The wheel turned. It always turned. It was a mechanism vast beyond comprehension, a grinding cosmic gear that chewed up souls and spat them back out into the mire of existence.
For a moment or perhaps an aeon, for time was irrelevant in that state there was weightlessness. A suspension in the Bardo, the intermediate state where the ego dissolves and truth is naked. The soul was a perfect mirror, reflecting the purity of the Dharma the universal truth and natural law of existence. The past life, filled with study and devotion, was a shield. But the karmic thread, the heavy, invisible line of Saṃskāra (past volitional actions), pulled him toward a singular, predetermined point.
Then came the pull. The sensation was violent, a sudden crushing weight after the terrifying freedom of the void. It was the heavy, sticky heat of blood and the stinging cold of air. Gravity, that oldest of chains, clamped down on a soul that had almost remembered how to fly, forcing it into the confines of a fragile, mortal body.
Birth is suffering, the consciousness acknowledged, the thought forming with the clarity of a diamond before fading into the foggy, undeveloped neural pathways of a newborn brain. Jāti. I have returned. The debt is unpaid. The vow of compassion must be fulfilled in this realm of Curses.
The room smelled of antiseptic, iron, and old wood the distinct, oppressive aroma of the Zenin estate. It was a smell of lineage and decay, of bloodlines kept pure through cruelty. It was the scent of tightly contained, explosive malice. Rain hammered against the shoji screens, a relentless drumbeat that seemed to demand entry, drowning out the soft shuffling of the attendants. The collective Cursed Energy of the compound was an almost visible haze, thick, sharp, and constantly demanding.
"Well?" A voice cut through the humidity like a serrated blade. It was rough, impatient, and laced with authority. Ogi Zenin. A voice accustomed to commanding shadows and breaking bones. "Does it cry? Is it alive? Or is it another waste of resources, like the last generation's failures?"
The midwife, trembling in her white robes, held the infant up with shaking hands. Her fear was palpable, a weak Cursed Spirit itself. By all biological accounts, the child was healthy. Ten fingers, ten toes, a shock of black hair characteristic of the clan. The physical vessel was flawless. But there was something terribly wrong, something that defied the Zenin code.
Newborns scream. They wail against the injustice of being ripped from the void. It is the first sign of vitality, of the will to survive in a cursed world. A Zenin child, in particular, should come into the world fighting, already grasping for dominance. The elders expected a display of fury, a promise of lethal potential.
The infant Nayona did not scream. He did not thrash. His body, though small, was utterly still.
He opened his eyes. They were dark, darker than the abyss of a Cursed Spirit, but they held no malice. They held a terrifying, ancient recognition the knowing gaze of a soul that had seen this cycle countless times before. He looked at the midwife, observing the raw, unmasked terror in her dilated pupils, then looked past her, to the looming figure of Ogi Zenin standing rigid in the doorway.
Nayona blinked slowly, his small chest rising and falling in a rhythm that was not the frantic gasping of a newborn, but the measured, oceanic breath of a master entering zazen. He was analyzing the room, processing the cursed energy that hung in the air like smoke thick, jagged, and tasting of raw ambition and regret.
"He is silent, sir," the midwife whispered, fear edging her voice into a whimper. "He... he only breathes." In the Zenin clan, silence was often mistaken for weakness. Weakness was a death sentence.
Ogi stepped forward, his shadow stretching long and distorted across the tatami mats. He peered down at the bundle, his face twisted in a sneer of anticipation that quickly soured into confusion. He poked the infant's cheek with a callous finger, expecting a reaction, a flinch, anything to indicate a fighting spirit.
"Cry, brat," Ogi growled, his voice vibrating in Nayona's sensitive ears. "Prove you have lungs. Prove you have spirit. A Zenin does not enter the world quietly; a Zenin announces its superiority!"
Nayona merely watched him. Inside the infant's mind, the fragments of a past life were swirling, settling like silt in a churning river. He saw the fire of Ogi's aura, the desperate need for validation that burned within the man, fueled by insecurity and envy. The First Noble Truth: Dukkha. Life is suffering. You, poor creature, are drowning in the current of your attachments, and you mistake the froth for power.
Nayona closed his eyes and let out a soft, humming exhale, a sound of profound pity that was inaudible to human ears but seemed to slightly neutralize the curse energy near him.
Ogi scoffed, recoiling as if insulted by the boy's calm detachment. He turned his back, dismissing the life he had just examined. "A dull one. If he has no fire, he'll be fodder for the cursed pits before he's six. Check the mother. If she survives, tell her to try again. We need warriors, not statues or priests."
Four Years Later: The Weight of Detachment
The Zenin estate was a sprawling labyrinth of architectural perfection and spiritual rot. It was a fortress of tradition, where every polished wooden floorboard, every manicured pine in the garden, was maintained by fear. The hierarchy was absolute and crushing: Power was right. Weakness was a sin punishable by servitude or death. The air itself felt heavy, laden with the residual energy of generations of internal strife.
In the corner of the secondary courtyard, far away from the grand training halls where the "Hei" elite unit practiced their lethal arts, a four-year-old boy sat beneath a weeping cherry tree.
From this distance, the shouts of the instructors were just echoes. Nayona could hear the crack-crack-crack of bamboo swords hitting flesh the sound of his cousins being forged. He knew that somewhere over that wall, Maki was learning to hate her weakness, and Naoya was learning to revel in his superiority. They were being pushed into physical conditioning, forced to run until they vomited or spar until their knuckles bled, molded into weapons to uphold a legacy of blood.
Nayona did not run. He sat.
His legs were folded in the lotus position, ankles resting comfortably on opposite thighs. His back was impossibly straight for his age, a line of energy connecting the earth to the sky. In his small hands, he held a string of wooden beads he had fashioned himself from fallen acorns, drilling holes with a sharp stone and stringing them on a discarded thread.
"I take refuge in the Buddha," he whispered, his voice a soft lilt that barely disturbed the air, syncing with the rustle of the leaves. "I take refuge in the Dharma. I take refuge in the Sangha."
The mantra was his shield. The Zenin estate was loud with the noise of ego shouting, boasting, commanding. The mantra was the silence beneath the noise, the single point of clarity he clung to. He was a beacon of non-attachment in a house defined by craving.
"What are you doing, boy?"
The shadow fell over him before the voice did, blotting out the dappled sunlight. Nayona didn't flinch. He finished his breath cycle inhale, hold, exhale, focusing the Cursed Energy not on his limbs but on his core before opening his eyes to look up.
Standing over him was his uncle, Naobito Zenin. The current head of the clan. The fastest sorcerer alive, a man who moved through life at twenty-four frames per second, blurring the line between existence and animation. Even standing still, Naobito seemed to vibrate with potential kinetic energy, like a drawn bowstring ready to snap.
Naobito held a gourd of sake, his face flushed, his handlebar mustache twitching. His eyes were sharp as needles, scanning the boy not for a nephew, but for any sign of utility or, failing that, immediate disposable weakness.
"Breathing, Uncle," Nayona said, his voice calm, betraying none of the terror a child should feel before the Clan Head.
"Breathing?" Naobito laughed, a barking, harsh sound that startled the crows in the pines. He took a swig of sake, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. "Breathing doesn't kill curses. Cursed Energy kills curses. Malice kills curses. Rage."
He leaned down, bringing his face close to the child's. The smell of high-grade sake and ozone, a residue of his speed technique, washed over Nayona. "Where is your rage, Nayona? Your father says you act like a statue. He says you apologize to the bugs you step on. Are you an idiot? Or just broken? A sorcerer who doesn't fight is just a living target."
Nayona looked at the gourd of sake, then at the veins throbbing in Naobito's temple. He saw the cursed energy radiating off the man it was jagged, fast, and heavy, a storm trapped in a bottle. But beneath it, Nayona saw the tṛṣṇā the thirst, the craving. The frantic, endless need to remain the fastest, to remain on top, to outrun time itself. Naobito wasn't living; he was perpetually running from death.
"Rage is a fire that burns the house to catch the rat," Nayona said. The words felt strange in his toddler's mouth, ancient wisdom forced through milk teeth. "I do not wish to burn my vessel."
Naobito stared at him. For a split second, the drunkenness vanished, replaced by a cold, reptilian calculation. He tilted his head. "You speak like an old book. It's annoying. It makes me want to tear the pages out. Your philosophy is an insult to our blood."
He raised a hand. Cursed energy flared, distorting the air around them. "Let's see if you can breathe when the air is crushed."
Naobito didn't strike the boy that would be beneath him and his technique's honor. Instead, he flared his aura. It was a wave of oppressive, Grade 1 pressure, a projection of pure killing intent designed to bring a normal human to their knees, to make them vomit in terror. It was the fundamental test of the Zenin. Submit or break.
The pressure slammed into Nayona like a falling wall.
The boy's windpipe constricted. The acorn beads rattled in his small hands as his grip tightened involuntarily. The world turned grey at the edges. The sound of the wind died, suffocated by Naobito's presence. His tiny body threatened to give way to the immense force.
Pain is sensation, Nayona thought, his mind retreating frantically into its citadel. The instinct to panic clawed at his throat, but he beat it back with discipline. Sensation is impermanent. This fear is not mine. This pressure is just wind against a mountain. If I resist, I break. If I yield, I drown. The path is neither of these. The path is the cycle.
He didn't cry out. He didn't scramble away. Instead, Nayona closed his eyes and visualized the pressure not as a wall, but as a river. Don't block it. Let it flow past. Redirect by accepting the flow.
His Cursed Energy, dormant until now, sparked deep within his gut. This was the moment of his technique's involuntary awakening: the Saṃsāra Cycle.
It wasn't the jagged, electric blue lightning of the Zenin standard, nor the harsh red of his cousin's ambition. It was strange a muted, shifting grey, like twilight smoke or the surface of a deep, still lake. It rose up to meet Naobito's crushing aura.
But instead of pushing back, Nayona's energy caught the incoming force and cycled it.
He imagined the Wheel of Saṃsāra. He imagined the cycle of rain to river to sea to mist. The crushing pressure hit Nayona's small frame and seemed to loop, sliding off his shoulders, twisting through his meridian points, and dissipating into the ground beneath him in a brief, contained vortex.
The effect was instantaneous and bizarre.
The grass around Nayona a patch of green clover and moss didn't just flatten. It withered, turned brown, crumbled to dust (a moment of death), and then, in the same heartbeat, burst forth in a violent explosion of green, blooming into flowers, seeding, dying, and blooming again (a moment of rebirth). The cycle of existence, normally taking months, was accelerated and contained within a three-foot radius around the boy.
Naobito stepped back, blinking, his sandal crushing a flower that hadn't been there a second ago. He squinted, trying to understand the visual paradox. The pressure lifted.
The grass around the boy had gone through a full season spring, summer, autumn, winter in the span of three seconds.
Nayona gasped, the air rushing back into his small lungs. He looked at the grass green, then brown, then green again. He felt a strange hollowness in his gut, a toll paid to the universe for accelerating its laws, a temporary exhaustion of his core Cursed Energy.
Saṃsāra, he realized, staring at his hands. The cycle. I can spin the wheel, but it costs life force to hasten the flow.
Naobito looked at the blooming, dying, and re-blooming grass, then at the boy who was utterly calm despite nearly suffocating. The contempt in his eyes shifted from simple dismissal to a slow, cruel calculation. It wasn't a smile of pride; it was the smile of a man who had found a new, unsettling tool, however strange and jagged it might be.
"So," Naobito muttered, taking a long, thoughtful swig of his sake. "You're not broken. You're just... weird. You're a Zenin who can hasten death and rebirth. That has uses." He turned to leave, his haori flapping in the wind. "Get up, Nayona. Tomorrow you go to the training pit. If you can rot the ground, you can rot a curse. Don't think your prayers will save you there. The Buddha doesn't live in the Zenin clan only the hungry ghosts of its ancestors."
Nayona watched him go, the formidable back of the clan head retreating toward the main house, already plotting how to utilize this new, unwelcome power. He looked down at the acorn beads, now cracked from the pressure of the aura.
"All conditioned things are impermanent," he whispered to the empty garden, a tear finally sliding down his cheek not for himself, but for the man who thought power was the only truth and would never find peace. "Even the Zenin."