The world he lived in was named the same as his old one — Earth — yet everything about it defied the logic Izumi once knew.
This Earth was tidally locked to its sun.
One half of the planet was forever scorched in eternal daylight, bathed in unending heat and blinding brilliance. The other half was swallowed by perpetual darkness, a land where sunlight had never touched since the birth of the world.
Most people called that dark hemisphere:
The Void.
The Abyss.
The Dead Side.
Different names, same fear.
No one truly knew what it held.
Izumi felt the memories of the boy's past seep into his mind like ink spreading through water. He did not ask for them, yet they came — fragments of knowledge, scraps of history, fears, whispers, echoes of a world twisted by light and shadow.
On the day side, life clung to the blinding world with stubborn determination. Cities stood beneath massive heat-shields, their walls reinforced to survive heatstorms that swept across deserts like waves of fire. People lived in fear of two things: the burning sky above, and the darkness beyond the horizon.
On the night side, the Void stretched endlessly — a place where no human city existed.
A place untouched by the sun.
A place alive with things that should not exist.
The barrier between these two halves was a narrow ring-shaped land known as the Twilight Belt — the only region where light and darkness brushed against one another. It was here that humanity built watchtowers, fortresses, and entire cities dedicated to watching the shadows beyond.
Even so, the darkness often moved.
And sometimes… something inside it moved too.
---
The only known gateways into the Void were the Abyssal Portals, strange rifts in space scattered across the bright hemisphere. No one knew how they formed. No one knew where they led. They pulsed with a cold, violet glow — enticing, terrifying, unpredictable.
People who entered through these portals vanished into the Abyss at random locations.
Some returned days later.
Some returned broken.
Most never returned at all.
The world believed only one thing:
Nothing enters the Abyss unchanged.
---
The boy whose body Izumi now inhabited had lived near one such portal.
Nightmares had haunted him since childhood — nightmares of black oceans, silent forests, creatures with too many eyes, and whispers that called his name. Whether they were dreams or memories, no one could say.
The final memories before his death were soaked in darkness.
He had stepped too close to the portal.
It swallowed him whole.
The rest of his story ended in silence.
Until Izumi opened his eyes inside this broken, fragile body.
He stared into the endless sky of this strange world — a sky too bright, too sharp, too foreign — and felt an emptiness settle inside him.
This was a world of eternal division.
A world of scorching day and devouring night.
A world where death awaited in the light… and horrors waited in the dark.
Izumi did not know why he was here.
He did not know what the Void wanted from him.
But deep inside, beneath the borrowed memories and the lingering pain, a thought whispered across his mind:
This world did not bring him here by accident.