MUSTAFU, JAPAN
ONE MONTH LATER — Saturday Morning
The sun filtered through the blinds of my room, painting golden bars across the pages scattered on my desk. My hand moved in a blur—faster than any normal person could follow—as textbook after textbook flipped open and shut. My fingers skimmed across words like a living scanner, pages soaking into my mind at hyperspeed.
I could feel the low hum of my Quirk in the back of my skull, the faint red glow in my eyes reflecting off the laptop screen. Enhanced cognitive processing. Memory retention. Neural mapping. It was an evolved version of my mom's ability—sharper, broader, and relentless. The kind of Quirk that turned a below-average student into an academic machine.
Science. Hero law. Quirk evolution theory. Crime psychology. Rescue logistics. Everything the entrance exams could throw at me, I devoured like it was oxygen.
From the doorway, I heard the light knock of my mother's foot against the frame. I glanced up just in time to see her step in with a tray of tea and rice crackers.
"Still grinding?" she said with a warm smile. "That textbook's thicker than a brick."
"Huh? Oh—sorry, I didn't hear you," I replied, blinking out of my mental trance.
"I'll say." She set the tray down beside me and leaned against the desk, surveying the chaos of books, notes, and bookmarked files. "Your memory's even sharper than mine ever was. Took me years of training to reach perfect recall. You've been at this for what—three weeks?"
I smirked, rubbing my temple. "...I reserve the right to remain silent."
She chuckled and gave me that knowing look. "Is it better now? Less overwhelming?"
"Yeah. My brain finally stopped vomiting encyclopedias at me. It's streamlined—just a quick mental overview unless I want the full data dump."
"That's good. Your Quirk's adapting, learning how to balance output."
She sounded proud, but also... conflicted. I could hear it in her voice.
Truth be told, she had every right to be. For all the baggage this Quirk came with—like scanning everything and everyone around me whether I wanted to or not—it had a silver lining: perfect memory. A full-on cheat code for a guy who'd missed a decade of schooling.
Three weeks. That's all it took to chew through Junior High's entire curriculum. Quirk Theory and Application. Modern Japanese Literature. Hero History. Post-Quirk Society. Advanced Math. You name it.
"Thanks, Mom. I was just catching up on—"
"Everything, apparently." She gestured at the stack of textbooks. "You're always reading something new whenever I check in."
"It's actually kinda fun," I admitted, stretching with a yawn. "You know how people get addicted to mobile games? Grinding levels, unlocking new stuff? This feels like that. But with... knowledge."
It sounded insane coming out of my mouth.
If someone had told me back in my previous life that I'd one day enjoy learning, I'd have blocked their number and reported them for emotional terrorism. Not even The Devil himself, king of all lies could trick the average college student into believing that.
Yet here I was.
Mom's expression shifted, softening. "Honey, I know you want to be prepared—and I am proud of you—but... this isn't what I wanted when you came back."
That caught me off guard.
"Huh?"
"I didn't get my son back after ten years just to lose him again to books and isolation." Her voice dipped into a half-scolding tone, arms crossing. "It's Saturday. You should be out. With friends. At a party. Living. Not buried in your room like a salaryman three deadlines deep."
I raised an eyebrow. "Parties are overrated. And I'm seventeen... in middle school. Even if there were parties, no one's inviting the weird old transfer student."
"You're not weird. You're exceptional. And you're not old—you're just... experienced."
I let out a short laugh. "Nice diplomatic spin."
"I mean it. These books will still be here tomorrow, and the day after. But your teenage years?" She picked up one of my notebooks and flipped through it. "They'll be gone before you know it."
Her gaze lingered on my notes, then lifted back to me.
She didn't say it like an argument. She said it like a mother.
I closed the book slowly. "I'm not trying to hide, Mom. I like this. It's the first time studying doesn't feel like punishment. It's like min-maxing a build in an RPG. Every hour spent makes me smarter. Stronger. More prepared."
She didn't reply immediately. Just stared at me with that look that stripped away all the logic and left behind raw concern.
"I know," I said again, softer this time. "But I need this. If I want to be a hero, I don't want to just pass the test—I want to break it."
"Ten years," she whispered. "Ten years of your childhood, gone. I want you to live what's left of it. Not just study it."
There was no guilt trip in her voice. No anger. Just love—and fear.
Even if I didn't go out to parties, she didn't want to see me disapp
"Even if you don't want to go out and hang, I don't want to see you drowning yourself in a maze of textbooks. Kids your age are supposed to hate studying and parents are supposed to encourage them to do so. You can imagine what it means when the exact opposite Is happening."
".."
The truth behind those words left me speechless.
'That ... Is kinda deep.'
"Take a break." She said.
"But ...".
"No buts. I'm not hearing it. Do something else. Watch TV, play some music, take a nap, paint, draw, write your old stories, scream into a pillow—anything."
She paused as she reached the door.
"But I don't want to see you trying to digest another Math or History Textbook. I'll kick you out of the house if you do."
Then she left.
I sat there in silence for a long moment.
'Well. That was uneventful...' I muttered mentally, closing the book.
Her words lingered in the air long after the door shut.
Ten years lost.
Nothing new on that front... Still blank. Still no memories of whatever childhood this body had lived through.
"My stories, huh?"
A slow thought formed. An idea. No, more than an idea—a plan.bI glanced at my desk drawer and pulled it open.
Not another textbook. This time, it was the notebook—the Idea Book. A black leather-bound journal filled with half-formed plots and story outlines, each one a gold mine in the right hands.
Except these weren't just stories.
They were memories—fragments of popular culture from a world that apparently didn't exist here.
I flipped through the pages, comparing titles and character sketches to the mental database in my head. Then, grabbing my phone, I opened a secure browser and started searching.
Search: "Masashi Kishimoto"
No results.
Search: "Stan Lee"
No results.
Search: "Nickelodeon network"
Nada.
Search: "Avatar"
That one hit... but not the way I wanted. There was a manga called Avatar, but it was about some guy with super strength and clone powers. Nothing remotely close to bending nations or The Blue Avatars Of Pandora.
'For Pete's sake.'
I kept digging.
Search: "American animation studios"
A few results, none of them familiar. No Disney. No Warner Bros. No DreamWorks.
Search: "British boy bands 2010s"
Again, nothing. No One Direction. No BTS. No Jonas Brothers.
After nearly an hour of deep-diving, I leaned back, heart pounding.
Nothing.
There was no trace of the shows, movies, music, or franchises from my original world. Either they never existed in this version of Earth, or they were buried so deep under Quirk-era history that they might as well be fossils.
Either way?
That worked for me.
I grinned.
If I had to sum up my master plan in one word—PLAGIARIZE BABY!
Oh wait, those are two words. Alright, moving on.
Look, it's not like this is new. Every transmigrator worth their salt does it. Usually the ones with no cheat skills, average talent, and zero plot armor? They survive by monetizing their memory. Who needs chakra, Kryptonian bloodlines, Nen, and bending when you can sell a bestselling novel?
And if there's no copyright risk?
They're my intellectual property now.
I chuckled, thumbing through the pages. I may have reincarnated into a world of heroes, but it looked like fate still wanted me writing novels.
"Fine," I muttered to myself. "If I can't be Japan's #1 hero yet... I'll settle for being its #1 bestselling author."
---
By the time evening rolled around, I had a full mug of cold tea, cramped fingers, and a grin that could split my face in half.
The first step was simple—restructure the format. I wasn't adapting a cartoon. I was pitching a novel, maybe even a light novel if I wanted to lean into this world's popular format. So I had to write the story like a serialized adventure with arcs, emotional beats, worldbuilding chapters, and cliffhangers that would keep readers hooked.
The idea of giving Avatar: The Last Airbender a literary backbone was... weirdly exhilarating. Mom had come to check up on my twice, and didn't kick me out thankfully once she confirmed what I was doing.
I could tell she would have preferred to, but she'd take what she could get, I guess.
My room was quiet now—no books open, no pages flipping at super speed. Just me, a glowing laptop screen, and an open Word document titled simply: "Avatar: The Last Airbender - Book One: Water".
It felt weird typing that title. Almost illegal.
But it wasn't.
I leaned back in my chair, exhaled, and cracked my knuckles. "Alright, Aang. Let's get you out of that iceberg."
I started by outlining the key narrative threads for Book 1: Water:
Premise: A world divided into four nations, each tied to a natural element. A hundred years of war. A vanished Avatar—the only one who can master all four elements. Two siblings from the Southern Water Tribe discover him frozen in ice.
Genre: Epic fantasy, coming-of-age, with a spiritual and martial arts angle.
Tone: Whimsical but grounded. Lighthearted when it needs to be, but with undercurrents of trauma, war, and legacy.
From there, I got to work on a full outline. A novelized version of Season 1 would need a tight pace. No filler. Every chapter had to count. So I trimmed, cut, and rearranged. Some minor episodes were condensed or removed entirely. Others—like The Storm, The Blue Spirit, and Siege of the North—were expanded.
I broke everything down into twenty chapters. Roughly one per major episode. Some merged, some split. Then I started writing.
---
DAY 1: Chapter One — "Boy in the Iceberg"
1,800 words before noon.
4,000 by dinner.
Nearly 7,000 before I forced myself to stop. Quite literally.
'This Quirk is the dream of all authors.' I mumbled under my breath. Miserable memories of my writing career back on earth plaguing my subconscious.
My Quirk made it easy.
Not for remembering the Avatar storyline. My quirk only gives me photographic memory for whatever I see. Not what I had seen before I had it. So no, the part of remembering every detail of the series was still up to me.
Still, it wasn't hard though.
The writing process, as expected, went fast. Faster than fast.
The painfully detailed memory from a childhood obsessed with the show, made sure that I didn't need many outlines. I didn't need to brainstorm arcs or invent lore. I already knew the beats: the introduction of Sokka and Katara, the humor, the mystery of the Avatar, Zuko's hunt, Iroh's wisdom, the struggle with the Northern Water Tribe, the heartbreak of Yue
It was all there. A bit foggy, sure. I couldn't remember word for word, but If this were counted as an original idea, I was ahead of every author when I came to knowing what I wanted to write and how I was going to write it.
Still, I didn't rush.
I could've typed the entire season in two days flat, maybe less. But that felt wrong. Artificial. I wanted it to read like a novel, not like a script. So I took my time—not with the speed of typing, but with the quality of prose.
Back to my quirk.
It did however, improve my writing ability by several fold. Just a single look at a paragraph and an analysis would immediately let me spot mistakes, clunky sentences, pacing issues, and the likes.
It was truly incredible. Of course, another issue was translating animation into prose—describing bending in a way that felt poetic and kinetic. That required my own natural talent. I spent two full pages trying to get Katara's first waterbending scene just right.
"She moved like the tide: fluid, sharp, inevitable. The water didn't obey her—it danced with her." Yeah, analysis flag right there.
Rewrite.
I reworded dialogue to make it flow better in written form. Converted scenes into rich descriptions. Let the emotions of the characters breathe in ways the show never had time to. I gave Sokka more introspection, Katara more conflict, Aang more subtle sadness.
The story was the same. But the lens? Sharper. Grounded. Kinda cringe but at least I would like to believe so.
---
DAY 5: Word count — 48,000
I was halfway through the season. It was going slower now. I mean, I should be faster than this. Memory problems were one thing.
The first few episodes and last few episodes of season one were more memorable than the middle ground, hence my writing speed predictably took a dive as I tried to remember more and more content accurately to avoid doing something that would come to bite me in the ass later on.
The fact that this soon to be millionaire still had to go to school each day was another.
Still, compared to most authors, it was developing at high speed. But when your mind works like an AI with creative flair, speed isn't the issue. I also had to devote time to my studying, chores, and the likes.
Moving on.
I went through everything I had previously written, making sure everything was as perfect as I could make it.
This wasn't a fanfiction. Well technically, it was ... Or was it? Not sure, but nobody knew that.
This was going to be a debut novel in a Quirk-powered society. Something that had to stand beside works of national literature.
The emotional arcs mattered a lot. If possible, I was going to give a lot of arcs to some of my my personal favorite characters. Like Ty Lee, Haru, The Kyoshi warriors, and most importantly, the cabbage guy.
No joke.
I was seriously considering giving the cabbage guy that always seemed to be wherever team Avatar was a backstory about being a secret Fire Nation spy under Zhao's command.
I'm sure it would be a killer plot twist.
Moving on. The Main characters couldn't be overshadowed. Aang's guilt. Katara's mother complex, Zuko's obsession and Toph's foreshadowing, all needed to be properly fleshed out to make this a big masterpiece.
I had to make them real. And so I did.
---
DAY 7: Manuscript Complete – 121,318 words
Book One was finished.
The final parts moved fast. Very fast.
Yue's sacrifice made me feel a little melancholy.
I wanted to change it, but the original series had very little losses except Aang who lost his whole nation.
Sokka and Katara both lost their mother but honestly from the way it was portrayed, that was more of a Katara thing. The last thing Zuko needed right now was to lose anything else he actual cared about.
Toph in book Two lost her sight from birth. Sokka on the other hand? What the hell would his guy lose if Yue didn't die? His boomerang?
Nah.
Sorry Yue, but this had to happen. Not just her death of course, but also for Sokka's angui ... Ehem. I mean, character development. (Why does he get all the girls?)
I printed out a copy and stared at it. A neat stack of white pages, bound by clips and ambition. A rewritten world, reborn through ink.
In a world ravaged by war, one boy awakens from a century of slumber to restore balance. With his friends beside him, he must master all four elements and confront an empire bent on conquest. But the weight of the world is a heavy burden—even for the Avatar.
Splendid
But now came the hard part:
Publishing.
___
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