Chapter 1: Nen Ability
Pain.
So much pain.
My head… my heart hurts!
Kai slowly surfaced from unconsciousness. He felt as if he were submerged in a weightless mass of water. It should have been a warm, comfortable feeling, but his heart was hammering against his ribs, threatening to burst.
Numbly, Kai sensed a bizarre aura. It felt like boiling water one second and bone-chilling ice the next, and it was trying to drill its way into the deepest part of his heart…
Stop drilling! It's really going to explode…
An unknown amount of time passed before Kai's eyes snapped open. The feeling of waking from a dream left a sharp sense of disillusionment. That was immediately replaced by the feeling of being bound, and the suffocating pressure of something heavy crushing him.
He struggled, twisting his body. Dim light filtered through the cracks of the heavy objects pinning him down. Kai thrashed more violently, shoving the weight off his body. Finally free from the awkward, binding position, he collapsed onto his back, panting.
The evening sky was awash with the light of the setting sun. His vision was filled with tall, messy patches of wild grass. He dimly realized… when and how did he end up lying in the middle of nowhere?
If he remembered correctly, he had been bored out of his mind during the lockdown. He'd just made a bowl of fried rice, ready to find something to watch to kill time… He was a totally normal guy who hadn't bothered anyone. How could he just close his eyes and wake up here?
Kai let out a long, frustrated breath. As he took his next deep inhale, his expression slowly changed.
Why was the smell of blood so strong?
He bolted upright—or tried to. His limbs were so weak and sore that he slipped and fell flat on his face.
The face of a dead man in a business suit was staring right at him. The corpse's dull, wide-open eyes met his.
Kai's scalp went numb. A chill shot up his spine and exploded in his brain.
He scrambled to look around. As far as he could see, hidden among the overgrown patches of tall grass, were bodies. Bodies everywhere.
And he had just been buried under a pile of them.
Next to the suited corpses were scattered shell casings, handguns, and other trash… A gang war? No way. What era was this? Who would be so brazen?
Kai looked down again. Beneath the pile of bodies, there was another one—a woman in a simple gray windbreaker, her eyes half-open as if she'd died in disbelief. He was no coroner, so he couldn't tell how long she or the others had been dead. But he could see that in the woman's rigid hand, she was clutching a small, empty, and torn swaddling blanket…
Kai's breathing quickened. He looked down at his own hands in disbelief, his gaze traveling up his arms.
Just like his hands, his arms and torso were incredibly slender and small. His skin was tender, not like that of the nearly thirty-year-old man he was supposed to be. This body was, at most, three or four years old.
Did I transmigrate?
And did I just crawl out of that swaddling blanket, from under a pile of corpses?
Kai's mind was a mess of chaos. He just wanted to get away from this mass grave. He crawled on all fours, slipping several times, his legs weak. He pushed through the tall, messy grass, trying to get away.
As he parted another clump of grass, he glanced at a high slope not far away. Silhouetted against the setting sun was a large, fierce beast. Its outline was blurry, but its eyes glowed with a strange, eerie light, and they were locked directly onto his.
Kai felt as if a bucket of ice water had been dumped over his head. He was wide awake now.
I'm screwed.
Despair washed over him. He quietly let the tall grass fall back into place, slumping to the ground, praying the beast on the slope hadn't actually spotted him.
Then, he turned his head.
He saw the gray tail of a wolf sticking out of the grass, not half a meter from his face.
Kai held his breath. He followed the tail with his eyes, and his heart sank. A wild wolf, easily over 200 pounds, was chewing on another one of the suited corpses, its teeth making wet tearing and crunching sounds as it ripped through flesh and bone. Kai couldn't believe it. Was I deaf before? How did I not hear that?
He carefully, slowly, began to inch backward, his eyes glued to the feeding wolf's back.
Suddenly, the wolf stopped moving. Kai froze, terrified.
The wolf lifted a hind leg, scratched its neck, and then went back to tearing at the corpse.
Kai suppressed his breathing and tried to move back again… and then he heard the last sound he wanted to hear.
To his left and right, the wild grass rustled. A moment later, two more wolves, their muzzles dripping with blood, poked their heads out. Their eyes glowed green as they stared at him.
Could this get any worse?
The first wolf, the one that had been busy eating, had stopped. It turned its head, licked its sharp teeth, and seemed to be… grinning at him.
…Apparently, it could!
Kai understood with dreadful clarity. These three wild hunters had known he, the only living person, was here the whole time.
Damn it. These three bastards. Were they playing with their food? Or were they saving this "fresh meat" for dessert?
The three wolves formed a pincer formation, pushing through the grass. They advanced slowly on all fours, deep, threatening growls rumbling in their chests as they closed in.
Kai kept backing up until he hit the original pile of corpses. There was nowhere left to run.
Staring at the three ferocious, man-eating wolves, with the sense of mortal danger completely overwhelming him, Kai felt his brain cells dying and being reborn at an unprecedented rate. He wracked his brain, desperate for any way to survive, but every wild idea was useless. He wasn't even sure if this was a transmigration, and now he was about to be buried in a wolf's stomach—or rather, split between three of them.
A single, soft child's hair floated into his peripheral vision.
Suddenly, Kai's panic subsided. He sat with his back against the corpse pile, staring intently at the three wolves now just feet away. He could see the bits of flesh stuck between their teeth, smell the nauseating stench of blood…
The soft hair, moving without any wind, drifted slowly toward the wolf in the center.
On a level invisible to the naked eye, a ball of white life energy enveloped the hair, bending and twisting it into the shape of a pentagram. It landed silently inside the lead wolf's ear.
A white light flashed and was gone. The hair dispersed and fell away, but on the skin inside the wolf's ear, a rose-gold pentagram pattern remained.
Kai stared in shock at "himself."
He also stared in shock at the lead wolf, which now had a look of human-like shock in its own eyes. This… is "me" too?!
I've possessed this wolf's body?
A current of questions flashed through his mind, but he knew he was out of time. He immediately controlled the wolf's body, slamming it without hesitation into the wolf on the left. Then, he roared and pounced on the wolf to the right. A sneak attack.
AWOO! Kai-wolf bit down, hard, on the struggling wolf's throat. Hot blood gushed into his mouth.
He didn't have time for the psychological trauma. The wolf he'd knocked over was already scrambling up to counter-attack, swiping its claws across his controlled wolf's back. A bloody wound soaked the fur. Kai-wolf snarled—That pain is way too real!
He ripped the throat out of the wolf beneath him and, with a spray of blood, spun to face the one that had attacked him from behind.
But Kai was an amateur wolf. In a brawl, he was no match for a professional. He had no idea how to fight on four legs. The enemy wolf howled, and the two of them became a blur of teeth and claws. The enemy was quickly gaining the upper hand.
His small, human body, still sitting against the corpses, watched in panic. If his wolf lost, his few dozen pounds of tender meat were next.
The first wolf, its throat torn out, stopped struggling. The other two were still locked in a desperate fight.
Kai (his human body) took a deep breath of the blood-thick air, ignoring the stabbing pain in his heart. He forced himself to calm down. He didn't know what was happening, but he couldn't make a mistake.
How did I do it? He thought back. I felt… like I was submerged in invisible water. Then that water wrapped around my hair… and then… right, it bent into a pentagram…
As he was thinking, a drop of dark-red blood on his arm suddenly lifted off his skin, floating and wavering in front of his eyes. His concentration wavered, and the droplet nearly fell. He quickly held his breath and focused, guiding the drop of blood toward the two fighting wolves.
In mid-air, that same white aura enveloped the blood, twisting it into a five-pointed star.
As the bloody pentagram flew closer, Kai-wolf, who had been trying to defend and conserve energy, let out a furious roar. It unleashed every last bit of the wolf's strength, managing to flip the other wolf and pin it to the ground. The enemy wolf thrashed, desperately trying to protect its soft belly. Kai-wolf used its full weight to hold it down. With one paw, it pinned the enemy's head; with the other, it waited for an opening, then hooked its claw into the enemy's mouth and yanked out its tongue.
At that exact second, the bloody pentagram, guided by Kai's human body, landed perfectly on the exposed tongue.
A white light flashed. Back at the corpse pile, Kai's vision exploded with stars, and his entire body went limp with exhaustion.
In the wolf's eyes, Kai's pupils constricted. The bloody pentagram on the enemy's tongue dissolved. It hadn't left the rose-gold mark.
It failed.
Kai's human body bit his lip. This strange ability… it must consume "Aura" at the exact moment of activation. His new, tiny body's "Aura reserves" were so low that successfully controlling one wolf was a miracle. He just didn't have the energy to control a second.
The enemy wolf thrashed with final, deadly desperation. Kai didn't have time to think. His eyes went bloodshot, and he ordered his wolf to bite down.
Sharp teeth tore through the enemy's windpipe. Blood gurgled as the wolf beneath him twitched one last time and went still.
Looks like the defensive strategy was the right one after all, Kai thought. The wolf's struggles weakened. He let out a sigh of relief. Thank god he'd managed to control one wolf to fight for him. Otherwise, with his new body's tiny arms and legs, he wouldn't just be dead. He'd be "giving the coroner a problem—they wouldn't even be able to piece the body together."
Soon, the second wolf was dead.
And then, Kai felt it again—that eerie, vicious aura, drilling into his heart. Both cold and hot at once. His heart seized. He had just managed to stand up, and he fell right back on his ass.
A congenital heart defect? Kai's face was pale. Or is it… He clutched his chest, staring at the mangled wolf corpse. That strange aura… did it enter him because the wolf died?
He remembered the agonizing pain in his heart before he first woke up. He looked around at all the bodies hidden in the tall grass.
He suddenly understood.
He sat there, stunned, for a long moment, before slowly letting out a shaky breath.
Whatever was going on… he had survived.
Kai-wolf spat out a mouthful of fur and stepped on the corpse, as if to declare victory.
But suddenly, the expression on Kai's human face changed. When he fell back into the corpse pile, his eyes had once again landed on the woman in the gray windbreaker, still clutching that empty blanket.
Kai had just assumed this woman was his new mother, and that he had been reborn from that blanket.
But that tiny, torn blanket… it was clearly for a newborn baby.
And his current body, while small and weak, was very clearly that of a three or four-year-old.
The wolf he controlled walked over to his human body. From this new perspective, Kai looked at his new self—a pale-faced little kid, shorter even than the wolf.
He looked at the dead woman. He looked at the blanket she wouldn't let go of.
...Who was the baby that was supposed to be in that blanket? And where did it go?
"AWOOOOOOOO—!"
From all around, the howls of more wolves answered, growing closer.
(End of Chapter)