Let's get one thing straight: isekai is a lie.
It's not about getting hit by a truck and waking up to a blue screen with a busty elf offering you a quest. Nah. For me, it was way lamer. I just went to sleep in my decent-but-slightly-lumpy 2024 bed and woke up in my childhood bedroom, which smelled like stale pizza and existential dread. Again.
My name is Yakuto. Or at least, it was. Now, it's still Yakuto. Same face, same dumb mole on my left elbow, same crippling inability to talk to girls without mentally composing my apology in advance. The only thing that changed was the calendar on my wall, which was screaming at me that it was 2015.
Let me break that down for you. In 2015, people were still unironically using the word "on fleek." Vine was barely clinging to life. We thought the worst thing that could happen was a dress being blue or white. The collective trauma of a global pandemic was just a twinkle in a bat's eye. It was a simpler time. A stupider time. A way, way more boring time.
At first, I thought I'd just had a really, really detailed stress dream about the future. You know, the kind where you're late for an exam you didn't study for, but instead of an exam, it's your entire adult life? But then I checked my phone. No TikTok. No YouTube Shorts. Just… Musical.ly. I opened it, saw a kid lip-syncing to "Watch Me (Whip/Nae Nae)" with a filter that gave him cartoon dog ears, and I closed the app so fast I nearly threw my phone across the room. My soul left my body for a solid minute.
The real kicker, the thing that confirmed this wasn't a dream but a full-blown cosmic prank, was the cultural void. The happy pills of my previous life—the epic, world-building, soul-stirring manga and anime—were just gone. Poof. Vanished from existence.
I scrolled through manga sites, my heart pounding like it was trying to escape my ribcage. No One Piece. No Straw Hats dreaming of becoming the Pirate King. No Naruto. No knucklehead ninja screaming about his bonds and ramen. No Bleach. No Ichigo with a sword bigger than his emotional baggage. No Attack on Titan. No Jujutsu Kaisen. No Chainsaw Man.
It was a desolate wasteland.
What did they have instead? isekai. "Got Reincarnated as a Moss on a Castle Wall" "The Day I Became a Village's Only" Outhole" "My Life as a Sentient Turnip: Farming Simulator Isekai"
I wish I was joking.
I tried reading them. I really did. Thought maybe I was missing something. But by chapter three of Reincarnated as the Hero's Left Shoe, I wanted to tear my eyes out. The cringe was physical. My soul was trying to flee my body.
So yeah. Living here for a year has been… what's the word? Oh right. Fuck-ass boring.This universe had a taste for the profoundly, mind-numbingly mundane.
I also read the other one where the protagonist was reincarnated as a single blade of grass in a medieval field and the entire plot was him trying to avoid being eaten by a cow. It had a 4.8-star rating. I felt my brain cells committing seppuku one by one.
Living here for a year was, in the most academic terms, fuck-ass boring. It was like being forced to watch a 24/7 livestream of paint drying, but the paint is beige and occasionally someone narrates the drying process in a monotone voice.
I tried. I really did. I thought, "Fine. If you want isekai, I'll give you isekai. I'll give you the god-tier stuff from my world." I sat down with a notebook, my determination at an all-time high. I was going to recreate One Piece.
I got as far as "Chapter 1: Romance Dawn." I drew a pretty decent Luffy. Then I tried to remember… what was the name of the first pirate he punched? What did the Going Merry look like again? What was the exact order of the East Blue arcs? Was it Buggy, then Kuro, then Don Krieg, then Arlong? Or did Mihawk show up before Arlong? My mind was a blur of iconic moments, but the minute, plot-essential details were like trying to grab smoke. I had the memory of a goldfish that had been hit on the head one too many times.
After a week of producing three poorly sketched pages and a stress-induced caffeine addiction, I gave up. My grand plan to become the cultural savior of this pathetic timeline died a swift and pathetic death.
So, what does a guy with the knowledge of future memes and the artistic talent of… well, me, do? He grinds. And my grind was drawing.
Because, oh yeah, when I got yeeted into this timeline, there was a brief, glorious moment of "System Arrival." A blue screen popped up in front of my eyes, just like in the trash isekai I despised. It didn't say much. No welcome, no quest, no explanation. Just:
Ding!
Host has received the skill: [Godtier Drawing Skill].
The System will now depart. Good luck.
And then it vanished. No follow-up. No customer support. It was the most underwhelming cosmic handout ever. Like getting a legendary, one-of-a-kind sword, but it's made of plastic and the handle is sticky.
Still, a gift horse and all that. The skill was no joke. My hands could now translate the images in my head onto paper with terrifying accuracy and speed. I could draw in any style—hyper-realistic, classic shonen, chibi, you name it. It was the one cool thing in this entire situation.
So, I became a TikTok artist. Well, it wasn't TikTok yet, it was still that cringe-fest Musical.ly, but soon enough, the platform rebranded, and I was there, ready to exploit the algorithm.
My content was simple: speed paints. I'd set up my phone, play some lo-fi beats that didn't slap but were "aesthetic," and draw whatever popped into my head. Sometimes it was a hyper-realistic drawing of a French fry crying. Sometimes it was a chibi version of a historical figure, like a pouting Napoleon. Once, I drew Shrek as a celestial being, bathed in holy light. It went mildly viral. The comments were a mix of "OMG TALENT" and "why?" and "this is so random lol."
It paid the bills. Well, it paid for my pizza and energy drinks. It was a living, if you could call this half-life "living." I was just going through the motions, a ghost of a cooler future haunting the cringe-filled past, waiting for something, anything, to happen.
And then, as I was finishing a drawing of a raccoon wearing a tiny crown and judging a slice of pizza (don't ask), it happened.
Ding!
The sound was so crisp, so clear, it cut through the lo-fi music directly into my eardrums. A familiar blue screen materialized in the air in front of me, pixels shimmering like a mirage.
My heart did a backflip. "No way," I whispered. "You've got to be kidding me. A year later? What, did you get lost in the cosmic mailroom?"
The screen glowed, text scrolling into view.
Ding!
Host has received the skill: [Photographic Memory].
The System will now depart. Good luck.
Yakuto: "..."
I just stared. The screen fizzled out of existence, just like last time. No fanfare. No explanation.
This was… suspicious. This was literally not a coincidence. This was the universe—or the System, or whatever—seeing me struggling to remember the recipe for instant ramen, let alone the entire plot of Naruto, and dropping the exact cheat code I needed into my lap. It was like it was reading my freaking browser history. It knew. It knew I'd tried and failed. It knew my one biggest obstacle was my forgetful brain, which could remember the entire Bee Movie script but not the name of Luffy's grandfather.
As the System vanished, the change was immediate and overwhelming. It wasn't like a light switch; it was like someone had power-washed the grime off my brain. Memories I didn't even know I had rushed to the surface, crisp and clear and perfectly indexed.
I could remember the entire periodic table. I could visualize every page of my high school physics textbook. The complex quadratic equations I'd purged from my mind after graduation were now sitting there, neat and tidy. I could suddenly understand snippets of languages I'd only ever heard in movies—the specific swear words in Korean dramas, the greetings from that one Italian film I saw once.
But that wasn't what made my hands shake. That wasn't what made a slow, manic grin spread across my face.
What excited me, what truly set my soul on fire, were the other memories. The important ones.
I could see it. Every. Single. Panel.
I could see the first chapter of One Piece, the stretchy boy grinning as he prepared to set sail. I could recall the exact shade of orange of Luffy's vest. I could remember the dialogue bubbles, the sound effects, the page layout. I could mentally flip through the volumes, chapter by chapter, arc by arc.
I could feel the weight of Naruto's Rasengan, see the intricate hand signs for a Chidori. I could hear Ichigo's Bankai command, visualize the black Getsuga Tenshou ripping through the air. I could remember the 3D Maneuver Gear diagrams from Attack on Titan, the complex Cursed Technique rules from Jujutsu Kaisen, the sheer chaotic paneling of Chainsaw Man.
It was all there. A library of masterpieces, perfectly preserved in the high-definition gallery of my mind.
The System hadn't just given me a memory boost. It had given me a key. It had handed me the cultural nuclear codes.
I looked down at my half-finished drawing of the judgmental raccoon. I slowly saved the file, closed the app, and opened a new, blank document. The white screen glowed with infinite potential.
"No more cringe," I whispered to myself, my voice cracking with a mix of sleep deprivation and sheer, unadulterated ambition. "No more sentient vending machines. No more latrine protagonists."
I cracked my knuckles, a glint in my eyes that hadn't been there since I first arrived in this cultural wasteland.
"It's time to show these people what a real masterpiece looks like."