The weather left much to be desired that day: gray, sullenly pompous clouds eclipsed the dim autumn sun. There were no natural light sources in Kyoto for more than an hour, and the gray masses of people crowding around shopping malls, cafes or intersections merged with the mood of the city. ...Akashi, slightly hunched over in front of his laptop, sat and stared desperately at the pixels of the text with tired eyes. There was a cloud of textbooks, documents, and drafts on his desk, covered in hieroglyphs that looked increasingly sloppy. The young man's hand trembled, and the ball of the pen slid across the paper with a rustle, leaving a smear. Seijuro's grip relaxed; the pen fell onto a pile of papers with a glass thud. Undoubtedly, the father put impossible tasks on the seventeen-year-old boy, seeing in him only a target, which only remained to be hit with a dart, in which all his roles in life were laid in advance: the heir of the Red House, the person to whom the baton should be passed... and what remained in doubt was his personality as an impeccable basketball player. After all, once, in the first year of high school, Seijuro made changes to his routine, and still has not regretted it once. Akashi Sr., who took pity on his son, allowed him to replenish his employment with basketball training. And most importantly, the desire for a basketball career lay only with Seijuro, and not with his father. Busy with tedious work and aching fatigue pouring lead through the body, the mind missed the moment of drowsiness. A brief vibration of the phone, lost under the weight of necessary and unnecessary benefits, decided to inform him about this. As if waking up, Seijuro, as if in a fever, was filled with frisky vivacity and began to clean up the outright mess. Textbooks on Japanese history, social studies and physics flew to the floor while others remained on the edge...