Silence.
A deep, enveloping silence. There was no pain. No cold. No hunger. Just darkness—soft and endless.
And then, a sound. Gentle. Muffled. As though coming through layers of velvet.
A voice.
Then light.
Takumi's eyes fluttered open, though they could barely see. Everything was blurred and bright, shapes swimming in a strange new world. He felt warmth—not the flickering, borrowed warmth of street lamps and alleyways—but something full, steady, and pure.
He was being held.
Wrapped in blankets softer than anything he had ever touched, cradled in arms far stronger than his fragile body had ever known. He blinked again, slowly adjusting to the light, to the world.
And then he saw them.
Two faces hovered over him, their features bathed in joy. A woman with long, dark hair and kind, shimmering eyes kissed his forehead with trembling lips. A man stood beside her, tall and proud, yet his eyes brimmed with emotion as he gently stroked the child's head.
Takumi did not understand.
Where was the cold street? The burning hunger? The pain that had always followed him like a shadow?
More importantly—why was he so small?
He tried to move, to speak, but only a faint cry escaped his lips. A baby's cry.
And then it hit him.
This wasn't a dream. It was something else. Something impossible.
He had died. He remembered it clearly—the sirens, the lights, the truck, the moment everything slipped away. And now… he was here. Alive, but reborn—in a place unlike anything he'd known before.
Tears welled up in his eyes.
He wasn't crying because he was afraid. He was crying because something inside him remembered. The memories of loneliness, of hunger, of running through the streets with stolen bread clenched in his hands—they flooded his tiny chest and made it ache. The love he had craved all his short life was now wrapped around him in warm arms.
Takumi cried.
The woman—his mother—held him close, whispering soothing words in a tongue he didn't yet understand. The man—his father—looked down at him with fierce protectiveness.
And yet, something in the air felt… off.
Outside the stone cottage walls, the sky was overcast with a thick violet haze. Trees twisted in unnatural ways. Shadows moved as if alive. In the distance, the low howl of a creature echoed faintly—one that didn't belong in any ordinary world.
Takumi had not been born again in the Kyoto he once knew.
No.
He had been reborn in the heart of the Duskarra Kingdoms—a land cloaked in eternal dusk, where the line between life and death, light and shadow, was blurred. A realm ruled by forgotten gods and sleeping monsters.
He didn't know it yet, but this was no ordinary second chance.
This was a world of darkness.
And in time, it would call for the boy who once ran through the streets of Kyoto, carrying bread in his hands and sorrow in his heart