Chapter 21: How to Fail at Unlocking Superpowers (Gracefully?)
From the still-very-human POV of Teen Ren (in Kaito's slightly less useless body)
Once Haruki and Hana waved goodbye—Haruki limping and Hana still chirpy like she hadn't just kicked her brother in the face—I dropped onto the park bench like I was eighty years old and had just finished climbing a mountain.
Time for the real training.
No more "punch until you're stronger" stuff. No more "watch YouTube and copy martial artists who could probably fold me in half with a sneeze."
Nope. I was going full anime protagonist now.
Which meant… unlocking energy powers.
Ki. Mana. Spiritual energy. Anything with a glow and the potential to explode stuff.
I closed my eyes, crossed my legs, and took a deep breath.
My Ki system—the real one I'd spent my entire life developing—was back in my original body, probably somewhere in Blackwood Forest while Kaito trained under Master Jin. Meanwhile, this body? Kaito's? It was an ordinary Earth human body, or at least it had started that way. Stronger now, definitely, but still nowhere close to handling something like a Death Spiral Bomb.
But… it was changing.
Not something you'd immediately notice in a school photo, but from the inside? Yeah, this body wasn't quite the same one I'd woken up in. The muscles responded better to training, the senses were sharpening little by little, and the reflexes were improving faster than they should have from ordinary exercise alone.
Some of that was training. Probably most of it. But with my soul sitting inside a body it clearly hadn't been born with, and all that spiritual energy apparently coming along for the ride, I doubted that was the whole explanation.
That meant something, right?
So, logically, if I couldn't access the Ki I knew, maybe I could touch the things that normally created it.
Y'know, the raw stuff. Physical energy and spiritual energy. Back home they were combined and cultivated together until they became Ki, but if Earth had its own supernatural systems, maybe people here developed the two differently. Maybe I could skip the familiar method and figure out what this body could actually use.
Problem: I had never, in my life, cultivated either one entirely by itself. That was like asking a chef who had always cooked with complete ingredients to suddenly separate everything down to the individual chemicals and somehow make dinner from there.
Still, I was Ren freaking Kisaragi.
Well… Ren temporarily inside Kaito Hoshino's slightly perverted, still-growing body.
Close enough.
I sat there and focused.
"What would Goku do?" I muttered.
Goku would scream a lot and raise his power level. Maybe punch the air a few times.
I tried that. Nothing happened.
"What about Ichigo?" I whispered.
Ichigo would probably nearly die, talk to his sword, or unlock something during an emotional breakdown.
That… sounded harder to reproduce. I didn't have a talking sword. Just a stick. And several bruises.
"Okay. Fairy Tail? That's pure magic energy."
I concentrated again, this time trying to feel anything. The warmth of physical energy. The movement of spiritual energy. Mana. Ki. A strange pressure. A whisper from my soul telling me I was secretly special. Give me a sparkle. A floating rock. Even a mosquito that glowed.
Nothing.
Just me, the grass, and one extremely unimpressed squirrel sitting in a tree.
I sighed and leaned back, staring toward the dusky sky.
Truth was, I couldn't consciously feel either of them. Not separately, anyway. Back home I could sense and manipulate Ki because physical and spiritual energy were already working together inside me, but trying to isolate either component inside Kaito's body was like listening to an orchestra your entire life and then being told to identify one instrument while everyone was still playing.
I needed more information. More training. Probably someone who actually understood how Earth's supernatural humans developed their power.
Fine.
No familiar Ki? Fine.
I'd master whatever this world could offer. Physical energy, spiritual energy, Mana, Earth-style Ki, magical aura, or whatever ridiculous terminology these people had invented. If it existed, I'd find it.
Even if I had to meditate under waterfalls, spar with gangs, read textbooks, watch terrible tutorial videos, or scream at the sky like an idiot.
I was Ren Kisaragi, and if the universe was going to make this difficult?
I'd figure out how it worked and then punch something with glowing fists.
Eventually.
For now, though… I sighed and stood up.
"Guess it's time to go home and not ruin dinner."
Okay, so there I was. Alone. Hungry. And standing in front of one of Earth's greatest examples of designers deciding that a perfectly understandable machine needed seventeen different buttons.
The microwave.
Now don't get me wrong—I knew what a microwave was. My world had heating formations, cooking arrays, electric appliances, and Yun Che had introduced enough Earth-inspired devices that a box designed to heat food wasn't exactly revolutionary.
This particular microwave, however?
This particular microwave had apparently been designed by someone who hated people.
I eyed it suspiciously. The microwave glared back with its judgmental little display screen, flashing:
"12:00"
…forever frozen in time like it was mocking me.
Miki had kindly left a note on the refrigerator:
"Dinner's in the fridge, sweetie. Just microwave it for 2 minutes. ❤️ —Mom"
Sweet. Simple. Innocent.
A lie.
I pulled the plate from the refrigerator. It was neatly covered and labeled Curry + Rice. I swear I heard a heavenly choir somewhere in the background.
Curry. My old friend. My fuel. My love.
I peeled the cover back slightly and placed the plate inside the microwave. Using the machine itself wasn't the problem; figuring out why this model had buttons labeled Time Cook, Power Level, Quick Start, and approximately four other things that seemed to perform the same job was.
I tapped Time Cook.
Nothing happened.
I tapped it again.
Beep.
Progress!
Then I entered 2… 0… 0.
So far, so good.
I hit Start.
Nothing.
No beep. No hum. Just… disappointment.
I glared at the microwave.
The microwave remained emotionally unavailable.
"Okay," I whispered, rolling up my sleeves like I was preparing to challenge a formation master to single combat. "So that's how we're playing it."
Eventually, I discovered that I had apparently pressed some other setting first, cancelled it, entered the time again, and finally got the countdown moving. The microwave whirred to life.
Victory!
I waited like a hawk. Miki had trusted me not to burn down her kitchen, and after admitting that I was secretly the soul of a thirteen-year-old Ninja from another universe who was also planning to unite local delinquent gangs, I felt like destroying an appliance might push my credibility beyond its structural limits.
Then…
BEEP BEEP BEEP.
I opened the door and was hit by a wave of steam. I lifted the plate like it was some sacred artifact retrieved from an ancient ruin.
Mission accomplished.
Well, almost.
The rice was perfect.
The curry?
Ice cold in the middle.
Of course.
I sighed and put it back in for another thirty seconds, this time remembering to stir it first.
When I finally sat down at the table, though, something strange happened.
It felt like home.
Yeah, the table was different. The curry didn't have exactly the same spices I was used to. The microwave was clearly a minor Demon disguised as a kitchen appliance.
But the quiet? The normalcy? That part felt familiar. It reminded me of evenings at the Veiled Moon Sect after training, when there was nothing urgent to do and I could simply sit down with food while Master Jin wandered in uninvited and somehow stole half of it.
And even though this wasn't my body, my home, or even my universe… I felt grounded.
Maybe I wasn't ready to unlock Earth's supernatural powers yet.
But I'd defeated the microwave.
And that, my friends, was still a victory.
Dreams are weird.
One moment you're full of curry and falling asleep in Kaito Hoshino's bed, and the next you're standing in an endless moonlit field beneath a sky filled with far too many stars, surrounded by that faint sense of impossible distance that always came with this place.
Classic mysterious soul-swap dream realm.
I looked down and, yep, I was in my real body again. Black hair? Check. Familiar clothes? Check. Ki sitting inside me exactly where it belonged? Double check. Cool wind dramatically moving my clothes even though there was apparently nothing producing that wind? Triple check.
And right in front of me, leaning against a floating boulder like it was a perfectly normal bench, was Kaito Hoshino—back in his original body.
"Yo," I greeted, dropping down beside him.
"Hey," he mumbled.
Yup.
Something was off.
Usually dream-Kaito was all wide-eyed and full of questions like, "Bro, if Shadow Clones share memories, can I make ten of them study different books?" or "Do Ninja have insurance?" Tonight, though, he was quiet. Kind of… mopey.
"I told your mom," I said casually, giving him a sideways glance.
His head snapped toward me. "You what?"
"Not everything!" I said quickly. "Just the important parts. That we switched bodies, that you're alive, that you're in my world, and that Master Jin is looking after you."
Kaito stared.
"And that you're safe," I added.
His expression changed.
"She… believed you?"
"Eventually. Your sudden personality replacement helped my argument."
He rubbed his face. "How did she take it?"
"Better than expected. She mostly wanted to know whether you were safe and whether anyone was hurting you, and then she informed me that since I'm currently living your life, I'm still going to school when the break ends."
Kaito groaned.
"Oh, and she seems extremely concerned about your future marriage prospects."
His hands stopped.
"…She would."
"She has a notebook."
His face went pale.
"You saw the notebook?"
"I fear the notebook."
"You should."
There was a silence between us after that. Not the awkward kind. The heavy kind. The kind that settled into your chest after the jokes ended and reality remembered it was still there.
"Do you miss them?" I asked quietly.
Kaito didn't answer immediately. He just stared toward the impossible stars hanging above us.
"I didn't think I would this much," he eventually said. "I mean, I always kind of took them for granted, y'know? Mom nags me about clothes everywhere, Dad makes terrible jokes, and sometimes they both drive me crazy, but now that I'm not there…" His voice weakened slightly. "I even miss Dad's stupid dances when he thinks nobody's watching."
I smiled faintly.
"Yeah," I said. "I wouldn't really know what that's like."
Kaito glanced toward me.
"My parents died when I was born. My father sealed Ballom inside me, and my mother died helping him keep Ballom restrained long enough to finish it. Everything I know about them came from other people."
Kaito stared at me. "Oh. Wow. That's… dark."
"Yeah."
"You say that way too casually."
"I've had thirteen years to get used to it."
He went quiet.
Then I shrugged slightly. "Besides, I turned out okay. Emotionally questionable, maybe, but charming."
That earned a weak laugh.
Progress.
Kaito looked toward me again. "Do you really think we'll get back?"
"We will," I said immediately. "Master Jin is investigating it, the Veiled Moon Sect knows people powerful enough to help, and whoever managed to swap us clearly had a reason for doing it instead of simply killing us."
"That last part wasn't comforting."
"It wasn't supposed to be."
He sighed.
"You've got guts," I continued. "I've got experience, and both worlds apparently have enough ridiculously powerful people running around that somebody has to know how to fix this eventually."
Kaito smiled slightly.
"And until then," I added, "we keep improving."
That got a little more life back into him.
"Oh yeah," he said. "How's your training going?"
"Pretty well physically. The supernatural part is being annoying."
"Still nothing?"
"Not consciously. I tried separating physical and spiritual energy, but that's not something I've ever needed to do before. Back home, they're cultivated together as Ki, so trying to isolate them inside your body is completely different."
Kaito nodded slowly.
"I was hoping you could ask Master Jin about it," I continued. "Earth obviously has Ki users and magic users, so there has to be some method for awakening one or both. I need to understand what this body is actually supposed to do instead of trying to force my world's system onto it."
"I'll ask him," Kaito promised. "He's been teaching me more about your Ki too, so maybe he'll know what carries over."
"Good."
"He's also been making me run around Blackwood Forest while giant snakes try to eat me."
"That's educational."
"HOW?"
"Motivation."
Kaito stared.
I grinned.
"Wait until Master Jin starts calling his dates field research."
Kaito's expression immediately changed.
"…He does that?"
"Constantly."
His eyes gleamed.
"Oh, I need to ask him about this."
"No, you absolutely do not."
"Too late."
I had made a terrible mistake.
The dreamscape began rippling around us before I could undo the damage, the moonlit field becoming translucent as both of us started drifting back toward our borrowed bodies.
We stood.
"Hey," I said, giving him a thumbs-up. "Tell my world not to fall apart without me."
Kaito grinned. "And tell my mom her son's still awesome, even if he's stuck in a cultivation action arc."
"I'll tell her you're eating giant snakes."
His smile vanished.
"Wait, don't—"
I laughed.
And just like that, the dream ended, leaving behind a quiet, strange warmth in my chest.
Maybe neither of us knew when we were going home yet.
But at least neither of us was facing this alone.