The first thing I felt was the smell.
The acrid stench of rotting flesh mixed with ash. A foul odor that scraped the inside of my throat.
Before I even opened my eyes, bile surged up and my mouth turned sour.
That wasn't all.
When I reflexively shifted my body, a damp, rough sensation pressed against my back.
My fingers unconsciously swept across the floor.
I grimaced at the sticky sensation seeping between my fingernails and opened my eyes.
Ash-gray clouds hung low.
It was the exact sky from disaster movies—the sky the protagonist looks up at, intuiting that the end has come.
Masses of pitch-black clouds drifting slowly.
The sight of violet sunlight squeezing through the gaps.
Hmm... aesthetically, quite interesting...
Violet??
Sunlight being violet.
Frowning, I looked closely.
"......Aurora?"
A massive, pale, cold purple curtain rippled beyond the clouds, dancing as if alive.
But wait.
I was momentarily flustered.
Not because of the sight before me, but because of the voice that had flowed from my mouth.
Thin and high-pitched.
It wasn't a voice I knew.
A completely unfamiliar vibration, fundamentally different from the resonance of my vocal cords that I had heard for decades, struck my eardrums.
I raised my hand.
It was small.
A child's hand, with dirt caked beneath the fingernails and knuckles protruding gauntly.
A single scene flashed through my mind.
Hundreds of novels I had read in my previous life swept past like a panorama.
A hypothesis came to mind.
An absurd, unrealistic hypothesis—yet one that the reality before my eyes was forcing upon me.
I instinctively began to verify.
I fumbled at my chest, touched my face, grabbed a handful of hair, and stretched it out before my eyes.
A girl.
A child, at that.
"......Fuck."
The face reflected in a puddle on the ground was pale and bright-eyed, like a newborn baby.
The fact that a curse had just come out of that face was shocking, to say the least.
Amidst a throbbing pain inside my skull, I groped for memories.
But no information about this body surfaced.
Name, age, family.
A perfect blank, as if they had never existed from the start.
Why I was here, where I had come from—I couldn't remember anything.
"Ha... I'm going crazy."
Possession? Reincarnation?
To think that I would ever take those words seriously.
In my previous life, those words existed only on smartphone screens.
They were genre conventions, clichés, promised unrealities meant to immerse readers.
My previous life's name was Ian.
An operative of a direct special task force under the NIS 7th Division, one that didn't exist on paper.
There were no severance packages; I was in an industry where retirement was usually announced in the form of an obituary.
[Ian. What are you going to do after retirement?]
[Retirement? I'm just changing the sign.]
[The sign?]
[From state-affiliated to self-employed.]
[...What?]
[The work's the same. I'm just going from wage earner to CEO.]
[Stop talking weird and go fishing or something. That's how people live these days. Healing in nature and all that.]
[Team Leader Kim. You're the fourth person to recommend fishing to me.]
[So?]
[All three are lying in nature now. Very deep inside.]
[Is that... a fact?]
[Who knows. I'm confused too. I'd prefer it to be a joke.]
[Hey...!]
[Maybe I'll just lie around reading webnovels. The ones where the protagonist regresses and gets satisfying revenge. Living vicariously through that wouldn't be so bad.]
[...No, that's not it—why do you keep speaking informally? I'm your senior, you bastard.]
I became a CEO running a company after retirement.
It sounded grand, but the reality was simple.
I did the same work as before; only the employer changed from the state to myself.
Profit came in where justification had disappeared, and it wasn't a bad trade.
The base was Granada, Spain.
If asked why that place of all places—
Doesn't everyone harbor a desire, at least once, to live in a foreign land and acquire a new identity?
Isn't the aspiration to gloriously decorate the second act of life at the turning point called retirement a natural, fundamental human desire?
It sounds nice when put that way.
Bullshit.
The real reason was simple.
I spread a world map on the wall and threw a knife.
It stuck in Granada.
That was it.
Still, it wasn't bad.
A white building on a hill overlooking the Alhambra Palace.
Some came to watch flamenco, some to eat tapas, and others came to give us work.
The company ran well. It managed itself without me paying much attention.
That left me with time.
The afternoons in Granada were long.
It was a city where the siesta culture remained, so between two and five in the afternoon, the entire city took naps.
I filled that time with webnovels.
Protagonists reincarnating and serving satisfying beatdowns.
Conquering the world with knowledge from a previous life.
Dying unjustly and returning to take revenge.
I read them all, regardless of genre.
Lying on a sofa with the Alhambra Palace visible outside the window, the afternoon sun against my back.
Then there was a phrase that would naturally come to mind.
'If I could start over...'
I even attached conditions to the start.
A bug or a snake would be problematic.
The youngest son of a count would be safe enough, wouldn't he?
Or a genius mage of the Magic Tower wouldn't be bad, or being the disciple of a legendary swordsman would be good too.
It was a humble fantasy.
The kind of imagination you have at least once while reading.
Never thinking it would actually happen.
But.
In a puddle, a blue-eyed girl with silver hair fluttering looked up at me.
Features that didn't point to any specific race.
Age.
Seven? Or eight?
"Sigh, let's just be satisfied I'm not a snake."
The one relief was that I was brimming with strength, as if I'd just been born today.
I don't think I felt this way even in my twenties in my previous life.
Is a child's body always like this?
Or is this body special?
Thinking of my previous life again, my eyes burned!!
'I'm so fucking pissed.'
A nuke in Europe? Is that even possible?
Did Russia fire it? There hadn't been any warning signs.
Shouldn't there be a procedure even for the world ending? Erasing everything without warning is too damn rude.
I evaporated without doing a thing.
Without fighting, without fleeing. Without seeing the protagonist's final line in a novel, without even finishing a cigarette. I just disappeared.
That was the most unacceptable part. The industry's top player shouldn't exit like that.
Whoa. Whoa. Let's not get worked up.
Yeah well, what can you do. It's a previous life anyway. Getting angry over the past is a waste of calories.
That aside.
"By the way, where the hell is this?"
Looking around slowly.
I saw pillars.
At first, one.
As I shifted my gaze, another.
Shifted again, another.
As if springing up anew in whatever direction I looked, they revealed their existence one by one.
I tilted my head back to find the tops, but the pillars disappeared into the dark clouds.
"Wow, they're huge!"
I counted.
When I don't know what something is, counting is my habit.
One. Two...
Nine in total.
Around each pillar rose smaller pillars.
Though called small, they were easily dozens of meters above my head.
They formed a dense forest, like offspring packed around their mother.
And corpses.
Here and there, quite a few were scattered.
Postures of those who had collapsed while fleeing.
People frozen facedown.
Reaching toward somewhere, unable to leave even a trace of resistance, dead in that very pose.
'These are traces of an instantaneous attack...'
And one-sided at that.
'I am curious what happened, though.'
I soon shook my head.
Seeing that the corpses hadn't been cleared away, this might not be over.
It means it could come back.
If I encounter that something in this body, the result is obvious.
'Let's get out of here for now.'
The conscience of the genre doesn't allow me to expect a third life.
By cliché standards, reincarnation's limit is once.
I walked carefully among the corpses strewn about and searched the dead one by one.
Knife.
Disgustingly large for my body.
Gun.
All destroyed so thoroughly it seemed intentional.
Alright. So what's left?
The result of my diligent searching:
A small cloth pouch. Inside, a few fingernail-sized gems and dried meat.
A metal plate carved with an emblem and a bundle of herbs.
And a necklace.
"Right. This is better than nothing."
I don't know what kind of world I've fallen into.
Being in a young girl's body is a handicap, but the bigger problem is having no money right now.
You never know. I'll take anything valuable.
***
Waking in another's body is called possession. But calling it reincarnation isn't too far off either. Above all, the phrase tastes better than possession. The nuance is a bit more positive too.
Reincarnation Day 3.
The identity of the world I woke in was still shrouded in mystery.
If this is another world, heroes and demon kings should appear by convention. There should be orc villages, an elven forest somewhere, and the Demon King's Castle at the northern edge of the map by standard rule.
But there's nothing.
No orcs or elves, let alone a Demon King's Castle—not even a single walled city is in sight. A world with no intention of meeting expectations.
However, the scenery looked familiar.
The terrain, the language, people's appearances. A feeling like I'd seen them somewhere.
A parallel world?
Or have I entered a novel I was reading?
That would be troublesome. I can't remember what happened to the protagonist.
"Status window."
Quiet.
As if muttering to myself in an empty room.
I tried various things according to genre conventions, but.
There was no system, no tutorial, not a single guide message.
I thought it was unfair. For exactly one second.
Then I gave up.
When you get down to it, that's not what's important right now. Whether there's a system or not, I'm hungry and have nowhere to sleep tonight.
It wouldn't have been a problem for Ian of the previous life, but I'm a child now.
Questions and answers can wait until my back is warm and my belly is full.
Survival first.
Possession. No, Reincarnation Day 5.
An encounter with a damn monster.
About the size of a wolf, entirely black, with four red eyes. Spikes protruded from its tail, and its legs were disproportionately long compared to its body, making its overall proportions distorted.
That was my first impression.
If I had to describe it, it looked like someone was drawing a dog but changed their mind halfway through.
It stood in the middle of the road, looking at me.
Neither charging nor retreating.
We looked at each other like that for a while.
Could it be that monsters know about staring contests too?
If I look away first, I lose.
Then what, I say, "Yes, yes, Mr. Monster, I lost. Please be on your way now," and the situation resolves?
In webnovels I read in my previous life, there was no particular mention of staring contests with monsters.
The protagonist appears, the monster charges, the protagonist cuts them down, the end. That was all.
But this bastard doesn't look like it wants to charge.
Now what.