In a corner of the capital's underbelly, nestled between crumbling brick alleys and the scent of old sin, a woman screamed beneath blood-soaked sheets. The brothel matron barked commands, the midwife's hands were steady, and outside, laughter from drunken nobles drifted through cracked windows.
And in that place where dreams had long since died, a child was born.
He didn't cry.
The midwife frowned. The child's eyes opened—wide, black, watching.
A cold silence fell over the small chamber. For one breathless moment, even the drunken laughter outside seemed to falter.
"Name him," the matron demanded, but the woman on the bed only stared ahead, empty-eyed and pale.
She had once been beautiful. Not noble-beautiful, but enough to catch the gaze of men with coin and power. She'd spent her youth chasing fantasies—a noble lover, a child with a name, a home of marble and silk. She'd whispered lies into the ears of cloaked men, trying to carve her way into a better life.
One night, she thought she succeeded. A nobleman, his face hidden in shadow, had returned to her again and again. She had stopped using herbs. Prayed to whatever gods still bothered to listen.
And it worked.
She conceived.
She believed she had won.
When she told the noble, he didn't rage. He simply nodded and sent for a mage.
The test was quick, painless—and devastating.
The child was not his.
She'd gambled everything and lost. The noble vanished. The brothel's clientele thinned. She was forced to keep the child, now marked with her failure.
From that moment on, she hated him.
She named him Kael—short, sharp, forgettable. Not for love. Not for hope. Only because the matron demanded it.
Kael's childhood was a chain of quiet suffering. He learned not to cry, because crying earned slaps. He learned not to speak, because speaking earned kicks. His mother saw him as a parasite, draining the scraps of her already ruined life. She fed him when she could, beat him when she couldn't, and ignored him when both were too much.
The other girls in the brothel pitied him at first. Then they stopped. Pity was too expensive.
When he was six, his mother sold him to a slave trader for less than the price of a bottle of decent wine.
He didn't cry.
The next four years were a blur of chains and commands.
Kael learned how to move, how to obey, how to fight—if not for freedom, then for survival. He was thrown into mock battles with other boys, whipped for showing weakness, and starved if he hesitated. The slavers were training him, grooming him for a future as a personal bodyguard or arena fighter.
He survived.
Not because he was stronger than the others.
But because he was emptier.
Until one day, fate intervened.
Bandits struck the caravan during a midnight crossing near the eastern ridge. Screams echoed. Fires burned. In the chaos, Kael slipped free of his bindings, took a knife from a fallen guard, and ran.
He didn't stop until the forest swallowed him whole.
The Beast Forest was no sanctuary. It was a living nightmare—filled with monsters, poisonous plants, and predators more intelligent than men. Yet, Kael survived.
He lived off insects and raw meat. Slept in trees. Watched monsters hunt and copied their patience. He fought wolves with sharp stones, learned how to skin a carcass, how to smell rot in water, how to feel the air before danger struck.
He grew lean, fast, and hard.
Sometimes he traded with isolated villages. Never stayed longer than a night. No one asked where he came from. No one cared.
He learned to hunt magical beasts.
He sold their parts—fangs, scales, blood—to black market traders in border towns. With the coin, he bought better blades, warmer cloaks, tools.
No one knew his name. Only whispers remained:
"That boy who walks like a ghost."
"He killed a two-horned jaguar with a spear he made himself."
"Doesn't use magic. Only moves."
They called him a feral, a wild blade, a beast-touched. But none dared cheat him twice.
On his seventeenth winter, Kael stood before the gates of the Imperial Academy.
Wearing a simple cloak, his ID newly forged, his aura hidden.
His file marked him as an unregistered orphan—a citizen now by legal technicality. No noble house. No family crest. No recommendation.
The guards almost turned him away—until he raised his hand and unleashed a ripple of pure aura.
They staggered back, faces pale.
Aura wasn't something a boy from nowhere should have. Not unless he'd bled on a hundred battlefields. Not unless he was a Master.
The instructors were skeptical. The nobles laughed. But the testing crystal shattered in his hand.
Word spread like wildfire:
"A martial artist who awakened aura before adulthood."
"A commoner with no background who moves like a sword drawn in silence."
"The only student in a generation who doesn't need mana to be terrifying."
Kael said nothing. He took his uniform. He stepped into the Academy halls like a shadow slipping through stone.
And for the first time since his birth…
He wasn't running anymore.