3
Glory
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* * * *
Hadrian
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* * * *
When I was a kid, my old man used to repeat the same thing to me constantly: “Your place is fixed in this world, and the best Hayashi is the one who knows his place.”
He used to say, “Don’t let your ambitions fool you. Those are of the world, and we are where we belong, son.”
We lived under the caste system in Saizakune, and my old man would say to me, “Get used to the weight of things. Life will be hard for you, so trust in the system.”
He kept saying these things to me up until the day our family lost everything. We were beggars for months and months, and I despised it, dreaded every moment of it. It all pissed me off—to think that someone like me could ever have a fixed, low-born destiny.
I left them behind. I went out on my own because I w
