The first thing I noticed was that dying hurt a lot less than being born.
I know that sounds backwards. Let me explain.
The truck hit me on a Tuesday. I remember the sound more than anything ,that specific kind of silence that drops between realizing something terrible is about to happen and the moment it does. Like the world taking a breath. I'd been looking at my phone, which was stupid, and then there were headlights, and then there was a very brief sensation of flying that was not as pleasant as it sounds, and then nothing. Clean nothing. The kind of sleep you can't appreciate until you've had it, because once you're having it you aren't really there to appreciate anything.
I didn't see a white light. I didn't see my life flash before my eyes. I didn't meet God, or a god, or some smug divine administrator who explained the terms and conditions of reincarnation to me while I nodded along too tired to read the fine print.
I just stopped. And then, after what felt like no time at all and also possibly a geological epoch, I started again.
Starting again, as it turned out, felt like being squeezed through a gap that was several sizes too small for anything with a skull. There was noise everywhere ,industrial, overwhelming noise, more of it than the world should be capable of generating. There were lights that hit my eyes like weapons. The air was cold in a way that seemed personally offensive. My entire body was outraged. I was outraged on its behalf. I opened my mouth and I screamed, because screaming was apparently the only available response to conditions this unreasonable.
Someone wrapped me in cloth. The screaming continued for a while. I couldn't stop it ,not because I was in genuine distress, but because the body doing the screaming was a newborn and newborns do not take direction from the consciousness trapped inside them. That was its own specific kind of horror. Being fully present, fully aware, completely unable to communicate that I was fully present and fully aware, while a medical professional counted my fingers and a nurse made sounds that I recognized, even then, as the kind of sounds people make when they are delivering bad news to someone in another room.
She didn't make it.
I didn't know that yet in a confirmed way. I knew it the way I knew everything about this world that I hadn't directly observed ,with that dreamer's certainty, the absolute conviction that lives somewhere behind the eyes. I had watched enough of this show to know that Ryo Shiba's mother died in or around childbirth. I knew it before I could form the sentences to think it clearly. A background fact. One of the rules of the universe I'd landed in.
Okay, I thought, or tried to think, in the messy half-formed way that thinking works when your brain is three minutes old. Okay. So that's real.
Somehow that was the moment it became real. Not the truck. Not the weightlessness and then the nothing. Not the noise and cold of being born. But the confirmation, from somewhere outside the fiction I'd consumed in my previous life, that I was actually here. That this was actually happening. That Ryo Shiba, orphan, same birth year as Izuku Midoriya, mother deceased, father unknown, future registered for a quirk he didn't actually have ,that was me now.
I was Ryo Shiba.
I tried to feel a way about that.
I mostly felt tired. The body, separate from my awareness of it, wanted to sleep. I let it.
The orphanage came later, after a brief and administratively tedious period of being a ward of something. I wasn't conscious for most of the logistical handoffs. Infancy, as a state of existence, is deeply boring when you're not terrified by it ,and I wasn't terrified, so I was mostly just bored. I slept a great deal. I stared at ceilings. I ate when food was offered because the body made clear that not eating was not a negotiation it was willing to have. I did not make friends with the other infants. They were not interesting.
What was interesting ,what became very interesting, around the time I was old enough to have motor control worth commenting on ,was the feeling.
It was in my chest first. A pressure, low and constant, like something that had always been there but I was only now paying attention to. Not painful. Not exactly warm. Dense, maybe. The way mercury looks ,that quality of being heavier than it should be for its size, more present than it should be, like it was taking up more space than physics had allocated to it.
I was two years old and sitting in a patch of sunlight on a linoleum floor and I pressed my hand flat against my sternum and thought: there you are.
Cursed energy.
I'd known it would be there. I'd known it from before I was born, technically. Sukuna's abilities were supposed to be mine ,the whole point, or at least my interpretation of the whole point of being dropped into this particular body in this particular world with full retention of two complete manga series. I knew what I had. I knew what it was eventually going to be capable of. I just hadn't felt it yet as a real thing, as weight and presence and mine, and the gap between knowing something academically and feeling it in your chest is wider than it looks from a distance.
It was very small. A coal, not a fire. But it was real.
I spent the next several years getting to know it.
The orphanage had routines. Meals, activities, outdoor time in a yard that was mostly concrete with ambitions of being a garden. Staff who cycled through with varying degrees of patience and genuine warmth. Other children who did what children do, which I observed with the detachment of someone at least twenty-two years older than their body suggested.
I was not a strange child, exactly. I was quiet. I was self-contained. I did not throw tantrums or cling to adults or have nightmares that required comforting. I did my schoolwork without particular enthusiasm but without failure. I played when playing was called for and sat still when sitting still was called for. I was, by every observable metric, a manageable and slightly dull kid.
Inside, I was somewhere else entirely.
In my head ,in the space behind the face I showed the world ,I was working. Not constantly, not in a way that ate my childhood whole, but steadily. Methodically. The way you work on something when you know the shape of what you're building and you're just doing the actual construction, one piece at a time.
I mapped the energy in my body. I found its edges. I pushed against them gently, the way you press a bruise to understand how bad it is, learning the texture of it, where it pooled and where it moved. In JJK terms I was doing something like what first-year students at Jujutsu Tech were taught to do in their introductory training ,just finding the energy, sitting with it, making it familiar. The difference was that I had seen Gojo do it, seen Yuji do it, seen Sukuna do it in his sleep with the casual authority of someone who had been doing it for a thousand years.
I had context. That mattered more than I can adequately explain. I wasn't fumbling in the dark; I was walking through a dark room I had studied the blueprints of. Still slow going. But not blind.
By five, I could move the energy deliberately ,a thin current down my arm, into my fingers, sustaining it for a few seconds before it scattered. By six, I could hold it for longer. By seven, the first time I reinforced my arm with it and took a fall off the play equipment without bruising, I understood in my gut what this was going to become.
I lay on the ground staring up at the sky ,blue, clouds moving, someone shouting somewhere ,and I smiled at nothing.
Right, I thought. There it is.
I was eight when I first really understood what I had been reborn into.
It wasn't a dramatic event. It was the news. A television in the common room, after dinner, while kids sprawled across furniture and the staff watched something none of them were paying close attention to. A hero fight in Osaka ,Pro Hero involvement, two villains, property damage, one civilian hospitalization. Footage from a phone camera, shaky, catching maybe twelve seconds of the fight before the person filming apparently decided proximity to explosions was not worth the content.
I watched it with my chin on my fist and felt the same thing I'd felt at two years old, pressing my hand to my sternum.
There you are.
Not the energy this time. The world.
My Hero Academia. Quirks and heroes and villains and all of it. Real. Physically, consequentially, undeniably real. That footage wasn't animated. The dust wasn't hand-drawn. The person who'd been hospitalized had a family somewhere who was currently doing what families do when the news is bad, sitting in waiting rooms, making phone calls, struggling to process information through the particular static of shock.
This was not a story I could watch from the outside.
I had known this. Of course I had known this. I'd been born knowing it. But there's the knowing and then there's the knowing, and at eight years old sitting in a common room with someone's leftover dinner cooling on a table nearby, I finally crossed all the way into the second kind.
This world had a timeline. I knew the shape of that timeline ,not every detail, but the major points, the catastrophes, the deaths, the moments where things went irreversibly wrong. I knew what was coming and I knew roughly when. I knew what I was going to need in order to survive it and come out the other side on my own terms.
I needed to be much, much stronger than I currently was.
I looked at my hand ,small, still a child's hand, completely ordinary ,and I ran a current of energy through the bones and felt them hum.
Then I'd better get to work.
I was, somewhat to my own surprise, not afraid. I was something closer to excited. The dark kind of excited, the kind that lives next door to dread and shares a kitchen with it, but excited nonetheless. I had landed in one of the most dangerous worlds I knew of, with one of the most dangerous power sets I knew of, and a complete map of what was coming.
I smiled at my hand.
Somewhere very far down, in a part of myself I wouldn't examine closely for several more years, something that was not entirely me smiled back.