Author's Note:The rice scene is coming. Watch what it transforms into FIRST. That order matters. Also—count how many seconds Ayumi's mother takes to react. That number shows up again in Chapter 47.
POV: Ayumi Sakamoto
Word Count: ~1,850
The apartment smelled like old coffee and unwashed laundry when Ayumi opened the door.
Her mother was exactly where she'd expected—on the couch in her bathrobe, still watching some mindless reality show even though it was after 2 PM on a Saturday. The curtains were drawn, keeping the apartment dim and slightly depressing, dust particles floating in the thin streams of light that managed to slip through the gaps.
"Hi Mom," Ayumi said, setting her bag down carefully by the door. "Have you eaten today?"
"Hmm?" Her mother didn't look away from the TV, where people were screaming at each other about something trivial. "Oh, yes. I had toast this morning."
"That was breakfast. It's afternoon now." Ayumi kept her voice patient, gentle, even though frustration prickled under her skin. "Let me make you some lunch."
"I'm not very hungry, sweetie. But thank you."
Ayumi went to the kitchen anyway.
The familiar weight settled onto her shoulders like a physical thing—heavy, constant, exhausting. This was her role. Her responsibility. Taking care of things because no one else would. Making sure her mother ate, making sure bills got paid on time, making sure the apartment didn't completely fall apart into the kind of disaster that would make people ask questions.
If she could just maintain control here, everything would be fine.
She pulled out ingredients on autopilot. Rice from yesterday that she could reheat. Miso soup mix. Pickled vegetables from the jar in the fridge that was probably a week past optimal freshness but still edible. Simple but nutritious. The kind of meal that would get her mother to eat something even when depression made the act of eating feel pointless.
As she worked, scooping rice into a bowl, her mind kept returning to Takeshi's words.
Your ability will manifest based on your subconscious, your core psychological truth. Whatever you are beneath the surface—the real you, not the version you show the world—that's what the essence will pull from.
What was her truth?
That she was terrified of becoming like her mother—depressed, unable to function, a burden instead of a help? That she'd built her entire personality around being the opposite—perfect, organized, self-sufficient to the point of complete exhaustion?
That underneath all the careful control and color-coded systems and pleasant masks, she was just a scared seventeen-year-old girl who wanted someone to take care of her for once, but was too terrified to ask because asking meant admitting she wasn't perfect, and imperfection meant people might leave the way her father had left?
Ayumi's hands tightened on the rice paddle until her knuckles went white.
And then the rice started to change.
It happened so fast she almost didn't register it. One second she was looking at normal white rice in the bowl, grains clumped together from being refrigerated overnight. The next second, her reflection was staring back at her from the surface.
Not like in a mirror.
The rice had physically transformed into an exact replica of her face.
Perfect detail. Individual strands of hair sculpted in white grains. The exact shade of her eyes somehow visible despite being made of rice. The small scar on her chin from when she'd fallen off her bike at age seven, rendered in miniature with impossible precision.
Her own face, staring up at her from a bowl, frozen in an expression of pure terror.
Ayumi dropped the paddle.
The ceramic clattered against the counter, loud in the quiet kitchen, and Ayumi stumbled backward until her spine hit the refrigerator hard enough to rattle the condiment bottles inside.
Her heart was pounding so hard it hurt. Her breathing came in short gasps that didn't seem to bring enough oxygen. The edges of her vision were starting to blur and darken.
"No," she whispered. "No, no, no, this isn't—this can't be—"
The rice-face maintained its shape for exactly three seconds.
Perfect.
Impossible.
Terrifying.
Then it collapsed back into normal grains like it had never been anything else, like physics had simply decided to stop playing along with the impossible.
Ayumi looked at her hands.
They were glowing.
Soft golden light pulsed beneath her skin, radiating outward from her palms in waves that matched her racing heartbeat. As she watched, frozen in horror and fascination, the glow intensified and spread up her wrists, crawling up her forearms like liquid sunlight.
She could feel it now.
A presence. Something waking up inside her that had been sleeping her entire life, stirring in the depths of her subconscious and rising to the surface like a creature from deep water.
The fragment.
The essence.
Whatever Takeshi had called it.
It was real.
Oh god, it was real, and it was inside her, and she couldn't control it, couldn't stop it, couldn't—
Ayumi's vision started to blur at the edges, the kitchen suddenly too small, walls closing in like they were trying to crush her. She couldn't breathe properly, couldn't think past the roaring panic in her head that screamed this was wrong, impossible, not happening—
Her phone.
Where was her phone?
She lunged for her purse with hands that wouldn't stop shaking, nearly dropping it, fumbling with the zipper because her fingers wouldn't cooperate and the golden glow was making everything harder to grip. Found her phone. Tried to unlock it.
First attempt failed—hands shaking too badly.
Second attempt failed—the glow was interfering with the touchscreen somehow.
Third attempt—finally, the lock screen opened.
Takeshi's number was right there in her recent contacts. She'd added it from the business card without even consciously making the decision, some part of her already knowing, already accepting that this was going to happen.
She hit call.
He answered on the second ring, voice immediately calm and alert like he'd been waiting for this exact call.
"Ayumi?"
"It's happening," she gasped, words tumbling over each other in her panic. "The glow, the—my hands are glowing and the rice turned into my face and I can't—I don't know what to—Takeshi, I can't control it, I don't understand what's—"
"Okay. Listen to me carefully." His voice cut through her panic like a lifeline, steady and grounding. "Where are you right now?"
"Home. Kitchen. My mom is—" Ayumi glanced desperately toward the living room, but her mother was still absorbed in her reality show, completely oblivious to her daughter's breakdown happening three meters away. "—she doesn't know, she can't see me like this, please, I can't let her—"
"I need your address. I'm coming to you right now. Can you tell me your address?"
Ayumi rattled it off, barely recognizing her own voice. The golden glow was getting brighter, spreading across her whole body now, and she could feel the essence responding to her panic, trying to manifest something but she didn't know what, didn't understand how to control or direct or stop it—
"I'm five minutes away," Takeshi said, and she could hear movement on his end—footsteps, rapid and purposeful, a door opening, street noise flooding in. "Maybe less if I run. Just stay calm, okay? I know that sounds impossible right now, but the glow won't hurt you. It's just your body adjusting to the essence, learning to channel it. You're not in danger."
"What if I hurt someone?" Ayumi's voice cracked. "What if I hurt my mom, what if I can't control it and something happens and—"
"You won't. First manifestations are almost always defensive, not offensive. Your subconscious is trying to protect you, not attack anyone. It's responding to your fear by trying to create safety." Takeshi's breathing was slightly elevated from running now, but his voice stayed calm. "Just stay in the kitchen, keep breathing, and I'll be there as fast as I can. I'm not hanging up. I'm right here with you."
The call stayed connected.
Ayumi pressed the phone to her ear with one glowing hand and focused on the sound of Takeshi's footsteps, his breathing, the ambient noise of Tokyo streets—cars passing, people talking, a bicycle bell ringing—all of it proof that he was really coming, really going to help her, that she wasn't completely alone in this impossible nightmare.
Three minutes, maybe less.
The glow started to pulse in time with her heartbeat, and Ayumi watched in horrified fascination as her skin began to ripple.
Like the surface of water disturbed by a stone, her appearance was shifting. Features blurring and reforming into something else, someone else, faces she knew cycling across her hands like a slideshow she couldn't control.
For just one second—so brief she almost missed it—she saw her mother's face looking back at her from her own hands.
Older. Tired. Depressed. Everything Ayumi feared becoming.
Then it shifted again, and she saw her father.
The face she hadn't seen in person for five years, preserved only in photographs and fading memories that got less clear every year. Younger than he'd be now. Frozen in time at the moment he'd walked away.
Then Mina from school.
Then her homeroom teacher.
Then neighbors, classmates, the woman who ran the convenience store down the street, people she'd passed on the sidewalk without really seeing—
Faces cycling through faster and faster, her body trying to become everyone and no one, lost in a cascade of transformations she couldn't direct or stop or understand.
"What's happening to me?" she whispered into the phone, voice breaking.
"Describe it." Takeshi's voice was steady, grounding even through her panic. "Tell me what you're seeing."
"My skin—it's changing. Different faces, different people. Like I'm transforming into everyone I've ever seen." Ayumi's breath hitched as her reflection in the refrigerator showed her wearing a stranger's face, then her own again, then someone else's. "I can't make it stop, Takeshi. I can't—"
"That's your ability manifesting. Transformation. Just let it cycle until I get there. Don't fight it—fighting makes it worse. I'm almost there, Ayumi. Thirty seconds."
So Ayumi stood in her kitchen, phone pressed to her ear with a hand that kept shifting between her own and others', and watched her body cycle through different appearances while her mother sat fifteen feet away completely oblivious to the supernatural transformation happening to her daughter.
When someone knocked on the apartment door exactly twenty-three seconds later—because of course Takeshi was precise even while running—Ayumi had never been so relieved to hear that sound in her entire life.
She rushed to the door, still glowing, still transforming, her reflection in the hallway mirror showing three different faces in the space of two seconds.
Yanked it open.
Takeshi stood there, barely out of breath despite having sprinted however many blocks. And behind him—
Two other people.
The silver-haired boy she vaguely recognized from school hallways. Akira something. Always quiet, always in the background, ghost-like.
And Kaito Endo.
Of course.
Of course it was Kaito Endo standing in her doorway, staring at her with those calculating dark eyes that had watched her humiliation two days ago with satisfaction, now watching her fall apart with an expression she couldn't read.
The universe, apparently, had a terrible sense of humor.
Ayumi's golden glow exploded outward in response to the surge of emotions—panic and embarrassment and rage all tangled together like live wires touching—and she felt her transformation accelerate, features cycling so fast now they were just a blur, her body trying to be everyone at once and failing spectacularly.
"You," she managed to say, and her voice was doing something strange, echoing slightly like multiple people speaking at once. "You're the—he's the—"
From the living room, her mother's voice drifted out, casual and oblivious:
"Ayumi? Who's at the door, sweetie?"
[To be continued in Chapter 5...]
Author's closing note:Three faces appeared first. Mother, father, then Mina. Pattern recognition time—what do those three have in common that nobody else does? Drop your theories. Also, notice Takeshi's exact arrival time vs what he said. Numbers matter in this story.
Next update: [1/20/2026 GMT+8:00 18:30]
Collections: [9]
Power stones: [1]
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