Silence.
The world had abandoned him in silence.
He remembered the rasp of his last breath, the choking dryness in his throat, the fever that baked him from the inside out. He remembered the way the villagers had carried him to the edge of the woods and left him in the shallow pit—unmarked, unwanted, forgotten. He was too weak to protest. Too weak to curse them. Too weak to cling to life.
And then—darkness.
He thought it was death. Yet death had no weight, no smell, no ache in the bones. But this darkness did. It pressed against him, soil clinging to his lips, damp roots curling against his flesh. He opened his eyes, and for the first time he saw without light. The blackness of the earth parted before his vision like mist. Every grain of dirt, every crawling worm, every buried stone was clear to him.
A breath shuddered from his chest. He had not meant to breathe, yet air filled his lungs—rich, sharp, laced with the stench of rot and dampness. His body, which had once been little more than brittle bone and leathered skin, surged with vigor. The weakness was gone. The disease was gone. In its place… something else.
Hunger.
It gnawed at him, more terrible than any fever. His stomach roared, but not for bread or water. This was deeper, older, a craving that echoed through marrow and sinew. His tongue scraped against the roof of his mouth, and he tasted iron.
Blood.
His nails dug into the soil. It crumbled like ash in his hands. With a single push, his arm broke free of the grave, tearing through the earth as though it were nothing more than cloth. Another push, another crack of dirt, and his body rose from the pit.
He gasped against the night air. The moon hung high, swollen and pale, its silver light cutting across his body. His skin prickled beneath it, but it did not burn. Not yet. His chest heaved, though he had no need to breathe. His eyes darted wildly across the forest, and the world was alive in ways it had never been. He saw the flutter of a moth's wing three paces away, the twitch of a mouse's whisker beneath the roots of an oak, the mist of warm breath rising from a sleeping deer farther than any human eye should reach.
He could hear, too. The forest was no longer silent. It sang to him—heartbeats, faint and pulsing, a symphony of drums hidden within flesh.
He staggered from the grave, falling to his knees in the grass. His fingers clawed into the earth, leaving furrows behind. He wanted to scream, but only a rasp left his throat.
"What… am I?"
His voice was raw, broken, but not with weakness—with something new, something sharper.
The hunger tightened in him. His gaze snapped to the deer. His nostrils flared, and he smelled the creature's blood pumping, thick and sweet, beneath its hide. His body moved before his mind could stop it. One moment he was on his knees, the next he was upon it—fangs he did not know he possessed sinking deep into its neck.
The deer convulsed, eyes rolling back as its lifeblood poured into him. The taste was fire and silk, ecstasy and rage, filling every hollow corner of his soul. He drank until its heart stopped, until its body was limp, until the forest grew silent again.
When at last he let go, his lips were drenched in crimson. He staggered backward, staring at his hands. The trembling hunger was gone. Strength coursed through him, unnatural, impossible. He could feel the night itself in his veins.
But so too came the fear.
He looked at the deer's corpse. Its eyes stared back, glassy and accusing. He had devoured life. Not meat, not flesh—life itself.
A sound tore from his throat. A laugh. A sob. A scream. He did not know which. He fell into the grass and clutched his head, his thoughts unraveling like old cloth.
He did not hear the rustle of footsteps until it was too late.
"By the saints—" a voice whispered.
He turned. A man stood at the edge of the trees, a villager clutching a torch. His face was pale, his jaw slack. He must have followed the sound, or perhaps he had come to see if the body they had buried still lay still.
Their eyes met.
The villager saw the blood staining his lips. The body of the deer at his feet. The impossible glow in his crimson eyes.
"Demon," the man breathed.
Akuma opened his mouth to deny it, to speak, to explain—yet the hunger stirred again. His body moved faster than thought. In an instant he was upon the man, teeth sinking into his throat. Hot, human blood flooded his mouth. Richer, sweeter, more intoxicating than the beast's. The man struggled, torch falling, sputtering in the grass. The fire's light flickered across Akuma's face, showing the truth of him.
When it was over, the villager's body lay in the dirt, empty, pale as moonlight. Akuma stood over him, chest heaving, lips dripping with red. The fire crackled and died.
He looked at his hands again. No longer the hands of a man. No longer weak. No longer mortal.
The first whispers had begun.
The world would not remember him as he was. Not a man. Not a victim. Not a soul abandoned.
But as what he had become.
Akuma.
The First to Bleed.