They said the boy from District 9 had no memories of his past.
No name. No family. Just an old leather coat with the initials "E.D." stitched inside and a jagged scar curling beneath his left eye—like a second smile carved by something that didn't quite finish the job.
They called him Echo.
Because every time someone spoke to him, he didn't reply.
He just listened... then mimicked their words a few seconds later, empty-eyed.
The name stuck. So did the fear.
"Echo. Stand up."
He didn't move.
The classroom was silent. Dust swirled in beams of dying sunlight that slipped through broken blinds. A dozen other boys watched him from their seats—orphans with bruised knuckles and twitching nerves, all wearing the gray robes of the Mindswept Asylum for Lost Children.
"Echo," said Mistress Jun one more time, her voice coiling with frustration. "Stand. Up."
Echo stood.
Slowly.
With the stiffness of a puppet remembering it had strings.
Mistress Jun's voice was sharp as needles. "Can you tell the class what happened in Sector 13 last night?"
He blinked. Tilted his head. His voice came out in a flat whisper:
"A body was found. No skin on the face. No tongue. Eyes removed and replaced with black marbles."
The class tensed. One of the smaller boys whimpered.
Mistress Jun narrowed her eyes. "You shouldn't know that."
"I do," Echo replied.
"Why?" she asked.
"I… saw it."
A beat of silence.
She stepped forward. Her polished boots creaked on the tile floor. "Saw it? From where?"
Another whisper. "From inside the killer's head."
Somewhere beneath the school, a bell rang.
It wasn't the class bell.
It was the Black Iron Alarm—only used when someone escaped... or died.
Ten Minutes Earlier
Blood was already drying on the walls of Cell 44.
A nurse hung from the ceiling by her own intestines, still twitching. The words EAT ME TO LIVE were smeared in crimson on the tiles, over and over again.
A man sat in the center of the room, cross-legged, completely naked, eyes wide open.
He was smiling.
No restraints. No fear. Just silence.
He had carved a third eye into his forehead using a shard of broken mirror and was now mumbling numbers.
"Seventy-seven, seventy-eight… seventy-nine…"
Another nurse opened the door—and screamed.
He didn't attack her.
He only whispered:
"He's awake now. The Mind-Eater has returned."
Back in the Classroom
Mistress Jun's hand trembled as she grabbed her relic-staff from the wall. It shimmered faintly, runes glowing violet along the shaft.
Echo didn't flinch.
"What are you?" she asked, voice cracking.
He tilted his head again. "I don't know. But I remember now."
"Remember what?"
His eyes rolled back. He grinned.
"The game."
Mistress Jun whispered a protective spell, just in case. Her breath came faster.
She had seen this before.
Not in this boy—but in someone else. Years ago.
Back when the Mind-Eater murdered twelve Seers in one night. When the Empire burned down its own monasteries to kill a single man with a grin and a god in his brain.
Echo looked at her now, and his voice dropped to something deeper. Older.
"This body is just the latest mask. But my rules remain."
A cold shadow passed through the room. The lights flickered. The other boys screamed and fled.
Only Mistress Jun and Echo remained.
"I will stop you," she said.
"No," he replied calmly. "You'll forget."
She stepped forward, staff raised—
—and then froze.
Her mouth opened.
She forgot why.
Echo was already gone.
Outside the Asylum
Rain fell like falling ash.
Echo walked barefoot across the cracked pavement, coat flapping in the wind.
His mind burned with fragments: a red door, screaming crows, a girl with white eyes and a dagger made of dreams.
He didn't understand it yet.
But something inside him whispered:
"Collect their minds. Piece it together. Win the game. Or die insane."
In a hidden tower far above the clouds, thirteen masked figures watched him through an obsidian mirror.
"Are we sure it's him?" asked one.
"Positive," said another. "The aura is identical. But… something's wrong."
"What?"
"He's fractured."
A third voice, female and cold: "Then the game begins again. Send the Reapers. Let's see if he remembers the rules before we kill him."
Later That Night
The first Reaper found Echo beneath an overpass, carving symbols into the concrete.
It was a girl.
White hair. No face.
Her fingers were razors.
"Mind-Eater," she rasped. "You're not ready."
He looked at her.
Then whispered, "Neither are you."
When they found her body two hours later, her brain had been scooped clean—and replaced with a burning rose.
***
The rose in the Reaper's skull glowed faintly in the dark, releasing smoke that danced in serpentine coils before vanishing into the wind.
Echo crouched beside her corpse, fingers slick with blood, eyes locked on the petals.
He didn't remember planting the rose.
But he knew it meant something.
A clue.
Like everything else in the game.
"What do you want me to remember?" he whispered to the flower.
No answer came.
Just the growing hum of a glyph-beast approaching in the distance—its hooves thudding like war drums against concrete, pulling a carriage carved from bone and lightning. More hunters. More pieces.
He vanished into the night.
Miles away, atop the crystalline Tower of Sight, High Seer Vaedra hissed and threw her chalice across the chamber. The obsidian mirror cracked.
"You said he was dead," she snarled.
Her robed council members flinched. None dared to meet her gaze.
The youngest among them—a girl no older than seventeen—cleared her throat.
"We didn't anticipate this. His soul shouldn't have survived the purge."
Vaedra turned.
The girl's courage evaporated.
"We burned the monastery. We erased his records. We even killed the last three Memory-Keepers. So explain to me how a boy wearing his smile just murdered a Reaper and planted a rose in her brain like a damn calling card."
Silence.
The Seeress stepped to the window, overlooking the golden skyline of Nu'Ravin, the capital city of the Empire.
"The Mind-Eater isn't just a killer. He's a concept," she said bitterly. "He doesn't just destroy minds. He rewrites them. Bends people into characters in his... games."
"Then perhaps this isn't him," one of the older men said quietly.
Vaedra turned, eyes aflame with silver fury.
"He called the Asylum mistress by name. She said he remembered the rules. And what else do you call a killer who turns corpses into puzzles?"
No one answered.
Another robed man cleared his throat nervously.
"Should we alert the Guild?"
Vaedra exhaled. "No. Not yet. The Guild will demand proof. But there's one person who'll know for sure."
The chamber darkened.
She waved her hand over the mirror. The cracked glass healed.
A new face emerged: a middle-aged man with iron-gray hair, smoking a bloodleaf cigar in a flickering tavern.
He froze when he saw her.
"Vaedra," he muttered. "Gods. It's been years. What's this about?"
She cut to the chase. "He's back, Marcus."
The man's eyes widened.
"Impossible. I saw his body burn with my own—"
"He's taken a new host," she interrupted. "A child. Maybe a clone. But the energy signature is identical. One of our Reapers is dead."
Marcus went quiet.
He took a drag from the cigar, then leaned forward.
"What do you want from me?"
"Finish what you started."
Echo awoke in an alley.
His hands were clean.
His coat was gone.
And there was a small, silver key hanging around his neck that hadn't been there before.
He sat up slowly, blinking at the sky above. The stars twisted unnaturally. No constellation looked familiar.
Behind his eyelids, images flashed.
Red velvet curtains.
A crowd clapping.
A man in a porcelain mask whispering riddles.
And then—blood. So much blood.
He touched his chest. It was rising and falling too quickly.
A panic attack?
He didn't know what that was, but it felt right.
He saw movement near a trash bin. A girl was watching him—no older than he was, maybe sixteen. She had two differently colored eyes and a raven perched on her shoulder.
Echo blinked.
The bird winked at him.
"Did you do it again?" the girl asked.
"Do what?" he said softly.
She came closer. Her boots didn't make a sound.
"You disappeared for six hours," she said. "And the Reapers are dead. Again."
He narrowed his eyes. "Again?"
"You always forget, Echo. Every time you kill one, you wake up not knowing who you are."
He shivered. "Who are you?"
The girl rolled her eyes. "We go through this every week."
She handed him a folded note.
He opened it with trembling fingers.
It said, in neat, elegant handwriting:
RULE 1: DON'T TRUST YOUR MEMORIES.
RULE 2: DON'T KILL TOO FAST. THEY'RE CLUES.
RULE 3: SHE KNOWS. FIND HER.
You wrote this, Echo. Last week. After you cut open the Dream Collector.
His breath hitched.
He looked up. "Who is she?"
The girl stared at him for a moment.
Then said:
"She's the one who beat you last time. The only one who ever did."
His pulse thundered in his ears.
"Where is she?"
The girl smiled faintly. "That's the game, Echo. You find her before she remembers who you are… or before she kills you again."
She turned and vanished into smoke.
Echo stood, shoulders trembling, eyes fixed on the horizon.
The silver key felt heavier now.
Somewhere in the city, a violin began to play itself in an empty cathedral.
And deep in the Empire's archives, the words MIND-EATER blinked to life in red ink on a page that had been blank for over a decade.