Lucy stopped counting the days the same day he started talking to a rat.
He had named it Professor. It didn't talk much, but it listened better than his high school classmates.
Up there, they kicked you for breathing. Down here… same thing, only sometimes it was corpses doing the kicking.
"Breathe," said Mira, the stone-faced woman with a long scar across her neck and a gaze so sharp that even blind, Lucy could feel it like a constant threat.Lucy obeyed. Or pretended to. He had learned that arguing with the dump's lunatics was a waste of energy—and energy, like affection in his childhood, was scarce and poorly distributed.
"Again," Mira insisted, striking his shoulder with a stick that smelled of mold and dried blood.
"I'm breathing, lady killer. It's just that every inhale kills a neuron. I must be in the red already," Lucy muttered.
"It's not about the smell. It's about hearing the mana."
"Right, now I'm not just blind, I'm deaf too."
The training wasn't physical—not in the usual sense. Fights were just pushing, dodging, and trying not to die. But this exercise… this was different.
Mira called mana "a resonance in the rot." She said if you stayed very, very still, you could hear the whisper of the invisible.
Lucy thought it was nonsense. Until, accidentally, he felt it.
It wasn't epic. No lights. No levitation. Just a brief, faint vibration between his fingers. Like a warm current drifting through polluted air.
And then, it was gone.
"You're clumsy, but not useless. Your sensitivity is… crooked," Mira said.Lucy frowned.
"Was that a compliment or a curse?"
"Both. Come back tomorrow. Or die. Whichever comes first."
···
The next days were a routine of bruises, stumbles, and frustration. Mira made him fight others, but mostly pushed him to use his hearing, his smell, his touch.
Lucy had to react to faint noises, footsteps in the trash, air currents, and echoes in the dark. And if he failed, he got hit. Sometimes more than once.
"You can't see," Mira said as she threw something at him without warning, "but you can foresee."
Lucy ducked just in time for a rock to graze his head.
"That was cheating!"
"Death doesn't give warnings," she replied with a crooked half-smile.
The training escalated. Now he had to not only dodge, but also strike with a wooden staff, guided by air pressure, subtle shifts that revealed the presence of his opponent.
He failed. A lot. Ended up with bruised ribs, scraped legs, and muscles burning with fatigue.
But amid the pain, something began to grow: a crude, barely-formed instinct—but alive.···After one of those training sessions, while panting beside a heap of garbage, he found something odd. Not food. Not a legendary weapon. Just a strip of cloth, old and frayed, but still sturdy.
He picked it up with trembling hands.
"Lya?" he called, crawling toward where he always found her.
She was there, sitting on a container, chewing half-heartedly on something that smelled like rotten rat.
"What color is this?" he asked, holding up the cloth.
"Black. Why?"
Lucy smiled, a tired, crooked grin.
"Because it matches everything."
With slow movements, he tied it around his head, covering his eyes. From now on, he wouldn't just live without sight. He'd train as if his blindness were a choice. Not just a flaw—but an advantage.
Lya watched him silently, a mix of curiosity and concern on her face."You okay?"
"No. But madness and life have always been good cellmates, haven't they?"
···
That night, Mira led him deeper into the tunnels. The air was thicker there, more humid—almost sticky. The training changed. It wasn't just about sensing mana anymore. Now he had to move it.
"Mana isn't yours," Mira explained.
"But you can touch it. Shape it. Like warm clay. Only if you listen. Only if you stop thinking."
Lucy tried. Failed. Over and over.
Until the frustration turned to anger, and the anger into pressure in his chest.
He closed his eyes—already covered by the blindfold—and breathed, very slowly.
Then he felt it.
A pulse. Not his. External. Like a string vibrating in the air.
Something that responded to his desperation.
He reached out, and for a second, the air seemed to bend around him.
A current.
An echo.
And then, exhaustion crushed him.
"That was the first time," Mira said—without praise, but without mockery. "The first time you didn't seem completely stupid."
"Thanks… I think."
"Come back tomorrow. And bring extra bandages. You're going to earn them."···The next morning, he walked with Lya again. She watched him stagger forward, feet tripping, body covered in bruises, face partly hidden behind the blindfold.
"You know," she said, "with that blindfold you look like a legendary hero… with anemia."
"Thanks. I work really hard at being uncharismatic."
"So? How's the mana going?"
Lucy stayed quiet for a second. Then smiled.
"Sometimes I hear it. Sometimes I touch it. Sometimes it slaps me. I think we're in the toxic stage of our relationship."
"Toxic stage?"
"Yeah. I chase it. It ignores me. But any moment now I'll unlock my 'ancestral berserker mode' and start shooting lightning from my fingernails."
Lya laughed and handed him something: a hard cookie, the kind that crunches like dry bones.
"For tomorrow. In case you die."
Lucy accepted it with a theatrical bow.
"The last wish of a blind beggar… poetic. Though if this thing is actually edible, I might really have hidden powers. Like, 'god-tier digestive resistance."
"Tragic, more like."