"Even if I had a voice, no one would have heard me."
The city of Jōkai was a fortress built to keep the unwanted in — and the undesirables out. Towering walls of black stone encased the city, stained by smoke and the never-ending shadows cast by giant elemental forges. To outsiders, it was a place of power, legacy, and elemental might. But to Kureha Arashi, it was a cage lined with thorns, a place where hope came to die.
By the age of six, Kureha already knew he was less than nothing.
No one noticed when he walked the streets barefoot, his skin pale and bruised, his ribs pressing sharp beneath tattered rags. The winter wind bit at his thin arms, but his hunger was a colder, deeper ache — gnawing at his bones and his soul.
He moved like a ghost, unseen, unheard.
Then he saw it — a piece of bread, dry and cracked, abandoned on the edge of a vendor's stall.
His hand shot out before his mind could stop it.
The vendor noticed.
"Thief!" he shouted, grabbing Kureha's arm with iron fingers.
The world blurred in a rush of hands and shouts. A man stepped forward, lifting a heavy cleaver not with anger, but with the cold indifference of routine. The blade came down.
Crack.
Kureha's body jolted from the blow, his mouth opening in a silent scream that never left his throat.
The crowd didn't flinch. They turned away, leaving him bleeding on the dirty cobblestones.
"Affinity-less trash," someone spat.
"Should've been drowned at birth."
No one helped him. No one cared.
That night, he woke in a cell cold enough to freeze his thoughts.
The Fukuro Orphanage.
A name whispered by the city's underbelly with loathing.
There were no beds, no warmth. Only stone and shadows.
The caretakers called it a home. The children called it a prison.
Kureha's days passed in silence, broken only by the sharp sting of fists and the rough hands of those who hated what he was: a boy with no elemental affinity.
At twelve, the world was supposed to change.
The Rite of Echo was sacred. Children stood within the Circle of Seals, surrounded by eight glowing stones — Fire, Water, Wind, Earth, Lightning, Ice, Light, and Shadow. Each stone awaited the child whose soul resonated with it.
For Kureha, the circle remained dark.
No glow.
No echo.
The priests exchanged worried glances. Whispers filled the chamber.
"Void-born," one muttered.
"Without an affinity, he is nothing."
They struck him to his knees.
No one saw the tears that never fell.
From then on, he was no longer Kureha. He was "defect," "mute," "worm."
The world taught him that silence was better than weakness.
The beatings came faster, the punishments harsher. When the guards were drunk, they took what they wanted without mercy.
Kureha stopped screaming on the third night.
Pain was no longer pain.
It was a shadow wrapped around his heart.
At fourteen, he became a ghost among ghosts.
He learned to move without sound, to vanish in plain sight.
His sharp eyes watched and remembered every step, every breath.
He wasn't afraid anymore.
Not of the boys who mocked him.
Not of the guards who ignored him.
He only feared one thing: being forgotten.
One night, a boy with a blazing Fire affinity tried to steal the moldy bread Kureha had hidden.
Kureha smiled — not with kindness, but cold calculation.
He waited for the swing, slipped under the arm, and drove a bone-sharp shard into the boy's side.
The boy screamed, blood staining the dirt red.
For the first time, Kureha felt warmth — not in his body, but in his purpose.
That night, he escaped through the corpse chute — a hidden passage where the orphanage disposed of the dead.
The chute led to the Kurokawa Wastes, a cursed forest where no sane soul dared wander.
Kureha welcomed the cold embrace of the wild.
Survival was brutal.
He ate rats, bark, anything.
He sharpened bones into knives.
He learned the language of the wind — when it whispered warnings, when it carried secrets.
For over a year, he wandered alone, his body growing lean and strong.
The forest became his home.
But the nights were lonely.
And then, on the 348th night, the wind stopped.
It wasn't a gentle calm.
It was silence.
A silence that screamed.
Drawn by instinct, Kureha stumbled to the ruins of an ancient shrine.
There, half-buried in snow, was a rune tablet pulsing with faint blue light.
Eight power stones lay before it, seven dull and cold.
But the eighth glowed with the color of a stormy sky.
Kureha reached out.
"Do you want to scream?"
The voice echoed inside his mind — ancient, deep, and filled with power.
"Do you want to be heard?"
The wind swirled around him, lifting snowflakes in a silent dance.
Kureha's heart hammered.
"Then I shall lend you my wind."
The world shattered into a cyclone of ice and fury.
Kureha was lifted from the ground, his body screaming in silence.
When he landed, the snow hissed beneath him.
His chest burned with new power.
The crystal was gone.
But inside him, the wind whispered.
For the first time, Kureha Arashi felt alive.
And he swore:
I will tear this world apart.