The rain fell heavily that night.
The city was quiet, except for the sound of stray dogs scratching through trash cans and thunder echoing across the skyline. Somewhere in that noise, under one broken streetlight, a baby cried.
That baby was me.
When the old dean of Saint Helena Orphanage stepped out to check why the dogs were barking, she found an infant wrapped in a blood‑stained blanket. My tiny chest glowed faintly with a strange red mark—clear even through the rain.
It looked like a circle of fire made of six curved lines spiraling into the shape of a phoenix's feather. The dean swore that, for an instant, the rain stopped around me—as if Heaven itself refused to let a single drop touch my skin.
She took me inside, muttering prayers, never knowing that the same mark had not been seen for over two thousand years.
The orphanage was small, hidden between old temples and neon towers. Life there wasn't grand, but it was honest. I grew amid torn books and cracked walls, watching the city lights blink every night like stars trapped in cages.
People always said I was different.
I remembered things no child should remember. Places, faces, patterns—nothing ever left my mind. My teachers called it a photographic memory; the other kids called it weird.
By twelve, I could memorise whole textbooks in one night. By fifteen, I could fix computer systems that the local police brought in for help. I never wanted credit. I just liked knowing how things worked—how people worked.
But deep down, I always felt something pulsing behind the mark on my chest—like a second heartbeat, waiting.
One summer night, while volunteering with the dean at a museum, I met the man who would change my life.
Professor Thornwood.
The world knew him as the richest living archaeologist and the man who revived ancient civilizations from dust. I'd only seen him on screens—always calm, neatly dressed, with those steel‑grey eyes that seemed to see through time.
He watched me from a distance while I was deciphering an old relic plaque that the curators couldn't read. When I looked up, he was already beside me.
"Do you know what that inscription means, young man?" he asked.
"It's not a curse," I said, surprising him. "It's a map … of energy pathways. Whoever carved it believed the gods lived not above, but inside us."
His eyebrows rose. "And who told you that?"
"No one." I smiled a little. "I just saw it."
He studied me silently for a while before saying, "You remind me of a student I never had."
A month later, he visited the orphanage and spoke privately with the dean. When he left, I was holding a letter of adoption—and a small wooden pendant engraved with the same phoenix‑shaped pattern as the mark on my chest.
"Your parents may have been lost," Professor Thornwood told me, "but your purpose isn't. Come with me. The world is waiting for what you'll find in it."
I moved into his mountain estate—a place half‑home, half‑museum, where ancient relics hummed with quiet secrets. There I learned everything the professor could teach: history, archaeology, martial arts, language, and the science of the unseen world.
He discovered quickly that I could learn any form or stance by watching it once. "A living mirror," he called me. I became a fighter, a thinker, and a hacker who could read code as easily as stone scripts. But he always made me promise one thing—
"Use your skills to protect, not to prove."
Years passed like pages in a journal. The professor turned from mentor to father, and I followed him across countries, digging up both history and truth.
One winter afternoon, we stood together at a world government ceremony. Officials handed each of us a black card—a "Universal Pass."
"Travel without restrictions," the minister explained. "Where the world's security cannot follow, you can. Professor Thornwood and his heir are granted passage everywhere. Your research is now protected by the Council of Nations."
Heir. That word still felt strange on my shoulders, but the professor just smiled and placed a hand on my head.
"You're not my heir because of what you know, Mukul. You're my heir because of how you care."
Despite my training, I stayed humble. Especially with girls. Maybe it was the orphanage in me—never wanting to stand above anyone. People mistook my calm for coldness, but kindness always spoke louder than power.
Whenever danger rose—a flood site, a hack attempt on a museum vault, or a local fight spilling over to civilians—I stepped in. Not for glory, not for fame, but because the professor had taught me that strength only means something when shared.
Still, sometimes, in the quiet between missions, I would look at the mark on my chest glowing faintly like an ember. I felt it watching—no, guiding me.
The professor noticed it too. He once told me, "I think the world placed you in that dustbin for a reason—to hide a light so strong that evil wouldn't find it too soon."
At the time, I laughed it off, but now I know better.
For every mark is a calling, and mine was only just beginning to shine.