The air in the Tower of Heaven wasn't just dirty; it was foul.
Every breath felt like a punishment. Sea salt dried in the throat, mixing with the stench of stale sweat, old blood, and the rust clinging to iron chains. Beneath it all was something subtler yet more disturbing: the scent of dark magic permeating the Ethernano crystals, like flesh rotting slowly without ever truly decaying.
The blue glow of the crystals filled the room. Cold. Dead. Unchanging. There was no morning. No night. Only time passing without meaning.
In a damp niche at the base of the Tower—far below the levels where the guards flaunted their whips—a drama of life began amidst the decay.
The Birth of Ren
"Stay conscious, Elara! Don't close your eyes!"
The voice belonged to Nana, a woman whose face was mapped by the wrinkles of suffering. Her back was permanently bent—a physical manifestation of decades spent lugging stone blocks to build the mad ambitions of the Zeref worshippers. Her rough, calloused hands now held the hand of a young woman drenched in sweat on a pile of rotten straw.
Elara, the mother of the unborn child, could only groan. Her face was as pale as the snow she had never seen. Outside their cramped cell, the sound of waves crashing against the tower's foundation sounded like the heartbeat of a sea monster waiting for prey. Every time a wave hit, crystal dust fell from the ceiling, sparkling like stars falling into the mud.
"Nana... I can't..." Elara whispered.
Her voice cracked, nearly drowned out by the harsh cheering of guards in the corridors above celebrating construction progress.
"You can! You have to!" Nana pressed a wet cloth to Elara's forehead. "Think of this child. He must not die in here before having the chance to see what hope is."
Elara's scream finally broke through, stifled by the cloth she bit down on to avoid drawing the attention of the guards.
In this place, screams were a sign of weakness, and weakness often ended with the tip of a spear. Seconds ticked by like frozen hours, until finally, a new voice joined the symphony of suffering in the Tower of Heaven.
A cry.
Small, weak, yet somehow magically pure in a place so filthy. The baby was born.
His skin was reddish, covered in mucus and blood, but his eyes were wide open—a pair of clear, sharp eyes staring at the darkness around him without the fear a newborn usually possesses. Nana received the baby with trembling hands. She wrapped him in a tattered cloth she had saved for months, the result of stealing remnants from dead slaves.
"It's a boy, Elara. A son."
Elara tried to lift her head. With the last of her strength, she touched the baby's cheek.
"Ren... Ren Chicle..."
The name was the only treasure she could give him. The next second, the light in Elara's eyes dimmed.
Her breath stopped with a gentle sigh, as if her soul had finally found a gap to escape the cursed tower and fly toward the freedom she had always dreamed of. Nana fell silent. Tears fell from her cloudy eyes, wetting Ren's cheeks. She had no time to grieve properly.
In the Tower of Heaven, corpses had to be reported immediately or the stench would invite trouble. However, if she reported Elara's death now, the guards would see the baby—a baby deemed useless because he couldn't hold a hammer yet.
"Rest now, Elara," Nana whispered, closing her friend's eyes. "I swear on the rest of my miserable life, he will survive."
Four Years Later
Four years passed, but time in the Tower of Heaven was not measured by calendars, but by the number of lives lost and the growing height of the tower.
Ren Chicle grew up in the shadows. He was a small secret kept by the slave community in the Lowest Sector. Nana, with her incredible ingenuity, had managed to hide Ren's existence all this time. She placed Ren in narrow crevices behind supply piles or inside ventilation holes too small for an adult to enter during inspections.
One cold morning, Nana returned to their cell after an eighteen-hour shift. Her body trembled with cold and hunger. In her hand, she held a small piece of hard, moldy bread—her food ration that she had purposely not eaten.
"Ren? Where are you?"
A little boy emerged from behind the stack of burlap sacks.
Ren Chicle, at the age of four, had an appearance that contrasted sharply with children his age—if there were any other children there. His hair was jet black, his skin pale from lack of sunlight, but his eyes... his eyes possessed a terrifying intelligence.
"I'm here, Nana. I was counting their steps," Ren's voice was calm, too calm for a small child.
"Whose steps?"
"The guards. The guard with the heavy boots passes every three hundred heartbeats. The guard with the long sword passes every thousand heartbeats. If I know the pattern, I can go out and get you water without getting caught."
Nana felt a tightening in her chest. Ren never played. He had no toys other than pebbles and broken shards of Ethernano crystals. His toys were survival strategies.
"Eat this," Nana handed him the bread.
Ren looked at the bread, then looked at Nana. "You haven't eaten since yesterday, Nana. Your eyes are yellow and your hands are shaking."
"I'm old, Ren. My stomach has shrunk. You need this to grow big."
Ren took the bread, but he split it in half. He forced Nana to take the other half. "If you die, who will teach me about the sun? I can't eat all this bread if it means I will be alone."
Nana swallowed hard, her tears almost breaking again. She hugged Ren. The boy's body felt warm, strangely warm, even though the air in the lower sector was always freezing.
Since Ren was born, Nana had noticed something strange. Ren was rarely cold. Even when sea storms battered the tower and temperatures plummeted, Ren's skin still felt as if it had just been heated near a furnace.
Nana began to teach Ren everything she knew. She used charcoal to write on the rough stone walls. She taught Ren to read, write, and count.
"This is the letter 'H', Ren. For 'Hope'."
"What is hope, Nana?"
Nana paused for a moment, looking at the blue-glowing crystal wall. "Hope is the feeling that one day, you will wake up and see a sky that is not made of stone. A bright blue sky, with a massive ball of fire called the sun that warms your skin without you having to ask."
Ren touched the letter 'H'. "Is the sun magic?"
"Maybe," Nana answered softly. "Some people say the sun is the purest magic in the world."
The Awakening
Ren's resilience began to attract unwanted attention as time went on.
One day, a guard named Krov, known for his cruelty, conducted a surprise inspection of the lower sector. Krov was a large man with a face full of scars and a strong smell of alcohol. At that time, Ren was sitting in the corner of the cell, trying to understand an old book whose cover was missing—the only possession of his mother's that Nana had managed to save.
The cell door was kicked open. The smell of alcohol was stronger than usual. His eyes were red, his smile filled with ill intent.
"What is this?" Krov's voice was sharp. "A little rat hiding?"
Nana immediately knelt. "Please... he's just a child..."
Krov laughed harshly, the sound of his laughter echoing in the narrow hallway. "A child? There are no children here. Only slaves or waste to be thrown into the sea."
He approached Ren and grabbed him by the collar, lifting the boy until Ren's feet dangled in the air. Ren did not scream. He did not cry. He just looked at Krov with deep, cold eyes.
"You have brave eyes, rat," Krov growled. "Let's see if you can still look at me like that after I break a few of your bones."
Krov swung his hand, preparing to slam Ren against the sharp crystal wall. Nana screamed, trying to reach for Krov's leg, but she was kicked aside.
But something strange happened just as Ren's back was about to hit the wall.
The air inside the cell suddenly became intensely hot. Not a burning heat like fire, but an atmospheric pressure that made oxygen feel heavy. The blue glow of the Ethernano crystal on the wall suddenly turned a reddish-orange for a moment, as if the energy inside the stone was reacting to something inside Ren.
Krov suddenly released his grip. He took a step back, his face filled with confusion.
"What... what was that?"
His hand that had just held Ren looked red, as if he had just gripped hot iron. Ren landed on the floor in a perfect standing position, his breathing calm, but around his body, the air seemed to shimmer like a mirage in the desert.
"Get out."
Ren's voice was extremely low, yet possessed an absurd authority for a four-year-old. Krov, whether from the influence of alcohol or instinctive fear, did not continue his attack. He spat on the floor, trying to cover his nervousness.
"Tsk! You're lucky today, rat. Tomorrow, you will start working in the lower mines. If you can survive, maybe you'll be useful."
After Krov left, Nana immediately hugged Ren. "Ren! Are you okay? What happened?"
Ren looked at his own hands. The shimmer in the air disappeared, and the temperature returned to cold. "I don't know, Nana. I just felt... so angry. And when I'm angry, I feel like something wants to burst out of my chest."
Nana looked at Ren with a mixture of fear and awe. She remembered old stories about great wizards, about those with "extraordinary potential" born from extreme suffering. She realized that Ren Chicle was not just an ordinary orphan. There was something sleeping inside him, a power that could potentially destroy this tower, or burn it to the ground.
That night, as Ren slept soundly in her arms, Nana looked toward the small crack in the cell's ceiling that showed a tiny sliver of the black night sky.
"Elara," Nana whispered in her heart. "Your son... he is not just a survivor. He is something else."
Nana knew that starting tomorrow, Ren's life would become much more dangerous. Putting a four-year-old to work in the crystal mines was a slow death sentence. Ethernano radiation would seep into his pores, and dust would fill his lungs.
Yet, as she looked at Ren's calm face in his sleep, Nana felt a new conviction. The Tower of Heaven might be the place where people came to die, but for Ren Chicle, this place was merely a second womb, a place where his power would be forged by the fires of suffering until he was ready to explode and seek the real sun.
"One day, Ren," Nana promised, kissing the boy's forehead. "You will burn away this darkness."
The next morning, before the work bell rang, Nana took a last piece of charcoal. In a hidden corner of their cell, she wrote a sentence she hoped Ren would remember forever if they were ever separated.
"True light does not come from crystals, but from the fire that keeps burning in the middle of a storm."
Ren woke up, his eyes immediately drawn to the writing. He didn't ask. He just nodded, then stood up, ready to face his first hell in the mines of the Tower of Heaven.
In his tiny hand, he held a crystal pebble he had found—not as a toy, but as a reminder of the enemy he had to conquer. The footsteps of guards were heard in the corridor. Chains began to clink. The cries of other babies in the distance began to sound. But Ren Chicle walked out of his cell with his head held high.
Ren's story had only just begun—born from death, nurtured by the love of an old slave, and fueled by a mysterious power waiting to be unleashed. The Tower of Heaven might have thought they had captured another life to sacrifice, but they did not realize they had just brought fire into a powder keg.