In a world carved into gold and dirt, where wealth meant godhood and poverty meant nothingness, Shoya Ichira was born at the bottom—buried in it.

He was ten years old and already old inside. Not in the poetic, wise-beyond-his-years kind of way. No—Shoya was hollowed out. Rusted. Weathered by a life that never offered warmth, only cold hands and colder mornings.

He lived in a building that smelled like urine and dead dreams. The wallpaper peeled like skin, the roaches didn’t run when you turned the lights on—they owned the place. Apartment 4C: a single room with a rusted sink, a cracked window, and a mother who spent her days chasing ghosts through syringes. His older brother, Kenji, was just another ghost himself. Eighteen and already broken, eyes glazed, mouth twisted into a permanent sneer. He drank, fought, and came home only when he needed to crash.

No one in that place was living. They were all just waiting to die differently.

Shoya had never gone to school. Not once. And he didn’t even ask why anymore. He knew. His mother would rather get high than pay for uniforms or books or whatever it took to get a kid like him into a classroom that didn’t smell like shit. She’d tell him life was hard, then disappear for three days, only to come back crying and shaking, begging for forgiveness she never earned. Kenji called him a brat, told him to stop dreaming. “This is just life,” he’d say. “This is just how it is.”

Shoya hated that sentence more than anything else in the world.

He didn’t just hate the rich—though he did, with every breath in his body. He hated their shiny towers, their smug, scrubbed faces, the way they looked at the poor like stray dogs that had wandered too close. But he hated the people around him too. The ones who gave up. The ones who drank and cursed and hit their kids and laughed like hyenas at nothing because it was easier than crying.

He hated the neighbors who let their children starve. He hated the way everyone talked about getting out but never took a single step. He hated the filth, the noise, the endless reruns of despair.

Sometimes he hated his own blood. Sometimes he looked in the mirror and wondered if he was already becoming like them.

He didn’t believe in God. Not because no one had taught him, but because if a god did exist, He was either cruel or didn’t care. And Shoya had no use for either.

Each night, he climbed up to the roof and stared at the city beyond. The glowing skyline. The rich district. A place that looked like another planet, one where people smiled without flinching. Sometimes, he imagined it all burning. Other times, he imagined himself walking through it, clean and powerful, while everyone who had ever looked down on him watched in silence.

He didn’t know what kind of person he would become. Only that it wouldn’t be this.

Shoya Ichira was not afraid of the darkness.

He was born in it. And one day, he would make it his.