The world returned to Kai not in clarity, but in sensation. Cold. Wet. Loud.
A baby's cry pierced the air — raw, helpless, and unfamiliar.
He was the one crying.
Tiny limbs flailed against a scratchy wool blanket. Above him, storm clouds churned over Gotham City, and raindrops streaked the cracked windowpanes of a rundown orphanage on the edge of Crime Alley. Thunder growled in the distance. The storm outside couldn't match the confusion in Kai's mind.
His thoughts were fragmented. He wasn't supposed to be a baby.
Yet he was.
The Archivist's words echoed faintly in the recesses of his soul: You will awaken in a world unfamiliar to your power — but perhaps, in need of it most.
He couldn't talk. Couldn't move properly. But he could feel — the cursed energy slumbering inside him, dormant but undeniable.
The first year passed in haze. Adults with tired eyes passed him from crib to crib, bottle to bottle. There was no love in their touch, only routine. The other children cried often, sometimes from fear, sometimes from hunger. Sometimes from nothing at all. The smell of antiseptic and overcooked porridge clung to the orphanage walls.
Kai didn't cry much after that first night. He watched.
By age two, he had learned to walk. By three, he read picture books silently while other kids chewed on crayons. By four, he memorized the creaky floorboards and where the loose vents were — places to hide things. Even as a child, he felt older than everyone around him. Like he had lived a hundred years.
Sometimes, he would stare at the stars from the rooftop — the few visible between Gotham's smog — and whisper the names of characters he once idolized. Batman. Gojo. Goku. It gave him comfort.
But no one ever came for him.
He was the weird one. The kid with the silent eyes. Caretakers whispered about how he never laughed, never screamed. How when he looked at you, it felt like he knew something you didn't.
No one adopted him.
Kai found an escape through food and memory. The food bag given to him at rebirth was hidden away in his shared dresser drawer. At night, he would pull it close and summon comfort food from memory — steaming takoyaki, curry rice with just the right spice level, a slice of golden castella. He always ate silently, savoring the warmth, the taste, and the feeling of having something truly his.
By five, the visions began.
It started with whispers in the dark. Shadows moving wrong. Cold spots in warm rooms. Then, one morning in winter, he stared too long at a bathroom mirror — and the reflection moved when he didn't.
That night, he saw it clearly: a cursed spirit crouched in the hallway ceiling, feeding off the sorrow of a girl crying in her sleep.
It had no eyes. Just a mouth full of jagged teeth and a veil of smoke around its form. Its presence was like rotting paper soaked in blood. Familiar, and yet otherworldly.
Kai's heart didn't race.
He looked up at it, and for the first time in this life — he smiled.
"Found you," he whispered.
The spirit froze.
It couldn't understand how a child was seeing it. Neither could Kai, not fully. But deep in his soul, he knew: this was his purpose.
He didn't exorcise it — not yet. He was still a child, still figuring out how to access cursed energy safely. But he watched it. Tracked it. Memorized its patterns. And it ran.
Over the next few weeks, more appeared. Feeding on fear. Thriving in shadows.
He began sketching their shapes in secret. Gave them nicknames. Catalogued them like he was building his own cursed encyclopedia.
He began practicing late at night, when everyone was asleep. He sat on the rooftop beneath the Gotham sky, summoning cursed energy with focus, clumsily creating spark-like flares in his palm.
Some nights he failed. Some nights he bled from the nose or passed out entirely. But he kept trying.
He had no mentors. No Tokyo Jujutsu High. No allies. Only instinct and memory. He mimicked Gojo's technique in his mind, but adjusted it to his own limits — developing small cursed tools from junk he collected. A screwdriver wrapped in string became a practice blade. An old copper ring, his focus talisman.
He would whisper old anime openings to himself as chants — not because he needed to, but because it made him feel braver.
On some nights, he'd summon the food bag for a reward after his practice — onigiri, yakisoba, or even a fresh slice of cheesecake. It became ritual: train, eat, sleep.
A Glimpse of the Infinite
On one particularly clear night, he concentrated longer than ever before. Hours passed. His fingers trembled, but the cursed energy gathered. Denser. More precise.
Then it happened.
For a split second, his eyes lit with sapphire fire — and the world bent. Every atom slowed. The air thickened. He could see the breath of a spider three feet away. The Six Eyes awakened.
And then he collapsed, gasping — but laughing.
He had done it. Even if only briefly.
One cursed spirit returned. Stronger. Hungrier. It entered the dormitory, lured by a screaming child having a nightmare. The staff saw nothing. But Kai did.
He chased it into the boiler room and cornered it, using a rusted pipe and focused cursed energy to seal it within an old furnace.
He didn't destroy it. Not yet. But he could have.
He began leaving notes behind — small symbols on doors, protection charms drawn in crayon, and every now and then... whispers reached him. That some kids no longer had nightmares. That rooms felt warmer. That the crying stopped.
No one knew it was him.
One day, he would make this world see what it could not. One day, he would make Gotham fear him — the cursed energy warrior who walked alone.
But for now, he was just a boy in the rain.
Alone.
Watching the dark.
And smiling.