Some people survive the unsurvivable. The world calls it resilience—because it never has to live inside it.

Kisuno Minazawa is fourteen and has been surviving since he was three—since the night everything was taken from him, since years spent running through Tokyo’s forgotten spaces, since three weeks in a warehouse with two broken teenagers who chose him as family and paid for it with everything they had.

He is very tired of it.

Now relocated to Kurosawa, a quietly defeated city in Gifu, Kisuno attends Shirakawa Higashi High carrying grief eight years old. Within days, the school knows his name. Within a week, it knows what the internet says—that the white-haired child with dead blue eyes is why two people rest beneath a zelkova tree.

This is not redemption. It is survival without meaning. The chrysanthemums have gone brown. Kisuno is still here.