1 Prologue: Origin

Ahxue had been born in the winter and thrown away in a dirty alleyway covered in the blanket of the night sky. As heavy snow descended upon the city where families huddled in their warm and brightly lit houses and tall buildings, Ahxue had been abandoned and left to die in the snow.

That's how she had gotten her name, Ahxue. She knows that babies aren't supposed to remember anything from that time, but she did. It is more so that she couldn't forget anything, especially everything that happened afterwards.

At that time she had been in despair, hating the heaven's for their cruelty and wishing for a miracle that would allow her to live.

She should have died in the alley, buried under the snow but she didn't. Instead heaven had given her a saving grace or maybe it had been a curse instead, now that she thinks about it.

A man had staggered into the alleyway, his black suit stained with blood running down it. He had run and hid behind the dumpster next to which she had been left to die.

The mumbled sound of heavy footsteps on the snow grew closer to the alley, the man had observed as those following him ran past the alley and Ahxue heard the disappearing sound of their footsteps. After a minute of silence, the man made to leave the alley.

Ahxue in that moment realized that this would be her one and only change at living, for given another ten minutes, she may freeze to death instead. So using all her strength she started crying. It was quite difficult and she felt her lungs burn from a lack of oxygen.

Waaa! Waaa! Waaa!

Her cries rang out, which surprised the man into freezing, he could hear the surprisingly loud cries of a baby in the silent alleyway. Noticing the sound coming from behind him he turned to find a layering of cloth bundled togethering and the sound originating inside. The man slowly stepped closer to the bundle and reached his hand out towards it, sliding the cloth aside, revealing the red wrinkled face of a newborn baby, crying it's lungs out.

The man had frozen at the sight of the crying newborn baby. The child was tiny but quite pretty with clear features even though her face was the color of a tomato as a result of the crying or maybe the cold weather.

He wasn't oblivious to the fact that someone had left this baby here to die, especially in this weather and on such an alley which no one would enter, this child had no chance from the very beginning. He was about to turn around and leave the child when suddenly his thumb which had been near the cheek of the child was enveloped in a wet warmth and the child who had been bawling previously was now quiet.

The baby was actually sucking on his thumb. His mind had gone blank, he had been an assassin most of his life and he had never come across such a dilemma. He had originally planned on walking away and forgetting about this incident completely but looking at the sleeping face of the child, his decision had been broken.

The child reminded him of himself as a young child orphaned at a run down children's home and then taken into the assassin's organization at the age of eight.

Maybe out of sympathy and pity in a moment's weakness, he picked up the child that was only about the size of his hand and walked away from the alley.

She had been taken by the man to the valley orphanage run by the organization that collected children from all walks of life and if they had the suitable aptitude to be an assassin then they would be taken into the organization and the rest who were unable to their fates lay in their usefulness to the organization.

The man who had taken her there was the one that had named her Xue, for the day he found her in the snow. The other children and caretakers would call her Ahxue for the rest of the four years that she had remained there. After the first day that she had been dropped in the orphanage and named by the man, she had never seen him again until fourteen years later.

When she had turned four the caretakers had realized that she was unlike the other children at the orphanage and after testing from various doctors and specialists was found to have an IQ of 300 along with hyperthymesia, which they said would make her unable to forget anything which she has seen.

That was when she had been made to enter the organization, at only four she had been the youngest of any recruits since the start of the organization. Seeing her potential the organization had trained her in every skill they could drill into her and she learned everything she could so that she could one day once more meet the man who had given her a chance at life. With her abilities she was able to find out the identity of the man within a year of entering the organization. The man had been Jiu, a senior member of the organization that only took S class missions and above but still even though she knew his identity, meeting him would be another task altogether.

All senior members of the organization were away on missions most of the year and even when they were at the organization, anyone below A rank would never get a chance to even meet them. Thus she learned as quickly as she could and by 10 she had mastered every skill possible from medicine to poison, hacking, weapons engineering, and martial arts. Anything that she was asked to learn to be molded into the perfect killer, she had learned and at 12 years old she went on her first solo mission. At 14 she had climbed up the ranks to A class and that's when she had finally been able to meet him, Jiu.

To her he was an existence unlike others, he had been the only one she had been working so hard to meet. She knew that it was likely that he did not even remember her but it was fine as long as she could meet him. To the 14 year old girl, who had been able to go out in the world for missions, she had seen many people and had found the existence of families. It was an abnormality and a wishful desire on her part perhaps but she imagined that Jiu was similar to a father figure in her mind.

Maybe it was an obsession but she committed the one taboo which assassin's should never have done, she gave way to emotions and was blinded by them. She had been a part of the organization for 20 years, rising to the strongest assassin at only 24 years old. To her she thought she was doing good to the organization but blinded to the fact that her achievements caused envy, hatred and fear against her, which ended up costing her the life which she worked so hard to survive.

The organization had set a trap for her and maybe a part of her knew that it was a trap that day when she had been tasked with the mission but still she followed through with it and at the age of 24 the life of Ahxue had ended.