---
"Where the hell am I again?"
Raon opened his eyes to absolute darkness. Not the suffocating dark of the train station, but something else. Emptiness. Void. He was floating, suspended in nothing, like a body adrift in deep water.
"Am I dead? Finally, actually dead this time?"
The thought came with bitter resignation. He'd already died once. Falling down those stairs in his old life. Now this. Killed by a monster in an abandoned metro station. Twice dead in the span of an hour.
*What a joke.*
He tried to move, but his body didn't respond. There was no body. Just consciousness, awareness without form, drifting in the black.
Memories surfaced. The specter. The fight. Those wolves, Dusk and Dawn. The invisible slash that had killed his own summon.
"Damn it. I should have just run. Used the wolves to escape instead of trying to fight. Now I'm dead for real."
His head hung low. Or at least, it felt like it did. Could you bow your head when you had no head to bow?
*How does dying even work? Does it hurt the second time? The third?*
Despair settled over him like a shroud.
Then, without warning, light pierced the darkness.
A projection appeared before him, flickering to life like an old film reel in a cinema. Images. Memories. Not his own.
The projection split, multiplied, fragments of memory spinning around him in a spiral. Dozens of them. Hundreds. Each one a moment, a scene, a piece of someone else's life.
Raon watched, transfixed, as the memories played.
---
**The first memory:**
A small child taking his first steps. Chubby legs wobbling. A woman's blurred face smiling, hands outstretched, ready to catch him.
**The second:**
The same child, older now, maybe three or four, holding a tiny bundle. A baby girl with dark hair and wide eyes. His sister.
"Wow. Such a great family."
The words left him without thought. He'd never had this. Never known what it was like to have parents who smiled, who reached for you, who welcomed a new baby with joy instead of burden.
In his previous world, he'd grown up in an orphanage. A cold place where food was scarce and affection scarcer. He remembered praying, not for himself to be adopted, but for *other* children to be chosen. Because when someone left, there was more food for those who remained.
That was survival. That was all he'd known.
But this... this was different.
He watched the memories unfold, hungry for every detail.
The boy, Raon, looked like his father. Dark hair, sharp features, serious eyes even as a child. The sister, by contrast, had softer features. Their mother's, probably, though her face remained frustratingly blurred in every memory, as if deliberately obscured.
The memories continued.
**Months after the sister's birth:**
The mother was gone. Just... gone. One day present, the next, vanished. No explanation in the memories. Just her absence, a hole where she should have been.
The household shrank. Raon, his father, his grandmother, and an uncle whose face was also blurred beyond recognition. They lived alone in the vast compound, a family reduced to fragments.
**Years passed in moments:**
Raon growing. Training. Struggling. Always trying, always falling short.
Then came the memory that made him sit up, or whatever the equivalent was in this void.
**The first summoning:**
Young Raon, maybe seven years old, standing in the courtyard. His hands moved through a sequence. Wolf. Strike. His shadow rippled, and from it emerged two wolves. One black as midnight. One white as bone.
Dusk and Dawn.
"So that's when you first summoned them."
But something was wrong. Even in the memory, young Raon looked confused. The wolves circled him, uncertain, as if they too didn't understand what had just happened.
**The ranking assessment:**
Raon, age ten, standing before government officials in a sterile testing facility. They made him summon the wolves again. Dusk and Dawn appeared, but the examiners were unimpressed.
"D-rank summons at best. Weak physical power. No special abilities."
The lead examiner wrote something on his clipboard.
"However, we've determined you can only reliably summon one at a time. Your spectral energy reserves are insufficient for maintaining both."
Raon's face fell.
"E-rank assessment. Marginal exorcist capability. Recommended for support roles only."
E-rank. The lowest. Barely better than a civilian.
Raon had been devastated.
A blurred figure, his father, appeared beside him in the memory. A hand on his shoulder. A smile Raon couldn't quite see but could somehow feel.
"It's okay, Raon. With time, your shikigami will grow stronger as you train. Rank isn't everything."
But the voice held something else beneath the encouragement. Disappointment? Concern? Raon couldn't tell.
---
**The next memory hit harder:**
The compound's training ground. Raon, age twelve, face-down in the dirt. Blood on his lips. His body trembling.
An older man stood over him. The uncle. His face was blurred, but his presence radiated anger. Contempt.
At his feet lay two bodies. Dusk and Dawn. Unmoving. Dead.
"You are weak. What a disgrace."
The man's voice was cold, clinical. He held a katana, its blade stained red with the wolves' blood. He dropped it with a clatter and picked up a wooden kendo stick.
"Get up. We're not finished."
The man walked forward, his feet splashing through the pool of blood spreading across the training ground.
Young Raon's hands moved. Different signs this time. Bird. Scatter. Sky.
"Fly, Murder!"
His shadow exploded.
Hundreds of crows erupted from the darkness, their caws deafening, their wings blotting out the sky. They circled the compound in a shrieking mass of black feathers and red eyes.
But something was wrong.
The crows turned on Raon.
One dove, its beak raking across his cheek, drawing blood. Then another. And another.
"No! Stop!"
Young Raon's voice was panicked, desperate. He couldn't control them.
The uncle moved to defend him, but the crows were too many. They swarmed together, hundreds of bodies merging into one massive form. A bird the size of a house, wings spread wide, beak like a spear.
Then, another figure appeared. Raon's father, materializing in midair with impossible speed.
One strike. A technique Raon couldn't identify. The massive bird shattered, crows exploding outward, dissolving into shadow and spectral energy.
The father landed, fury radiating from him.
"What if that thing had attacked your sister? What if you'd killed someone?!"
Young Raon couldn't answer. Could only stare at the destruction he'd caused.
---
**But the memory didn't end there:**
Days later. Raon alone in his room. Hands moving through the familiar signs.
Wolf. Strike.
His shadow stirred.
Dusk emerged. Then Dawn.
Both alive. Whole. As if they'd never died.
"What? How is this possible?"
The watching Raon, floating in the void, felt his confusion mirrored. He'd seen the wolves die. Seen their blood on the ground. Heard his father say they couldn't be resummoned.
But here they were.
The original Raon had tested it again and again. Each time, the wolves returned. No matter how many times they fell, they always came back.
*Why? What makes his summoning different?*
No answer came.
---
**The memories continued:**
The night that changed everything.
Raon's father kneeling before him. The man's face was still blurred, but his voice was clear. Steady. Final.
"Take care of your sister. I'm going to bring your mother back."
"When will you return?"
"Soon. I promise."
The father stood, turned, and walked into the darkness beyond the compound gates.
He never came back.
---
**The final memories were harder to watch:**
Years of bullying. Raon at school, isolated, mocked. "Kagero scum." "Your clan is cursed." "Weakling."
Raon enduring it all in silence.
Then came the betrayal.
The three students. The "friends" who invited him to hunt specters. The abandoned metro station. The knives in his back. The laughter as they left him to die.
The specter toying with his broken body.
The darkness closing in.
And then... nothing.
Until someone else opened those eyes.
---
Raon watched the final memory fade. The projections slowed, spiraled inward, converging on a single point.
He reached out with hands that didn't exist and caught them. The memories felt warm, heavy, precious.
"It's all right. Don't worry."
He didn't know if the original Raon could hear him. Didn't know if there was anything left of that boy to hear. But he spoke anyway.
"I won't promise revenge. That's not who I am. But I can promise this: I'll protect your family. They're my family now. Because I'm you. Or you're me. Or... whatever this is."
The memories compressed between his palms, glowing brighter, and then they surged forward.
Into him. Through him. Becoming him.
Names. Faces. Feelings. Knowledge. A lifetime of experiences that weren't his, but now were.
The void began to dissolve.
Light pierced through the darkness.
And Raon opened his eyes.
---
**Hospital Room. Midnight.**
The ceiling was white. Sterile. A faint beeping sound filled the air.
Raon blinked, disoriented. His body felt heavy, wrong. Tubes connected to his arms. An oxygen mask covered his mouth and nose.
He lifted a weak hand and pulled the mask down. The air tasted of disinfectant and something metallic.
A window to his left showed darkness outside. Midnight, maybe later.
*I'm alive. Again.*
He tried to sit up, but pain lanced through his chest. The wounds. Right. The specter's claws. He fell back against the pillow, breathing hard.
The door opened.
A nurse walked in carrying a tray. She was young, probably mid-twenties, hair pulled back in a neat bun. She glanced at her tray, then toward the bed.
She froze.
Raon was staring at her. Eyes open. Awake.
For a moment, neither of them moved.
Then she saw his eyes. Dark in the dim light, but reflecting the faint glow from the hallway. Red-tinged in the shadows.
"AHHH!"
The tray clattered to the floor, instruments scattering.
The nurse stumbled backward, hand over her mouth.
"DOCTOR! DOCTOR, HE'S AWAKE!"
She turned and ran from the room, her footsteps echoing down the corridor.
Raon lay there, alone again, staring at the ceiling.
He touched his face. His hands. His body.
"This is real. Am back a gain"
Footsteps approached. Multiple people running.
Raon closed his eyes and steadied his breathing.
'All right, Raon. Let's see how good you are at surviving
.'
The door burst open, and the questions began.
---