Prologue
The classroom was empty.
emptier than it had any right to be.
The desks, arranged in rigid lines, stood like soldiers awaiting a command that would never come. Chalk dust clung to the air in thin layers, drifting lazily through shafts of late afternoon sunlight that leaked through half closed blinds.
Outside, somewhere beyond the glass, life still moved, distant laughter from the courtyard, the faint scrape of a basketball echoing across concrete, the slow hum of cicadas basking in the warmth of a fading day.
But inside, there was only stillness.
And a boy sitting alone at the far back of the room.
A boy named Ren. He was fourteen, a primary school student, caught somewhere between the fading simplicity of childhood and the quiet confusion of what came after.
His name didn't matter much, at least not to him. Names were labels, and labels, he thought, were just one of many ways people tried to define what they didn't understand. What mattered more, at this moment, was the quiet. The kind of quiet that pressed gently against the walls of the mind, where thoughts could stretch without interruption and the soul could speak in whispers.
He sat hunched slightly forward, his elbows resting on the scarred wooden desk, fingers idly tracing the grooves of old carved initials. The desk bore its history in scratches and nicks, reminders of those who had come before him, names of lovers now long apart, meaningless symbols, crude jokes fading under years of varnish. He wondered, for a moment, if they too had sat here thinking the same thoughts.
Dark brown hair fell loosely over his forehead, strands catching the dying light and glowing faintly amber at the edges.
His eyes, brown, deep, and pensive, seemed to drink in the dimness rather than reflect it. Beneath the soft shade of his lashes, they carried a stillness that was not empty, but heavy, like a well that knew too much of silence.
His skin, lightly tanned from walking home beneath the late summer sun, caught the room's glow and made him appear almost unreal, a painting left forgotten in the corner of a gallery.
On the blackboard before him, yesterday's lesson lingered half erased:
The nature of morality: self-interest vs. selflessness.
He had been staring at those words for nearly an hour now, long after everyone else had left. The teacher's voice was gone, the laughter of his classmates gone, the arguments and scribbled notes all gone. Only that sentence remained, white chalk against the fading black, haunting him.
Self-interest.
Selflessness.
He turned the words over in his mind like stones, feeling their texture, their weight.
Why was it, he wondered, that people spoke of selflessness as if it were a virtue, yet lived as if self interest were the only truth?
He thought of the small things, the subtle cruelties people didn't even notice,
the way students rushed to be first in line at the canteen,
the way friends forgot promises when convenience interfered,
the way adults smiled with lips that didn't reach their eyes.
Watching it all quietly from the edges of rooms and hallways, like an observer trapped between worlds.
Sometimes he saw through people, through their layers of kindness, their practiced words, their carefully constructed empathy. Beneath it all was hunger, wanting, endless and gnawing. Wanting to be liked, to be seen, to be loved, to be more.
Even their good deeds were bartered with invisible expectations. Every act of generosity seemed to ask for something in return, even if it was only gratitude, validation, or a sense of being righteous.
He leaned back in his chair, its wooden legs creaking softly. The sound echoed in the vast emptiness of the room.
Maybe, he thought, selfishness wasn't the disease, it was the nature of being human.
The thought didn't come bitterly. There was no anger in him, no contempt. Only a weary sort of curiosity, as though he were studying an ancient text written in a language he only half understood.
He remembered watching his mother once, years ago, giving coins to a homeless man on the street. Her face had been kind, her voice gentle. But when he looked into her eyes, he saw something flicker there, something not quite pity, not quite pride. Later, she had smiled and said,
"It feels good to help someone,"
he'd realized.
Even kindness, he thought, was selfish in disguise.
He wondered if that made her bad.
He wondered if it made anyone bad.
Maybe morality wasn't about good or evil, it was about survival, about the quiet instinct to protect one's own sense of meaning in a world that often refused to give any.
A shadow crossed the window as a cloud drifted past, dimming the golden light. The air cooled slightly, and the room seemed to breathe with him.
He looked at his reflection faintly mirrored in the glass, the dark hair, the eyes that looked too old for his age, the faint curve of a frown that wasn't quite sadness, but something lonelier. He tried to smile at himself, but the image didn't move.
just watched.
Sometimes he wondered if the world had made him this way, quiet, detached…or if he had always been like this. He couldn't remember a time when noise didn't feel exhausting, when people didn't feel distant even when they stood close.
He liked to think of himself as invisible. It wasn't that people ignored him, they simply didn't see him. He was the boy who didn't speak unless spoken to, who finished his work and left before anyone noticed he had been there. To them, he was background noise, the faint hum between louder voices.
But today, in this empty classroom, he wasn't invisible.
He was alone, and that was different.
The silence was a kind of companion, one that didn't demand or judge. It allowed his thoughts to wander freely, to ask questions without the pressure of finding answers.
He reached for a piece of chalk, the stub worn nearly to dust, and began to write beneath the teacher's unfinished sentence. His handwriting was small, deliberate
"If every act of kindness is born from self-interest, then is there such a thing as true Morality?"
He stared at the question for a long time.
The chalk broke in his hand.
He watched the small fragment roll across the desk and fall soundlessly to the floor. The motion, trivial and insignificant, somehow felt profound.
Maybe that was what life was, moments falling quietly, unnoticed, until the room was empty and the air thick with dust.
He thought again about the others, his classmates, his teachers, the people outside chasing laughter and sunlight. Were they selfish? Or were they simply trying to fill the hollow space inside themselves the only way they knew how?
He didn't have an answer. He wasn't sure he ever would.
But something inside him, quiet and persistent, whispered that maybe the first step toward understanding others was to understand the selfishness in himself.
He closed his eyes. For a moment, the world disappeared, the desks, the chalkboard, the fading sun. All that remained was the rhythm of his breathing and the slow turning of a thought too large for words.
When he opened his eyes again, the light had changed. The golden hues had deepened into orange, and shadows stretched long across the floor, like dark rivers flowing toward the door. The day was ending, and soon the room would be swallowed by night.
He stood, slowly, his chair scraping against the tiles. The sound felt almost intrusive now, breaking the sacred stillness he had built around himself. He gathered his bag, but paused before leaving, glancing once more at the chalkboard.
The question he had written glowed faintly in the dying light.
He smiled, softly, barely, and whispered,
"Maybe tomorrow."
Then he walked out, leaving behind the question, the silence, and a trace of himself that would linger like chalk dust in the air, waiting for the next lonely thought to stir it back to life.