There was no such thing as a clean beginning in this place.
The city was not born from stone or history but from a long accumulation of collapse. It was as if it had been built on layers of failure, each one hiding an older one beneath it. The alleys were narrow to the point of suffocation, as if they refused even thoughts to pass freely. The walls were cracked and decayed, carrying the marks of a time no one remembered anymore, and the sky above was always gray—rarely raining, but never stopping its silent threat of rain.
Here, everything looked like the result of a mistake no one ever admitted.
In this world, justice was not an idea… but an old joke no one laughed at anymore, only repeated out of habit.
And in the heart of this place, a child was born who was never meant to be requested by the world in the first place.
His name was never properly recorded on the day of his birth. No official document carried his weight; no celebration marked his arrival, not even a glance of importance from the outside world. There was only a cold room, dim lighting, and a short cry that ended too quickly, as if it already understood that continuing made no sense.
Then came silence.
A long, silent moment, as if this were not the beginning of life… But with the closing of a file, no one wanted to reopen it.
His mother did not look at him the way mothers usually do. There was no beautiful confusion between love and fear in her eyes. Only exhaustion. Exhaustion, like someone who had lost too much to remember why they were fighting in the first place. She did not smile or cry, only turned her face slightly as if trying to understand how she had ended up here.
As for his father, he was absent even when present. A man who passed through the family's life like wind through a broken window: a short sound, a fading trace, and then complete disappearance before he could even become a memory.
And so the child did not begin life as a "son," but as an extra existence in an already overcrowded world of the lost.
He grew up in a place that did not recognize innocence as a value, only as a temporary weakness before collapse.
In the streets, children did not play like children in stories.
There were no long laughs, no innocent dreams.
The first question they learned was:
"How will you survive today?"
Not: "What do you want to become?"
That difference alone was enough to create two entirely different worlds inside the same city.
Every corner was a lesson, and every lesson carried a cruelty that required no explanation:
Those who trust lose first.
Those who hesitate are crushed before they begin.
And those who show emotion… are targeted faster than they can imagine.
No one here taught you how to live.
Only how not to die quickly.
And over the years, something in the boy began to change in a way no one noticed.
He did not laugh much, not because he was sad, but because laughter seemed useless. He did not cry either, not because he was strong, but because he learned early that tears do not change outcomes. The world does not pause for anyone.
He began to observe instead of participate.
Analyze instead of react.
He stayed silent more than he spoke.
And at some undefined point, something irreversible shifted inside him.
When he saw injustice, he no longer asked, "Why is this happening?"
Instead, he began asking a different question entirely:
"How does this system work—and how can it be used instead of resisted?"
That was not a child's question.
It was the question of something else forming quietly inside a mind that refused to believe in randomness.
One day, he found an old chessboard inside an abandoned building used as temporary shelter. It was dusty, some pieces broken, others missing, but the board itself was strangely complete, as if waiting for a player who did not yet know the rules.
He sat in silence.
He did not know the game.
But he did not see it as a toy.
He saw it as a system.
Something with hidden rules, structure, unequal value assigned to each element, and a cost for every move no matter how small.
He reached out and touched a piece.
And in that moment, he did not think of it as a game.
Something simpler—and far more dangerous—occurred to him:
Every piece here can be replaced.
Every loss can be reinterpreted.
And every "end" is not truly an end… but a transition into another form of control.
He lifted his gaze toward the board as if seeing the world clearly for the first time.
He no longer saw the city as chaos.
But as an incomplete system.
A system that can be understood.
And if it can be understood… it can be manipulated.
In that moment, a child was not born.
Something else was.
A different possibility of what a human being could become when they abandon the idea that the world is fair—or even supposed to be.
Something that does not seek love, justice, or salvation.
Only one outcome:
Never to be on the losing side of the board.