# THE WEIGHT OF BORROWED SOULS
### A Tensura Fanfiction
---
## — What the Sea Takes
A life so average that the universe apparently decided it needed a dramatic ending.
Shinji Satou. Age 29. Former junior analyst at Kuroda Maritime Logistics. Currently: tied to approximately forty kilograms of quick-set concrete and sinking at an estimated rate of — well, fast. Faster than ideal, anyway.
*So this is what drowning feels like.*
He'd always imagined it would be more cinematic. Thrashing. Terror. The desperate clawing for a surface that kept retreating upward through green-dark water. But the cement was thorough work — whoever had done the knots clearly wasn't a first-timer — and all he could really do was watch the circle of light above him shrink.
It was smaller than he expected, that circle. The ship's running lights. Getting smaller.
*Right,* he thought. *So this is what we get.*
He was calm about it, which surprised him. Then again, he'd had about six hours to make peace with the situation, beginning from the moment Kuroda's men had found him in the hotel room and the look on their faces had confirmed that 'plausible deniability' was not going to be on the table tonight.
He'd known it was a trap. He'd *known*.
He just — and this was the part that was genuinely embarrassing — he'd gone anyway.
*Kaori Kuroda. Thirty-four. Married. Completely out of your league. And she found you first.* He watched a column of his own breath escape upward in silver bubbles, racing for the surface he could no longer reach. *You should have asked yourself why she found YOU first, genius.*
Because the answer, as it turned out, was: because her husband needed someone to frame for embezzlement who would disappear without too many people asking questions. A junior analyst with no family in the city and a documented habit of working late. Someone who would make a convincing fall-guy and a very clean loose end.
He'd been recruited specifically for his own murder. That was the part he was still processing.
*Bitch. I actually liked you.*
The water was cold. Not painfully cold — he'd crossed that threshold about thirty seconds ago. Now it was just a fact, like the dark, like the pressure building in his ears.
*She's already called the police, you know. Filed the report. Loyal wife, devastated by her employee's theft. By the time they pull you up — if they pull you up — there will be nothing left to contradict her.*
*...Except.*
He felt, in some distant register behind the cold and the dark and the shrinking lungs, a spike of savage satisfaction.
Except that Shinji Satou had not, in fact, spent six hours in a holding room without doing *something* about it. Being an emotional fool and trusting the wrong woman — fine, fair, deserved. Being an emotional fool who left no insurance — that would have been unforgivable.
Three encrypted files. Two recipients who didn't know each other. One set to auto-deliver at 9 AM if he didn't manually abort it.
*You're going to wake up tomorrow and your whole careful life is going to be on fire, Kaori. I hope the view from the window is nice, because you're going to have a lot of time to enjoy it before they come to the door.*
He couldn't see it happening. That was the infuriating part. He'd never know.
*Unfinished business,* some distant part of him observed. *They say that's what makes ghosts.*
His lungs were making a very urgent case for reconsideration.
*No,* he told them. *There is no reconsideration. The math on this one is already done.*
The light above was gone. He wasn't sure when it had gone.
*Huh.*
So this was it. Twenty-nine years old, relatively decent face, solid work ethic, died because he'd had feelings like an idiot and hadn't listened to the part of his brain that had been quietly screaming *something is wrong with this woman* for six weeks straight. No family nearby. No girlfriend. No one who was going to—
*Stop. Stop catastrophizing. You did what you could. The files exist. The clock is running. That has to be enough.*
The voices came then — the kind that weren't quite voices, weren't quite thoughts, something underneath both. The soul recognizing its own departure. He'd read about this somewhere. The dying brain performing its last filing.
*Yeah, I heard that too.* He wasn't afraid of them. That also surprised him. *People with unfinished business become ghosts, supposedly. Well — I definitely have unfinished business. So fine. Fine. That tracks.*
He exhaled the last of it.
The dark closed over.
—
＜＜Condition confirmed: Mortal death via drowning.
Analyzing residual soul data...
Anomaly detected: Exceptional will-to-persist.
Anomaly detected: Unresolved directive (revenge/justice classification).
Anomaly detected: Refusal of dissolution.＞＞
*...What.*
＜＜Initiating reincarnation protocol.
Target vessel: [GHOST] — Class: Spiritual Lifeform.
Assigning racial traits... success.
Assigning resistances... success.＞＞
*I am definitely hallucinating. Oxygen deprivation does—*
＜＜Processing core mental architecture...
Identity structure detected: EXCEPTIONAL rigidity.
Ego preservation instinct: CRITICAL level.
Result: Unique Skill 『DREADNAUGHT』 (The Immutable Architect) has been acquired.＞＞
*That is a very cool name. I am still dying.*
＜＜Processing residual desire-pattern...
"I want to understand. I want to take. I want to survive."
Result: Unique Skill 『NEKROMANTEION』 (The Sovereign of Souls) has been acquired.＞＞
*...Wait, wait — SOVEREIGN OF SOULS? Now you're just showing off.*
＜＜Reincarnation complete.
New form: Ghost (Base Rank).
Location: [Unknown World — Pre-Classification Era].
Note: You have retained full memories and personality architecture.
Note: You are currently at 4% magicule capacity.
Note: It is recommended that you locate a host body within 72 hours.＞＞
*Note noted.* He paused. *...Is there a tutorial? Some kind of manual? Hello?*
Silence. The particular silence of a system that had done its job and moved on.
Shinji Satou — or what was left of him, which was apparently quite a lot — existed in the dark for a long moment.
He was not in the ocean anymore. He wasn't sure where he was. The dark here was different — alive with something, threaded with currents he could feel but not see, movements of energy that pulsed like slow breathing. He had no body. He had, in some approximate sense, *hands*, but when he looked at them they were the idea of hands — translucent, faint, the color of a screen in an unlit room.
He passed one through the ground experimentally. The earth offered no resistance.
*Okay.*
He stood up — or performed the motion that corresponded to standing — and looked at the forest around him.
It was enormous in the way only very old things were enormous. Trees that made the forests back home look like houseplants. Undergrowth threaded with something luminescent and low. Air that tasted like the moment before a lightning strike, but permanent. Sustained.
He had no heartbeat. He registered this clinically.
He had no breath. Also fine.
He had no hunger, no thirst, no fatigue, no pain.
What he had was 4% magicule capacity, two skills with names that sounded like they belonged on a heavy metal album, and the slowly-developing awareness that he was alone in a world he knew nothing about, with no body, no allies, and no resources.
*Classic,* he thought.
Then, because cataloguing a situation before committing to a response had always been his particular compulsion — the analyst's instinct, the need to inventory before acting — he began to list what he knew.
He was dead. He was a ghost. He was somewhere very far from Tokyo. He was, by some mechanism he didn't yet understand, still *him* — still Shinji Satou, still the man who had died in the Pacific Ocean over a woman with bad intentions and worse taste in husbands.
He had skills that he didn't fully understand yet.
He had, somewhere in the distance, the sound of something large moving through the trees.
He had 72 hours.
*Alright,* he thought, and something in him — the part that had always been better at survival than it had any right to be — settled into a particular kind of cold clarity. *Let's figure out what we're working with.*
He turned toward the sound of the moving thing.
*Step one: don't get exorcised.*
*Step two: find something I can use.*
*Step three — don't lose yourself. Whatever happens out there, whatever you have to do to survive it — don't lose yourself.*
He started walking. The forest swallowed him whole.
Shinji Satou, age 29, former junior analyst, current ghost — began his second life.
Chapter End.