The stage is a small village surrounded by deep mountains.
At the mountain’s peak stands an ancient shrine,
where it is said that the deity who protects the land resides.

In the village, there is a custom that has been passed down for over a hundred years—
in years of crop failure or epidemics, “to appease the wrath of the gods,”
a child is left at the shrine as a sacrifice.

However, in reality, the gods never desired such sacrifices; it was merely a tradition the villagers had started on their own.

The children who were abandoned either wandered the mountains until they vanished, or else the gods secretly carried them away to another town at the foot of the mountain.

This year, due to a severe famine brought on by heavy snowfall, the chosen one was a boy born with white hair, shunned as an “unlucky child bearing the color of the god’s child.”
Having lost his parents at an early age, he had been raised in a barn on the outskirts of the village, tormented by the villagers as a sacrificial offering. As a result, his speech and knowledge were far below his actual age, leaving him still very much a child.