Kuro walked the long road in silence.
His assigned quarters were located near the innermost edges of the outer ring. So many had died.
Whispers said the toll had already passed a hundred thousand. Humans made up the bulk of the casualties, though other races had fallen too. The clan compound was on full alert, every corridor tense. Not with fear, but with the kind of sorrow that made people quiet. Nobody lingered. Nobody spoke above a whisper.
It took him nearly half an hour to reach the large housing unit. His room was on the fourth floor—plain, functional. A mattress, a water basin, nothing else.
He lay down without even removing his shoes.
And for the first time in days, he allowed himself to rest.
At only eight, he had seen more than most adults. Death, disillusion. But nothing had weighed on him quite like the dream.
A few days later, after receiving basic ration allocations and mandatory obligations, he had a strange dream.
He woke up in cold sweat. A field of grey sand stretched to the horizon, and the sound of waves crashing behind him. And in front, just barely visible—a lone figure. A monk, blindfolded in white cloth, holding a crooked staff. His mouth moved, but it wasn't clear.
The silver bell tied to his belongings rang by itself. No wind. No movement. Just that small, chilling sound.
And the memory of his mother's voice.
"The Seishi descend from a blind monk... last of his kind."
The next day, Kuro made his way to the outer archives.
When Kuro first stepped into the archive and asked about Seishi history, the room seemed to still for a second.
The old archivist Kenji, stood behind the counter, thin-boned, half-bent with age—blinked at him like he hadn't heard correctly.
"Seishi?" he repeated, voice low, careful.
Kuro gave a slow nod.
"I want to know about the blind monk."
The archivist stared a moment longer, then let out a breath that whistled through his teeth.
"You're the first to ask that in… gods know how long."
He stepped out from behind the desk, reaching for a hanging lamp. The wick flared to life with a dim amber glow as he added softly,
" We keep them in the old vault."
He didn't say more. Just motioned for Kuro to follow.
They walked in silence.
Past shelves of categorised tomes, past copied books, through corridors where the stones grew darker and dust began to settle like a second skin on everything. The walls changed—older, less refined, the mortar work done by hand.
Eventually, they reached a long passage . Empty shelves lined the walls, some cracked and split. The only light came from the flickering lamp the archivist held out ahead of them.
Kuro could hear the echo of their steps now.
Finally, the man stopped at a heavy door built directly into the stone itself—its surface reinforced with older metal fittings, not of modern design.
He unlocked it with a key pulled from beneath his robes.
Inside, the racks stretched out before him, enormous in scale. They rose several tens of meters high, far beyond Kuro's reach, towering with the weight of ages. Each one was wide, made from thick stone, ancient wood, and strange metals that had weathered the passage of time. Rows upon rows of empty spaces where scrolls once sat now stood vacant.
Kenji then led Kuro to a secluded section in the far corner of the room, where three ancient scrolls lay, bound in red twine and preserved with great care. "These are the last of the original writings," Kenji said. "They hold the history of the Seishi and their founder, the blind monk. He once taught that all knowledge should be shared openly. But after his death, his disciples concealed most of his teachings, releasing only trivial details about his past. The rest was kept within their inner circles, and no one outside them knows the full truth. These scrolls are among the rare originals from that era."
Kuro unrolled the first scroll.
And frowned.
The language wasn't Yamihana. Not the form used today, at least.
It was raw, stiff phonetics and strange, symbolic phrasing. Kenji called it. "The unshaped tongue." A linguistic precursor to the modern dialect. It didn't flow, it scraped.
It took Kuro hours to read even a few lines.
Then longer to make sense of them.
The grammar was broken by modern standards, its syntax fluid and tonal rather than structural—symbols were often linked to vibrations or emotional intent. The scrolls didn't describe things. They invoked them. One phrase in particular stopped him cold:
"To burn, speak flame. To move, whispering wind. To bind, hum silence."
They weren't just metaphors.
These were the roots of enchantment.
The scrolls spoke of the monk, no name ever given, only referred to as The Listener.
He was said to descend from an ancient race that lived entirely underground. People born blind, hunter-gatherers in pitch black. They didn't see the world. They felt it. Through pressure. Through vibration. Through rhythm.
After the Kurayami Descent, a cataclysm they called the Breaking, something shifted. These underground tribes discovered strange symbols etched into the deepest stone—symbols that resonated with unnatural energy.
No one knew how many there were.
No one could agree on what they looked like.
But they felt them. When carved, chanted, or traced, those symbols bent the world ever so slightly. Brought fire from breath. Hardened stone through intent. With time, they developed resonant speech—a primitive chant-speak built to match the frequency of these symbols. That was where their enchantments were born.
They worshipped the symbols, believed them divine. But not all agreed.
A small group—those who feared the growing dependency on these powers—split from the main tribes. Heretics, they were cast out and left to die. But rather than perish, they fled, rising through ruined tunnels into the surface.
What they found above was worse.
The surface had been overrun—corrupted by decay, torn apart by war, rotted by what the scrolls called filth-nations. There was no refuge… until a vision came. One seen by their seers.
A land of mountains wrapped in fog.
A shore of cold wind and untouched stone.
Only one reached it.
Only one survived the voyage.
The monk.