"It's strange to be born twice... Stranger still, to wish that death hadn't granted you another chance."
– From the thoughts of Kain
The sky was gray, a mixture of the scent of rain, smoke, and farewells.
He felt nothing when his heart stopped beating... no pain, no regret, just an emptiness resembling the end he had always mocked.
His name was ordinary, his life more than ordinary, just a young man suffering from life's disappointments and the irony of fate. The streets he had crossed, the dreams he had built, all turned into faded memories in a fleeting moment.
A car accident? A sudden illness? It didn't matter... What mattered was that he was dead.
Then... darkness.
But it wasn't the eternal darkness he had always imagined.
There was something else... a voice, just distant whispers... systems operating, calculations being made:
"Transmigration activating,"
"Soul Path: Unconventional,"
"Due to delayed activation, compensation will be granted later"...
Huh... compensation?! What is happening?!
Then another voice was heard, a gentle one, and he felt as if his soul was being drawn to it. It said:
"Live this time to the fullest... Do not forget your purpose... I will always be with you, as I was and as I will be... And know that the System always remembers."
Huh... you'll always be with me?! What system?!
Then...
A baby's cry.
I opened my eyes for the first time, again.
The light blinded me, the air was strangely cold... So many sounds around me: crying, heavy breathing, I understood nothing... I only saw a face slowly taking shape before me. A young woman, her eyes teary, her cheeks flushed from the effort, but she was beautiful, warm in a wondrous way.
Then she said in a faint, loving voice:
"Welcome to this world, my little one... Kain."
Kain? Kain? Is that my name?
It sounded... kind of nice.
But wait... her face... her name... the echo of her name when the doctor had called out to her a moment ago:
"Renée, breathe slowly!"
Renée? That name is very familiar...
At first, I wasn't sure of anything.
I was a baby, an infant. I couldn't even control my eyelids, let alone my tongue or muscles.
But inside... there was consciousness, memories, an adult moving within a small, helpless mind.
I thought I had been transported to a fantasy world, or a world drastically different from my old one, but... nothing here was strange.
No purple skies, no dragons, no magical towers...
Everything resembled our world.
Until I heard her name.
Renée... Renée.
Swan?
My heart—if you could even call it that in this tiny body—nearly stopped.
I had been a huge fan of the Twilight series.
I had read all of it, memorized its details by heart.
And the name "Swan" was not an ordinary one.
Renée's name was originally "Swan," but after the divorce, it became "Dwyer."
It couldn't just be a coincidence of names.
Could it be...?
Am I in the world of Twilight?
No... I couldn't be sure yet.
But with each passing day, my suspicions slowly turned into certainty.
A middle-aged man... with light brown hair and eyes that resembled my mother's. I watched him in silence, though he rarely spoke. They said he was my father. Could he be... Charlie?
Charlie Swan?
It was hard to be certain, especially since I couldn't even crawl, but little by little, the names started to pile up, the small details became clearer.
I was sure... It was really Charlie!
I am in the world of Twilight.
And this... was a problem.
The years passed, slow and heavy.
I grew up... or rather, my body grew. As for me, I was a prisoner within it.
A child with the memories of a dead young man... or rather, a fog of memories where I couldn't recall how I died, and every time I tried to remember, that damned pain would come to stop me.
But I could remember the other details normally. I was a man in my thirties, single, working as a software engineer. They said I was successful... so successful that I was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2050. You could say I was a damned genius.
And yet, my name had also been Kain. Which was... rather strange.
But all of that was in the past.
I had to focus on my present.
The world of Twilight is not a safe place. It's a chaotic mess of vampires, werewolves, and supernatural interventions that show no mercy to the weak.
And I... was the weakest of them all.
I was like the other "normal" children of this world, at least.
Nothing special about me.
No powers, no fangs, no mysterious transformation.
Just a human body... fragile and weak.
And every day... I waited.
Where was the System?
Where was my chance?
Where was my compensation?
Hadn't it been said that something would appear? When?
The wait was a silent torment.
Every passing moment weighed me down even more.
I was living a double life: a child in people's eyes, and a man anticipating a light that fate had promised him in death.
I began to wake up and go to sleep hoping to hear that sound... the sound of the System. But there was nothing.
For long years, I convinced myself that the activation hadn't been forgotten, just... delayed.
Despite this, my appearance in my new body was quite attractive.
Hair as black as night, with a single blue streak since birth, eyes as blue as the sea, a handsome face, and a near-perfect physique. I was 180 cm tall and weighed 75 kg.
Today: September fifth.
I had lived a normal life until now.
No system, no cheats... and also, no vampires.
And that, in itself, was a good thing… to some extent.
My relationship with my new family in this world was… somewhat normal.
After our parents' separation, Forks became the home I returned to with my father, Charlie. But I was the one who chose to spend most of my time away, in a boarding school. It was my way of keeping a distance between myself and this new world… and of not getting attached to a family that wasn't truly mine.
As for Bella, she grew up with our mother, Renée, in sunny Phoenix. We weren't close… not because of hatred or conflict, but because life had simply led us down different paths—and I chose to deepen that distance myself. Sometimes we met, exchanged a few words, and then everything slipped back into its familiar silence.
Then, Bella decided to come back to live with us.
But I know she didn't do it out of a genuine desire…
Her stepfather, "Phil," the baseball player, was traveling a lot, and his constant moving made it difficult for her to have a stable life with him and our mother.
So, for her mother's sake, Bella decided to return to Forks.
This time, unlike what happened in the original story…
She moved at the beginning of the semester, not in the middle of it.
As if fate were giving us a complete beginning, not just a belated attempt to join a life that was no longer the same.
It wasn't easy for her.
Moving from a warm city to a gray town she hadn't known since childhood, a house she wasn't used to, and a brother she barely knew.
As for me?
I am Kain… seventeen years old.
Today, high school starts all over again, after my father, Charlie, insisted that I leave the boarding school.
My mother once told me:
"Every new beginning is an opportunity, even if it doesn't seem like one."
But... do I believe that?
Or am I just repeating her words to console myself... in a world that doesn't belong to me?
And before I took that first step toward my destiny... something happened.
The air stopped.
And time itself stopped.
I saw people slow down as if in a cinematic shot.
The birds froze in mid-air.
The sounds of cars vanished.
My own heartbeat fell silent.
Then...
[Ding!]
[Evolution System – Delayed Activation]
🌀 End of Chapter One
✦ Next Chapter: "Opening the Gate... and Receiving the Gift"