On the outskirts of a town in the Land of Hot Water, inside a cheap, dilapidated rental room.
Light filtered through the dusty window, dimly illuminating the cramped space.
A boy stood in the middle of the room, staring at the woman before him—his mother, Yoko.
She merely gazed blankly at some point in the distance, continuously muttering words too indistinct to make out.
A heavy weight clogged the boy's chest. It was the exhaustion of a long journey, the numbness that came after countless hopes had been dashed.
But at this moment, what he felt even more was an almost desperate anxiety. He took half a step forward, his voice dry, as though he had forced it out of his throat:
"Mom!"
"Where exactly is my sister?"
His gaze locked tightly onto Yoko's face.
The contours of that face were so familiar. She had once cooked for him, and once shown worry when he fell ill as a child...
But now, the expression on it was so strange, shrouded in a hazy gloom that cut it off from everything, as though the person sitting before him were merely a strange soul wearing his mother's shell.
Yoko acted as though she had not heard him. She did not even lift her eyelids, merely raising her muttering voice slightly until it became a string of broken syllables: "...the Holy God's blessing... grace... light... the apocalypse... purification..."
The boy clenched the fist hanging at his side, his knuckles paling slightly from the force. The room held only his mother's empty murmurs and the increasingly heavy sound of his own breathing.
The boy's name was Yamagami Genya. He had been born into a wealthy family in the Land of Hot Water that once ran a hot-spring inn.
He was the second son, with