Chapter 1:
Is This Another World?
When I opened my eyes, the first thing I saw was dazzling light. It grew to encompass my entire field of vision, and I squinted in discomfort.
Once my vision adjusted, I became aware of the blonde young lady gazing at me. She was one gorgeous girl—wait, no. She was definitely a woman.
Who is she? I thought.
By her side was a young man of roughly the same age, his hair brown, his awkward smile directed at me. He looked strong, proud, and impressively muscled.
Brown-haired and stubborn-looking? I ought to have reacted negatively the instant I saw this big oaf—but to my surprise, there was no feeling of ill will. His hair must have been dyed that color. It was a very fetching shade of brown.
The woman looked at me with a warm smile and spoke. Her words were oddly indistinct and difficult to make out, however. Was she even speaking Japanese?
The man said something in reply, his face losing some of its tension. I likewise had no idea what he said.
A third unintelligible voice joined the conversation, but I couldn’t see who was speaking. I tried getting up to figure out where I was and to ask these people who they were. And let me tell you, I may have been a shut-in, but that didn’t mean I didn’t know how to talk to people. But somehow, all I could muster was this:
“Ahh! Waah!”
Nothing but garbled whining and moaning.
And I couldn’t move my body. I mean, I could sort of move my fingertips and my arms, but I couldn’t sit up.
The brown-haired man said something else, then suddenly leaned down and picked me up. This was absurd! I weighed over a hundred kilos. How could he lift me that easily? Maybe I’d lost some weight after being stuck in a coma for a few weeks?
That was a pretty nasty accident I’d been in, after all.
There was a good chance I hadn’t come out of it with all of my limbs. For the rest of the day, I dwelled on a single thought:
My life is going to be a living hell.
✦ ✦ ✦
Let’s jump ahead a month.
Apparently, I’d been reborn. The reality of my situation had finally set in: I was a baby.
I was finally able to confirm that after being picked up and having my head cradled so I could see my own body. But why did I still have all of my memories of my prior life? Not that I was complaining, exactly, but who would imagine someone being reborn with all their memories— to say nothing of that wild delusion actually being true?
The two people I first saw when I came to must have been my parents. If I had to guess, I’d say they were in their early twenties. Clearly younger than I’d been in my past life, at any rate. My thirty-four-year-old self would have written them off as kids.
I was jealous that they’d gotten to make a baby at that age.
Early on, I’d realized that I wasn’t in Japan; the language was different, and my parents didn’t sport Japanese facial features. They also wore what appeared to be some form of old-timey clothing. I didn’t see anything that resembled home appliances; a woman in a maid outfit came by and cleaned with a rag. The furniture, eating utensils, and the like were all crudely fashioned from wood. Wherever this was, it didn’t seem like it was a developed nation.
We didn’t even have electric lighting, only candles and oil lamps. Perhaps my parents were so poor that they couldn’t afford to pay the electric bill.
But how likely was that, really? Seeing as they had a maid, I figured that they must have money, but maybe the maid was my father’s sister, or my mother’s. That wouldn’t be too odd. She’d at least help out with the housekeeping, right?
I had wished that I could go back and do everything over again, but being born to a family that was too poor to pay for utilities wasn’t exactly what I’d had in mind.