He spent two days thinking about it before he actually did anything.
Which was two days longer than he wanted but shorter than he expected. Part of him kept waiting to talk himself out of it. The other part kept running the logic Gloom had already laid out and coming up with the same answer every time. He needed a body. The body needed to be dead. He was not going to find one just lying around at four years old in a residential neighborhood. So.
So.
There was a stray cat that came through the yard every morning. Gray, medium-sized, one torn ear. It had been showing up for weeks based on the memories that weren't his. It ate whatever it could find near the back fence and left. Nobody owned it. Nobody was looking for it.
He spent an afternoon while his mom was on a phone call going through the cabinet under the sink. He had enough working knowledge of what was in there from his old life, combined with the careful logic of someone who had spent sixteen years hyperaware of what could kill him. He found what he needed, mixed a small amount into a dish of milk, and left it near the back fence before his mom came to check on him.
He did not let himself think too hard about the amount. He had done the math. It would be fast.
* * *
The next morning he was at the back window before his mom was up.
The cat came at its usual time, picked up the scent of the milk, and approached. Kaito watched with his small hands pressed flat against the glass. His chest was doing something he did not have a clean word for. Not guilt exactly. Not nothing either. Something in between that he suspected was just the honest feeling of doing something irreversible.
The cat drank.
Within a few minutes it started. The cat moved away from the dish and vomited once in the grass. Then its legs went wrong. It went down on its side and its body shook, and Kaito watched all of it without looking away because he had decided that if he was going to do this he was not going to flinch from it.
Then it stopped moving.
And something changed in the air near the body. A small dark shape, something he could not describe as a color or a light or a shadow exactly, more like a mark, appeared just above the cat. Hovering. Still.
He understood without being told what it was.
He reached out and touched the glass with one finger, aimed at it.
And then his body fell.
* * *
The world came apart and reassembled itself in less than a second.
He was low to the ground. Everything smelled like ten things at once. The glass of the window above him was enormous. He could hear the wind moving through the grass individually, each blade a separate sound. He flexed something that was not fingers and his new body responded, smooth and immediate, exactly the way Gloom had described.
He stood up on four legs and it felt like he had always had four legs.
"Why do I not feel bad?" he asked, and his voice existed only inside his own head now, directed at Gloom.
"Because it was an animal. People hunt animals. Some feel guilt, some do not. It was not your cat. You had no bond with it. The soul math is clean."
He sat with that for a moment. Then he decided to move.
He crossed the yard in four strides and jumped.
He cleared the fence by a foot and a half. He landed on top of it without thinking about balance, adjusted automatically, and kept going. He hit the roof of the small storage shed at the back of the property and scrambled up the slope to the peak without slowing. From up there the neighborhood opened up around him, rooftops and power lines and the tops of trees he normally looked up at, and the morning was cold and sharp and the cat's body processed all of it with a clarity that four-year-old human senses simply did not have.
"Okay," he said inside his own head. "This is genuinely cool."
He checked the HUD.
╔══════════════════════════╗
║ 🖤 GLOOM SYSTEM v1.0 ║
╠══════════════════════════╣
║ HOST : KAITO MURA ║
║ AGE : 4 ║
║ STATUS : 👻 POSSESSING ║
╠══════════════════════════╣
║ 🐚 SHELL : STRAY CAT ║
║ SPECIES : FELIS CATUS ║
║ QUIRK : NONE ║
╠══════════════════════════╣
║ 📊 SHELL STATS ║
╠══════════════════════════╣
║ 💪 STR 28 [███░░░░░] ║
║ ⚡ SPD 61 [██████░░] ║
║ 🛡️ END 22 [██░░░░░░] ║
║ 🌀 AGI 74 [███████░] ║
║ 🧠 INT 9 [█░░░░░░░] ║
║ 🎯 QCT N/A [░░░░░░░░] ║
╠══════════════════════════╣
║ 📊 MAIN BODY STATS ║
╠══════════════════════════╣
║ 💪 STR 5 [█░░░░░░░] ║
║ ⚡ SPD 5 [█░░░░░░░] ║
║ 🛡️ END 5 [█░░░░░░░] ║
║ 🌀 AGI 5 [█░░░░░░░] ║
║ 🧠 INT 5 [██░░░░░░] ║
║ 🎯 QCT 5 [█░░░░░░░] ║
║ 👻 SOL 5 [█████░░░] ║
╠══════════════════════════╣
║ 📝 NOTES ║
║ > No quirk in shell ║
║ > SOL fixed to host ║
║ > AGI + SPD dominant ║
║ > Weak body = skewed ⚠️ ║
║ > Body VULNERABLE ☠️ ║
╚══════════════════════════╝
"Hmm."
Agility was the standout. Speed too. Compared to his main body both numbers were almost embarrassing. But he noticed the intelligence column and felt something like vindication, because at least he had that.
He spent another twenty minutes on the roof. Jumping distances, testing the difference between how the body wanted to land and how he directed it to land. He found that the body had instincts and he had control, and they did not fight each other. The cat's reflexes kicked in automatically and he could override them or let them run. It was closer to driving than possession, closer to wearing something well-fitted than forcing his way into a space that did not fit.
Then he came down and tested the range.
* * *
"How far do I have to be from a shell to switch back into it?"
"As long as you can see the mark of death, you can enter the body. Line of sight."
"So like a mile?"
"Not if there are walls between you. Literally see it. If something is blocking your direct sightline, the mark is blocked too."
Line of sight. He filed that. It was a real limitation. No reaching through floors or around corners. He would need to physically be able to see the mark to make the transfer.
He switched back into his main body from across the yard. It was instant. One moment he was low and fast and smelling everything, the next he was upright and small and the world was quieter and blunter. His knees hit the ground because he had been standing when he left and his body had just dropped where he left it.
He looked at his hands. Regular four-year-old hands. He looked at the cat lying still in the grass.
He switched back into the cat, walked it to the fence at the edge of the yard, lay it down in the strip of grass just under his bedroom window where it would be visible from inside, and switched back.
He stood in the yard for a moment. The morning was getting lighter. He could hear his mom moving around in the kitchen. He had maybe ten minutes before she came to check on him.
He needed to figure out what he was going to say.
* * *
He went inside and sat at the kitchen table. His mom had her back to him, making tea. He looked at his hands again, then at the window.
"Mom," he said.
She turned around. "Yeah, baby?"
He pointed toward the back window. "There is a dead cat outside."
She came and looked. Her face did the thing adults' faces did when they were deciding how to protect you from something. He had seen it enough times in his first life to recognize it immediately.
"Oh. Yeah, we will take care of that. Did that scare you?"
"No," he said. He paused. Then, carefully, he added: "I think I did something."
She crouched down to his level. "What do you mean?"
"I touched it. With my mind. And I went inside it for a little bit."
His mom went very still the way parents went still when something was bigger than they were ready for. He watched her process it. Her eyes moved to the window and back to him.
"You think your quirk came in?"
He nodded.
She pulled him into a hug that was tighter than it needed to be and he let her, and over her shoulder he was already thinking about what came next. Gloom had already told him what the smart move was, and the smart move was to let her believe the version that made sense to her right now. He was four. His quirk had just manifested. He had possessed a dead animal for a few minutes.
That was all she needed to know today.
"Before you tell her anything, consider what you actually want her to know. You do not have to reveal the full scope of your quirk immediately. A child discovering they have some form of possession or communication with animals is unusual but not unheard of in this world. You could let her draw her own conclusions for now."
"You are telling me to let my mom think I have a watered-down version of my quirk."
"I am telling you that trust is built over time and that you are four years old. There is no version of you explaining soul possession and karmic ledgers to a parent right now that ends well."
"That is fair."
"You will know when it is time to show her more. Start small."
He nodded to himself, still in his mom's arms, looking at the dead cat through the window.
Start small.