1 A LITTLE ELEPHANT

Clouds gathered in the gray sky and rained down on the corpses impaled on stakes, dismembered or hung from trees, while a middle-aged man with long hair and broad shoulders, wearing an expensive kimono, walked along the road without his feet touching the ground. In one corner, scavengers were ripping open people's bellies, some birds were pulling out people's eyes, but even in the gloom, a lump of flesh fell from between the crotch of a woman hanging from a tree.

With a sudden start, he looked in the direction of the sound, and then looked in amazement at the white-skinned, gray-haired boy with black horns like a small mound at his temples, lying peacefully on the ground.

When a little face appeared on his stubble face, revealing dimples, he opened his hands and looked up to the sky. Then he took a deep breath, muttered some prayers, cut the child's umbilical cord and wrapped the baby with a piece of his kimono.

"So life can flourish even here..."

25 years later... in a cave.

The old man, emaciated and emaciated, his eyes sunken in and his lips dry, looked at the young man at his bedside with watery eyes, and with difficulty he opened his lips and began to move them, but nothing could be understood except a grunt.

When the young man put his ear close to the old man's mouth, the grunts took on meaning and filled his eyes too.

"Leave me at the River of Swords. My sword will accompany you."

The last breath of the old man, who had barely completed the words, was only a slight murmur in the young man's ear. After lifting his head and looking at the old man's peacefully closed eyes and then at his body, he heaved a deep sigh, lifted his shoulders, and with his right hand pulled the blanket over the bedridden man upwards to cover his face.

Then, after taking the necessary actions and watching the old man's burning body all day long, he put the old man's ashes in the gourd that had been emptied for the drink. And after tying the mouth of the gourd with a rope and hanging it around his waist, he put his master's katana around his waist, tucked the map between his chest and the kimono and set off.