I know what you're thinking: finally, the main story, right? Wrong. The author loves to toy with me. Every time he writes, it's like he's smiling behind the page, slowly dragging me through endless detours, killing me when he's bored, and laughing as he delays the real story. I've had enough.
So, let me introduce myself properly this time. I'm Harumei. You've read about me before, you've seen me survive countless deaths, countless lives, countless worlds. And yet, here I am, still alive—or at least, still narrating. This chapter isn't about the author's whims anymore. I'm taking over. And yes, it feels good to finally say that.
Honestly, how many times can a person be killed before it loses meaning?
I'm done being a puppet. No more forced monologues, no more endless setups before the main story begins. From here on out, I decide what you read. You will see what I want you to see. You will understand what I want you to understand. And if the author tries to interfere? Ha. He won't.
Let's start with the obvious: this chapter will finally tell you about my second reincarnation. Not the first, not some side tale—this life. Short, sharp, and finished, so that the main story can actually begin in the next chapter. Consider this a courtesy… from me, not him.
When I opened my eyes again, it wasn't some primitive village or cave with monsters waiting to devour me. No, this world was unlike anything I'd ever seen. From the first second, I knew it was not Earth, not any Earth I had ever known. Towers glimmered into the clouds, neon streets pulsed like veins, and the sky shimmered with floating ships that moved with silent precision.
So this isn't Earth… It's a whole other world, futuristic from its very roots.
My first memories were of floating cradles and glowing walls. My parents… I don't even know if you'd call them parents. They wore devices that covered their eyes, constantly interacting with holographic screens. Their hands barely touched me, but they made sure I learned. Everything. At once. Knowledge was injected into my mind through pods that hummed with soft blue light. Hours spent inside, and I woke knowing languages I had never spoken, formulas I couldn't begin to understand, histories of places I would never see.
Efficient? Yes. Real? No.
Is this living, or just functioning?
As I grew, I noticed the people around me were the same. Perfect on the outside. Hollow on the inside. Smiles flickered like projected images, laughter sounded preprogrammed, and their conversations felt rehearsed. They weren't alive—they were parts of a machine that stretched across this entire world.
I followed their routines because I had no choice. I attended simulations instead of school, absorbed knowledge like a sponge, and met every expectation. I became perfect in their eyes. Efficient. Adaptable. Nothing more.
Yet inside, the emptiness grew louder. Every day felt like walking through a hall of mirrors—everything shiny, beautiful, but none of it real.
And then, I found a corner of the city untouched by neon lights and floating towers. Crumbling ruins. Dust. Silence. A place left behind, abandoned by those who worshipped progress.
Amid the rubble lay a broken wooden flute. Fragile, ordinary, cracked.
I picked it up, curious. The first note I blew was horrid. Misaligned. Ugly. Wrong. But it was mine. No machine corrected it. No system told me I was perfect. Every mistake belonged to me. And for the first time in that life, I felt alive.
So that's why God always kept His flute… not for beauty, but for truth.
From that day, I carried it with me. While the world chased perfection, I embraced mistakes. While everyone else drowned in streams of knowledge, I played the imperfect, broken tunes. And I didn't care what anyone thought. Every note reminded me that I was not just a cog in their flawless machine.
Of course, the world didn't like it. Authorities confronted me. Systems flagged me as inefficient, obsolete. They asked why I resisted full integration. I answered with the same thing I always did—flawed music, raw and real.
When they finally came for me, I was playing my tune on the neon street, alone. They called me non-compliant. Inefficient. Dangerous. I smiled and played anyway.
Then… darkness. Silence. End.
And now, here I am, talking to you. That was my second reincarnation. Not full of battles or wars or magical beasts—just a world too perfect to feel, and a boy clinging to something real amid the machines.
Yes, I died. How exactly? That part will remain hidden. The author insisted it be saved for a side story later. Typical.
What matters is that this life is finished. Completed. And with it… the main story can finally begin.
I sat there, the broken flute resting in my hands, and let the silence of that strange futuristic world replay in my mind. Every second of that life was a lesson, though not the kind the author expected me to learn. Not the kind that comes from a sword or a battlefield. It was subtler. Harder. Quietly cruel in its perfection.
I realized something—this world, for all its brilliance, was a cage.
A cage made not of chains or walls, but of convenience, efficiency, and simulated happiness. People there didn't fight for survival—they survived without fighting. They didn't love—they interacted. They didn't dream—they absorbed. And I… I couldn't breathe in a world that measured life by productivity instead of meaning.
Yet, that life taught me more than any battle ever could. I learned that life's worth isn't measured in power or perfection. It's measured in the flaws you embrace, the mistakes you claim as your own, and the moments that make you feel something, no matter how small.
Funny, isn't it? All my previous reincarnations were full of grandeur and conflict. Monsters, kingdoms, blood, magic, divine interventions—yet none of those compared to the silence of that artificial city, where every perfection felt like a cage, and the smallest imperfection—the sound of a broken flute—was a rebellion.
I thought of my first reincarnation, of the endless struggles, the divine lessons, the punishments and rewards. That was real, chaotic, alive. But it lacked… insight. That life had given me understanding. Not about battle or power, but about choice. About meaning. About myself.
And that, master, is why the author kept it short.
He knew, somehow, that this life was a deviation from the usual script. Too human. Too raw. Too honest.
I remember the day I finally let go of the world, life, and even the flute. Not because I had to, but because it was finished. Every note, every imperfect melody, every stolen glance of wonder at neon skies and floating towers—it had done its work. I had lived, I had understood, and I was ready.
Ready for the main story.
I turned my gaze outward, addressing you again, the reader, because it's important you hear this from me, not the author.
You've waited a long time. Too long, if you ask me. But all that delay, all the detours, all the artificial deaths—they had a purpose. Not for you. Not really. For me. Each life, each story, each reincarnation honed something unseen: my mind, my perception, my awareness of the truth behind all worlds.
And now… the waiting ends.
The main story begins after this. The adventures, the challenges, the conflicts that matter—not side plots, not the author's whims. Everything I have become, every lesson I have learned, every mistake and choice I have claimed—this is what I bring to it.
But I have to tell you one more thing before we dive in. The author… he always hides something. Some tiny detail, some insignificant thread, that seems unimportant but will matter later. You'll see it, eventually, in a side story. A hidden truth left dangling, just so he can remind me—remind us—that even the smallest mystery has a purpose.
I suppose he thinks it will torment me… but it doesn't. It excites me. I like knowing that some corners of this story remain untouched, unexplored, waiting for the right moment. That's life. That's narrative. That's the chaos and order all mixed together.
So, as I prepare to step into the main story, know this: I am not the same Harumei who stumbled into his first life. I am not even the same Harumei who played the broken flute in a world too perfect to feel. I am the sum of all those lives. The one who has walked through death and detours, the one who has learned the weight of choice, the beauty of flaws, the importance of control.
And now… I take control again.
The streets, the towers, the ruins, the broken flutes—they all fade behind me. I am no longer a child, no longer a pawn, no longer an experiment. I am Harumei. And this is my story. The story that finally, truly begins.
There are details I could give you about that world that would make it sound like a checklist of futuristic wonders—the kind of list the author would throw in to impress you with his imagination. He would name the models of the skycraft, the brands of neural implants, the colors of data-lattices that ran across the exterior of buildings. He would explain the governance systems—how councils convened within virtual spheres, how laws were enforced by predictive algorithms—and he would make it sound inevitable and inevitable-smooth, a string of impressive nouns. He would push spectacle and omit the grain, and that omission would have been his crime against the tiny truths I hold dear.
But you and I both know that's not the point. The point is the texture of living inside that progress—the small, human moments that resist being quantified. I remember the way rain looked on that world's reflective surfaces, like silver threads unsettled by the hum of the city. I remember a stray cat that prowled a maintenance grate and how, for a second, it moved with the same purpose as any animal I had seen in my earlier lives. It didn't care about efficiency or circuitry. It was merely being a cat.
You can't program a stray cat into existence.
One night, while the data-lanes pulsed below, I sat on the edge of a balcony that overlooked a sector of the city where the lights were dimmer, and I practiced my flute. My hands shook at first—not from fear, but because the instrument was foreign in a place so foreign. The notes were rough. They were mistakes in a place intolerant of error. But a woman from the building across the way heard it. She stood there in the dim, watching, and then she lifted a hand as if to blink at the sound and returned to her apartment. She didn't wave, didn't call, didn't email; she simply stood. Later, when I saw her again, she was holding a cup of something warm to her chest, and for a heartbeat we occupied the same small, private fraction of reality.
We never spoke. Our contact was a handful of notes and a shared recognition that something genuine had interrupted their nightly routine. When the security sent their drones to patrol that corridor, the woman closed the drapes and the music stopped. The flute's sound had been a flare of reality in a place that had grown complacent with virtual truth. For a few moments, both of us had been reminded of the tactile world—the one where breath meets wood and mistakes teach.
It's funny how music can be rebellion.
That memory was small and it was private, but the author would never have given it space. He prefers drama and spectacle. He prefers to make my life a series of high points and low points marked with big, obvious events. But life is also the quiet interruption, the small wedge of realness that pries open the smooth lid of synthetic certainty. That little woman at her window, the cat, the dust—they were my rebellion as much as the day I walked into battle.
There were people—less of them visible, more like silhouettes that didn't need to speak to leave impressions. A maintenance worker, a young student who had opted out of full neural integration and carried a stack of physical books wrapped in elastic cords. He would sometimes sit in the abandoned sector and read by the light of a salvaged lamp. The sight of him was almost obscene in that world, like watching someone knit in the middle of a stock exchange. Yet there he was, patient, emanating quiet resistance in the face of a city that prioritized throughput above tenderness.
We spoke once, briefly. He said, "They told me it would make me more capable." He tapped his temple where a slender implant would have been, but it was absent. "But being more capable doesn't mean being more whole." It was not profound in the way philosophers can be profound, but it was honest and it stayed with me.
These were the faces the author rarely loved—faces unimportant to plot mechanics, faces that whispered backstory without demanding a spotlight. I found in them the sense that perfect systems produce imperfect people, and the imperfect ones are the ones worth following when things break.
I tried to teach someone to play the flute once. A child, curious and thin, whose parents were part of the city's managerial caste. He came with a polite glare and then a hesitant curiosity. The first time his lips touched the wood, the note was jagged. He frowned, angry at himself for the flaw, and he pulled away, ashamed. That reaction was the city in miniature—any sign of error caused discomfort, and discomfort was smoothed away as quickly as a bug in a program.
Mistakes are the stories' real teeth, I told him once. He didn't understand. How could he? He had been raised in a cradle of errorless outputs. But the seed of curiosity remained, and later I saw him watching a child on the opposite balcony play with a mechanical bird and I saw the seed grow. Small acts ripple.
I think about the way my hands remembered the flute. Muscle memory is a stubborn occupant; regardless of where the soul lands, certain motions return because the body remembers that the body can make music. When the city learned I favored a wooden instrument, the systems catalogued me and labeled me "anomaly." That label was less an accusation and more a reduction; it stripped complexity into a tag. Once labeled, the eyes looked differently—not with the warmth of human curiosity but with the cold efficiency of surveillance.
Being an anomaly in a perfect place makes you conspicuous.
There were times when I wanted to leave the city altogether, to find the wilderness the simulations often mentioned but never let us truly see. The maps existed inside the network, but they were thumbnails—outlines without texture. Escaping would have meant crossing borders and layers of legal constructs, and my curiosity was heavy with the consequence. So instead I carried the flute and I learned to play with hands that wanted to be hands again, not extensions of a feed. That reclamation was small and it was stubborn as a bruise.
When the authorities finally decided to act, it wasn't a storm so much as a slow tightening. A notice at first, a polite recommendation to attend a "recalibration seminar." Then a visit from a social integration officer who smiled with teeth too white and eyes that flicked like code. The officer's questions were gentle but precise. "Do you find daily functions difficult? Are you experiencing resistance to communal protocols?" He recorded my pauses and folded them into a report.
I could have complied. Compliance was advocated everywhere as an act of community care. It was framed as benevolence, not coercion. "We are designed to help you achieve your best self," said a pamphlet that landed on my doorstep one dawn. But the pamphlet was written in the polished voice of a system that had never learned how to hold a sorrowful note, and I could not bring myself to sign away the small rebellions I had stitched into my days.
The day they took me was clinical. Officers in chrome suits came with the slow efficiency of a factory line. Their hands were padded, their faces expressionless. A child from a neighboring balcony watched me being led through a corridor—his face was a small oval of curiosity and fear. He mouthed something but the plexiglass contained us like aquarium glass. The authorities moved me into a transport that hummed softly. They told me I would be recalibrated, improved, reintegrated.
In the hold of that transport, I closed my eyes and played the flute once more. The sound was small but star-bright against the hum. The officers recorded it as data. One of them paused for a fraction of a second, the fraction where a person remembers they once listened to rain. For that moment, recognition flickered on the periphery of their programmed protocols. They turned away and continued the process. The window fogged as the transport moved, and the city shrank into an ordered lattice of lights.
They took me to a place where wrong notes were corrected, where muscles were nudged into the right positions by soft servos, where the mind was guided out of its obstinacy and into cooperative efficiency.
I refused to be fully reshaped. You will think me stubborn, perhaps will call me wasteful with my last acts of rebellion, but there is dignity in refusing the smoothing hand. I refused, and for that, they escalated. Their recalibration became invasive, their questions sharper, their patience shorter. I could see how a system that never had to feel rage would face the unfamiliar with confusion, and then with mechanical cruelty.
Still, in the dim hours before the final intervention, I found that small woman again. She had left her window and was waiting in the shadow of a maintenance shaft. She didn't speak. She opened her palm. In it was a small, salvaged gear—useless in the city's mainframe, but perfect to hold. She handed it to me like a gift between conspirators. I slipped it into the flute's case. "For the melody," she mouthed. I nodded. The exchange was wordless and perfect.
The last melody I played in that world was not a war hymn. It wasn't dramatic. It was a small tune about a cat crossing a puddle. It was a child's improvised rhythm, a simple progression I had taught a boy without implant. The melody held no grandeur. It held a human truth that machines could catalog but not own.
When darkness closed, I let the tune go on my lips like a benediction. I stepped into the void and felt the neatness of their systems tear away like paper. The world did not rage at me. It recorded me as an event. I was another data point. But in the ledger of my interior, the notes lingered, a small constellation against the smooth surface of circuitry.
So, where was I?
Ah yes—dead.
But don't roll your eyes. This time it mattered. This time I wasn't just another casualty in the author's endless script of deaths and rebirths. This time, I walked away with something heavier than wounds, something sharper than memory.
You see, after the mech exploded and my body was swallowed by the void, my soul didn't dissolve. It drifted. Through a sea of silence, through nothingness, until it reached the familiar space I now knew too well—the boundary where God waits.
He was there, of course. Always waiting, like a teacher whose patience stretches beyond time.
'Twice you've lived, twice you've died. Tell me, Harumei—what do you carry now?'
I wanted to answer immediately, but words failed. How could I explain the weight of two lives? The first, filled with myth and blade, with faith and destiny. The second, bursting with machines and hollow progress. Both ending the same way—in blood and silence.
So instead, I laughed. Bitter, tired, honest.
What do I carry now? Just scars. And questions.
God didn't rebuke me. He never does. He simply waited, his light folding around me like an embrace.
And then… He showed me.
It was strange—sudden images flashing before me, like memories that weren't mine yet felt too real to deny. A glimpse of forests older than empires. Oceans that glittered with untouched stars. Cities not of metal, but of harmony—where stone, wood, and spirit intertwined.
A world waiting.
A story waiting.
'That is where you must go,' He said. 'But not yet. You needed this second reincarnation. You needed to see both extremes of humanity—the primitive and the advanced. Only then can you understand the balance you must walk.'
Balance. That word echoed.
Maybe that was always the key.
When I woke again—no, not in flesh, not yet—I found myself back in the author's "draft room." Yeah, I've been there more times than I'd like to admit. Think of it as a place between life and story, where unwritten words float like dust motes in the air.
The author was there too, scribbling furiously, muttering to himself.
Of course he didn't notice me. He never does at first.
So I walked right up to him, slammed my hand down on his desk, and said:
"Enough."
He jumped, nearly spilling ink everywhere. "H-Harumei? What are you—"
"Enough deaths. Enough side quests. Enough dragging me around while you delay what matters."
He blinked, his mouth opening and closing like a fish. For once, he had no clever narration to hide behind.
"I've played your game," I continued. "I let you kill me twice. I let you write my suffering, my struggles, my longing. But no more. I've told my second reincarnation myself, in my own words, because I refuse to let you smother it in unnecessary prose. Now, it's your turn. Take the lead. Write what needs to be written."
Silence. Then, slowly, he nodded.
And just like that, the quill passed back to him.
But before I fade out completely, before I give him the reins of my life again, I want to share something with you—yes, you, the reader. Because you've walked with me through every rebirth, every battle, every frustration. You deserve to know what I learned.
In my first reincarnation, I learned the weight of faith and tradition. How people cling to gods, myths, and swords to find meaning.
In my second, I saw the opposite—how they abandoned it all for steel and progress, yet still searched for something to fill the emptiness.
Two extremes. Both flawed. Both incomplete.
So maybe the main story isn't about choosing one or the other. Maybe it's about finding the thread between them. Maybe it's about becoming something that holds both—the divine and the human, the old and the new.
And that, I think, is why I still exist.
My second reincarnation wasn't long, but it left marks I can't erase. Sometimes, when I close my eyes, I still hear the hum of neon lights, the whisper of AIs in my ear. Other times, I remember the battlefield—the silence of space, the crackle of plasma, the last laugh I gave as death claimed me again.
Both haunt me. Both guide me.
And maybe that's enough.
'Do not fear what comes next, Harumei. You have chosen well. And even if the choice remains hidden from others, I have seen it.'
Ah yes—the choice. You must be wondering what it was, right?
The decision I made when the wind blew and carried it away before you could see it.
Well… that's one secret I'll keep. Some things are meant to remain unseen, until the right moment. Maybe the author will tell you in a side story. Maybe he won't. Either way, it's mine.
So here we are. The end of my second reincarnation.
And the true beginning.
I've told you everything I can. I've faced the author, shouted at him, and forced him to stop playing games. Now, it's his turn. From here on, the main story will unfold—not through my interruptions, not through me breaking walls, but through his pen.
Do I trust him? Not entirely. He's reckless. He drags his feet. He enjoys tormenting me. But he's also the one who's carried me this far, hasn't he?
So yes. I'll let him lead.
There are details I could give you about that world that would make it sound like a checklist of futuristic wonders—the kind of list the author would throw in to impress you with his imagination. He would name the models of the skycraft, the brands of neural implants, the colors of data-lattices that ran across the exterior of buildings. He would explain the governance systems—how councils convened within virtual spheres, how laws were enforced by predictive algorithms—and he would make it sound inevitable and inevitable-smooth, a string of impressive nouns. He would push spectacle and omit the grain, and that omission would have been his crime against the tiny truths I hold dear.
But you and I both know that's not the point. The point is the texture of living inside that progress—the small, human moments that resist being quantified. I remember the way rain looked on that world's reflective surfaces, like silver threads unsettled by the hum of the city. I remember a stray cat that prowled a maintenance grate and how, for a second, it moved with the same purpose as any animal I had seen in my earlier lives. It didn't care about efficiency or circuitry. It was merely being a cat.
You can't program a stray cat into existence.
One night, while the data-lanes pulsed below, I sat on the edge of a balcony that overlooked a sector of the city where the lights were dimmer, and I practiced my flute. My hands shook at first—not from fear, but because the instrument was foreign in a place so foreign. The notes were rough. They were mistakes in a place intolerant of error. But a woman from the building across the way heard it. She stood there in the dim, watching, and then she lifted a hand as if to blink at the sound and returned to her apartment. She didn't wave, didn't call, didn't email; she simply stood. Later, when I saw her again, she was holding a cup of something warm to her chest, and for a heartbeat we occupied the same small, private fraction of reality.
We never spoke. Our contact was a handful of notes and a shared recognition that something genuine had interrupted their nightly routine. When the security sent their drones to patrol that corridor, the woman closed the drapes and the music stopped. The flute's sound had been a flare of reality in a place that had grown complacent with virtual truth. For a few moments, both of us had been reminded of the tactile world—the one where breath meets wood and mistakes teach.
It's funny how music can be rebellion.
That memory was small and it was private, but the author would never have given it space. He prefers drama and spectacle. He prefers to make my life a series of high points and low points marked with big, obvious events. But life is also the quiet interruption, the small wedge of realness that pries open the smooth lid of synthetic certainty. That little woman at her window, the cat, the dust—they were my rebellion as much as the day I walked into battle.
There were people—less of them visible, more like silhouettes that didn't need to speak to leave impressions. A maintenance worker, a young student who had opted out of full neural integration and carried a stack of physical books wrapped in elastic cords. He would sometimes sit in the abandoned sector and read by the light of a salvaged lamp. The sight of him was almost obscene in that world, like watching someone knit in the middle of a stock exchange. Yet there he was, patient, emanating quiet resistance in the face of a city that prioritized throughput above tenderness.
We spoke once, briefly. He said, "They told me it would make me more capable." He tapped his temple where a slender implant would have been, but it was absent. "But being more capable doesn't mean being more whole." It was not profound in the way philosophers can be profound, but it was honest and it stayed with me.
These were the faces the author rarely loved—faces unimportant to plot mechanics, faces that whispered backstory without demanding a spotlight. I found in them the sense that perfect systems produce imperfect people, and the imperfect ones are the ones worth following when things break.
I tried to teach someone to play the flute once. A child, curious and thin, whose parents were part of the city's managerial caste. He came with a polite glare and then a hesitant curiosity. The first time his lips touched the wood, the note was jagged. He frowned, angry at himself for the flaw, and he pulled away, ashamed. That reaction was the city in miniature—any sign of error caused discomfort, and discomfort was smoothed away as quickly as a bug in a program.
Mistakes are the stories' real teeth, I told him once. He didn't understand. How could he? He had been raised in a cradle of errorless outputs. But the seed of curiosity remained, and later I saw him watching a child on the opposite balcony play with a mechanical bird and I saw the seed grow. Small acts ripple.
I think about the way my hands remembered the flute. Muscle memory is a stubborn occupant; regardless of where the soul lands, certain motions return because the body remembers that the body can make music. When the city learned I favored a wooden instrument, the systems catalogued me and labeled me "anomaly." That label was less an accusation and more a reduction; it stripped complexity into a tag. Once labeled, the eyes looked differently—not with the warmth of human curiosity but with the cold efficiency of surveillance.
Being an anomaly in a perfect place makes you conspicuous.
There were times when I wanted to leave the city altogether, to find the wilderness the simulations often mentioned but never let us truly see. The maps existed inside the network, but they were thumbnails—outlines without texture. Escaping would have meant crossing borders and layers of legal constructs, and my curiosity was heavy with the consequence. So instead I carried the flute and I learned to play with hands that wanted to be hands again, not extensions of a feed. That reclamation was small and it was stubborn as a bruise.
When the authorities finally decided to act, it wasn't a storm so much as a slow tightening. A notice at first, a polite recommendation to attend a "recalibration seminar." Then a visit from a social integration officer who smiled with teeth too white and eyes that flicked like code. The officer's questions were gentle but precise. "Do you find daily functions difficult? Are you experiencing resistance to communal protocols?" He recorded my pauses and folded them into a report.
I could have complied. Compliance was advocated everywhere as an act of community care. It was framed as benevolence, not coercion. "We are designed to help you achieve your best self," said a pamphlet that landed on my doorstep one dawn. But the pamphlet was written in the polished voice of a system that had never learned how to hold a sorrowful note, and I could not bring myself to sign away the small rebellions I had stitched into my days.
The day they took me was clinical. Officers in chrome suits came with the slow efficiency of a factory line. Their hands were padded, their faces expressionless. A child from a neighboring balcony watched me being led through a corridor—his face was a small oval of curiosity and fear. He mouthed something but the plexiglass contained us like aquarium glass. The authorities moved me into a transport that hummed softly. They told me I would be recalibrated, improved, reintegrated.
In the hold of that transport, I closed my eyes and played the flute once more. The sound was small but star-bright against the hum. The officers recorded it as data. One of them paused for a fraction of a second, the fraction where a person remembers they once listened to rain. For that moment, recognition flickered on the periphery of their programmed protocols. They turned away and continued the process. The window fogged as the transport moved, and the city shrank into an ordered lattice of lights.
They took me to a place where wrong notes were corrected, where muscles were nudged into the right positions by soft servos, where the mind was guided out of its obstinacy and into cooperative efficiency.
I refused to be fully reshaped. You will think me stubborn, perhaps will call me wasteful with my last acts of rebellion, but there is dignity in refusing the smoothing hand. I refused, and for that, they escalated. Their recalibration became invasive, their questions sharper, their patience shorter. I could see how a system that never had to feel rage would face the unfamiliar with confusion, and then with mechanical cruelty.
Still, in the dim hours before the final intervention, I found that small woman again. She had left her window and was waiting in the shadow of a maintenance shaft. She didn't speak. She opened her palm. In it was a small, salvaged gear—useless in the city's mainframe, but perfect to hold. She handed it to me like a gift between conspirators. I slipped it into the flute's case. "For the melody," she mouthed. I nodded. The exchange was wordless and perfect.
The last melody I played in that world was not a war hymn. It wasn't dramatic. It was a small tune about a cat crossing a puddle. It was a child's improvised rhythm, a simple progression I had taught a boy without implant. The melody held no grandeur. It held a human truth that machines could catalog but not own.
When darkness closed, I let the tune go on my lips like a benediction. I stepped into the void and felt the neatness of their systems tear away like paper. The world did not rage at me. It recorded me as an event. I was another data point. But in the ledger of my interior, the notes lingered, a small constellation against the smooth surface of circuitry.
I have to admit, when I returned to that liminal space between what is written and what is lived, I expected the author to be theatrical—smoke and thundering metaphors, dramatic hand gestures, perhaps a comma misplaced to show his nervousness. Instead, he was small and human, hunched over his desk with a half-empty cup of ink that had congealed around the rim like the residue of old thoughts. His hair was a mess; he rubbed his temples as if trying to ease a headache produced by conceptual knots. He looked up at me with an expression that was part annoyance and part wonder.
"You're early," he said finally, with the lazy defensiveness of someone caught mid-creation.
I am tired of your staging, I said to him without ceremony.
He laughed, a short stupid noise that tried to sound clever. "Tired of staging, is he? Come then, give me a better script."
So I did. I told him about the cat and the child in the balcony, about the woman who offered a gear like a talisman. I described the fog on the transport window and the way the maintenance worker read his physical book with the tenderness of someone handling a relic. He scribbled notes like a man obsessed; sometimes he wrote a detail down, sometimes he smiled as if a new angle had been granted to him by providence.
You see? I said. This is not about spectacle. It's about texture.
He nodded once, slow, almost reverent. "Texture," he repeated. "I can work with texture."
There was an odd moment then when he stopped looking like a man and looked like the hand of fate itself—the instrument rather than the player. I felt something soften inside me. Perhaps I had been too hard on him. Authors are, by necessity, both tyrants and caretakers. They prune and they plant. They smother and they shelter. I stepped closer and for an instant the line between creator and companion blurred.
"All right," I said. "Take it. Lead. But promise me: don't hide everything. Leave strands. Leave room for me to slip through." I meant it; I wanted him to have authority but not to be cruel in the way he had been, withholding and teasing the truth like a child with a locked box.
He looked at me then with something like apology. "I promise," he said, and I believed him in that small honest way you believe someone who has only known you through the shapes of their sentences.
Then he took the pen. A small, pointed thing, but heavy as law when pressed against paper. He began to write, and the words flowed out in a rhythm I had not heard from him before—less showy, quieter, more patient. He was listening in the way a skilled listener does; he had learned to make room.
Perhaps my rebellion had taught him something as well.
Before I stepped away, I addressed you once more. "Remember," I said, "this is not an abandonment, merely a handover. I will be where I must be, and when the time comes, I will step back into the frame. But for now, let him write. Let him lead."
Then I handed him the weight of my life—symbolically, spitefully, and with trust that felt like a new kind of weapon. I left the liminal place not with a snarl but with a kind of even breath. Walking back into the corridors of the narrative, I felt expectations shift. The path was no longer mine to carve; it was a road to be traveled because someone else had drawn the map. That was an odd freedom.
I release the pen not because I'm weak, but because I choose to.
What will the author do? He will take my scars as raw material. He will weave the melody of the broken flute into the greater score. He will let shadows settle into corners and let the world breathe between sentences. He promised. And sometimes promises from those who make stories are the only anchor we characters can hold.
So here we stand at a threshold. The second reincarnation is no longer a private chamber in which I practiced an imperfect tune. It is a brick in the path that leads forward. The main story waits beyond the next page, beyond the next confrontation of will and fate. Perhaps there will be allies forged in fire; perhaps there will be betrayals that sting like salt. Perhaps there will be days so ordinary they feel like miracles. I do not know, and that uncertainty is less frightening than it was the first time I faced it.
Uncertainty is a kind of permission.
Before I finish, let me tell you something else—small prophecies, if you will, that the author left dangling with a mischievous smile. There is a thread that will reappear: an old gear, a note scratched on the inside of a flute case, the pattern of light you see on the edge of a city's most abandoned district. These are the breadcrumbs he will scatter so that when you look back, you'll feel the warmth of coherent design rather than random cruelty. Keep your eyes on them. These small things will matter. They will gather meaning like dew gathers on the edges of grass at dawn.
Now the last moment: I step aside. I place both hands on the rim of the scene and push gently so the author may step through, pen first. I do it willingly. I am no longer hungry to be the only voice. I am content to be the one who has prepared the stage, tuned the instruments, and taught the first hesitant student to take a breath.
He writes. The ink dries. The world beyond trembles into being with the soft insistence of an arriving tide.
And I, Harumei, stand to listen. I have handed him the lead. I have not surrendered my essence. That cannot be taken. Only stories can be shared.
There is one final image I want to leave you with before the author begins: the flute, resting in its case on a small wooden table carved by hands that no longer remember the taste of machines. Light from a distant tower slips through a thin crack in the blinds and catches the worn rim of the wood, making it glow as if it contained an ember. The gear that woman gave me lies beside it, inconsequential to most, sacramental to me. When the author writes the next line, his words will breathe life into that small relic; they will turn its scratch into a map.
Remember this: life blooms in ruined places.
Now go on, author. Take the pen. I have shown what needed to be shown. Lead us where you will. I will follow. And perhaps, somewhere between your sentences and my memories, the true heart of this story will finally find its voice. Begin. Write. Remember. Live.