The earliest memory Anei has of his past is crying when he skinned his knee after being pushed aside and having his dinner stolen. He was a doorstep baby, raised by the orphanage and though many past memories of his melted into a haze, this one memory is the clearest. He was adopted at the age of four, along with two others a year older than him, by the Oukami family. It was then that his life truly started. Upon arrival at his new home, he was greeted by a decently sized family, and for the first year he had fun and felt loved. Even the other kids he'd been adopted with, who had once bullied and pushed him around in the orphanage due to his size, ended up becoming close friends. When he was five, he and his two "siblings" were taken to the basement. This was a mystical place, for in the year they had lived, people always went to the basement to train, coming up exhausted but with smiles so kind. So, obviously, the kids were excited. Arriving at the basement, the three found four other children their age, with eyes as wide and curious as theirs, locked into a room. They spent some time in there, a long time, and soon the basement felt more a prison than a room of wonder. All attempts of escape were found futile, and soon tears started to be shed, some complaining about hunger. When this started, a stranger opened the door and beat them into silence. This continued for how long, the children fed only water, and only if they answered questions that were similar to the lines of, "Who in the Oukami clan gives the warmest hugs?" that slowly lead up to, "Who in the Oukami clan is worth dying for?" The children, who had been so thoroughly loved before, used these questions to remember the warmth, always answering one or two people before agreeing with the conclusion that "All of them, everyone is worth dying for". It seemed like ages before their first experience at the basement ended, and they learned why everyone always looked so exhausted and happy- it was a relief to see the familiar kind and loving faces instead of the large stranger that beat them. Training continued in this way, and when Anei was eight, he and his "siblings" were given their weapons, Anei's involving senbon and poison. Creative boy he was, he suggested the use of his nails, to which his family lauded him on and supported him, giving him nail files to sharpen his claws, training him for a fitting regime. In the basement, his training escalated as well. As he continued to grow, he was forced to read through scrolls about acupuncture points in the body, and to practice with increasing speeds at slashing at a dummy. The stranger changed every few months, so that Anei never got comfortable enough with one, each of their regimens varying in degrees of pain. One of them was a man who enjoyed torture, and when Anei was twelve, he was the one that said for every strike against the dummy that Anei missed, he would have a needle struck into one of his pressure points, to send inside him pain. Anei got much better at using his claws after that. With age obviously comes the need to go to school, and when Anei did so, his basement trainings refocused on loyalty. When being whipped from the back, the strangers would ask him personal questions- no more of warm hugs, but more about if so-and-so had done something or if Anei had ever caught whatsherface doing another thing. They were all truths that Anei had learned to deny or agree, his mind being melded to find a way to cause the least damage to his family. He learned this lesson after his first mistake, admitting that he had in fact seen dubious documents in his auntie's room, to which the lashing he received was so rattling he accidentally recieved a killer scar under his left eye. Thankfully it didn't damage his sight, but he was taken out of the basement afterwards, coddled by the very aunt he had outed. Immediately a rush of shame overflowed him- how could he have betrayed her like that?- and it was then that his loyalty to Oukami was fortified. His basement trainings afterwards lightened up on the loyalty training, focusing more on poison, Anei training by lying in bed and intaking a number of his specified poison in small doses, hoping to train him into not dying by his own hand. At the moment, Anei resumes poison and loyalty training, the latter during only every few months or so. He still gets a bit of a numb sensation if he accidentally intakes his poison, but at least doesn't straight up pass out and vomit like the first time around.