Wait.
That wasn't right.
Ryouma tried to sit up again and discovered he couldn't move. Not paralyzed—he could feel his limbs, sort of, in the distant way you feel your foot when it's fallen asleep. But they wouldn't respond. Wouldn't coordinate. His body felt wrong, like wearing a coat three sizes too small.
And it was dark.
Not the comfortable darkness of a bedroom at night, or even the absolute void he'd floated in after death. This was a close darkness, pressing in from all sides. Warm. Wet. The air—if it was air—felt thick, muffled, like being underwater but without the panic of drowning.
Oh, Ryouma thought. Oh no.
He tried to speak and produced no sound. Tried to move his hands and felt something shift, sluggish and uncoordinated. His thoughts felt clear—painfully clear, actually, the way they always did when he was anxious—but his body was a stranger's.
A very small stranger's.
I'm a baby, he realized, and the thought arrived with the kind of calm certainty that usually preceded something terrible. I'm literally a baby. I'm being born. Or I was just born. Or I'm about to be born. Oh god, which one is worse?
The darkness pressed closer. Muffled sounds filtered through—rhythmic thumping, distant and constant. A heartbeat? Not his. Someone else's. And beneath that, other sounds he couldn't quite parse. Movement. Pressure. The sense of being contained in something that was slowly, inexorably, pushing him somewhere he didn't want to go.
This is, Ryouma thought, the most uncomfortable I have ever been in two lifetimes.
He tried to take stock of the situation the way he always did when things went wrong—make a list, identify the problems, figure out what he could control. It was a habit that had served him well in his previous life, even if "well" meant "managed to avoid most confrontations and died reaching for soup."
Problem one: He was a baby.
Problem two: He was conscious.
Problem three: No one had warned him about this part.
That last one bothered him more than it should have. The voice in the void—the tired, cosmic bureaucrat who'd processed his reincarnation like a DMV clerk handling a license renewal—hadn't mentioned anything about being aware during birth. Ryouma had assumed he'd just... wake up. Skip the whole messy biological process and arrive fully formed, or at least fully infant-sized, in a crib somewhere.
But no.
He was experiencing this.
All of this.
I should file a complaint, he thought, and then immediately felt bad about it. The cosmic entity had probably been having a rough day. Ryouma didn't want to add to their workload.
The pressure increased. The muffled sounds grew louder—voices, maybe? He couldn't make out words, just tones. Urgent. Strained. Someone was working very hard at something, and Ryouma had the uncomfortable realization that the "something" was him.
I'm sorry, he thought reflexively, even though he had no control over any of this. I'm sorry I'm making this difficult.
Time passed strangely. He couldn't tell if it had been minutes or hours. His body moved without his input, pushed and pulled by forces he couldn't see. The darkness remained absolute. His thoughts spiraled in the way they always did when he couldn't do anything productive.
No one chose me, he realized suddenly.
The thought arrived with unexpected weight. The voice in the void hadn't selected him for anything. Hadn't looked at his soul and decided he was worthy of a second chance, or that he had some grand destiny to fulfill. He'd just... died. And then he'd been here. And the entity had processed him the way you'd process anyone—with tired efficiency and a vague sense of cosmic irritation.
There was no goddess who'd summoned him.
No divine plan.
No "you're special, chosen one" speech.
He'd just ended up here, the same way he'd ended up everywhere else in his life—by accident, without fanfare, slightly apologetic about the inconvenience.
That's, Ryouma thought, actually kind of worse.
If he'd been chosen, at least there would have been a reason. A purpose. Some cosmic entity looking at the spreadsheet of souls and thinking, "Yes, this one. This mediocre man who died reaching for soup. He's exactly what we need."
But no.
He was just... here.
Reincarnated by bureaucratic necessity, not divine intervention.
I'm not special, he thought, and felt the truth of it settle into his bones—or whatever passed for bones in his current state. I'm just some guy who happened to die at the wrong time and got shuffled into the reincarnation queue.
The pressure peaked. The darkness shifted. And then—
Light.
Not much. Just a sliver, painful and bright after so long in the dark. Ryouma tried to close his eyes and discovered they were already closed. The light was filtering through his eyelids, which meant he had eyelids now, which meant—
Air hit his face.
Cold air. Dry air. Air that wasn't thick and warm and pressing in from all sides.
He tried to gasp and produced a sound that was definitely not a gasp. High-pitched. Automatic. The kind of sound that babies make because their bodies know what to do even when their minds are busy having existential crises about cosmic bureaucracy.
Hands touched him. Large hands, careful but efficient. He was being moved, lifted, turned. The muffled sounds resolved into voices—actual voices, speaking words he didn't understand. The language was wrong. The cadence was wrong. Everything was wrong.
I'm in a different world, Ryouma thought, which he'd already known intellectually but was now experiencing viscerally. I don't speak the language. I don't know where I am. I don't know who these people are. I don't know anything.
Someone was wrapping him in cloth. Soft cloth, warm. The hands were gentle now, less urgent. One of the voices—lower, exhausted—said something that might have been relieved.
Ryouma tried to open his eyes.
It took three attempts. His eyelids felt gummy, reluctant. When he finally managed it, the world was a blur of shapes and colors that his infant eyes couldn't quite process. Too bright. Too much. He closed them again immediately.
Okay, he thought, forcing himself to be calm. Okay. I'm alive. I'm a baby. I'm in a new world. No one chose me, but I'm here anyway. I can work with this. I've worked with worse.
He hadn't, actually. But it seemed like the kind of thing you were supposed to tell yourself in situations like this.
The hands lifted him again, and he felt himself being passed to someone else. These hands were different—smaller, trembling slightly. The voice that accompanied them was soft, speaking in that universal tone that transcends language: exhausted, relieved, full of something that might have been love.
Oh, Ryouma thought. I have a mother.
The realization hit harder than expected. In his previous life, his parents had been distant, polite strangers who'd done their duty and then quietly faded into their own lives. He'd never blamed them for it. Some people just weren't meant to be parents.
But this voice, these hands—they felt different.
He was being held against something warm. A heartbeat, steady and close. The same heartbeat he'd been hearing for... however long he'd been in the darkness.
I'm sorry, he thought again, because he couldn't help it. I'm sorry I was conscious for that. I'm sorry I made it weird. I'm going to try to be a normal baby now, I promise.
The voice murmured something. The hands adjusted their grip, cradling him more securely.
Ryouma felt exhaustion creeping in—real exhaustion, the kind that came from his body rather than his mind. Being born was apparently very tiring. Who knew?
Everyone, he thought drowsily. Everyone probably knows that except me.
The last thing he was aware of, before sleep pulled him under, was the steady rhythm of his mother's heartbeat and the uncomfortable certainty that he was going to spend this entire second life overthinking everything.
Some things, apparently, transcended reincarnation.