Kurayami Akira was four years old when his blood answered him.
He did not scream.
The pain came first—sharp, burning, wrong. It crawled up his arm like ice and fire together, a sensation his young body had no words for. Akira stared at his palm in silence as red droplets slid down his fingers and struck the tatami floor.
That's strange.
He didn't remember cutting himself.
The blood did not spread.
It stopped.
Then it moved.
The droplets trembled, pulling together as if drawn by an invisible thread. Akira's breath caught as the red liquid lifted from the floor, stretching, thinning, hardening in the air. It shaped itself into a narrow, uneven blade—crude, fragile, but unmistakably solid.
His knees gave out.
The blade clattered to the floor and shattered into splashes of crimson.
The room erupted.
His mother screamed his name. His father shouted—too loud, too fast. Chairs scraped back. Someone knocked over a cup. Akira felt hands on his shoulders, shaking him, but all he could see was the blood.
I've seen this before.
The thought came without words, without memory. It was not his voice, not entirely. Like an echo bouncing through an empty room.
A girl flashed through his mind.
Black hair. Glasses. A red sword formed from her own blood.
Pain.
Loneliness.
Don't use it too much.
He didn't know who she was.
He didn't know why the image hurt.
Doctors came. Men in white coats with clipped voices and scanning eyes. They wrapped his arm, asked questions he couldn't answer, whispered words his parents pretended not to hear.
"Emitter-type…"
"Self-inflicted output…"
"High-risk…"
Akira sat quietly on the hospital bed, feet not reaching the floor, staring at the bandage around his arm.
His parents didn't touch him anymore.
That night, he dreamed of another life.
Not memories—feelings.
A cramped apartment. A phone glowing in the dark. A college lecture half-listened to. The name Sato Haruki drifted through his mind like it belonged to someone else.
Twenty-one years old.
Average.
Normal.
He woke up crying without knowing why.
The decision was made two weeks later.
They didn't say the word abandoned.
They said facility. They said special care. They said for your safety.
Akira stood at the gate of the orphanage with a small bag in his hand. His mother knelt in front of him, her smile stiff, her eyes wet but distant.
"Be good, Akira."
His father didn't look back when they left.
As the car disappeared down the road, something settled deep in Akira's chest—not rage, not sadness.
Understanding.
This power leads to loneliness.
He didn't know how he knew that.
He only knew it was true.
That night, alone in a narrow bed, Akira raised his hand and bit his finger.
The blood welled up.
It hovered.
Slow. Obedient. Heavy.
He forced it back into his skin, clenching his fist until it vanished.
"I won't end like that," he whispered to the dark.
He didn't know who that was.
But somewhere, in the echo of a forgotten soul, a red blade waited to be forged.