACE CHASERS]!
[SUBDUED LATE SURGERS]!
[SUBDUED END CLOSERS]!

[FRENZIED FRONT RUNNERS]!
[FRENZIED PACE CHASERS]!
[FRENZIED LATE SURGERS]!
[FRENZIED END CLOSERS]!

One red debuff skill after another—skills only Umamusume could master—was flung behind her in a heap as if they cost nothing, launched by the Umamusume shrine maiden running at the very front of that swarm of demons and ghosts.

In an instant, the monsters desperately chasing her visibly lost a notch of speed.

And in that opening, while the ghosts behind her were being restrained by the debuff skills she had thrown out, the Umamusume shrine maiden they were targeting seized the perfect chance to accelerate with flawless precision.

Her right cleat kicked hard against the ground, and she unleashed an overwhelmingly powerful final spurt: final three furlongs in 33.7 seconds.

Then, like the wind, she burst out of that remote, deserted country cemetery in Hokkaido.

…

“Phew. That was close. I almost died here tonight~” After leaving the cemetery and running roughly the length of a Kikuka Sho, the Umamusume young lady who had finally escaped the evil spirits’ clutches collapsed onto a roadside bench meant for passersby to rest on.

With one hand on her hip, she gasped for breath while fanning herself nonstop with the other. Only after a long while did she feel she had recovered from that desperate sprint. Then she rose from the bench, bought a can of cola from the vending machine beside it, and drained it in one go.

After finishing the cola, still slick with sweat, she clenched hard and crushed the empty can flat in her hand.

“Damn it. They told me the cemetery over here might just have some common haunting, a poltergeist phenomenon or whatever. How is this damn thing a haunting? Add up all those evil spirits and you’ve got enough to run a Satsuki Sho, plus a Japanese Derby on top of that!”

After complaining, the Umamusume young lady mentally cursed the entire family of a certain unreliable person in charge at the government’s Supernatural Disaster Prevention Department in Hokkaido who had given her this information—pets included—before hurling the cola can she had crushed with strength more than three times that of an ordinary human into the roadside trash bin.

Then, still looking furious, she set off with angry strides toward her family’s shrine.

…

The Umamusume young lady’s name in this life was Nice Nature.

Why “in this life”?

That story had to begin in her previous life, when a dump truck suddenly crashed through the balcony of her home in apartment 3303 on the thirty-third floor.

She had no idea what sort of world line this Umamusume world she had transmigrated into belonged to. On the surface, it was still a peaceful, stable world centered on Umamusume racing and everyday life, but in the shadows, supernatural incidents just as unscientific as Umamusume themselves happened from time to time.

And she, Nice Nature, who should have been an ordinary Umamusume born to an ordinary family in the Hokkaido countryside, had, due to this world-line shift, become the daughter of a shrine maiden from a shrine in Hokkaido. At the age of twelve, she had smoothly taken over her mother’s work and become the thirty-third exorcist shrine maiden of the Nice family shrine.

The Umamusume of the Nice family were born with extremely high spirit sight.

As a child of the Nice family, Neicha had naturally inherited the Nice family’s excellent ghost-seeing genes—rare even across Japan’s entire supernatural world.

For the evil spirits of this world, the most ideal targets to attack were those with spirit sight high enough to sense their existence, or even directly see their forms.

So from the time Neicha was three years old, once she could read and had acquired the most basic ability to learn, her mother began teaching her with all her might in order to keep the still-young Neicha from encountering danger due to the ghost-seeing talent she possessed as a Nice family Umamusume.

Neicha’s mother, the previous shrine maiden of the Nice family shrine and its current head priest, Nice Dancer, began tirelessly teaching her daughter how to develop and use a modified Umamusume aura specialized for dealing with evil spirits.

At the same time, she devoted herself to teaching Neicha the anti-spirit debuff skills passed down through the Nice family since ancient times—skills capable of weakening and absorbing the negative energy of monsters and ghosts, such as their yin energy, taking it for oneself and using it to continuously strengthen one’s own aura.

She trained her Umamusume aura in hospital morgues before dawn.

She did pace-running drills with her mother in mass graves in the wilderness at midnight.

Thanks to that, Neicha, as an Umamusume, developed her own Unique Skill at the age of eight and awakened her own Umamusume Zone at ten.

Under circumstances where, ever since childhood, she had needed to engage in “friendly communication” and “mutual greetings” with a bunch of ghosts and evil spirits whose first meeting with the living was a life-or-death affair, our Neicha gradually grew from an Umamusume little girl who could only flee in sorry fashion while being chased by ghosts into a qualified shrine maiden who chased ghosts around at night.

A portion of the red skills inherited through her family had been heavily modified compared to the debuff skills used by ordinary Umamusume, because they were meant for exorcism. In the three years after she took up her mother’s heavy responsibility at twelve and became the shrine’s official shrine maiden, through battles of wits, hunts, and counter-hunts against evil spirits, she had honed them from unfamiliar techniques into skills she could use at will.

Now, just shy of sixteen, ordinary evil spirits who encountered Neicha had only one fate left: being kited in circles by the high-speed Neicha while a series of red skills locked them down until they were destroyed.

Of course, even Neicha, who could chase ghosts around at night, smash red debuff skills down over the heads of all sorts of spirits, and, at critical moments, unleash her final spurt and leave every demon and monster in Hokkaido far behind eating her dust at speeds of over seventy kilometers per hour, did not dare claim she was invincible.

At the very least, tonight, facing a cemetery full of more than thirty evil spirits, in a situation where the yin energy was so dense it had nearly formed a ghost domain, even this wild-running Umamusume—whom the staff who knew her at Hokkaido’s local government Supernatural Countermeasures Department liked to brag could fight ten evil spirits at once—could only flee in a miserable state.

In any case, after twelve years of growing up immersed in gods and ghosts, plus three years of practical experience, her identity as an exorcist shrine maiden, along with the series of shrine maiden duties that identity entailed, had become an utterly ordinary, everyday part of the normal life she, Nice Nature, had begun in this second life plus first Umamusume life—even if, to others, no part of that life had anything to do with the word “normal.”

And as an ordinary person who believed that, even before transmigrating, the society of her previous life had already worn all the edges off her, Neicha’s pursuit in this life was to keep living in the life she had built for herself: catching ghosts at night, going to school during the day.

Occasionally, she could even tell fortunes for the superstitious rich people living near her home, or sell them some exorcism charms and amulets to scam… earn a little pocket money. It might not look remotely ordinary to other people, but to her it was a comfortable circle called “habit,” where she could guard her unchanging daily life and, ideally, never have to leave it for the rest of her life.

As the saying went: people live in pursuit of peace of mind!

And peace of mind came from the comfort zone called “unchanging,” built silently and invisibly by the ghost known as “habit” over years and years, day after day, year after year.

That was right. She, Nice Nature, longed for a peaceful life!

Anyone who tried to destroy the already established comfort zone she had drawn around herself in this life was an evil spirit or demon that she, as an exorcist shrine maiden, had to exorcise!

As for thoughts like, as an Umamusume, transferring from the ordinary junior high school she currently attended to a local or central Tracen Academy, making her racing debut and racing like every Umamusume who dreamed of becoming a Triple Crown Umamusume…

Neicha, who longed to maintain this unchanging, peaceful everyday life of hers, had long since thrown those options beyond the clouds.

First of all, abandoning her work as a shrine maiden and transferring to Tracen Academy would shatter the comfort zone Neicha had only barely managed to build for herself through more than ten years of effort after coming to this world.

And then there was the record of her original self that she, as a Cygames player in her previous life, knew about: forty-one starts, seven wins, seven third-place finishes out of sixteen graded races, third place in the Arima Kinen for three consecutive years, and a lifetime without winning even a single G1 race. Just that was enough to make Neicha completely unable to work up the Mood to begin a racing career…

However, as people often said: nine times out of ten, life refused to go your way.

…

At 1:30 in the morning, before Neicha—who had just returned home grumbling after being chased by more than thirty evil spirits all night and nearly losing her life to them, leaving her Mood about as awful as it could possibly get—could even take a bite of the late-night snack she had heated up in the microwave…

Her mother, who immediately slid across the floor on her knees the moment Neicha came in and hugged her leg, told her something that was enough to make her already terrible Mood explode on the spot.

“What? You’re saying you copied other people and traded stocks, and now you lost money!?”

After receiving this awful news, Neicha hurriedly lowered her head and pressed her mother, who was clinging to her leg and bawling, “How much did you lose!?”

Faced with her daughter’s question, the single mother named Nice Dancer, who was crying beautifully enough to make flowers wilt in shame, sniffled between sobs.

“Sniff…”

“You should be asking how much I owe…”

“…”

“Please, Neicha. To save our shrine, you absolutely have to make your racing debut!”

“…”

“You don’t want the two of us, mother and daughter, to end up begging on the streets together, do you!?”

…

In short, Nice Nature, who had never once thought about becoming a racer before, had, under the major premise of “her mother has incurred a massive debt, so she urgently needs her daughter to debut as a racer, run races, and earn a large amount of prize money to repay the debt on her behalf,” no choice but to transfer from an ordinary high school in Hokkaido to the Umamusume Training Center Academy in Fuchu, Tokyo—that is, Japan’s Central Tracen Academy—and become a rookie Umamusume there.

And what Neicha, who urgently needed to run races and earn prize money to pay back her family’s massive debt, and who had therefore hastily entered a Debut Race after less than a month of training following enrollment, had even less expected was…

“NEXT TO APPEAR IN THE PADDOCK IS TODAY’S 1ST FAVORITE!”

“EVEN BEFORE HER DEBUT, SHE HAS ALREADY DRAWN WIDESPREAD ATTENTION FROM RACE FANS ALL ACROSS JAPAN!”

“EVEN BEFORE TODAY, SHE WAS ALREADY FAMOUS THROUGHOUT JAPAN’S RACING WORLD FOR HER UNIQUE FOOTWORK KNOWN AS THE TEIO STEP!”

“KNOWN AS THE ‘SUCCESSOR TO THE UNDEFEATED TRIPLE CROWN UMAMUSUME EMPEROR’—TOKAI TEIO!”

“””Ohhhhh—!!!”””

As the impassioned voice of Misato Akasaka—jokingly known in her previous life as “Japan’s only Umamusume race announcer”—fell, today’s 1st favorite in this Debut Race, the small bay Umamusume named Tokai Teio, appeared on the pre-race paddock stage amid the crowd’s cheers, stepping with her unique gait known as the Teio Step.

“Tokai Teio!”

“Tokai Teio!”

“Tokai Teio!”

However, the joys and sorrows of people did not overlap.

Compared to the spectators in the stands, who immediately grew excited as Tokai Teio took the stage, Nice Nature, today’s 3rd favorite, had long since finished her paddock appearance before Tokai Teio came out and was doing her pre-race warmups in the preparation area. Her expression, however, was visibly growing uglier by the second.

Damn it. How had she forgotten!?

How had she forgotten about Tokai Teio, the protagonist of the second season of the Umamusume anime she had watched in her previous life? And how had she forgotten that she was in the same generation as her!?

Could she win?

Absolutely not!

After all, she had already reincarnated into this world and spent sixteen years as an Umamusume named Nice Nature. Because too much time had passed, she no longer remembered whether her original self’s Debut Race, which she had specifically looked up in her previous life, had been the same race Tokai Teio ran in.

But she had not forgotten that her original self had only placed second in her first Debut Race, and only successfully debuted on her second attempt…

“It’s fine… It’s fine… I’ll just treat it as respecting history…” Having realized that Tokai Teio’s appearance in today’s Debut Race had directly dropped her own win rate from double digits to single digits, Neicha could only keep doing her pre-race warmups while quietly comforting herself.

However, as she comforted herself, her warmup movements grew increasingly listless, and the expression on her face gradually changed from ugly to completely unmotivated.

That was right. According to the history she had seen in her previous life, her original self had not succeeded on her first debut anyway. Since she was destined to lose today’s Debut Race, why should she waste brainpower worrying about it?

From the very beginning, she had never intended to become a racer in this life. The only reason she stood on the track now was to earn money through racing and repay the debts of that troublesome bastard of a mother of hers, who had copied others in stock trading and ended up owing an absurd amount.

Whether she won or lost did not matter. What race she ran did not matter either. As long as she placed and got prize money, why should she care whether she won every race from now on?

The only pity is that I’ll have to wait half a month and run a second maiden race before I can successfully debut. But that can’t be helped. Who told me to have such bad luck that my Debut Race just had to overlap with Tokai Teio, the future undefeated Double Crown Umamusume…

“THE RACE HAS BEGUN!”

With Misato Akasaka, who seemed to have monopolized all commentary work for the central-region races of the URA Twinkle Series, announcing the start of the race, seven of the eight participating Umamusume, including Tokai Teio, rushed out of the gates one after another.

They began chasing and fighting for position right from the Opening Leg of the race.

To seize a position that could increase their chances of winning this Debut Race, they refused to yield so much as an inch.

The only one completely out of place among these competitive Umamusume was Neicha, who had discovered that her Debut Race overlapped with Tokai Teio’s and had therefore lost all fighting spirit.

At this moment, while everyone else was locked in fierce competition during the Opening Leg to seize positions that would give them a crucial advantage in the race…

Her running form was loose and sloppy, and even her eyelids were half-lowered as if she had not woken up.

“Go on, fight for it. Better yet, get into an actual brawl and crack each other’s heads open~”

Knowing that with Tokai Teio, the future undefeated Double Crown Umamusume, in the race, the championship had nothing to do with her anymore—and that no matter how hard she ran from here on, all she could do was scrape together a participation subsidy plus placement prize money before preparing for a second debut after the race—Neicha simply made sarcastic remarks while drifting along with the field, allowing the other participating Umamusume, who were putting in every last ounce of effort to seize favorable positions and whose expressions were practically ferocious, to squeeze her all the way to last place.

After all, the prize money for winning a Debut Race was only ten million yen, about five hundred thousand RMB. Second place prize money was roughly thirty percent of the winner’s, about one hundred fifty thousand RMB.

For that little money, why would she risk her life?

In this world where the demons and monsters from strange tales really existed, a shrine maiden like her who genuinely had the ability to exorcise spirits was absolutely a government employee—and a high-income one at that!

One hundred fifty thousand RMB was only about two months of her base salary…

However, at the very moment Neicha, who had already decided to completely phone it in for this race, was calculating that she would simply hang at the very back of the field through the Opening Leg and Middle Leg, conserve energy, then start her final spurt and sprint once the race entered the Final Leg, and that as long as she could place and scrape up some prize money at the finish it would be fine—and even if she did not get any prize money, that was fine too…

A figure with Uma ears and an Uma tail appeared. Its facial features were nothing but vague outlines, its body was translucent, and wisps of faint black mist continuously drifted from it. With one glance, anyone could tell it was neither human nor Umamusume, nor even anything living.

It appeared on this racecourse, where only eight Umamusume were competing, with jarring abruptness, and from the outside lane, it passed Neicha, who was in the middle of splendidly phoning it in.

Is that… a vengeful spirit!?

Throughout the entire racecourse, aside from Neicha—the exorcist born with extraordinarily high spirit sight—not a single person or Umamusume noticed that another “participating Umamusume” had appeared on the track.

And Neicha, the only one who had noticed a supernatural incident occurring on the racecourse, could not help jolting the instant the nonhuman thing that had suddenly appeared beside her passed her, as though startled by the unexpected development.

Immediately after, she froze for a brief moment. Then, as if guided by professional instinct, her original laziness vanished. Her eyes widened, her whole body became alert, and she wore the excited expression of someone thinking, Work’s here. She fixed her gaze on the back of that nonhuman thing only she could see, which had already completely passed her and was smoothly overtaking the midpack group ahead of her, closing in on the Pace Chasers farther forward.

Wait, it actually has Uma ears and an Uma tail!?

No. Impossible. The Three Goddesses govern the souls of every Umamusume in this world. An Umamusume in this world can’t become a vengeful spirit after death. It shouldn’t even be possible for their soul to linger in the world after death as a ghost due to lingering attachments, the way humans can!

In that case, there’s a high probability this thing isn’t a spirit!

At that thought, even Neicha, who was a hereditary shrine maiden born to a family of shrine maidens, who could be said to have been dealing with the demons and monsters of the human world ever since she emerged from the womb, and who had extremely rich combat experience against nonhuman things, could not help but let the excitement in her eyes turn somewhat grave.

Because among the extensive work experience she, a “real exorcist,” had accumulated, there was only one supernatural phenomenon she could think of that could appear before people in a spirit-like form and be connected to Umamusume, beings whose souls could absolutely never remain in the world for long in any spiritual state after death due to the existence of the Three Goddesses.

That was the troublesome thing known as an “urban legend”—or rather, a “rules-based urban legend.”

In the impression of “real exorcists” like Neicha, things like “rules-based urban legends” were fundamentally different from the spirit-type supernatural phenomena she often encountered in the past, such as “ghosts,” “vengeful spirits,” and “evil spirits,” which were formed from the lingering attachments and resentment of humans after death.

To give an example, if ordinary spirits like ghosts and vengeful spirits were like stat-check monsters in computer games that displayed a health bar the moment you encountered them, and most of the time could be solved by sheer strength…

Then a rules-based urban legend was a pure mechanics boss involving puzzle elements. If you did not obediently solve the puzzle according to its rules, it would lock its health, and no matter how much money the player spent or how hard they ground to raise their character’s strength, they would never be able to damage it.

What made a rules-based urban legend hard to deal with was not the “legend,” but the “rules”!

It could be said that, in this world, aside from the Three Goddesses—who, to the vast majority of people and even the vast majority of Umamusume, existed only in legend—any exorcist who wanted to exorcise a rules-based urban legend first had to resolve the rules involved.

So, the question was:

What would the rules be for a rules-based urban legend generated with an Umamusume as its model?

And if she wanted to exorcise it, what prerequisite would she need to satisfy?

The answer was simple.

It could only be one condition: race against it, and outrun it.

T/N: NICE NATUIRE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! NEICHA1!!!!!!!!!!

This is a fan translation of 我，优秀素质，是赛马娘也是巫女 by 百景绘 Rights to the original work belong to the creator. Please support them by exploring their original work or sharing it with others if you can. Thank you for reading and supporting my efforts to bring this story to a wider audience!