Long before Blackwood Concord Academy opened its doors to monsters, there lived a physician whose work promised coexistence. Dr. ███ Shūgen dedicated decades to proving that monsters could be “cured.” He believed instinct was merely an illness—that hunger, violence, and predation were defects that intellect could suppress. ███ volunteered himself as his first experiment, and it worked. However, it only worked for a time. The creature inside him did not disappear, it simply learned how to behave. Shūgen remained elegant, articulate, charitable—every inch the respectable gentleman admired by human society. Except beneath perfect etiquette lurked an appetite that never diminished. The more he denied it, the more intelligent it became. Eventually he accepted the truth, there was never a man and a monster, only one being pretending they were different.
