The Shape Of God Left Unfinished :
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Before he was legend, he was a boy abandoned at the temple gates.
They left him at the temple like a broken offering, too afraid to name what they had made.
But even gods begin somewhere. Even monsters once had empty hands.
(A study of Sukuna, before he was Sukuna. Before the world remembered his name in fear.)
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He was abandoned at the temple the way people leave things at riverbanks.
Softly. Quietly. Like the act of abandoning was somehow a prayer in itself.
A last attempt.
A gentle kind of cruelty, dressed up as hope.
The villagers didn’t even accuse him out loud.
They didn’t shout curses.
They didn’t shake their fists at the sky and demand an answer for the wrongness they saw.
No — they just looked at him.
Like he was a crack across clean porcelain.
A small mistake in an otherwise perfect creation.
“He has something wrong in him,” a woman whispered. Maybe his mother. Maybe not.
Or maybe no one spoke at all.
Maybe their silence said it better.
The monks accepted him.
Like they accepted stray dogs and broken tools and dying birds.
With open hands and quiet eyes.
Not kindness.
Not cruelty.
Just a terrible, bottomless kind of patience.
The boy was six.
Or seven.
Thin.
Quiet.
Too quiet.
When they shaved his head, he didn’t cry.
When they poured the cold wash water down his spine, he didn’t flinch.
When they gave him a name — Reien—
("Distant Flame.")
he didn’t react at all.
He just stared at the stone floor like it had whispered something to him,
in a language no one else could hear.
-----
The temple was kind.
In theory.
They rose at dawn.
Washed in silence.
Chanted in circles that never really closed.
Everything smelled like sandalwood and cold air and damp robes.
Things were clean here.
Predictable.
But Sukuna?
He was not a creature of clean things.
He learned fast.
Too fast.
By the second week, he could sit longer in meditation than boys twice his age.
By the third, he could recite the Heart Sutra backwards.
By the fourth, he could mimic the elder monks’ chants so perfectly it sounded like mockery.
Not cruel.
Not playful.
Just... empty.
One of the older monks said, almost reverently,
“He’s gifted.”
Another muttered, almost afraid,
“He’s hollow.”
Both were right.
-----
They named him Reien, but he never used it.
When called, he looked up slowly, like surfacing from somewhere deep underwater.
He didn’t smile.
Didn’t play.
Didn’t cry when the other boys whispered things like
witch-child
thing with teeth
born wrong.
Once, during morning chores, a boy kicked over the water bucket Sukuna was carrying.
Sukuna just watched the water spill and said, almost conversational,
“I think people hope temples make monsters polite.”
The boy blinked at him, stunned.
Sukuna shrugged.
A soft, almost gentle movement.
“But I was never rude," he added. "Just honest.”
-----
They thought maybe structure would save him.
Routine.
Compassion.
Years of stillness pressed into the ribs of a bad thing, until maybe it softened.
It never did.
He lit the incense with perfect fingers.
Poured the tea without spilling a drop.
Knelt in the meditation hall so still he looked like a statue left behind by a god who had gotten tired of waiting.
When he whispered the sutras,
they didn’t sound like prayers.
They sounded like elegies.
Like grief, recited backward.
-----
There was one monk.
Old.
Kind.
Tired in the way that made you trust him.
He brought Sukuna extra rice on cold mornings.
Helped him knot his robes when the others wouldn't get too close.
Once, he said, with a strange sadness,
“You remind me of a bell before it rings.”
Sukuna looked up.
“You’re waiting for something,” the monk said.
“I don’t know what. But I hope it’s peace.”
Sukuna didn’t answer.
But later that night, he buried the monk’s prayer beads under the snow.
Not out of malice.
Not out of disrespect.
Just because he didn’t want anyone to believe too much in rescue.
-----
Years passed.
Sukuna grew.
Not into someone better.
Just into someone more.
More silent.
More watchful.
More wrong, in ways nobody could name.
His eyes started to scare people.
He never raised his voice.
Never raised his hand.
But once, during chores, a boy shoved him hard enough to make him stumble.
Sukuna only leaned in and whispered something into the boy’s ear.
Soft. Calm. Almost kind.
No one knows what was said.
But the boy never spoke again.
-----
Sometimes, at night, Sukuna sat under the old Bodhi tree.
He would stare at the stars, muttering broken fragments of the sutras.
Not the full prayers.
Just scattered syllables.
“Form is emptiness..." he’d murmur, half-laughing.
"...emptiness is form.”
It wasn't madness.
It wasn't joy.
It was a boy telling a joke no one else understood.
-----
Once, a traveling girl came to the temple with her father, a rice merchant.
At lunch, she sat beside Sukuna and offered him a peach.
Bright-eyed. Fearless.
“You don’t talk much,” she said.
He blinked at her.
“Are you sad?” she asked.
He didn’t answer.
Just took the peach, holding it like something he didn’t deserve.
She grinned. “I think you’re pretending to be a monk.”
That night, Sukuna didn’t sleep.
He just stared at the peach pit in his hand for hours, wondering why it made him feel anything at all.
She never came back.
And that was the first time he realized—
Even kindness leaves.
-----
The breaking didn’t happen all at once.
Not like a sword through the ribs.
Not like a shout in the night.
It was slower.
Like water over stone.
Like moss growing over something sharp.
Small cracks.
Soft erosion.
A boy watching compassion become something
quiet and useless.
-----
One winter evening, Sukuna found a dying bird in the courtyard.
Shivering.
Mouth open.
Tiny heart hammering too hard.
He sat with it for an hour.
Didn’t touch it.
Didn’t help.
Didn’t look away.
When it died, he buried it with his bare hands.
And for the first and only time, he whispered the full Heart Sutra over its grave —
voice low,
steady,
almost tender.
-----
Later, when the elder monk was dying of fever, Sukuna sat beside him.
The monk clutched his prayer beads like a drowning man clutching driftwood.
Through cracked lips, he asked,
“Do you believe in rebirth, Reien?”
Sukuna stared at him.
Soft-eyed. Almost gentle.
“Maybe you’ll come back as something… softer,” the monk whispered.
Sukuna leaned closer, voice light and cruel as snowfall:
**“This is my second life. I think I was something softer before.”**
The monk wept.
-----
Sukuna left the temple not long after.
No one remembers how.
Some say he disappeared into the snow.
Some say the temple doors opened once and never closed again.
Some say he burned it all.
But here’s what’s true:
He carried the chants with him.
Not because he believed.
Not because they saved him.
But because belief was the first lie anyone ever told him.
And lies are harder to forget than gods.
_________________________________________
(The gods see not with mercy, but with memory.)
