My name is Souji and I live in a village, isolated from the rest of the world. The island is actually pretty big, but most of it is surrounded by a forest. We have a small area in the forest which we had claimed. It was where we hunted and gathered food. We also used that area to get wood, so that we could slowly, but surely, expand our village.
I am an just an ordinary twelve year old boy, who was raised in this village called Unoda Frequah. I was raised by a widow who found me in the woods when I was just three years old. "You were beyond the village," she told me. "No one has appeared beyond the village before. You were the first thing we've ever found outside the border!" I didn't think it was really a big it deal though. So what if I was from beyond the village? What difference would that make? In the end, I didn't really care.
I've heard rumors about what was beyond the village. Apparently, no one who had set out to explore the forest, beyond the safe land that the village owned, had made it our alive. They were all either missing or definitely dead. Not like we ever knew though. If the missing was gone for more than two years, they would be announced dead.
People say that monsters beyond our imagination lurked in these forests. No one even knew what they looked like, but they all knew something, just something was there. Sometimes, people would find horrendous marks on trees, covered with black ink, dead animals with black marks, and torned pieces of cloth, which everyone was pretty sure, were the clothes of the missing and dead.
I didn't really care though. It had nothing to do with me. I was just going to be an ordinary kid, the type where anyone barely notices me, kind of like a background character. Unfortunately though, ever since I came into the village, crazy rumors spread around about me.
They said I was like a creature of the forest and that I was probably one of the monster's child. I would've been fine with anything people said about me if these rumors hadn't been glued in everyone's brain. People still whisper about me today, I can hear them. Those words spreading, like roaches. I wondered if I would ever be a normal, ordinary kid.