The city was still half-asleep when Kaizen Ryou Aizawa opened his eyes.
The sunlight bled through the curtains, warm but dim — Tokyo's quiet kind of morning.
For a moment, he couldn't remember where he was.
He had been standing on a rooftop...
And then —
"Hey,"
a faint voice whispered in the dark.
"Long time no see."
He could almost see the person's face — a blurred silhouette, smiling faintly.
But before Kaizen could speak, the image shattered like broken glass.
He woke up, sitting straight, his heartbeat steady but his forehead damp with sweat.
The clock read 6:03 A.M.
He looked at his reflection on the mirror across the room.
Same face. Same eyes.
Except for a flicker — his right eye flashed red for half a second.
Then it was gone.
Kaizen's morning was always the same — quiet, organized, efficient.
He washed up, made black coffee, checked emails from editors, and sat before his desk.
On the digital screen in front of him, chapter sketches of his manga "The Girl I Met Online" waited for completion.
His stylus moved smoothly, his hand steady.
He drew a girl staring at her phone under streetlight rain — a scene his fans would later call "melancholy perfection."
But to Kaizen, it was just another page.
He whispered to himself,
"Stories don't need to be happy. They just need to feel real."
After hours of drawing, he stood up and walked toward the massive canvas standing near the balcony — the seven-foot painting.
The girl's face was still incomplete.
Her expression — unreadable.
Her eyes — half-formed, yet alive somehow.
He stared at it for a long time.
Lyra often asked who she was, but Kaizen never answered.
Maybe because he didn't know either.
At noon, while scrolling through headlines on his phone, one article caught his eye —
"Indian B.com Student Simi Manna's Death — Police Still Searching for the Killer."
The photo below showed her smiling beside her school friends.
Kaizen's eyes lingered for only a moment before closing the app.
The coffee on his table had gone cold.
By evening, Kaizen visited the Senvidia Gym, a private training area built into their company building.
He wasn't obsessed with muscles — he just liked the rhythm.
The sound of punching sandbags, the repetition, the stillness that came after every jab — it kept his mind from drifting too far.
After that, he stopped by the Senvidia Library — a quiet room lined with artbooks, philosophy texts, and old manga volumes.
He picked up one of his first sketchbooks, pages yellowed at the edges.
Inside, a small doodle read: "For S.M. — my first reader."
He smiled faintly, then closed the book.
Night fell quietly.
Back in their apartment, Lyra was arranging flowers near the balcony.
Kaizen joined her, helping silently, then they sat together — no words, just the city glowing beneath them.
Lyra rested her head on his shoulder.
"You work too much," she murmured.
Kaizen smirked lightly. "Work doesn't talk back."
"Neither do you," she replied, half joking.
He looked at her for a moment — calm, composed, beautiful — then said,
"If I disappear one day, will you still finish my manga?"
Lyra smiled softly. "I'd burn every page until you came back."
For the first time that day, Kaizen laughed — quietly, almost surprised that he still could.
Then, his phone buzzed.
Manajit Ghosh again.
Kaizen answered lazily. "Yo, what now?"
The voice on the other side was trembling.
"Kaizen... I don't know how to say this."
Kaizen's expression froze.
"What happened?"
"Your parents," Manajit whispered.
"There was a car accident... They didn't survive."
For a moment, everything went silent again — the sound of the city faded, the world shrank to a single pulse in Kaizen's chest.
He didn't move. Didn't speak.
Only the unfinished canvas across the room seemed to glow faintly under the lamplight, the half-drawn eye staring straight at him.
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Art by: @senpai_high
Author: @october.days_
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