The Conquerors Path
chapter-767

Third Person POV:

On a rainy day, the cry of an infant was heard loud and clear within the valleys of a dumpster. The cry of the baby is weak, but the will in it is more than enough to show its desire to live. A will so powerful that a miracle came over it-a miracle that the baby was picked up from where it lay, and the way in which it was found still brought chills to the one that found the baby.

A baby was thrown out into a dumpster with its own umbilical cord wrapped around its neck, seemingly as if someone had tried to choke the baby to death with its own umbilical cord, yet it somehow seemed to survive. Its will was too strong to be destroyed by anything, as defying all odds, a couple found the baby.

Taken to the hospital, it was said that even with treatment, the baby's chance of survival was slim. Heck, the doctors were sure the baby would die, yet once again, the baby beat all odds and survived. The baby survived against the odds the world had placed on it and thus became a survivor.

The baby's pale complexion, riddled with disease, was said to be unable to live a healthy life, and nobody even wanted to adopt the baby. Who wants to love and care for someone who might die one day? Yet, against the odds, the very couple that found the baby took it in, willing to care for it.

A very middle-class family took the baby in, hoping to care for it as long as the baby would live. But once again, the baby beat all the odds the doctors said it wouldn't. Its body, which was said to never be healthy, became healthy on its own. Its mind, which was predicted to be stunted, grew on its own to match a normal range.

Though without many noticing, the brain itself grew to match that of a genius. From its very birth, it was said the baby wouldn't be able to beat any odds, yet it did. From its very first breath, the baby lived, beating the odds fate threw in its way. From barely surviving being strangled to surviving and living, a story of legends, one can say, and a will of the supremes. Was the baby blessed, or was it cursed? The truth of it would only be known to fate itself, the rest not having any idea of what true fate the baby held. From there, the baby grew. It grew like any other baby would, showered with happiness and love from the two couples that swore to take care of it.

And as the baby grew as the first child of that family, becoming a very loving and mischievous boy, along the way, the baby that grew into a child got a baby brother, a new emotion of love for which the child promised to take care of. It was a happy family of four, with everyone taking care of each other.

There was love, there was kindness, there was generosity, and there was a whole lot of familial growth and caring. It was a normal life if the first parts of the child's life were removed from the question. But then the question remained: Who was so cruel to strangle a baby with its own umbilical cord? Who was vicious enough to throw a baby into a dumpster?

Even beyond that, what did the baby even do to deserve something like that? What made the perpetrator so scared that he or she would do something like that? Just what ran in the blood of the boy that it would scare everything? Just what was so damaged in the boy that fear drove the assailant to strangle the baby?

To the world, the baby that grew into a child that slowly kept growing was everything that could be defined as normal. Everything was going beautifully enough to live a normal life, but the child was anything but normal. It had a darkness in it, the child in question itself could see, feel, and understand things that no one else could.

Others would find making or marking emotions in people hard, understanding the true depth of empathy, but the boy was born with a unique insight, a unique empathy that many couldn't see, and it gave the child the ability to see into aspects of life that control the human mind and, at times, to even tap into it.

The child had been clinically diagnosed with low latent inhibition, a condition in which his brain is more open than most people's to incoming stimuli in the surrounding environment. He is unable to block out peripheral information and instead processes every aspect and detail of any given stimulus.

Normally, pairing that up has bad probabilities, yet the child was uniquely gifted with a high level of IQ, a level above normal, to which the child came to understand emotions better than humans normally could. To the world, the boy looked normal, but that wasn't the case at all. The boy had just accepted to look normal.

Watching, understanding, and giving, the boy adapted to the world.

'So you laugh at these things?'

'So you need to react like this?'

'These emotions shift like this?'

'Love and lust are connected.'

'Anger and sadness can be controlled.'

'The mark to control good and evil is easy...'

The boy came to understand things on a level of emotion that no one could by watching, by understanding, and by seeing everything. The boy perfected the perfect mark of emotions around him, but within him, the boy felt completely hollow, as if a missing piece of his own soul wasn't with him, as if he was missing a part of himself, and these gifts he had were just the lowest of it all.

The child that grew up knew it was empty inside, but by studying the environment around it, the boy grew to be normal. He could imitate emotions better than anyone, and to all, everything looked fine. The situation around him gave the boy the gift to see beyond human levels, which meant he had unlocked a level of control that many only experience after all the deaths of life and at their death bed understand.

The boy had learned to manipulate...

The boy could see the buttons, words, expressions, and situations that he could press to get the results that he wanted. With just subtle gestures from his hands, with taps and soft voices, the boy understood he could control the minds of those around him. The human mind was very simple for him to manipulate and play around with.

The human mind became the boy's toy. He could play around and manipulate all around him with just his intentions and actions. His control over manipulation grew with each day, and so did the god complex that he was absolute-a being to which not many would be able to do anything at all.

Perhaps this was the reason the person that tried to kill him at his birth feared?

Such a thought had indeed hit the mind of the boy, and it didn't make him feel anything at all. After all, he is a hollowed-out being. He is damaged.

The thought that he couldn't feel anything didn't affect the boy. It only made him feel more numb. At first, he watched and adapted just to get an understanding of everything. Even at that young age, the boy knew that being different would only bring problems, so he adapted and wore the mask of being the most normal type out there.

Yet as time passed, the inhibitions holding him back started to fade, and the god complex whispering in his ears grew, the thought that nothing could be done to him, the thought that he could hold it however he wished. All sparked situations within him. As he grew and as the child saw more, so did his understanding of the situation around him.

It was a thrill, and it was a calling. It was as if that hollowed part in his own inner self felt only alive when those people around him played like puppets in his hands. It was certain urges in him that led him to do this. The idea that he could understand everything about a person from one look and control that inner depth to his own liking was like a drug.

With a single glance, he could tell what had happened. In a single instance, he could tell if the person was lying. A single look, and he could understand all he had to do to bring a person and create subtle control points to control them. It was all being done from single looks. It was a gift, one which only he could wield.

And thus, the limits of what could be done kept being tested by the boy. Sadly, in the end, a growing child, no matter how smart, is still a child. And within a situation that had grown to be disastrous, the father of the child found out how unique the boy was, and from then on, the situation took a whole other turn.