Youth of a Tiger Kid

NEW STORY by a Wattys 2023 Grand Prize winner - out Dec 1st, 2023!

Everybody wonders, but nobody knows: these days, what does it mean to be a real man?

In the most remote jungle of the empire of Centralia, the outrageously wealthy Yuwang created a very special school: half for young warriors and half for rich, rebellious kids. Huzi, his son, is its champion: at fourteen, he has the head of a child but the muscles of an adult, and he would do anything to make his father happy, even kill an opponent with his martial arts skills.

Secretary Bai, on the other hand, has a problem: his son Haowen is a genius, but he is very effeminate and dresses like a princess. The absolute head of the Centralian bureaucracy cannot show such an unmanly son, so he delivers him to Yuwang to transform him. What will happen to a sensitive, non-binary kid amidst a group of brawlers? He will soon find out, as he ends up entrusted to Weichao, the true alpha male of the village: seventeen years old, big and bad, terror of the boys and forbidden dream of the girls, and soon of Haowen as well.

However, not all girls are the same. Two of them will give a hard time even to Weichao: the twenty-year-old Lihua, gorgeous, rich, and independent, and dreamer Mei, the artist in Huzi's class. So, the boys will be tested in war, in love, and in love war.

At the end of the story, after amazing jungle adventures and fights up to the last blow, which of these three boys will prove that he is really a man? Which of them will win the heart of the person of their dreams? A story about violence and love, and the love for violence, and the violence of an impossible love; above all, a story about the violence of fathers on sons.

[A new episode every Friday, completion by summer 2024. Thanks for comments, stars, and help in promoting the story.]

Cover by Konan - Tiger fur image (C) mirengraphics CC-BY-SA 3.0