It was not a scream… Nor a natural birth, Nor a prophecy carved on a sacred stone. The beginning was a room. A room without windows. Without light. Without sound. A room deep within an old Arknights facility, its walls black as if they had absorbed everything that tried to reflect upon them. In the center… a child. Only four years old. His name: Raven. He did not cry. He did not scream. He asked for nothing. He lay there, eyes wide open in the darkness, staring at nothing… As if the nothingness was staring back at him.
At the age of four, Raven did not know the meaning of dreams. All he knew were nightmares. Every night—if the passage of time in a windowless room could even be called night—he saw the same thing: a shadow with no shape, a voice with no mouth, and a pressure on his chest that made the air vanish. Whispers in a language he did not know… yet somehow it knew him: "You are the cause…" "You are the curse…" He would wake—if he could be said to truly wake— and his heart would beat at an unnaturally slow pace, as if fear was no longer an accident… but a state of existence.
Elsewhere, far from the room, Priestess stood before the ruins of something that had vanished. Something that was not merely a source of power, nor the heart of a system, nor the core of a world. It was what ancient legends called: the Genesis. It had disappeared. It had not been destroyed. Not stolen. Not sealed. It had… simply ceased to exist. From that moment, the world of Arknights changed. Systems began to falter. Laws became unstable. And silence—that strange silence—crept through the layers. Priestess looked at her hands… then at the records… and finally at one name that appeared across every account: Raven. A child. Her child. "It's… a curse." She did not say it with anger. She said it with coldness, the cold of someone who knew something had gone beyond control. She did not yet know the truth. She did not know that what disappeared was not a victim… but had left of its own will. She did not know that the Genesis… was the last absolute of pre-era legends. An entity beyond measure, beyond containment, beyond comprehension. And that Raven… was not the cause. He was merely the point it passed through.
She did not kill Raven. Nor exile him. Nor erase him. She did something colder. She abandoned him. But she did not leave him to die. She issued a single order, sealed beyond question: "One girl… only she shall care for him."
Her name was Emma. Seventeen years old. She was neither a warrior, nor a researcher, nor a priestess. She was… human. When she opened the door to the room for the first time, she did not see a curse. She did not see danger. She saw a small child, frailer than he should be, with dark purple eyes that glimmered in the darkness, as if they belonged to something older than the walls themselves. Raven sat still. He did not flinch. He did not smile. He looked at her… as if he had been waiting for her for years. Emma swallowed hard. "…I'll stay with you." She did not know why she said it. But at that moment, something stirred in Raven's chest. It was not light. It was not power. It was… a feeling. The first true feeling he had ever known.
Nothing supernatural appeared. No energy burst. No reality fractured. But the darkness in the room… became quieter. As if it had responded to him. The darkness was not Raven's enemy. It was the first to embrace him. And so, unbeknownst to anyone, Level One of his ability began: Darkness. Not pure darkness yet. Not an entity. Not an absolute concept. Just… a shadow learning to exist.
That night, Raven slept without a single nightmare. For the first time, the shadow did not whisper. For the first time, he did not feel like a curse. And before he drifted into sleep, one thought emerged from the depths of his being, without sound… without language… but unmistakably clear: I am who I am. I am not a mistake. I am not a substitute. I am not someone else's shadow. And that thought—would become the spark, across years, eras, and paths, leading to the birth of countless forms: Pure Darkness… The Storm… The Absolute Priest… The Absolute Imp… The Absolute Sin… And one entity… whose name shall not be spoken now. For absolute silence is not born in the beginning. It is born… at the end.