The first sensation was one of gentle stirring, like silt settling at the bottom of a tranquil sea. It was a profound peace that felt alien, a stark contradiction to the screaming chaos that had been his last reality. Then came the pain—not the physical agony of a shattered body, but a grief so potent it felt like a physical entity, a leaden weight pressing down upon his soul.
Elara… Live… for us. Live happy…
The words, his own desperate, final plea, echoed in the nascent consciousness. The image of her face, streaked with tears and dirt, a mask of beautiful, heartbreaking anguish, burned behind his closed eyelids. A sob, raw and guttural, tore itself from a throat too small to contain such sorrow. His eyes flew open, expecting the cold, hard concrete of the bridge and the mocking city lights.
Instead, he saw a ceiling. Not just any ceiling, but a celestial masterpiece, a vaulted dome of what looked like pure, polished alabaster, intricately carved with blooming flowers and soaring, fantastical beasts. The air was thick with the scent of a thousand different blossoms, sweet and almost intoxicating. He was lying in a bed so vast and soft it felt like sinking into a cloud, the sheets spun from a silk that was cooler and smoother than anything he had ever touched.
Panic, cold and sharp, pierced through the fog of grief. He pushed himself up, his movements clumsy. The room was immense, a grand, circular chamber with towering windows that showcased a breathtaking panorama of immaculate gardens and impossibly elegant architecture under a brilliant blue sky. But it was not the grandeur that made his breath catch, nor the unfamiliarity of it all.
It was the sight of his own hands. They were small, delicate, with unblemished skin—the hands of a child. Frantically, he looked down at his body, clad in simple but exquisitely made white pajamas. He was small. A boy. No older than five. A strange, heavy sensation between his shoulder blades made him twist. Sprouting from his back were two wings, a cascade of amethyst and twilight, their feathers delicate as spun moonlight yet heavy with an impossible reality.
"What… what is this?" he whispered, his voice high-pitched, childish, yet laced with the ancient horror of a man who had just died. The memories were a violent tempest. The proposal, the screech of tires, the cataclysmic impact, Elara's scream, the taste of blood, the encroaching cold… It was all there, vivid and visceral. He was Kael. He had died.
And now he was here. In a child's body. With wings.
The grief returned, a tidal wave that drowned out the confusion. "Elara!" he cried out, the name a shard of glass in his throat. He clutched his head, the tears now flowing freely, hot streams down his cherubic cheeks. He had failed. He had left her. He had made her a promise to wait for her, but he was here, in this impossible place, while she was alone, grieving on that cold, blood-stained bridge. The future they were supposed to build, the life they were supposed to share, had been stolen, and he had been cast into this… this gilded prison. The sheer injustice of it, the bitter regret, was a poison seeping into his very being.
Then, a second torrent began. Another life, another set of memories, not his own, yet suddenly as intimate as his last breath, flooded his mind.
He saw through these same young eyes, looking out from a hidden alcove. He felt a profound, aching loneliness, the only constant companion in these beautiful, silent halls. He tasted the sweetest fruits, plucked by silent servants who never met his gaze. He saw the breathtaking view from the windows, the world a perfect, untouchable painting below. He felt the soft petals of the colossal flowers in the gardens of this castle, a place he now knew as Pangaea Castle, in the holy land of Mary Geoise.
Then came a darker memory, sharp and terrifying. Peeking from behind a marble pillar, watching men in strange, bubble-like helmets, their faces twisted with disdainful arrogance. They were called Celestial Dragons. He watched as one of them, a woman with extravagantly styled hair, kicked a kneeling, chained man. She had laughed, a high, cruel sound, as the man's head hit the pristine floor with a lifeless thud. The child, Dravokh, had felt a cold fear then, a primal understanding that he was witnessing something utterly wrong, a casual cruelty that was as normal as the sun in the sky to these people.
The two streams of memory converged, Kael's life and Dravokh's, creating a maelstrom of confusion and pain. He was Kael, who had loved and lost. He was Dravokh H. Liloa, a lonely child in a place of terrible beauty. From Kael's fractured knowledge of the world he'd left behind—snippets of news, overheard conversations about popular fiction—a name surfaced, connecting the impossible dots. One Piece. He was in the world of One Piece. A work of fiction.
The realization brought no excitement, no thrill of adventure. It brought only despair. If this was another world, a fictional world made real, then Elara was not just in another city, but across an insurmountable chasm of reality itself. The hope of ever seeing her again, a foolish, desperate ember he'd clung to even in death, was finally, brutally extinguished.
"No…" he whimpered, curling into a ball on the vast bed. "I don't want to be here. Take me back. Please… I need to go back to her." He had no will to live in this world. What was the point? His Radiant Night was gone, lost to him forever. His purpose was ash.
As his despair reached its nadir, a shimmering pane of intangible, obsidian glass materialized in the air before him. Letters, etched in cold, silver light, began to form, stark and clinical against the opulent backdrop of the room.
[Emotional Resonance Unstable. Soul Anchor experiencing critical stress.]
[Host psyche at risk of collapse due to cross-dimensional memory trauma.]
[Initiating ******* ****** Skill]
[Sealing all memories and associated emotions pertaining to the entity 'Elara'.]
[Seal will remain in place until the host vessel achieves a stable emotional and psychological foundation.]
[Acknowledged.]
"What?" he breathed, his eyes wide with confusion and a dawning horror. Before he could process the words, a faint silver light pulsed from the panel, washing over him. It wasn't painful. It was worse. It was a cold, precise emptiness. He felt a sensation akin to a surgeon's scalpel slicing through his very soul, carefully, cleanly excising something vital.
The burning, all-consuming image of Elara's face flickered. The sound of her name on his lips felt foreign. The weight of his grief, the anchor of his very being for these past few moments, simply… lifted. It was gone. And in its place was a vast, terrifying hollowness. He knew he had lost something. Something indescribably important. The most important thing. A gaping wound remained in his heart, but he could no longer remember the blade that made it. He was crying, yet he no longer knew for whom. The name, the face, the promise—all locked away behind a door he didn't even know was there.
He was left adrift, a five-year-old child with the fragmented soul of a man, weeping for a reason he could no longer comprehend.
It was in this state of profound, hollow confusion that the very air in the room grew heavy, chilled, and still. The vibrant scent of the flowers seemed to retreat, muted by a presence that commanded silence. From the shadows in the corner of the immense room, a figure emerged. Tall, impossibly slender, and draped in flowing black robes that seemed to drink the light. The figure's face was obscured, hidden in a darkness that felt absolute, but Dravokh knew him from the child's memories. This was his father. The one they called Imu. The man who ruled this castle, who ruled everything.
A voice that was not merely heard but felt—a vibration in the bones, ancient and devoid of warmth—cut through the child's quiet sobs.
"Dravokh. Why are you crying?"
The question was not born of concern. It was a demand for information, as cold and sharp as a shard of ice. The boy, Dravokh, flinched. His mind, Kael's mind, raced, searching for an answer. The truth was a mystery even to himself now. He couldn't say 'I'm mourning the woman I lost in another life,' because that memory was now a phantom limb. He was left with only the raw emotions of the child's life: the loneliness, the fear, the suffocating sense of being trapped.
He wiped his tears with the back of his small hand, his purple wings twitching nervously behind him. He looked towards the imposing, shadowed figure, a lie forming on his lips, but a lie steeped in a deeper truth.
"I was crying… because the flowers are sad," he said, his voice trembling, a perfect imitation of a confused child.
The silence that followed was heavy, absolute.
Dravokh pressed on, his child's heart emboldened by a man's desperation. He pushed the lie further, twisting it into the one question that truly mattered in this new, terrifying reality.
"They get to grow outside. They can feel the sun and the wind. They can see the sky." He took a shaky breath, his gaze fixed on the shadowed silhouette of his father. The hollow ache in his chest fueled his words, giving them an emotional weight that was painfully real.
"Father… why am I not allowed to leave this place? Why am I the only one who has to stay inside the castle forever?"