Chapter 63: Broken Kanata: Origins

In that first world, Kanata was just an ordinary boy.
No hero. No savior.
Just a young man who dreamed of small, simple things—
a quiet life, dinner with his friends, and growing old without losing anyone.

But the world never gave him time.

The Dragon Arm Curse erupted one night in the center of the city, consuming hundreds of lives in a single flash.
His friends vanished one by one.
Time repeated the same nightmare again and again.

Kanata stood amid the burning ruins of Tokyo, his body trembling, his voice breaking into the cold night air.
“Why does this world always take something from me?!”

No one answered.
Only the wind replied—cold, and silent.

Days bled into years of despair.
One night, Kanata stumbled into an ancient library, its walls covered in dust and forgotten magic.
With hands torn and eyes hollow, he found a forbidden grimoire.
Inside lay a ritual that promised the impossible—
a way to force time to obey.

《Chrono Rewrite》
A spell that could manipulate the current of time itself.

Kanata tried it.

Once.
The tragedy changed—but loss remained.

Twenty times.
A hundred.
Three hundred.

Every version of the world showed him a different tragedy:
— A friend who once lived, now dead.
— Another he protected, now gone.
— The Dragon Arm consuming his body.
— His father vanishing without a trace.
— His soul hollowing into something inhuman.

Every world was a failure.
Every world devoured hope.

On the 394th attempt, Kanata fell to his knees, his face streaked with blood and tears.
His voice broke between shallow breaths.
“No matter what I do… there’s no world that wants me to be happy.”

For the first time in centuries of loops, he wept—alone, in a world stripped of everything.
“Why does it have to be me…? Why am I the one who keeps suffering like this?!”
His cry echoed through the ruins as rain fell—his grief mirrored by the sky itself.

When despair reached its limit, he began to see something strange.
In some Rewrite attempts, fragments of time refused to reset—like droplets of water clinging to a glass after it’s been emptied.

Then he understood.

Time wasn’t a river.
It was a pond.

And every reset left residue behind.

He learned to harness that residue—
to merge it, stabilize it, refine it.
Until, finally, he created something new.

Water shimmered before him, glowing like the light of a thousand dying suns.
It was calm, yet unbearably heavy—
as though it carried the burden of every life ever lived.

Kanata reached out.
The water whispered without words:
“I am the time you forced to turn back. I am every regret you refused to let go.”

He gave it a name:
The Eternal Fountain.

It was meant to stabilize time—to store fate, and preserve hope.
For the first time, Kanata believed the world could be repaired.

He built the first Fountain.
Then he entered another universe—
and built it again.

He failed.

He built it a third time.
It exploded.

The fourth.
It birthed monsters of time.

The fifth.
It resurrected the dead.

Hundreds of trials.
Thousands of worlds.

A few endured.
Most collapsed.

But Kanata never stopped.
“If I can create even one perfect Fountain… maybe I’ll finally find happiness.”

He continued.
For decades.
For centuries.

His body aged beyond nature.
His soul cracked under the strain.
His eyes dimmed of their humanity.

Then—after countless failures—
he found it.

A world where the Fountain worked perfectly.
It glowed like a miniature sun, its waters pure and calm.
A world without collapse.
A world without tragedy.

A world where another version of himself—
the Prime Kanata—
lived peacefully.

He watched that Kanata laugh with friends, eat simple meals, and walk under the daylight without fear.

“This… is it.”
His voice trembled with awe.
“The Fountain finally works.”

For a moment, he felt joy.
But it faded into something colder.

Even if the Fountain had succeeded…
he himself could never be happy.

The memories of hundreds of failed worlds haunted him.
Every scream, every death, every ending.
They all clung to him like chains.

And in that unbearable silence, he whispered,
“I can never be happy… not like this.”

Kanata made his final choice.

He broke his soul apart.

He separated his emotions, his memories, and what little hope remained—
and scattered them across countless universes.

Each fragment became a new Kanata:
— A sorcerer.
— A kind-hearted wanderer.
— A ruthless king.
— A coward.
— A hero.
— A villain.
— A boy who never knew pain.

He smiled faintly as he watched one fragment live peacefully.
“At last… a version of me that can be happy.”

But his act came with a cost.

The fragments collided.
Timelines overlapped.
The Fountains across all worlds couldn’t handle the burden of so many Kanatas existing at once.

Worlds began to shatter.
Skies split open.
Dark creatures emerged from the debris of fate.

And from the deepest fracture of time… something awoke.

Leviathan.
The devourer of destiny—
a being born from the remains of broken timelines.

Kanata watched as everything crumbled—
the worlds he created, the fragments he loved, all gone.

The Fountains cracked.
Time shattered into glass.
And once again, he lost everything.

For the first time, he understood the terrible truth.
“I… caused all of this.”

He fell to his knees in the void of eternity, voice breaking apart.
“I did all this… just to be happy.”
“And I failed.”

The man once known as Kanata died that day—
and in his place, something else was born.

He became Broken Kanata.

When every universe collapsed, when every fragment vanished, only one world remained standing—
a single world with a flawless Fountain.

The Prime World.
The home of the Kanata who lived peacefully.

Broken Kanata watched from beyond time:
the dinners, the laughter, the sunlight on that boy’s face.

For the first time in thousands of years, he felt something worse than despair.

Envy.

He clutched his chest, trembling, his eyes flickering gold and red.
“Why… why do you get to live in peace… while every other version of me had to die protecting your world?”
“Why were you chosen to be happy?”
“Why only you?”

His voice cracked.
It wasn’t rage.
It was heartbreak.
The sound of a soul that had loved the world too much.

From that pain, a new resolve was born—
not to destroy the Prime Kanata,
but to replace him.

Because the Prime World was the only one left—
the only world where the Fountain remained perfect,
where no one had to suffer again.

“If the world will never allow me to be happy…”
he whispered.
“…then I’ll take your life, and live it myself.”

That was the day the universe trembled—
and the mission of Broken Kanata began