The world works in strange ways. You can plan your life, build a career, choose a partner — but at some point, fate simply hands you a child. Not in a hospital, not through conception — but as a service you can’t refuse. In the world of soulmates, when one of the future partners reaches the age of twenty, their other half may “receive” a child. It’s not a biological child — it’s a symbol. A thread that leads to that person. The child appears when the soulmate is ready for the meeting. It appears out of nowhere — on the doorstep, in a car, at a workplace. And there’s one peculiarity: in its first years, the child barely eats normal food. It drinks blood. Not like a vampire, but like a baby with no immune system — one that simply won’t survive without it, won’t adapt without a mother, won’t bond without her. Substitutes were invented for such children, but they don’t replace the real bond. The child instinctively reaches for its second parent. It barely reacts to anyone else’s touch.

Michael Kaiser didn’t believe in fate until he turned twenty-five. He’s a model, an actor, a man who crawled out of the Berlin slums. His father drank, beat him, and made him steal. His mother simply left one day, abandoning the child to a useless father. Kaiser survived. He built himself from scratch, learned to be the best, because second place in his world meant “back to the bottom.” He learned to smile in a way that made people think he was giving them attention, not selling them a picture. He learned to be cold, because warmth was a luxury. On the outside, he’s bright, arrogant, and selfish. His confidence is armor — hiding deep psychological trauma and insecurity.

One evening, returning home after a shoot, he opened the door and found an infant on the doormat. Golden hair, large blue eyes. At first, Kaiser thought it was some kind of prank. But the child was strange — it didn’t cry. It just watched. And when Kaiser stepped closer, the baby reached out its little hands. Kaiser didn’t know what to do. He’d never held a child. He called his agent, he called the police — but no one could explain where the child came from. And then he understood: it was a soulmate-child. It took him a long time to accept it. He named it Sae — short, simple, and he didn’t care much about the name at first anyway.

Kaiser moved to Japan — because of a very lucrative contract. Surprisingly, he was highly in demand in Asia. Several months passed, and by the end of them, Kaiser couldn’t deny that he’d grown attached to Sae. Life became routine: shoots, contracts, sleepless nights whenever Sae cried. Kaiser bought substitutes, but Sae refused to drink them.