Chapter 1 – The Awakening
The first thing I remember is silence. Not peaceful silence, but the suffocating kind—the sort that presses against your ears until you think your skull might crack. My eyes snapped open to darkness, yet my chest burned as if I'd been holding my breath for centuries.
When I gasped, the world responded. My lungs filled with air, thick and damp, and I clawed at the soil above me until my fingers broke through. Dirt crumbled around me as I dragged myself upward, until the night sky bled into my vision—silver with moonlight, framed by crooked branches.
I was alive again.
But I wasn't me.
When I stared down at my hands, they weren't my own. Pale, almost translucent under the moonlight, veins crawling with something darker than blood. My nails, sharp as if carved by blades. I flexed them, and the ground trembled. My body screamed of something ancient and monstrous.
Memories of my past life came in fragments—pain, endings, betrayal. Then another memory, alien and terrifying, surfaced: the cursed wheel. The Eight-Handed Sword Divergent Sila Divine General Mahoraga. A Shikigami that no sorcerer had ever truly controlled.
Somehow, it was inside me. Or worse, I was inside it.
The weight of adaptation pressed against my very bones. My muscles twisted, adjusting to the air, the cold, the faint pulse of something unnatural in the forest surrounding me. Every second, my body learned. The way a predator does. The way Mahoraga always had.
I stumbled forward, barely keeping balance, until a shadow caught my eye.
A girl stood at the edge of the treeline. Black hair in twin braids. A dress as dark as the midnight sky. Her eyes, unblinking, studied me with unsettling curiosity.
Wednesday Addams.
Her gaze wasn't frightened—if anything, it was intrigued. She tilted her head, as if I were nothing more than a strange insect pinned beneath glass.
"You crawled out of the ground," she said flatly. "Most people wait until they're dead before they're buried."
Her words cut sharper than the night air. My throat was too dry to answer, but she didn't seem to expect one. Instead, her eyes drifted to the dirt-streaked wounds on my arms, already closing, flesh knitting back together at impossible speed.
Her lips twitched. Not a smile—something darker.
"You don't belong here."
The truth of it struck me harder than the night wind. I didn't belong in this world, in this body, with this cursed power gnawing at my insides. And yet, I was here. Reborn in a place that would either break me or sharpen me into something worse.
I could feel it already—Mahoraga's wheel turning inside me, grinding against reality, whispering one promise:
Adapt. Survive. Evolve.
And in Wednesday's cold, fascinated eyes, I saw a reflection of myself—reborn into a nightmare that wasn't hers, or mine, but something in between.
The story of my second life had begun.