By the time I was ten, the whispers had stopped trying to hide from me. I had learned how to stand in doorways without creaking the hinges, how to breathe without being heard, how to tuck myself into corners and folds of darkness like I belonged there. Maybe I did. Maybe that was all I would ever belong to.
I pieced together what I could from the fragments of conversation they never intended for my ears. Names spoken like prayers or curses. Places I had never seen, marked on maps I was not meant to find. I learned that Validant was not just a family name but something older, deeper, something bound to blood and promise. Some called us a clan. Others, something more sinister. Assassins, spies, ghosts that moved in the places people feared to look.
I began to understand that my training was not simply to make me obedient. It was to make me useful. To make me necessary. And to make me dangerous.
The power inside me did not sleep. I could feel it under my skin, in my bones, curled up like a predator that had not yet decided whether I was worth keeping alive. I tested it in secret. Late at night, when the house was silent and the oil lamps had burned themselves into faint trails of smoke. I would press my palms to old wood, to scraps of cloth, to bits of food long past saving. I watched them crumble to nothing, watched the mold bloom like bruises under my fingertips.
Sometimes it frightened me. Sometimes it thrilled me. Mostly, it reminded me that whatever I was, it was not normal. I stopped pretending that it could be.
They knew. Of course they knew. The woman I called Mother never spoke of it outright, but her lessons changed. I was not just taught to hide my body in the shadows but to hide the shadows in my body. Control was everything. Fear was weakness. If I slipped, there would be no second chance. The world we moved through did not forgive mistakes.
When I turned twelve, they took me beyond the walls of the compound. For the first time, I saw the city from above. Not the narrow alleys and hushed courtyards but the sprawl of rooftops, the shifting tide of people who never looked up. It was beautiful in a way that hurt. Lanterns swung from iron posts, their glow painting the stones below in soft amber. Steam rose from bathhouses and kitchens, curling into the night air. I could almost pretend it was normal, that I was normal, that I could step down there and disappear into the crowds.
But I knew better.
That night, I took my first life.
They did not tell me his name. They did not tell me what he had done to deserve it. They placed a knife in my hand and a whisper in my ear. Make it clean. Make it silent. Make it untraceable.
I did not want to. But wanting had no place here. Wanting was weakness.
He never saw me coming. He sat with his back to the door, drinking from a chipped porcelain cup, his breath clouding the glass in front of him. I watched him for a moment, trying to find something in him that would make this harder. A flicker of kindness. A glimmer of regret. Anything that might feel like mercy.
There was nothing. Just a man, living his last seconds without knowing it.
The blade was sharp enough that he did not have time to cry out. His blood was warm on my hands, hot enough that for a moment I wondered if it would burn away whatever part of me still wanted to be something else. It didn't. It only sank deeper.
I cleaned the knife like they taught me. I wiped my hands on the cloth they gave me. When I stepped back into the alley, Mother was waiting. She did not smile. She did not praise me. She only placed her hand on my shoulder and steered me away from the body cooling behind us.
That was my first lesson in what it meant to be Validant. There were no good deaths. Only necessary ones.
Years passed like that. Quiet missions. Silent nights. A name that still did not feel like mine but grew heavier every time someone spoke it with respect or fear. Kenjiro. The boy with the rotting touch. The boy whose shadows listened when he called.
I wondered sometimes if the past I remembered had ever really belonged to me. The hum of an old TV, the flicker of a game loading on a dusty screen, the voice that called me by another name in a language I no longer spoke out loud. Pieces of another life I held tight to in the moments before sleep, when I felt the curse under my skin shift and sigh like a restless thing dreaming of freedom.
One night, when I was fifteen, I stood alone on the roof of our compound and watched the city lights flicker in the fog. I pressed my palm to the old wooden railing and felt the decay crawl out from my skin, eating through splinters until they fell away into darkness.
I could end all of this. I knew it then. If I let it out, if I stopped holding it back, if I opened every door inside me, I could rot this whole place to ruin. Bring it down in a tide of black mold and splintered beams and cold ash. I could take them all with me.
But I didn't. Because even then, I knew the curse was not my enemy. The curse was a promise. A question waiting for an answer I had not yet found.
So I pulled it back inside. I waited. I watched. I listened.
Because one day, I would understand what I was. And on that day, I would decide what to do with the world that made me this way.
Until then, I was Kenjiro. I was Validant. I was patient. And I was not afraid.