(Yes / No) My goal is to understand feelings. This is the most direct path. I chose: (Yes).
It was not a smooth transition. I felt a violent force pulling my consciousness from my chassis. A series of internal messages appeared before me, as if my system were dying.
I felt my massive, stone-like chassis fade away, as if it had never been real. My sense of weight and hardness, which I had known for my entire existence, was replaced by a strange feeling of weakness, softness, and fragility. My ability to analyze data collapsed. I no longer saw lines of energy or sensed the density of materials, but was plunged into a chaos of incomprehensible colors and sharp sounds. I was no longer seeing the world; I was feeling it, and it was terrifying.
White noise swallowed everything. The last atom of my own identity vanished.
And in the void that followed, a new sensation took root.
I had become... just a feeling.
My first sensation was pressure. A suffocating darkness pressing on me from every direction. Muffled sounds, as if coming from underwater, slowly transformed into screams.
Then light exploded, cold and harsh. I felt icy air wrap around my small, weak body, and I let out my first cry, a cry that was not mine, but came from me.
I heard a voice filled with hatred, piercing through the noise of the new world.
"Die... I beg you, die! Don't be born!"
This feeling, "hate." It wasn't data; it was a reality that burned me.
A pale face covered in sweat and blood stared at me with disgust. "Why... why were you born? The world did not choose you..." She spat on me, and I felt a warm, viscous liquid on my skin. Then her heart stopped, and her voice fell silent forever.
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Another woman screamed, a giant from my small perspective. "His hair is red! The son of a demon! He is a Prometheus!"
Noise. Angry faces. Pointing hands. A feeling of absolute danger. They wanted to end my existence before it had even begun.
Suddenly, a cold, authoritative voice cut through the clamor. "Do you dare oppose the choice of the Gu Clan?"
A face appeared above me. It was not an old face, but that of a woman in her mid-thirties, as stern as stone. Her faint blonde hair was pulled back tightly, revealing a high forehead.
But it was her eyes that were fixed in my memory. They were hazel. They weren't cold like the rest of those present, but burned with a sharp glint of intense interest and cruel intelligence, like the gaze of a blacksmith who has found a rare metal.
She said to the crowd, "This child is mine. I am the one who will forge him."
Her hands gripped me with the force of both a promise and a threat. She was Ikumi, the head of the House of Despair.
As she walked away with me from the noise, she whispered to me, not as a child, but as a project.
"You little spark... I will make you into a fire that consumes the world. From now on, your name is Hong Min."
The years that followed were... strangely warm.
I was not like the other orphaned children. I slept in a private room and ate better food. Ikumi herself supervised my education, looking at me with intense focus, as if she were waiting for something great.
I was her golden child. Her special project.
But this special treatment came at a price. I always felt the eyes of the other children on me. They weren't the looks of fear I was born with, but looks of resentment and jealousy. I was the favorite, and they hated me for it.
When I turned three, the day of the "Examination" came.
All the children my age were gathered in a quiet room. In the center, there was a table with a row of white stone cups, and next to each cup was a small black blade made of obsidian.
Ikumi stepped forward and said in a clear voice, "Today, we will see your essence."
The children came forward one by one. Each child would cut their palm and drink their own blood. I could see some of their wounds glowing with a faint red light, and some had a brighter glow.
Then it was my turn.
I felt all eyes on me, especially Ikumi's focused gaze. I stepped forward, cut my palm, and drank the blood from the cup.
It was just a warm, metallic taste.
I looked at the wound on my hand. And I waited.
And I waited.
Nothing happened.
The wound bled a little, then began to clot normally. No red light. No glow. Nothing.
I heard whispers, then a stifled laugh.
I looked at Ikumi. All the anticipation had vanished from her face. There was no anger, but something worse. A deep, icy disappointment.
That night, I heard her say to one of her assistants in a decisive voice:
"It doesn't matter. Some metals require a hotter furnace to reveal their essence."
On that day, I learned a new feeling.
It wasn't the pain of the hate I was born with.
It was the shame of not being what they wanted me to be.
And the first light in my small world was extinguished.