Lord of woes: My broken soul, is bound by a Cursed System
Who decided that every main character must be kind-hearted, forgiving, endlessly loving, non revengeful and some predictable saint carved from cheap hope?
If you believe that, then you have never met Star.
Star Crestfold, Prince of Throvarin, was once a normal child.
He laughed easily. He believed in justice. He ate warm bread with honey, drank tea because everyone else did, and thought the world rewarded effort.
But, he grew older... and puberty happened.
And the world noticed him.
Or rather, it noticed what he lacked.
While other children awakened their Spirit Marks, climbed ranks, and were measured by levels and titles, Star remained untouched. No sign. No glow. No rank. No system would acknowledge his existence. He trained his little heart out... until his heart learned what exhaustion felt like... but nothing answered him. Rather;
They mocked him.
At first, quietly. Then openly.
Whispers turned into laughter. Laughter into names; The Hollow Prince. The Unmarked. A royal mistake.
He endured. He always endured. Because endurance was all he had. But...
His father did not.
As a king, he demanded strength. As a Spirit Warrior, he worshipped power. And as a father, he failed. The disappointment hardened into disgust, and disgust into hatred. Star was pushed aside, treated less like a son and more like a stain on royal blood.
Worse still, the king allowed it: Star’s younger stepbrothers, radiant with manifested power, were never stopped. They taunted him, demonstrated their abilities in front of him, reminded him daily of what he would never be. Their cruelty was not punished, rather it was encouraged.
And the hatred did not end with Star.
It bled outward, toward his mother, whose only crime was giving birth to weakness, and toward his little sister, who loved him without understanding why that love was shameful.
Then the kingdom itself began to rot.
The Relapsed (you will get to know them in the book) were chastised, hunted, punished, erased in secretcorruption. This Corruption spread through Throvarin like a sickness and Stability shattered.
This led to the tearing of the Mind Veil to unleashed demons, monsters, and calamities upon the land.
It was disaster... the kingdom crumbled, seas turned red, day turned dark, and all hopes vanished.
The king however, acted swiftly.
He saved his second queen.
He saved his favored sons.
He saved the future he believed in.
And he abandoned Star. Abandoned his first wife. Abandoned his daughter.
Star still remembers it; the moment his father looked at him, not with fear, not with regret, but with nothing. As if Star had already died in his mind.
When the monsters came, his mother stood in their path.
She died slowly. Painfully.
Protecting a son the world had decided was worthless, and a daughter too young to understand why she was screaming.
Star fled with his sister, her small hands slick with blood that was not hers, his ears ringing with sounds that never left him. The flash of light. Her last cries. His mother’s final breath.
Something inside him broke.
Not loudly.
Not cleanly.
It cracked; slow, deep, and permanent.
Star did not swear revenge.
He did not cry for justice.
Those things belonged to the boy he used to be.
What remained was something colder. Something hollow. A prince without a kingdom. A son without a father. A believer who had learned that effort meant nothing, love was conditional, and power decided who deserved to live.
And also a vessel with no soul
"And the world would one day learn"
"Some wounds do not heal."