Izumi woke up in a body that was not his own.
At first, he assumed it was one of those strange dreams that visited him on sleepless nights — nothing more, nothing less. He closed his eyes again, expecting warmth, softness, the familiar sag of his mattress.
Instead, something hard and cold pressed against his back.
Unmoving.
Unforgiving.
A faint shiver ran through him.
Still half-drowned in drowsiness, Izumi rubbed his face and touched his arms, his chest, his legs. The sensation was alien — thinner, weaker, fragile in a way he had never felt before.
"What…?"
The word never left his lips, only echoed inside his mind.
He tried to move, to sit up, but the emptiness inside him pulsed like a hollow pit. A void. Not the emotional emptiness he carried all his life — but something deeper, colder.
Something that didn't belong to him.
His past life offered him little comfort.
He had been a failure — a man who hid away from the world, drowning in alcohol and cigarettes. A forsaken child in a family that no longer bothered to say his name. He tried ending his life again and again, always failing because fear gripped his throat at the final moment.
After more than ten attempts, he promised himself it was over.
"No more running. No more trying to die."
Yet life had a cruel sense of humor.
The night he finally decided to live… was the night he died.
And when he opened his eyes again, he woke not in his body — but in the frail frame of a child.
---
With effort, Izumi forced his gaze downward.
The body he now occupied couldn't be older than fifteen.
Thin, almost skeletal.
Ribs visible through pale skin.
Long, tangled black hair spilled over his shoulders like a neglected curtain.
His clothes were tattered, dirty — barely enough to shield him from the biting cold.
It wasn't just neglect.
This body had suffered.
Fresh cuts lined his arms.
Old scars ran along his wrists.
Bruises darkened his ribs.
And his skin — too pale, too cold — looked drained of life.
"This boy…" Izumi thought. "He tried to die."
No — he didn't try.
He succeeded.
The truth settled into Izumi's mind with a chilling certainty.
The boy's soul was gone.
Destroyed.
Erased inside the darkness that devoured him.
And Izumi… was whatever replaced him.
He opened his mouth to breathe, but the air was different. Heavy. Damp. Thick with a strange, metallic scent. No sunlight. No sky. No warmth.
Only endless darkness stretching in every direction.
Before he could process it, a violent pain exploded in his head.
A flood of memories — fragmented, broken, screaming — surged into him.
Images of a world swallowed by shadows.
A land without sun.
A sky without light.
A portal swallowing everything around it.
A cold voice whispering from a place that wasn't a place.
His vision blurred.
His body shook.
Izumi collapsed to the ground, hands pressed to his skull as agony ripped through him.
He had never endured physical pain in his past life — but this torment was beyond anything imaginable.
It was the pain of a soul being forced into a body that no longer had one.
It was the pain of dying twice.
The darkness deepened.
The whispers grew louder.
And before Izumi could grasp the meaning of his rebirth…
He fell unconscious in the heart of the Void.