The child arrived in the rain.
No name. No blanket. No trace of where he came from—only a thin, blood-specked cloth and a strange stillness in his breathless crying.
They found him just before dawn. The oldest monk in the temple—white-bearded, half-blind, and already sweeping the stone path—paused when he saw the bundle at the gate. He didn't speak. Just stared. The rain hissed as it hit the worn tiles.
The baby did not wail. Only blinked up at the sky, as if it had taken everything from him before he had the chance to ask.
The monks debated what to call him.
"Ghost-born," whispered one.
"No. Heaven-sent," said another.
But the elder raised his hand and said, "He will not be named until he knows what a name is."
So they gave him no title. No rank. He grew up in silence, drifting between shadows of rituals and the slow, tired lives of monks who barely remembered why the temple existed.
The place was once holy, maybe. But that time had passed. Now it felt like a memory. The murals were faded. The statues were cracked. The sacred texts were mostly used to block wind from the cracks in the wall.
Still, they followed the old rhythms.
Chanting at dawn. Sweeping at dusk. Incense that never quite masked the smell of rot in the corners.
By age four, the boy understood that he was different.
Not because the monks treated him poorly. Not even because he was the only child in robes two sizes too big. But because he watched differently.
He did not chant the sutras with the others. He listened to the way their voices cracked on certain syllables. He noticed which monks sang only when others were near. He watched them bow to stone idols and then argue over soup rations an hour later.
"Why do we kneel to statues?" he asked once.
The old monk, the one who had found him, squinted at him.
"We kneel so we don't forget humility."
"But they don't speak."
The monk smiled faintly. "Neither do the mountains. But they teach you, if you listen long enough."
The boy nodded.
He began listening to everything.
There was only one other child at the temple—an orphan boy named Ren, a few years older and loud enough to be heard from the far end of the courtyard.
Ren liked to talk. He also liked to challenge. He once tried to fight the bell tower for "looking at him funny." He bruised easily and healed fast.
He couldn't understand the quiet boy.
"You just sit there," Ren muttered once, flopping down beside him on a stone bench. "Staring at clouds. That's not training."
"I'm not training."
Ren blinked. "Then what are you doing?"
"Listening."
"To what? There's nothing out here."
"That's what I'm listening to."
Ren stared at him a second longer, then snorted.
"You're weird."
"I know."
He stayed sitting beside him anyway.
Ren liked to play "fight," using sticks as swords. He'd swing wildly, shouting names for attacks he'd made up himself.
"The Thousand Snake Strike!"
"Burning Sky Fist!"
The younger boy never hit back. He always dropped his stick after the first swing.
"You don't even try," Ren huffed. "You'll never be a real monk."
"I don't want to be," he said simply.
Ren stared. "Then why are you here?"
"I didn't choose to be here."
That silenced Ren for the first time in days.
From that day on, he stopped trying to teach him how to fight. But he still ate with him. Still walked the stone paths beside him. Still talked about ridiculous things the quiet boy never answered.
The boy began dreaming strangely that year.
Dreams where the temple was upside down. Where monks spoke with voices that belonged to no human. Where the statues wept blood. Where the sky was made of paper and the stars whispered names that didn't belong to him.
He told no one.
Not even Ren.
But in the mornings, he would sometimes stare at the tallest peak beyond the valley, long after the others had gone to work.
And once, just once, he said aloud to no one:
"I think I came from there."
On the eve of his fifth year, the elder monk brought him to the shrine.
Not the public one. Not the cracked, half-forgotten altar in the main hall.
This one was hidden behind a false wall in the back of the temple, down a corridor no one else entered anymore.
Dust layered everything like snow.
The elder said nothing as he lit a single candle and motioned for the boy to kneel.
The boy obeyed.
They sat in silence.
Minutes passed. Then hours.
At last, the boy asked, "Why am I here?"
The monk finally looked at him.
"To see what you feel."
The boy frowned. "Feel what?"
The monk pointed at the altar.
It held no statue. No symbol. Just a smooth, black stone. And behind it, a wall of names—hundreds of them. Each carved in a different hand, some barely legible.
"What is this place?" the boy asked.
"The place before names," the monk said.
"Am I one of them?"
"No. Not yet."
He gestured toward the empty space at the bottom of the wall.
"When you are ready… you will write your own."
That night, the boy lay awake under thin blankets, staring at the ceiling.
Ren snored loudly across the room, twitching in some dream.
The candle flickered low.
And in that flicker, for a brief moment, he saw something.
A vision?
A memory?
A shadow?
He couldn't say.
But it felt like standing on the edge of something massive—something that would one day demand everything from him.
He closed his eyes and whispered:
"I don't need a name yet."
And drifted into sleep.