It was a world where the strong and the rich didn't just rule; they preyed on the weak. Power wasn't just strength; it was a license to be cruel, and wealth was the ultimate shield against consequences. This was the world that created me.
My name is Sadd Venan, and my story began with a kick a metaphorical one from the grand, cold walls of the Batan household. My mother, Lina Venan, was from a background so poor it barely registered on the city's ledgers. She had no family name to protect her, no wealth to leverage. She was an orphan since birth, adopted by an old couple who gave her love but little else; they passed away peacefully when she was seventeen.
The Injustice
Lina worked on every kind of miscellaneous job she could find, battling exhaustion to pay for her tuition and daily survival. She carried the quiet determination of someone who had to fight for every breath. But that fight was brutally interrupted on one terrible, fateful night.
She was drugged by the eldest Batan son, Sam Batan. During that encounter, I was conceived.
The moment she found out, Lina fought the only way she could: she reported it. She went to the authorities, the special security forces the very "Elites" supposedly responsible for social security and criminal justice. But the Batan name carried far more weight than Lina's truth.
She was ignored. Worse, she was met with cold threats from the authorities and direct, chilling warnings from the Batan family's lawyers. They made it clear: her life was worth nothing compared to their reputation. Lina was left completely alone in the world, her dreams her future crushed under the heel of unimaginable wealth.
In her desperation and profound grief, she tried anything to undo what had happened. She tried all sorts of inferior drugs, hoping to abort me, but it was unsuccessful. She didn't have the means the money for a safe, legal hospital procedure.
She fell into a deep seclusion, her health deteriorating as she experimented with more cheap, low-grade chemicals in her lonely apartment. It reached the point of dying. But the universe, or perhaps just luck, intervened in the form of a gentle soul. She was found barely alive by a local vicinity healer, Mr. Calsius.
"That woman," Mr. Calsius later told me, his eyes full of distant sadness, "she had the life drained out of her, not by a monster from a Gate, but by human cruelty."
He admitted her to his small, humble clinic and took care of her until I was born. She named me Sadd. Later, I took her last name, Venan, determined to carry her spirit with me.
A Mother's Hope and A Father's Cruelty
The years passed too quickly. I was seven when my mother's health finally gave way completely. She had reached a critical stage; she was mostly in a coma, though sometimes she would wake up for a day or two, her eyes clear and full of a quiet love before slipping back into the darkness.
"You must promise me, Sadd," she whispered during one of those brief awakenings, holding my small hand. "You must try to find him. Your father. He has the means. He can help you get me the advanced treatment."
She needed big-city hospital care, the kind of treatment that Mr. Calsius, with his limited local resources, simply couldn't provide.
Before her coma became permanent, she described how to find the ancestral Batan home a walled fortress in the Inner District. I carried that instruction like a sacred scroll.
With a heart heavy with fear and desperate hope, I sought help from Mr. Calsius. He couldn't go himself, but he gave me the address and a pleading letter, his face etched with worry. "Tell them it's not about money or revenge, Sadd," he instructed. "Tell them it's about a mother's life."
I walked for hours until I reached the massive, ornate gate of the Batan family estate. It felt like standing before a king's palace.
The gate slid open slightly, and there he was: Sam Batan. My father. He was a man polished by wealth, his clothes flawless, his Status Window undoubtedly glowing with terrifying numbers.
He looked down at me, his gaze sweeping over my worn, clean clothes and my desperate face. Then his eyes caught something maybe a flicker of Lina's defiant spirit, maybe just the shape of my jaw. He hesitated.
Sadd's thought: This is it. He will see me. He will help her.
"Are you... Lina's brat?" he asked, the words coated in cold disgust. He didn't wait for an answer. He saw the poor clothing, the desperation, and decided immediately.
I tried to speak, tried to tell him about the coma, about Mr. Calsius, but the words were choked by the rising terror in my throat.
He didn't listen. He raised his hand, and the sound of the backhand across my face was sharp and loud. I fell to the ground, the letter scattering on the pristine pavement.
"A thief! Coming here to beg! Don't you ever show your face here, you garbage!" he shouted, his face contorted in rage, not because I was his son, but because I was poor and a problem.
He yelled for the armed guards at the gate. "Get this filth out of here! Throw him out like the object he is! If he comes back, I'll have the Elites deal with him!"
I was dragged, kicked, and tossed onto the hard, cracked road outside the Inner District, the Batan gate slamming shut behind me like a judge's final gavel. I lay there, my face stinging, tears mixing with the dust, clutching the crumpled, useless letter.
I learned the harshest lesson of this world right then: my blood meant nothing. My mother's life meant less. In the world of the strongest and wealthiest, my life was just a scar they wanted to erase.