Chapter3

A room he was very familiar with, the boy thought... And yet,

something inexplicably felt out of place. He knew he'd lived in this

room for a while, now... but he was also seeing it for the first time. It

shouldn't have been possible, but it was almost as though there were

two people's consciousnesses within him...

Something just didn't feel right... rather, something was muddled

with his memories. As he looked around the room in a daze, a sour

smell suddenly pierced his senses. The boy noticed the rags he was

wearing were soaked with sweat. He furrowed his brow, mind now

awakened. With a deep breath, he collapsed back on the floor; he felt

like lying down for a little longer. He lifted a hand to place against his

forehead — but in the next moment, he gasped loudly and stared

intently at his hand.

It was definitely his hand... the small hand of a seven-year-old boy.

But it was... weird. There was something strange about it...

Ignoring the headache pounding in his head, the boy kicked his

hazy brain back into gear.

A child's hand...? I... Wait, I?...

Rio — that was the boy's name. He was an orphan living in the

slums of Beltrum's capital, sworn to take revenge on a certain man.

That was why he had grasped at straws to survive up until this point.

That should have been the entirety of Rio's existence...

So why did he have another person's worth of memories? The

memories of a person living in another world, in an unfamiliar

civilization, with technology that he didn't recognize...

Broken images of various scenes flashed through his mind... They

seemed all-too realistic to be written off as just the imagination of a

seven-year-old boy. They showed the life of a completely different

person. Someone named Amakawa Haruto. According to his

memories, he was a twenty-year-old university student. No — even

now, Rio was living that life, as if those memories had happened to

him just moments ago. A strange unsettled feeling fell over Rio,

causing him to shake his head violently.

What am I thinking? Amakawa Haruto...?

The set of dual memories left Rio feeling confused. He looked

down at his hands, as if he were trying to escape reality. But it wasn't

the unblemished skin of a Japanese child who grew up well provided for in the age of plenty. These were the hands of someone that was

underweight from malnutrition; the skin was dry and rough and

covered in a thin layer of grime.

Of course... According to his memories as an orphan, he hadn't

had a bath in ages.

Seriously...?

It was so unhygienic. Rio grimaced. The tattered clothes he wore

were stiff and made of hemp, and he couldn't remember the last time

he'd washed them. Of course, he didn't have any proper socks or

shoes, either... But he should be grateful he had something to wear at

all, he guessed. His hair was disheveled and pretty damaged, too. But

he could tell it was black in color underneath all of the filth.

"...Phew."

Rio breathed in and out, deeply, trying to calm himself and

organize his memories. He placed a hand against his mouth in

thought. He was Rio... and he was apparently the university student

Amakawa Haruto as well, with seven years worth of memories from

living in Beltrum's capital and twenty years worth of memories from

living in Japan. But no matter how much his memories were doubled,

he wasn't Amakawa Haruto. If he were Haruto, he wouldn't be a little

boy right now, much less in a place like this. And if his memories

were correct, the young man named Amakawa Haruto wasn't even

alive.

"In my memories, I died on the bus... I think?"

He remembered being on a bus that hit something, and he

remembered being in extreme pain, like his limbs were torn apart. He

couldn't remember what happened after that, but it was hard to

imagine recovering from something like that.

"Where am I right now...? Is this a dream? The afterlife? Was I...

reborn?"

He listed off every possibility he could think of, but there was

something too raw about this reality to write off everything as a

dream. It was hard to imagine that this was the afterlife, too.

Although... this place, while definitely not heaven, was as close to

hell as it could get.

Which meant he was most likely reborn, Rio suspected. Could

such a fantastical story be real? Did this Amakawa Haruto even exist?