Pressure.
Too much pressure. Crushing. Twisting. My tiny frame was being mangled by forces I couldn't comprehend. Everything that had once been soft and warm and still was now chaos and force and movement. The fluid that had wrapped around me like a quiet cocoon was retreating, forced out by invisible waves. My entire body was being pushed, squeezed, compressed into something that barely felt like existence anymore.
Oh god. I'm being born. I'm actually being BORN.
Which, as it turns out, wasn't some magical, sacred gateway to a new life. It was raw, biological warfare. Being shoved through a squirming tunnel of muscle and heat, every inch of me screaming in protest. Limbs bent. Skull compressed. Every nerve ending sparking like a faulty cable. I couldn't breathe, couldn't orient myself, couldn't even think properly.
No wonder babies come out crying.
I emerged into cold. And noise. And dryness.
The moment I hit air, I knew instinctively—I hated it. Everything was too much. My lungs tried to fill, and all I got was fire. Cold oxygen scorched through virgin tissue. My throat responded before I had time to even think about it. I screamed.
Not the cute baby kind. A full-body, guttural, existential crisis kind of scream. The kind you let out when you realize you're no longer in the void, no longer warm or protected, but cast headfirst into a sensory explosion.
Hands touched me. I was turned, hoisted, wrapped, then smacked. They slapped me?! Oh, we are not off to a good start.
The worst part came a moment later.
My eyes opened.
It wasn't voluntary. Reflex, maybe. Biology doing a system check. But the result?
Total disaster.
There was light. Harsh, blinding light. And people. Or shapes, really—blurred and swaying. At first, I thought my eyes weren't working. Then everything sharpened—violently sharpened. It was like someone cranked the focus too far. Everything turned hyperreal.
Then came the real problem.
It wasn't just sight. It was perception. I wasn't just seeing people. I was seeing through them. Skeletons, muscle fibers, strange glowing pathways inside their bodies—every layer, every twitch, every pulsing node of energy. Like x-ray and thermal and something else entirely, all crammed into one poor newborn brain.
I had no idea what I was looking at. None of it made sense. It didn't look like any human anatomy I remembered, and the glowing lines made everything worse. My brain tried to categorize it, to make it logical—but it failed. Hard.
And it just kept getting worse.
The details wouldn't stop coming. Everything I saw carried movement, rhythm, variation. Pulses of energy, flows that shifted when people moved or breathed or even looked in different directions. Like watching living puppets made of nerves and light, constantly changing under my gaze.
It didn't help that my field of view seemed... wrong. Wide. Too wide. I couldn't focus on a single direction—my brain was being bombarded from every angle. Left, right, behind, above—I had no control over the flood of data pouring in from all directions.
It wasn't vision anymore. It was violation.
And then came the sound.
Voices slammed into me. A wall of noise. Not words—screams. Garbled and raw. Emotional. Terrifying. My ears were just hurting. The sounds were sharp, invasive, echoing off the inside of my skull like someone had turned up the volume on a broken speaker system. I couldn't make out anything they were saying—just a chaotic storm of overlapping tones. I knew they were people, I felt their presence, but the noise? It was pure, incomprehensible static.
A woman sobbing. A man barking commands. Someone gasping. A nervous chuckle. A loud exclamation that.
I wanted it to stop. All of it. I didn't want this body, this noise, this chaos. I wanted the darkness back.
But there was no going back.
My body shook with every heartbeat, overwhelmed by stimulation. It felt like I was vibrating on a frequency too high for this world. My skin itched, my mouth was dry, and yet everything around me was wet. The sweat, the blood, the tears—mine or someone else's—I couldn't tell. All of it merged into a sea of discomfort.
The people holding me were clearly reacting, but I couldn't make sense of their expressions. Too many layers. Too many pulses. One of them brought me closer—my mother? The rhythm of her heartbeat was louder, stronger. Familiar, somehow. Comforting and terrifying all at once.
My eyes stung. The pain behind them radiated across my skull. I whimpered. My breathing hitched. Whatever was happening with my vision—it was draining me. Fast.
My tiny chakra pool—if that's what this energy was—was being consumed. And the moment it began to run dry, so did I.
My limbs stopped twitching. My vision flickered. The glowing pathways dimmed. The world blurred. The shapes of people became just that—shapes. Shadows. The light behind them flickered out like a dying candle.
Then darkness began to reclaim me, not with terror, but with mercy.
I felt my body slump into someone's arms. Maybe my mother. Maybe a nurse. I couldn't tell. All I could feel was the warm cloth on my skin, the faint tremble in the hands holding me, and the fading roar of life around me. The overload was retreating.
The cold wasn't so bad now. The voices were farther away. The weight of perception was lifting. I could feel the rhythm of a heartbeat again. Slow, steady. My body, exhausted and overstimulated, accepted the rhythm like a lullaby.
Thoughts dulled. Sensation dimmed. I gave in.
Finally.
The last thing I remember before losing consciousness was the thought:
This better get better. Or I swear to all gods, I'm staying asleep.