Western Heaven Continent, on its remote frontier, lay a small place called Black Rock Town.
Far from the continent's prosperous heartlands, spiritual energy was thin here and resources were scarce. Most of the town's buildings were stacked from rough black stone, low and haphazard, while the streets reeked year-round of cheap tobacco, rotting food, and excrement.
Most of the people living here were poor, numb, and struggling to survive, their eyes filled with weariness toward life and indifference toward the future.
At the easternmost edge of town, beside a barren slope littered with thorns and garbage, stood a tiny space barely pieced together from broken boards, rotten tarps, and a few chunks of stone—something that could barely be called a "den." It was as low as a dog hole, drafty on all sides, and turned into a puddle whenever it rained. This was A'Yu's "home."
She was ten years old this year, yet she did not look like a ten-year-old child. She was skin and bones, with waxy yellow skin from chronic malnutrition, caked in grime that could never be washed away. The scraps of cloth on her body, scavenged from some unknown garbage heap and long stripped of any recognizable color or style, barely covered her. The only thing that set her apart was the little face mostly hidden beneath filth.
Though she was sallow and emaciated, the contours of her features hinted at startling delicacy. Her eyes in particular were large and black. At an age when they should have been lively and clear, they instead resembled two dry wells, hollow and devoid of light, holding only a near-dead numbness and an instinctive stubbornness to survive.
She took her mother's surname, Yu. But in Black Rock Town, no one properly called her A'Yu, and no one knew who