Chapter 2: The World Rejects Me

His breath came in shallow bursts.

The stone slab behind him was now shattered. The rune circle that once pulsed with crimson light had dulled, bleeding into the cracked floor like spilled ink. The whisper of wind in the chamber had stopped—yet he felt no calm. Only rejection.

He stepped forward, but the world itself recoiled.

The air rippled, shimmering with static. Symbols carved into the walls twisted into unintelligible noise. He reached out to touch them—

Pain.

It shot through his arm like acid through bone. His skin burned, flaring with marks that didn’t belong to this age.

“You shouldn’t exist.”

The voice echoed—everywhere and nowhere. Not hostile… terrified.

He fell to one knee, clutching his chest. Something pulsed beneath the skin—faint, dark, alive.

“Because you are the contradiction.
The prophecy never named you.
The world has no place for what was erased.”

And yet, he still breathed.

He forced himself to his feet, blood dripping from his fingertips.

If the world had rejected him...
If his name had been wiped from fate itself...

Then he would rewrite fate.

And he would do it through Tsuyoi.

"Tsuyoi..." The word rose from within, not learned—but remembered. Not a spell, not a prayer. A curse... and a promise.

Tsuyoi was not magic.
It was grief that refused to die.
A heresy that bled through forgotten souls.
A language unrecorded, unwritten—unbelieved.

While normal sorcery obeyed law, lineage, and legend…
Tsuyoi defied it.

Where others cast, he would rewrite.
Where others channeled, he would corrupt.
Every spell he spoke would be a scream the world refused to hear.

He lifted his hand. Shadows rippled.

This is not magic, he thought. This is memory sharpened into a weapon.

No prophecy guided him.
No god watched over him.
Only this: the will to return.

And Tsuyoi—born of sorrow, forged in rejection—answered that will.