Chapter 7 Beneath Nebula

Nebula was the most beautiful world ever built, as long as you never looked down.

Up above the clouds, whole islands floated in the blue, cities bigger than kingdoms shining in the sun. Aura ships crossed the sky. Nobles lived in palaces hung among the clouds, and kings ruled from golden towers, and the richest merchants in the Neva System traded fortunes between one breath and the next. Six of the system's ten kings made their home here, and so did the great Academy, where the future legends of the world were made. To amost of the people , Nebula was paradise.

To Kaizen Al-Harith, it was a lie. Because paradise only covered the top.

Far below the floating cities, below the rich districts and the noble estates, there was another world, the one the people up top liked to pretend was not there. The Undercity, where millions lived and suffered and died while nobody up above ever looked down to notice.

Kaizen was ten years old, and he sat on a rusted pipe above one of the crowded streets of City B and watched all of it the way he watched everything.

His hair was a mess and his clothes were stitched together from other people's scraps, and he was thin in the way that comes from too many missed meals. But his eyes were sharp, sharper than most grown men's, and nothing on that street got past them. Not the guards squeezing taxes out of the stalls. Not the children digging through trash for something to eat. Not the merchant slipping coins into an official's hand. And not the slave wagon rolling slow down the middle of the road.

Especially not the slave wagon.

Seven people sat inside it, chains on their wrists and ankles. Three men, two women, two children. One little girl looked no older than six. Nobody helped them. Nobody even turned to look. People just kept walking, because in City B a wagon full of slaves was nothing new.

City B belonged to Marcus Valker. He was a noble, a small one by the standards up above, not a high ranking one, not anyone the golden towers would notice. Down here he was everything. Aura Stage Two peak , strong enough that no one dared stand against him. Every year the taxes rose. Every year the food cost more. Workers who missed their quotas vanished. Families who could not pay their debts vanished. Children with no one to protect them vanished, and most of them turned up later in wagons like that one. The city ran because people feared Marcus more than they hated him.

Kaizen hated him anyway. He hated all of them, every noble, top to bottom. But not out loud. Hating out loud got you killed, and Kaizen was a lot of things, but stupid was not one of them. So he smiled when a smile kept him safe. He lied when a lie kept him fed. He played weak when looking weak kept him alive. That was the first thing the world ever taught him. Survive. Whatever it costs.

The second thing it taught him came when he was eight.

His father, Idris, was a cook. A simple man, a kind one, the sort nobody remembers a week after he is gone. One afternoon a noble came into the restaurant, and a young serving boy tripped and spilled a plate down the man's fine clothes. The boy started crying and begging and apologizing, terrified out of his mind. Idris stepped in to calm it, to take the blame off the child, to help.

The noble hit him. Once. Only once.

Kaizen still remembered the sound of it. The crack, then the quiet, then the way his father went down and did not get up. There was so much blood. Nobody moved. Nobody said a word. The noble fixed his sleeve and walked out, as if a man's life was worth less than a stain on a shirt.

Kaizen dropped down beside him and shook him. Again. And again. His father did not move, did not speak, did not breathe. he was normal person not aura user.

All sort of thoughts went through his mind but one thing which was constant was WHY ? his father did nothing wrong , he was only trying to help so why such big punishment and are we just insects.

He clenched his fists so hard his nails cut his own palms, and never even felt it. What he wanted, kneeling there, was not money and not food. It was power. Enough power that no one could ever do this to him again. And he had none. He was eight years old, small and weak and useless, and he hated that more than he hated the noble.

A year later his mother got sick. It started small. Then weeks went by, then months, and the cough got worse and the fever never broke. Everytime he loked his mother , the same thought came back to him , She was not dying because she was ill or there was no cure but she was dying because they did not had money to get her cured. 

So Kaizen begged. Every day, every chance he got, he begged anyone who looked like they had a coin to spare. Merchants. Shop owners. Travelers. Most looked straight through him. Some laughed. One threw water in his face. A guard once hit him hard enough to split his lip. He kept begging anyway, because his mother was dying and he could not make himself accept it. He remembered every face that said no, every voice, every one of them.

At night the anger had nowhere to go. He punched walls until his knuckles split. Some nights he dug his nails into his own arms, not because it helped, but because he did not know where else to put what was inside him. His mother was dying, and there was nothing, nothing at all, that he could do.

She died quietly, in her sleep. No miracle came. No noble helped. No doctor knocked. She was there one night and gone by morning, and once again Kaizen buried someone he loved with no one beside him.

By nine, he had no family left.

The world expected him to die. Most orphans in the Undercity did. Kaizen did not, because survival had stopped being something he did and become the only thing he was. He hauled cargo. Swept streets. Ran messages. Worked warehouses. Picked scrap. Stole when he had to. Every coin went into a hiding place. Every meal was counted. He was not really living. He was getting ready, building toward a day when no one could ever make him feel small again.

One winter evening he finally bought himself a real meal. Meat, bread, hot soup, the first decent food in months. He had just sat down when an older thief swept it all off the table and walked away laughing.

Most kids would have cried. Kaizen watched. He remembered.

For two weeks he followed the man. Where he slept, when he drank, when he was alone. Every habit, every weakness. Then one night Kaizen walked into the empty warehouse where the thief slept, and the thief did not wake up. A knife did the rest. Once, clean, quiet. He took back his coins, and then he took everything else the man had, and when he walked out he felt nothing at all. No guilt. Just a simple, settled understanding. Take what was his, and you did not get a second chance.

By ten, Kaizen had thirty gold coins hidden away. A fortune, down here. Years of hunger and cold and work turned into metal.

Everyone told him the same thing when he said what he meant to spend it on. You are wasting it. Commoners do not get good Aspects. You will read Grey, or Common at best. Save your money.

He went anyway. He had spent ten years knowing nothing about himself, no family, no bloodline, no answers, only questions, and he was tired of questions.

Master Orren Vale lived at the edge of City B, one of the few real Aspect Readers in the district. Stage Three, sixty-seven years old, thousands of readings behind him, most of them the same disappointed parents and the same Grey children. He looked annoyed when Kaizen walked in. Then he saw the gold. Thirty coins, all of it, paid up front.

"You worked years for this," the old man said.

"Yes."

"You know there's a good chance you read Grey."

"I know."

"Still want to?"

"Yes." His heart was going hard. If it came back Grey, some cold corner of him thought, at least he would finally be sure of one thing about himself.

Orren looked at him a long moment, then nodded. "Sit."

"Stay still."

Kaizen nodded.

He felt something warm move through his body. It wasn't painful just strange. Like water running where water wasn't supposed to run.

The old man's eyes narrowed.

"That's odd."

"What is?" Kaizen asked.

"Quiet."

More Aura entered his body.

A moment later, Orren's expression changed.

Kaizen felt a sharp sting in his right hand. He looked down.

A thin black spike had pushed out from the tip of his finger.

Both of them froze.

The spike was wet and dark, almost like blood, but not quite.

"What did I do?" Kaizen asked.

Orren didn't answer.

The old man grabbed a piece of scrap metal from his desk and held it out.

"Touch it."

Kaizen hesitated but did as he was told.

The black spike brushed the metal.

Nothing happened for a second.

Then dark marks began spreading across the surface.

Kaizen pulled his hand back so fast he nearly fell out of his chair.

"I didn't mean to do that."

This time Orren still didn't answer.

He was staring at Kaizen.

like he was something unique and different and not like some poor beggar

For the first time in Kaizen's life, someone looked at him and seemed worried

What is it?" Kaizen asked.

No answer.

"What am I?"

Still nothing. There was sweat on the old man's forehead now, and his eyes would not leave the basin. When he finally spoke, it was barely a whisper.

"Impossible."

The reading had a name for the thing living in Kaizen's blood. Black Blood. Tier four. Unique, the kind of Aspect luck hands to maybe one child in many thousands, and almost never to a commoner. A cursed, powerful bloodline that gave its owner command over his own black blood. He could pull it out of his body and shape it into blades, spikes, shields, whatever he needed, and it carried a poison that could rot a living thing from the inside until it died depending on his aura stage and power. He could also drive it back through his own body and make himself harder, faster, stronger than any ordinary man. A weapon and a curse in the same veins.

Orren turned slowly and looked the boy in the eyes, and for the first time in his long life he had no answer to give. Only a question, and his voice shook on it.

"Boy. What exactly are you?"

And for the first time in his life, Kaizen wanted to know the answer just as badly as the old man did.