The moon shouldn't have been that color.
The elders of the Shiwi Xitsu Clan—the Eyes of Light—knew every phase of the moon as well as they knew their own names. They had records spanning centuries. Hand-drawn celestial maps made by generations that had long since turned to dust. None of them mentioned a bluish full moon.
And yet there it was, pouring its impossible radiance over the clan's territory, bathing the rooftops in a cold glow that seemed to come from another world.
It was beneath that light that a newborn's cry split the night.
Yutora Tsarketsu. The name carried the weight of the main family—Tsarketsu, “Future-Seer”—and of the entire clan—Shiwi Xitsu, “Eyes of Light.” A clan that, unlike so many others that had lost their way, maintained full awareness of its culture, its abilities, and who it was. Every member knew what ran through their veins.
Murasaki Oni held her son against her chest. Her eyes—eyes that had watched two thousand and forty-five years pass—filled with something she hadn't felt in centuries. Fear. Not of enemies. Not of wars. Fear of what would happen when the others looked at that tiny head.
Because Yutora's hair was red.
Zake Tsarketsu, the clan's leader and the child's father, stood motionless in the doorway. He didn't approach. He didn't need to. He could already see the color from there. And when he saw it, he understood everything that would follow. The Elders. The sentence. The word no one said aloud but everyone knew—curse.
Being born with red hair in the Shiwi Xitsu Clan meant destruction. It meant that child would bring about the end. That's what they said. That's what they believed. And there was only one punishment: execution.
What no one else remembered—or no one wanted to remember—was the truth.
During the Beast Era, when the world still bled on every street corner, there was Yutsu Tsarketsu. The founder. His hair was white as clean bone. But Yutsu fought. He fought so much and against so many that his opponents' blood splattered across his white strands and dyed them red. He noticed. Thought it strange. Thought it beautiful. And kept it. When his children were born, they had that same shade—as if the bloodline had absorbed the color of their father's battles and transformed it into a mark of blood.
The Elders of that time respected Yutsu. But Yutsu died. And generations later, the son of a Chief Elder planted a lie in the heart of the clan: red hair was cursed. One sentence. That's all it was. And that sentence crossed centuries, killed dozens, and now pointed toward a newborn crying beneath a blue moon.
Zake knew the lie was a lie. But knowing wasn't enough. His own father—the current Chief Elder—was the one holding the clan's reins from behind the title of leader. He manipulated Zake with the precision of someone who knew every weakness of his own son. In Zake's mind, standing against the Elders meant losing everything—his position, his family, the life of the boy he was trying to protect by not protecting him.
Murasaki didn't think that way.
Murasaki faced the Elders head-on. She looked them in the eye with two millennia of existence burning behind her irises and said her son would not be touched. She challenged Zake. “You're the leader. You can't bow your head to them.” But Zake heard that as another problem, not a call to action. And the silence between them grew with every year Yutora survived.
The boy grew up knowing he was different. Not because anyone explained it—no one explained anything to him. But the looks told him. The whispers in the halls told him. The empty space around him during training, where no one wanted to stand too close, told him.
Yutora had blue-green eyes that seemed to hold a quiet storm. And the hair everyone feared.
At twelve, someone tried to solve the problem ahead of schedule.
An infiltrator from another invading clan disguised himself as a servant. He worked inside the main residence for weeks without raising suspicion. Then, one ordinary morning, he put liquid mercury in Yutora's coffee.
The boy drank it without noticing anything. He trusted the servants. He trusted the routine. He trusted the familiar scent of that kitchen. That trust would be the last innocent thing Yutora Tsarketsu ever had in his life.
The mercury began to take effect. Yutora collapsed in the middle of a hallway, his body striking the floor with a sound Murasaki heard from the other side of the house. By the time she arrived, her son was no longer responding. Coma.
The clan's doctors had no answers. The Elders didn't lift a finger. Murasaki watched her son's face fade and made the only decision left—she called a friend. An outsider scientist. Someone the clan would never approve of.
He came. Examined Yutora. And implanted a chip capable of operating at the atomic level—a technology that shouldn't have existed in that context, but did because Murasaki knew people the clan didn't even dream existed.
One week. Seven days of silence, of Murasaki sitting beside the bed without sleeping, of Zake passing the door without entering. And then Yutora opened his eyes.
But something had changed.
The chip hadn't merely cured the poisoning. It had awakened something inside Yutora—a formation of Vital Energy that shouldn't have been possible. Those who studied VE knew its variations, its densities, its limits. What Yutora carried now fit no category.
Nurcleu EV. Vital energy that mimicked the capabilities and immense reserves of a nuclear bomb. The name wasn't a metaphor—it was a description. The densest EV that had ever existed. And Yutora, twelve years old, waking from a coma with the taste of metal in his mouth, had no idea what was inside him.
Life went on. But differently.
The taunts increased. The looks that had once been fearful now came mixed with contempt. Yutora was mocked. Shoved. Tested. And his father—the clan's leader—didn't react. Didn't defend him. Didn't look at him.
But Zake did something else that no one saw.
During training, after the others left, Zake stayed. He taught Yutora Kyork Xitsu—the clan's ocular ability, which allowed its user to see ten seconds into the future. He taught him how to teleport in 0.3 milliseconds. He taught him combat, positioning, and terrain reading. Everything a Tsarketsu needed to know to survive, Zake drilled into his son's body with the silent urgency of someone who knew time was running out.
It was love. Twisted, stifled, unable to be spoken aloud. But it was love.
Yutora turned eighteen.
The execution had been scheduled for fifteen, but Murasaki postponed it three times by confronting the Elders with a ferocity that made even the oldest among them back down. Three years bought with blood and threats. But the final deadline was approaching, and this time even Murasaki wouldn't be able to hold it back.
Yutora didn't wait.
On the night before what would have been his last morning in the clan, he went to the room where the Saizai Katana rested. The first celestial weapon created by Infinit—the God of that universe. The strongest of them all. The leader of every celestial item. A blade with a soul of its own that chose its wielder and rejected everyone else, becoming too heavy to lift.
Saizai demanded two things: kinship with the bloodline, or wisdom and honor.
Yutora extended his hand. Closed his fingers around the hilt.
The katana weighed nothing.
He left the clan before dawn, Saizai strapped to his back and without a single word of farewell. The irony was as sharp as the blade—the clan condemned the only heir its founder's own sword recognized as worthy.
He walked to a nearby city. And there, for an entire year, Yutora walked.
He seemed directionless. Like a lost young man wandering the streets without purpose. But every step was calculated. Every pause was strategic. Yutora was planting teleportation marks—on walls, on poles, on sidewalks, across the surface of fountain water, in the air between buildings, in the soil of flower beds. Any surface would do. When he finished, there wasn't a single blind spot in the city. He could appear anywhere in 0.3 milliseconds.
No one noticed. Except one person.
Eliziy Takariuki lived alone in an apartment in that city. She had left home to escape a family that treated her like garbage—her father, Kenatsu, had cheated on her mother, Ember, with another woman. That affair had produced half-siblings who were forced into the same house through a cowardly agreement between the two families. Her half-siblings treated Eliziy like a servant.
Until the day they hit Ember.
Eliziy saw her mother on the floor. Saw her half-siblings laughing. And something inside her exploded—not like fire, but like gravity. An invisible force crushed the half-siblings against the wall with enough pressure to make them lose consciousness within seconds. Telekinesis. A power Eliziy hadn't even known she possessed. A power that, at its maximum, would be capable of compressing an entire cargo ship down to the size of a marble.
Eliziy stood there, staring at her own hands in disbelief. Ember rose from the floor with a smile. Not fearfully—with joy. She retrieved ancient texts about Telekinesis Users and showed them to her daughter. Eliziy learned the basics. Then she left.
She lived alone. Worked. Got by without much trouble. Then she began to notice a young man repeatedly passing through the area around her apartment.
She watched him for an entire year. Always the same route, always the same strange calm. Until one day, he stopped somewhere different from usual. And seconds later—he vanished. He didn't walk away. He didn't jump. He simply ceased to be there.
Eliziy felt a chill. That guy was seriously weird.
She saw him appear on the roof of a building beside her apartment. She tried to hide. But she realized he was already looking directly at her—the blue-green eyes fixed on the exact spot where she was hiding. Before she could react, he vanished again and appeared on the balcony of her apartment.
Eliziy acted on instinct. Telekinesis. She slammed the intruder against the wall with all the strength she had, expecting him to pass out like her half-siblings.
Yutora didn't pass out.
He endured the pressure. And broke it. He sent it back with pure force—Eliziy's telekinesis was powerful, but if the pressure itself was broken, the effect ricocheted. Eliziy was disoriented for several seconds, her vision spinning.
Yutora advanced. He was going to touch her—and slipped.
Marbles scattered across the balcony floor. The warrior who broke telekinesis with brute force, the wielder of the Saizai Katana, the bearer of Nurcleu EV, fell backward and struck his head against the floor with a dull thud. Unconscious.
Eliziy stood still. Looked at the body on the floor. Picked up her phone. Took pictures. When she lowered the phone to check the image and looked back at his face—Yutora had his eyes open, staring at her.
Neither of them moved.
Yutora remained lying down. Eliziy remained standing. And there, on that balcony, with marbles scattered between them, they began to talk.
They reached a simple agreement. Yutora would help with combat and housework. Eliziy would provide food. Nothing more.
The days passed. The agreement became routine. Routine became comfort. Comfort became something neither of them named for a while, until there was no way not to name it.
Yutora realized the city gave him an advantage—his teleportation marks covered every inch—but not Eliziy. She would be vulnerable there. So he decided to move. Eliziy agreed without hesitation.
Two teleports. That's all it took. They appeared in a clearing large enough to build a house, surrounded by silence and far from any clan.
They built together over the course of a month. The house was large, spacious—more than two young people alone in the world would need, but exactly what two young people alone in the world wanted.
Eliziy wrote down what they needed to buy on a piece of paper. Yutora read the list, vanished, and returned in two teleports with everything in his arms. Eliziy thanked him and kissed him.
Yutora didn't react immediately. He stood there holding the bags, wearing the same expression as someone who had just taken a blow he hadn't seen coming—and he was someone who could see the future. Eliziy laughed and happily went to put away the groceries.
Yutora found work as a Bounty Hunter. The job suited him—pragmatic, dangerous, with no need to be a hero or a villain. Yutora was neither. He protected the people he loved. Eliziy. Murasaki. Friends, if he ever made any. Family, if he could someday call someone that again. If anyone dared threaten the safety of those he loved, Yutora went to the problem and solved it. His opponent's defeat wasn't a possibility—it was a certainty.
But it wasn't always necessary. Murasaki was a Shadow Oni with two millennia of existence and an entire army made of darkness. She didn't need protection. She needed her son to know that he was alive and free.
Yutora had inherited more than blood from her. Super vision—which expanded his field of view and allowed him to see anyone's Vital Energy within an eight-kilometer radius. Oni regeneration—four times faster than normal, though it consumed more EV because of the Nurcleu running through him.
And it was that super vision that, on an ordinary afternoon, made Yutora stop in the middle of what he was doing.
He was on the porch of the house he had built with Eliziy. The sun was sinking slowly. The wind carried the smell of wet earth. Everything was quiet.
Then he felt it.
A Vital Energy in the distance. Very far away—almost at the edge of eight kilometers. But so dense, so absurdly heavy, that it seemed to bend the air around it. Yutora knew powerful EV. His own was nuclear. But this was different. This was wild. It had the texture of something ancient and hungry—like the roar of a creature that had existed before the ages had names.
Yutora narrowed his eyes. Kyork Xitsu activated by reflex—ten seconds of the future unfolded before him. And in the ten seconds he saw, the EV didn't move. It only pulsed. Waiting.
Niko Draco. Wielder of the Gauntlets—the celestial item that carried the spirit of a legendary Dragon within it. A presence that didn't ask permission to be felt.
Yutora stood motionless on the porch, his blue-green eyes fixed on the horizon, the wind whipping through the red hair an entire clan had wanted to erase from the world.
The EV pulsed once more.
And the scene darkened.