This summer, my father died. Though he was born a peasant, his innate courage and valorous deeds allowed him to deftly climb the ranks of society. He was even granted a noble title, albeit a minor one, before his life was cut short at the age of thirty-nine.
My father had long suffered from a chronic illness. Before he took ill, he was a strong and sturdy man, but as the days passed by and his sickness took its toll, his vitality faded. He was eventually an emaciated husk, barely recognizable as the man I once knew.
When he passed, his final breaths came so quietly and softly that I almost thought he’d fallen asleep. My father had suffered so terribly for so long, but at the very end, as he slipped away from us, he looked peaceful─tranquil, even. The moments before death, it would seem, have a way of relieving us of all our anguish.
The day of his funeral service arrived, and my father was laid to rest atop a bonfire. Cremation was far from a universal practice in the Summerforth Empire, and some regions went so far as to prohibit it, but it was simply the way things were done in our territory. Watching the flames crackle and dance before me, watching the plume of smoke waft up overhead, drove in the reality of the situation: my father was dead and gone.
Truth be told, thanks to certain complications in my personal history, I had never fully accepted the fact that he was my father. That didn’t change the fact that he was the person I trusted and respected above all others in this world, though. Tears welled up in my eyes, but I held them back.
I can’t allow myself to cry.
I knew what I had to do next, and if I was going to pull it off, I couldn’t break down. Not here.
After the funeral, I gathered my father’s closest subordinates. I stood before them, clad in the most impressive outfit I owned, doing everything in my power to present myself as a grown man─or at least as close to one as I could manage. Then, head held high, I made my declaration.
“From this day onward, I, Ars, shall succeed my father Raven as the head of House Louvent!”
It was the twelfth year since my life in Japan had ended. Twelve years after I died and was reborn in this world.
○
My own death had come so abruptly that it was downright anticlimactic.
I was a thirty-five-year-old man, living out an utterly mediocre existence in a country called Japan. I was born into an average family, went through elementary, middle, and high school without incident, graduated from an average college, and found a job at an average company that paid me a salary of around four and a half million yen a year─a perfectly unexceptional wage.
The only part about my life that wasn’t ordinary to a fault was the fact that I never got married. Considering Japan’s rapidly declining birth rate, though, for all I knew, that might have also been within the realm of average.
The fact that I never had a girlfriend either probably counted as abnormal, however. I’d describe my looks as, well, average, so I suppose my personality must’ve ruined any chance at romance for me. I’d often been told that I was too passive for my own good…and that I was too absent-minded just as often.
The people who told me that weren’t wrong, either. I never found anything that really sparked my enthusiasm, aside from my lifelong love of books, and I just didn’t have it in me to be proactive about things that didn’t catch my attention. That might have had something to do with why I never found a girlfriend, actually. After all, I never met a girl who I genuinely fell for.
Anyway, let me set the scene for you: it’s Monday morning and I’m just about to walk out the door, dejected at the thought of going back to work after a blissful weekend of freedom. I step outside, my favorite briefcase in one hand and my key in the other, and just as I’m about to lock the door behind me, wham! I gasp in shock and pain as a jolt of unbearable agony shoots through my chest! My hands tremble, and my key and briefcase fall to the ground. I clutch at my chest, but it doesn’t help─it hurts so much I can’t breathe or even remain standing. Moments later, I join my bag on the concrete.
What is this?! What’s going on?! I try to process the situation, but the pain is so intense that I can’t focus. I can’t even think. The world goes dim, my consciousness fades, and I sink into a pit of darkness, tormented by pain worse than anything I’ve felt before, not even understanding what just happened to me.
○
When I woke up, the first thing I saw was a woman’s face. I couldn’t even begin to make sense of why that would be, so I tried to take a step back and put the pieces that had brought me there together.
I remembered leaving for work, to start, just like I always did. Then I remembered trying to lock my door, being overcome by pain, collapsing, and passing out. The next thing I knew, I was waking up with a woman’s face in front of me. Her features were attractive, but clearly indicated she wasn’t Japanese. She was probably Caucasian, as best as I could tell.
Okay, so if the chest pain knocked me out, I guess this is probably a hospital?
If that were true, though, you’d think the woman would have been wearing a nurse’s uniform or something. I definitely didn’t know her, either─I’d remember if one of my friends was a Caucasian woman.
Perhaps the weirdest part of it all was the way she was looking at me. It was the sort of gentle, loving expression an affectionate pet owner might give their beloved dog. It certainly wasn’t the look you’d give some random guy who’d passed out and gotten himself carted off to a hospital.
It didn’t take long for the woman to say something, but that didn’t answer any questions. I couldn’t understand a single word that came out of her mouth. It was a foreign language, obviously, but it wasn’t one I’d ever heard. I was pretty confident I could have picked out one of the world’s more commonly-used languages, even if I couldn’t speak any of them myself, so whoever she was, I assumed she must have been from some smaller nation.
I tried to say something to her…and failed. I could move my mouth just fine, but for some reason, I couldn’t form words. I could make a sort of “ahhh” noise, and I could manage “oooh” just fine, but that was my limit. I tried moving the rest of my body without much more luck. I was moving, technically, just not how I wanted.
Hmm?
As I squirmed about, my own hand entered my field of vision. It was small. Shockingly small, even. Almost like a baby’s hand, in fact.
My mind was a mess of question marks. At long last, I convinced myself that surely I’d just been seeing things, but when I took another look at my hand, that theory crumbled away. It was just as tiny as before.
What the hell? Is this some kind of joke? Or, could it be…I died? Have I been reincarnated?
I knew enough about Buddhism to be familiar with the concept of the souls of the dead being reborn in a different form. The historical Buddha taught that to live is to suffer─that human souls are bound to the cycle of reincarnation, doomed to be born, die, and be born again, over and over, trapped in a cycle of pain all the while. Only through training and discipline could enlightenment be reached, and only through enlightenment could a soul escape the cycle.
I wasn’t enlightened, that was for sure, so apparently, I’d been shipped off for another trip through the cycle. That didn’t explain why I had all of my memories, of course, but at the very least, I was convinced of one thing: something extremely abnormal had happened to my body. That understanding, however, didn’t change the fact that I couldn’t speak, move, or do anything. All I could do was wait.
And, as I waited, the powerful urge to sleep washed over me. I was in a baby’s body, after all. Unable to withstand the intense fatigue, I quickly drifted off into the land of slumber.
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