(After Chapter 1, the narration will switch to third person.)
When my hand lightly touched the starving old man before me, I knew my golden finger had finally arrived.
This was the first time since my birth that I had used my innate ability.
Whenever I touch a human with my hand, I can freely alter their soul. By altering the soul, I can indirectly control the human body.
In just a few seconds, the old man, who had been delirious from hunger, suddenly snapped his eyes open, his gaze as bright as that of a young man.
This was because I had manipulated his soul, forcing the latent nutrients in his body to take effect. At least for this moment, he felt full.
Was this a blessing?
No.
Quite the opposite.
This was a curse.
I had cursed him, giving him a sense of satiety.
From this moment onward, he would never feel hunger again, but the potential of his body had been completely exhausted.
In other words, from now until the day he dies, he will only continue to maintain that feeling of fullness.
It was like a leaking fuel tank.
What I had done was not refill the oil inside.
Instead, I had simply shrunk the tank itself and sealed it shut.
His potential had indeed been consumed by me.
But he survived.
He survived through a curse.
I did not feel the joy of saving someone.
On the contrary, I felt an overwhelming sense of irritation.
Instinctively, I wanted to reverse this state and let the old man I had "saved" fall back into his destined death.
It was strange.
Before transmigrating, although I certainly wasn't a saint, I was definitely not the sort of villain who disregarded human life.
If a dying person had been lying in front of me and I had the ability, I would at least have been willing to call an ambulance.
If I had possessed the power I have now, I would never have hesitated to save them.
But now it was the exact opposite.
I had saved someone, yet the result was immense annoyance.
I instinctively realized that doing such things went against my very nature.
It was like forcing a tiger to eat grass.
A tiger can eat grass, but it can never truly become a herbivore.
That is determined by its physiological structure.
For a tiger, a vegetarian diet is equivalent to death.
Now, saving people does not threaten my survival.
It merely makes me feel irritated, uncomfortable, and disgusted from the bottom of my heart.
But after this incident, I stopped saving people.
I started harming them instead.
Of course, I didn't start harming people on purpose.
At first, I was simply training my innate technique while observing others.
I soon discovered that as I walked through the streets, no one could see me.
I deliberately brushed against people, and they reacted, which meant I definitely existed, but could not be perceived.
At times, I suspected I was a ghost, but I quickly ruled that out because I didn't dissolve in sunlight.
Of course, depending on the world's setting, there are ghosts that can exist in broad daylight, but compared to a ghost, I felt more like something else entirely.
A god.
I was very much like a god.
Calling myself a god was admittedly embarrassing, but based on everything I had observed, I became increasingly convinced that I truly might be one.
Before I explain why, I should first introduce the world I transmigrated into so you can understand my state of mind.
This world was almost identical to the one I originally came from.
It was equally modernized: towering office buildings, pedestrians walking with their heads lowered as they stared at their phones, fashionable clothing, cars, planes, and trains—everything was there.
Supermarkets, ramen stalls, and all kinds of snack shops lined the streets.
Naturally, there was no shortage of entertainment facilities either—parks, arcades, and toy stores.
I'm not a historian, so I couldn't say exactly how this place differed from my previous world.
Before transmigrating, I had been something of an otaku.
I could even see huge anime posters plastered across the walls of office buildings.
Naruto, One Piece, and Bleach were obvious at a glance.
Dragon Ball and Pokémon were there as well.
Naturally, the language spoken here was Japanese, which also felt strangely familiar.
Now, as for my own situation—
After transmigrating into this world, despite only knowing a few simple Japanese words in my previous life, I could now use the language fluently without any learning process.
There was no barrier to reading or writing at all.
Although I had no one to talk to, I assumed communication wouldn't be a problem.
After all, even when I talked to myself, my Japanese flowed perfectly.
That alone was strange enough.
Other humans could not see me, yet I could still interact with them normally.
I could touch them, alter them, destroy them, or save them—all at my whim.
I could see human souls directly.
I could alter human souls.
I could make a starving person remain full until death.
Naturally, I could also make a healthy person remain hungry forever.
Through soul manipulation, I possessed a completely different level of control over humans.
I even had the feeling that, if I fully mastered this ability, granting someone a lifespan of hundreds of years—or even immortality—might be possible.
Fluent language and literacy without learning.
The ability to perceive and interfere with souls.
A racial trait that allowed unilateral interference with others.
These characteristics led me easily to one conclusion:
I was a god.
Especially when it came to my control over humans, I wasn't simply fantasizing.
I had already tested it.
At the time, I had simply been thinking about how to train my abilities while observing humans when a concept from my previous life suddenly came to mind.
I called this concept the Thought Steel Seal.
As the name suggests, a Thought Steel Seal can lock a person's thoughts in place, forcing them to remain fixed on a particular way of thinking no matter how much they reflect on it.
To a certain extent, this is the ultimate information cocoon.
Normally, information cocoons can be broken by debating with others, coming into contact with different perspectives, and broadening one's horizons.
But once a Thought Steel Seal is engraved, there is no escape.
It is more absolute than fanaticism itself.
Since I can alter a human body through the soul, it naturally follows that I can alter a person's thoughts through the soul as well.
Of course, at first, I did feel some psychological resistance toward experiments like this.
So, I carefully selected my target.
Fortunately, I soon found one.
He was a gambler—and not just a gambler, but also a drug dealer.
Someone like that deserved to die.
I openly used him to practice my ability.
To my surprise, it was incredibly easy.
I altered him so that he developed such an intense aversion to gambling and drugs that he would feel nauseous and vomit whenever he encountered them.
It wasn't that he willingly quit.
Rather, his body simply could no longer accept them, forcing him to stay away.
The principle behind it was unexpectedly simple.
If you truly understand psychiatric illness, then you know mental illness is not merely psychological; there are often physiological factors involved as well.
For example, the depression patients I knew before transmigrating had genuine functional impairments in the brain and truly required medication.
Some mental illnesses cannot be treated through counseling alone.
Medication is essential.
From this perspective, as long as the brain's functions are adjusted, it becomes easy to induce mental abnormalities.
Take this scum, for example.
By slightly altering his brain structure, I was able to make him feel revulsion, disgust, and even vomit upon contact with gambling or drugs.
Once the body rejects something, no matter how much the mind craves it, pain will force a person to stay away.
Humans are creatures that form habits with ease.
Once avoidance becomes habitual, no matter how much he still desires drugs and gambling mentally, he will have no choice but to stop.
And so, I spent my days leisurely experimenting with the Thought Steel Seal.
Then one day, I found another test subject.
He was a high school delinquent, dressed in a school uniform and leading a group of lackeys.
Exactly like the stereotype.
In an alleyway, he and his followers were kicking someone wearing the same uniform.
His face carried a smile full of violence, utterly relaxed and at ease.
I didn't hesitate.
I chose him as my target and lightly brushed a hand over his head.
Immediately afterward, his expression changed from violent to dazed, then from dazed to ashamed.
Finally, in the middle of the bullying, he suddenly shoved away the two lackeys who were kicking the victim, knelt in front of the bullied boy, and repeatedly bowed his head in apology.
I felt satisfied.
It wasn't merely the satisfaction of punishing a bully.
It was a deep pleasure rising from within.
My entire body and mind felt light and buoyant.
That was when I realized it.
It wasn't my moral compass from my previous life that made me feel this way.
It was because I had harmed someone with my own hands.
I felt light because my instincts were reminding me that I had been born to harm people.
Good people, bad people, saints, scum, or any ordinary person—
all of them fell within the scope of my "prey."
That was also why I had been so active lately.
Although my strength itself had not increased, the act of experimenting filled my body and mind with pleasure.
Since all my subjects had been worthless scum, it didn't conflict with the morality of my previous life, which only made me more enthusiastic about continuing these experiments.
I was still sorting through my instincts when the boy I had "saved" suddenly spoke.
"It was you, wasn't it? I saw it. You touched him, and then he suddenly became like that."
After finishing the experiment, I had naturally intended to leave.
I never expected someone to actually be able to see me.
It had already been over a month since I transmigrated.
For the first week, I had stayed in the sewer where I first arrived, acting cautiously.
Later, I grew bolder and climbed out through a manhole.
Since then, I had wandered through crowds every day.
Not a single person had ever been able to see me.
And yet, I could touch them freely.
That was also when I came to the conclusion that I was a god.
Because my ability truly possessed godlike potential.
And I firmly believed it.
Additionally, I was heavily influenced by the novels and anime from my previous life.
Although logic told me that I was far from invincible and that there were still many things left to encounter and understand, I had no intention of being as cautious and paranoid as a certain Bone King.
At that moment, I genuinely felt as though I had transmigrated into some Tokyo god-style fantasy novel as the protagonist.
I truly believed it.
That was why I used my abilities openly in the streets without restraint and immediately began thinking of concepts like the Thought Steel Seal.
I had even started planning to recruit a shrine maiden or something.
I had already prepared myself to try firing my ability from my eyes—like a Sharingan or something—once I perfected the Thought Steel Seal.
I felt like it was definitely possible.
According to the usual novel tropes, I had assumed the first person able to see me would definitely be a beautiful girl.
I truly hadn't expected it to be a frail, bullied boy.
Still, it was fine.
Although he looked weak, at least he knew how to be grateful, so he wasn't completely useless.
"Excuse me… who are you?" the boy asked cautiously.
I looked at the boy standing before me.
He had black hair, with long bangs covering the right side of his face.
His face was bruised and swollen from recent abuse, making him look pitiful, weak, and somewhat ridiculous.
His school uniform was covered in dust and torn in several places—a textbook image of a bullying victim.
A complete loser.
After thinking for a moment, I suddenly smiled.
"I am a god," I said.
The boy froze, clearly unsure of how to respond.
I found myself becoming interested in him.
I looked at him carefully with eyes capable of peering directly into the soul.
For the past month, I had been using these soul-piercing eyes to observe other people.
My gaze could even penetrate internal organs.
To me, the body was merely the outer shell of the soul, and all physical reactions could naturally be reproduced through the soul itself.
I quickly noticed that the flow of his soul did indeed seem different from everyone else's, though I couldn't quite pinpoint how.
At that moment, the downside of not having conducted enough unrestricted soul experiments on humans became apparent.
My understanding of human souls wasn't nearly as refined as I had imagined.
If I had known, I would have experimented on more scumbags.
Although I had already conducted close to a hundred experiments over the past month, I had been cautious in the early stages, carefully adjusting the details of the Thought Steel Seal and limiting myself to one or two cases a day.
Later, as I became more proficient, handling five or six a day was no problem.
I had a hunch that if I continued, I would eventually be able to engrave a Thought Steel Seal of absolute loyalty into a human brain with a single touch, making it impossible to remove.
At that point, it would no longer be just an ability issue.
Their brains would have been permanently remodeled by me.
"It's quite unusual that you can see me. You have aptitude," I said.
The boy froze again.
"Me? Aptitude?"
"Have you not noticed? Very few people in this world can see me, and you are one of them."
That wasn't a lie.
Throughout this entire month, I had wandered openly through crowds, yet so far, he was the only one who had been able to see me.
Although the fact that it was a boy instead of a girl left me slightly dissatisfied, I also felt a strange sense of relief.
Before this, I had truly believed I was the protagonist of some novel.
With abilities as powerful as mine, I had to be the lead of some Tokyo god-style power fantasy.
I had no complaints about that kind of life.
Still, it was better not to be too restricted by clichés.
The reason I felt relieved that the first person to see me was a boy rather than a girl was simple:
In those Tokyo god-style power fantasies written for readers, if the first person encountered were a boy instead of a girl, the author would definitely be buried under criticism.
What kind of power fantasy starts like that?
Shouldn't it obviously be a shrine maiden?
Incidentally, if I had come across a novel like that before transmigrating, I would have dropped it without hesitation.
The boy's expression became strained.
"Am… am I special?"
"You seem troubled," I said.
"How could someone like me possibly be special?"
He looked down at himself—dust-covered, bruised, weak, and easy to bully.
If he were gender-swapped into a girl, he might be described as soft and cute.
But he was a boy.
What else was there to say?
I suddenly asked, "Would you be interested in becoming a girl?"
The boy jumped in shock.
"Huh?"
"If you were a girl, you could become my shrine maiden. A soft and cute girl who cries when bullied—that kind of shrine maiden would be quite nice," I said.
That's right.
I still hadn't forgotten about shrine maidens.
And I couldn't.
I was a god, and a god must have a shrine maiden to serve him.
What kind of God doesn't have one?
It was a necessity.
Besides, my ability allowed me to change a man into a woman with ease.
This was far simpler than remodeling the brain to create a Thought Steel Seal.
Although I hadn't actually tested it yet, I was confident it was simple enough that it wouldn't even require experimentation.
The boy's expression collapsed.
"No, no, no… let's just forget about the girl thing."
"Is that so?"
I felt a little disappointed.
The boy's face turned pale.
"You… you sound completely serious."
"Because I am," I replied seriously. "Trust me, you're much better suited to being a girl than a boy, and I truly have the ability to transform you without any side effects. You could even have children in the future…"
"No, seriously, don't!"
His face turned white with fear as he shook his head frantically.
I couldn't help but smile.
"Sigh… won't you really consider it? I'm being completely serious," I said.
"It's precisely because you're serious that I'm seriously refusing!" the boy shouted, his expression twisting as his usually weak voice rose into something close to a roar. "More importantly, why did the conversation suddenly turn into me becoming a girl? That makes no sense at all!"
"I am a god, after all," I said leisurely. "Naturally, a god should have a shrine maiden by his side. But as you can see, I currently lack one. Unfortunately, anyone who wishes to follow me must at least be able to see me. So far, you're the only one I've found who can. But since you're a boy, you can't exactly be a shrine maiden. So, I thought, as long as I turn you into a girl, the problem is solved. See? Perfect, right?"
"It's not perfect at all!" the boy protested loudly, his face full of grievance.
I couldn't help but smile.
Although it sounded a bit perverted, I had genuinely enjoyed teasing him just now.
Then again, maybe it wasn't even a joke.
If he had agreed, I really would have turned him into a girl.
Strange.
Was I this kind of person before transmigrating?
Or was this yet another instinct, just like how I instinctively rejected saving people and naturally wanted to harm them?
The boy took several deep breaths before finally calming down.
Then he bowed to me seriously.
"Thank you very much, Lord God."
I waved a hand dismissively.
"It was nothing."
"My name is Yoshino Junpei, I—"
"Wait."
I suddenly interrupted him.
"What did you just say your name was?"
The boy—Yoshino Junpei—froze again before replying in confusion,
"Yoshino Junpei. My name is Yoshino Junpei. Is there something wrong with my name?"
Of course there was.
There was a huge problem.
I looked at him carefully.
Long bangs covering the right side of his face.
A weak and timid expression.
A Japanese school uniform.
If he hadn't spoken his name aloud, I never would have felt any sense of familiarity.
But the moment he did, a tidal wave of déjà vu crashed over me, leaving me stunned.
After an entire month in this world, I finally understood where I had transmigrated to.
And I finally understood what this ability to see and alter souls truly was.
No wonder I instinctively rejected saving people.
No wonder I instinctively wanted to harm them.
No wonder no one in this world had been able to see me, leading me to believe I was some kind of deity.
I finally knew whose body I had transmigrated into.
Damn it.
I had transmigrated into Mahito.