I can't pinpoint the exact moment it began.
It seeped into the edges of my consciousness like a slow, cold drip through cracked stone.
I started hearing… a voice.
Not in the room, not in the waking world, but in the fractured, desperate landscape of my dreams.
The voice of a young girl, distant and muffled, as if calling from the bottom of a deep, dark well.
She was trying to reach out, her presence straining against some invisible barrier, pushing into the deepest, most isolated parts of my world—or perhaps, she was trying to pull me into hers.
A part of me, a part I didn't recognize and couldn't rationalize, wanted to respond.
In the hazy logic of the dream, I would see a faint, shimmering silhouette—small, pleading, her hand outstretched.
An instinct older than thought would surge up: Reach back.
Grasp her hand. Pull her close. Let her whispers solidify into words you can understand.
I wanted to talk to her. To listen. To finally hear the secret she was so desperately trying to impart.
This longing would hit me most fiercely during the hollow, midnight hours, as I sat hunched in the ghostly blue light of my mother's phone, my small fingers trembling with a desperate, furious intensity.
I was trying to bypass her locks, to scour her messages and contacts for any digital breadcrumb that might lead me back to the phantom, to our father.
The two impulses—the irrational pull toward the spectral girl and the cold, logical drive for vengeance—twisted together in my mind, a dissonant chorus.
Yeah, I know how it sounds. I'm probably going insane.
How could there be voices in the distant corners of my dreams?
A logical, scientific mind, which I once prided myself on possessing, would diagnose this as a textbook psychotic break.
The trauma of witnessing my mother's murder, the pressure of this infantile body, the crushing weight of my secret purpose—it had all fractured my psyche.
This voice was merely a symptom, my mind constructing a companion in the abyss to stave off a terminal, suffocating depression.
But I am not someone who gives up.
Surrender is a language my soul has never learned.
My past life was that of a doctor.
To be a doctor, you don't just need to be smart.
You need to be mad smart. You need to devour libraries, to hold volumes of knowledge in your mind not as trivia, but as a living, breathing arsenal against death.
You need to understand systems, biology, chemistry, psychology—and you need the courage to look beyond the approved manuals when those manuals fail. I had always believed that.
I saw too many of my colleagues become prisoners of their institutions, shackled by protocols and liability fears, watching patients decline because 'the rules' offered no solution.
I was different. I put the patient above all else. Above hospital policy. Above the scowls of administrators. Above my own career, my own reputation, my own safety.
That philosophy, that relentless commitment to saving a life by any means necessary, was what defined a true healer.
The purpose was not a paycheck, not a prestigious title, not the protection of a venerable institution. The purpose was the fragile breath in the body before you. That purpose was sacred.
It was that conviction that ultimately destroyed my first career. An unorthodox procedure. A gamble with a treatment far outside the established canon.
I saved a life, but I shattered the rules. The institution that once bore my name cast me out and exiled me to a smaller town and a smaller hospital, with a smaller paycheck and an unknown future.
Yet, even in the ruin, I never regretted the choice.
I believed in the principle to my last, bloody breath on that rain-soaked street: a doctor's job is to save people.
Full stop.
And it was this very principle—this refusal to be shackled, this willingness to venture into the unknown for a chance at salvation—that led me to extend my knowledge into realms science dismissed.
Into the mystique.
When medicine reached its limit, I began to research everything.
Folklore. Historical anomalies. Case studies of so-called 'miraculous' remissions that defied diagnosis.
The eerie, the unexplained, the esoteric.
If there was a chance, even a whisper of one, that a forgotten ritual or a misunderstood energy could re-knit a failing heart or purge a ravaging cancer, I felt obligated to know.
To understand.
I became a scholar of the impossible.
And now, trapped in this second, nightmare life, with the voice of a ghost-girl in my head and the blood of my mother on my hands, that same relentlessness is what remains.
The tools are different. The patient is no longer a stranger on a gurney, but my own shattered future. The disease is a hidden father and a lurking threat.
But the oath is the same: By any means necessary.
The voice in my dream, whether madness or miracle, is now part of the diagnostic picture.
And I will not stop listening.
And I came to believe, with a certainty that went beyond faith and bordered on grim acceptance, that those gods and mysteries do exist.
They linger at the edges of our reality, vast and indifferent, operating on a frequency the mortal world is fundamentally deaf to.
But here is the cruel, or perhaps merely logical, twist: they are not just beyond our reach.
They seem to be beyond their own reach when it comes to direct intervention in our world.
There are rules. Barriers. A cosmic separation of substance that prevents a deity from simply stepping into a living room or a hospital ward to rearrange fate.
They can whisper, perhaps. They can nudge. They can cast shadows that look like omens.
But they cannot grasp the steering wheel of human destiny with their own hands.
My own rebirth as the son of Ai Hoshino—and the simultaneous rebirth of my twin sister, Ruby—solidified this theory into unshakeable fact.
We were not a random biological event.
We were a deliberate, impossible placement.
Our very existence was proof of a consciousness, a will, operating from a plane outside of time and flesh.
Somewhere, in a dimension I could not perceive, something with the power to rewrite souls and reassign them to new, specific cradles was at work.
And if such a power existed, then a line of communication must also exist.
A method. A protocol, hidden in the static between worlds, waiting to be decoded.
History is littered with the footprints of those who stumbled upon the crack in the wall.
Abraham Lincoln foresaw his own assassination in the haunting, visceral detail of a precognitive dream—not a vague anxiety, but a theater of his own death played out in his mind's eye before the trigger was ever pulled.
Robert Monroe didn't just dream; he learned to navigate. He charted maps of non-physical realms through sleep, speaking of the afterlife and cosmic landscapes as a traveler speaks of foreign countries.
Thomas Edison harvested invention and insight from the threshold between sleep and waking, where logic dissolves and creation is born.
What was the common trigger?
The gateway?
A dream.
But not the chaotic, nonsensical dumping ground of daily anxieties.
A different kind of dream.
A permeable state.
So, what made their dreams special? Why did their sleeping minds become receivers for knowledge and power, while most of us only replay the mundane?
What frequency were they tuning into that the rest of the world couldn't hear?
This question began to consume me, burning in the hollow where my childish heart should have been. Because the voice—that young girl's voice, pleading and distant—always appeared in my dreams.
It was not a coincidence.
It was a signal.
I became convinced the answer had always been there, echoing just beyond the veil of my own perception.
That faint, desperate voice in the distance wasn't a symptom of my breakdown; it was the source code of my entire situation.
If I could just hear her clearly, if I could understand her words, she would unravel the mystery of my rebirth.
She would reveal the purpose—or the cruel joke—behind being placed here, as Ai Hoshino's son, in this specific tragedy.
That knowledge… it wouldn't just be an answer. It would be a tool.
A devastating piece of leverage I could use for my own ends.
So, with a discipline that felt alien in my small body, I began to experiment.
I tried to induce a state of sleep paralysis, that terrifying borderland where the mind is awake but the body is a prisoner.
I would lie perfectly still in the dark, systematically emptying my mind.
I pushed away the noise of grief, the scheming plans for revenge, the memory of blood on linoleum.
I silenced everything, striving for a perfect, blank receptivity.
I was not trying to sleep. I was trying to tune in.
To stretch my awareness toward that unreachable frequency, to reach the source of the signal.
I wanted to talk to the voice.
I needed to ask her the only question that mattered anymore:
Why?
...
I'm not sure if this site still has the bug where newly posted stories don't appear in the update section, but unfortunately this story is not showing up there.
If this bug persists, I will reupload this story to another one of my accounts and also to an older story of mine that still appears in the update section.
That older story hasn't received many views yet, which makes it a convenient option.
For now, however, I will wait and see whether this bug continues until the power ranking reset.
If you're enjoying this story, feel free to throw in all your power stones, rate it 5 stars, or add it to your library and collection. For every 250 power stones will unlock a bonus chapter.