Rain.

  Not the digital shimmer of the Null Ascent, nor the glitch-static sleet of the Codestream Drift. This was real rain. Cold, sharp, and unkind.

  Kai was thirteen.

  And the sky had been gone for three days.

  Not metaphorically—it had literally vanished from his city. A blackout anomaly. No stars. No moon. No sun. Just a dull, fluorescent hue cast from artificial grids. The world was boxed in. A terrarium for ghosts.

  He sat in the corner of his room—books on quantum theory piled up beside an ashtray his father left behind. Not that the old man smoked. No, he just needed something to stub his anger into.

  The silence was a god.

  And Kai was its prophet.

  Every sound he made was judged. Every whisper of curiosity condemned. His mother wept in the next room, never loud enough to disturb the walls. She was an echo. A presence that refused to be present.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  School?

  It was a battlefield of masks. Teachers who taught to earn, not to enlighten. Students who laughed so hard it bruised. Kai, with his too-quiet mind and too-loud thoughts, sat alone at every table. He once asked a classmate what love felt like. They told him to shut up and go die.

  He didn’t.

  But he almost did.

  Once.

  He stood at the train platform, calculating how fast the engine moved versus his mass. But logic is cruel—it told him he’d survive. Maybe paralyzed. Maybe awake forever. And that was scarier than death.

  So he walked home.

  And that night, he rewrote something inside himself.

  He stopped believing in rescue.

  Stopped believing in adults, gods, or fate.

  He decided: “If no one is coming to save me… then I’ll become the thing that never needed saving.”

  And in that twisted, beautiful paradox, Kai was born again.

  Not in light.

  But in the profound silence of being unchosen.

  He scribbled formulas into the walls of his room. Not for school. Not for exams. For understanding. He didn’t want answers. He wanted power. The kind that made logic blink. The kind that cracked rules into something beautiful.

  He didn’t want to be human anymore.

  Humans were too fragile.

  He wanted to be meaning.

  But meaning had a price.

  And Kai was already paying in scars.

  End of Chapter 61