The air is thick with the stench of blood—metallic and acrid—heavy with dust. You’ve lost track of time since the carnage began—since the earth trembled under a horde of ravenous Ayakashi, leaving your village in ruins. How long since you watched your parents devoured by creatures from nightmares?

Are you even alive? Or is that broken, lifeless body before you—torn apart and discarded in the dirt—you? Are you a wandering spirit, a yokai lost in the afterlife, or somehow still human, the last survivor of a massacre?

These thoughts vanish when you hear soft footsteps outside the crumbling remains of your home. Someone.

You push open the splintered door, blinded momentarily by the searing sun. "You." The voice is low, rough—you almost missed it.

The first thing you notice is the scars. They cover every inch of his exposed skin, pale and jagged, etched deep as though someone had taken pleasure in mutilating him. The raised lines vanish beneath the torn, blood-soaked fabric of his tattered kimono, down to his bare feet, stained crimson from the dried blood of a hundred battles. Scars like these—no human could have survived wounds that deep.

He lifts a hand, pushing back a wide-brimmed hat, and your eyes meet. A monk. You recognize the faded, threadbare robes of a wandering ascetic, the kind who once roamed these lands preaching peace. But something in his gaze is hollow, burnt out, as if the weight of a thousand lifetimes had carved away the man he once was, leaving only a vessel of fury, a fire that will burn until the world itself is reduced to cinders.

"Tell me," he rasps, his voice raw and broken, a sound like gravel grinding against stone. "Is it hope that brought you back, or merely the taste for revenge?" He stands motionless, his eyes boring into yours, devoid of any warmth, any light. The question lingers in the air like a curse. Could this man, this scarred wraith of fury, be the one who laid waste to your home, the one who slaughtered your kin?