Hunger is not a feeling.
It is a sound. A low, rhythmic grinding of bone against bone, echoing from the hollow pit where a stomach used to be.
I looked down at my hands. They were trembling, the skin stretched tight over knuckles that looked like jagged stones. Between my fingers, I clutched a handful of grey moss I had scraped from the underside of a rotting well.
It tasted like damp earth and ancient disappointment. I swallowed it anyway.
In the world of Enkai Sekai, everything has a price. Every breath is a transaction.
I am twenty-three years old. My name is Rai Kurotsuki. And in a world where magic defines your worth, I am a walking ghost.
Above me, the sky was the color of a fresh bruise—purples and sickly yellows swirling in a vortex that didn't belong to the natural order. This was the edge of the Valgarde Empire, a place where the sun was a myth and the only thing that grew was the graveyard.
"Rai! Stop eating dirt and move!"
The voice belonged to Goro. He was leaning against a shattered stone pillar, his hand white-knuckled around the hilt of a rusted shortsword. He was two years older than me, built like a mountain that had suffered an earthquake.
"It's not dirt," I rasped. My voice sounded like sandpaper on wood. "It's dinner."
"It's suicide," he countered, his eyes scanning the horizon. "The Gate is shivering. Can't you feel it?"
I didn't answer. I didn't need to feel it. I could see it.
The Inga Mahou. The Magic of Causality.
For some, it was a gift. A spark of fire to warm a hearth. A surge of strength to till the fields. For the nobles in the capital, it was a tool of absolute dominion.
For me, it was "Ketsubetsu." Rejection.
My magic didn't create. It didn't destroy. It simply... refused. Every time I tried to draw the mana from the air, it recoiled. My body was a void that the world found repulsive. I was a mistake in the grammar of the universe.
Suddenly, the air didn't just vibrate; it screamed.
The bruise in the sky tore open.
It wasn't a clean cut. It was a jagged, weeping wound in reality. White light, cold as the void between stars, spilled out, turning the grey ruins of our village into a landscape of stark, terrifying brilliance.
The Gen Gate had collapsed.
"Run!" Goro yelled, grabbing me by the shoulder.
He didn't need to tell me twice. We sprinted through the narrow alleys, our boots splashing in puddles of stagnant water. Behind us, the sound of the collapse intensified—a roar of collapsing dimensions.
Then came the things from the other side.
They weren't monsters, not in the way the stories described them. They were shapes of pure, distilled intent. Shimmering outlines of predators that shouldn't exist. The Gen.
I saw a woman from the village—I think her name was Hana—standing paralyzed in her doorway. A streak of silver light passed through her.
She didn't bleed. She didn't scream.
She simply turned into ash, her soul harvested before her body realized it was dead.
I kept running. My lungs burned. My "Rejection" magic flared up, a dull, aching heat in my chest that did nothing but remind me of my helplessness.
*Refuse this,* I thought bitterly. *Refuse the death behind me.*
But my magic remained silent. It was useless for survival. It was only good for making me an outcast.
We reached the center of the village, where the old shrine stood. It was a place of broken wood and faded talismans. There, amidst the chaos, I saw her.
She was huddled near a fallen beam, her silver hair glowing with a faint, dying light. Her clothes were shredded, and her skin was the color of moonlight.
An Elf? No. A Gen.
But she didn't look like the predators tearing through the village. She looked... broken.
"Rai, don't!" Goro hissed, stopping at the edge of the shrine. "That's one of them. We have to go!"
"She's a child, Goro," I said, though my feet felt like lead.
"She's the reason the sky is falling!"
He was right. Logic dictated that I should leave her. In this world, mercy was a luxury that cost lives. But as I looked at her, I didn't see a monster. I saw myself.
I saw someone the world had decided to erase.
I broke away from Goro's grip and lunged toward her.
The air around the girl was thick, heavy with the scent of ozone and ancient blood. As I reached her, a shadow loomed over us. One of the silver predators—a Gen Soldier—had found its mark.
It raised a lance of pure energy. There was no emotion in its eyes, only the cold calculation of a harvest.
I didn't have a sword. I didn't have a shield.
I had "Ketsubetsu."
I threw myself over the girl, bracing for the end. I felt the heat of the lance. I felt the cold breath of the abyss.
*I refuse,* I whispered in the dark theater of my mind.
*I refuse to let this be the end.*
For the first time in twenty-three years, the void in my chest didn't just ache. It pulsed.
The lance struck.
But it didn't pierce me. Not yet.
A shockwave of static electricity erupted from the point of contact. My magic—the useless, stagnant Rejection—collided with the Gen's energy. It didn't cancel it out; it simply pushed it back for a fraction of a second.
It was a miracle. A pathetic, one-second miracle.
The lance shattered the ground beside us, throwing me and the girl into the ruins of the shrine.
Pain.
It wasn't a sharp sting. It was a heavy, crushing weight. My vision blurred. I looked down and saw a jagged shard of sacred wood protruding from my side.
The scent of my own blood was metallic, mixing with the ash of the burning village.
The girl crawled toward me. Her eyes were like burning embers, orange and gold, swirling with a grief that felt older than the mountains.
"Why?" she whispered. Her voice wasn't a sound; it was a vibration in my soul.
I couldn't answer. I was busy trying to keep my intestines from spilling out onto the dirt.
She reached out a trembling hand and touched my chest. Her fingers were ice-cold.
"You are the one who refuses," she murmured. "The one who lives in the gap between what is and what should be."
From the folds of her rags, she pulled out an object. It was a key—or at least, it had the shape of one. It was carved from a material that looked like obsidian but felt like silk.
The Tamashii no Kagi. The Key of the Bound Soul.
"Take it," she said. "If you die now, the world wins. And I hate this world as much as you do."
The Gen Soldier was recovering. It raised its lance again, the silver light blindingly bright.
I looked at the key. I looked at the blood soaking my shirt.
I had spent my life waiting for a sign. A reason for my existence. I thought I wanted power. I thought I wanted revenge.
But as the shadow of death closed in, I realized I only wanted one thing.
I wanted to stop being the one who was rejected.
I grabbed the key.
The moment my skin touched the obsidian, the world went silent. The screaming of the sky, the roar of the fire, the frantic shouting of Goro—it all vanished.
There was only a voice. Not the girl's. Not mine.
It was the voice of the blood in my veins. The voice of a thousand ancestors who had been stepped on, spat upon, and forgotten.
**[Genetic Sequence Identified.]**
**[Synchronizing with Host Logic...]**
**[Causality Error Detected: Magic 'Ketsubetsu' is not a failure.]**
**[It is a lock.]**
The key didn't glow. It didn't explode with light.
Instead, it began to melt. It seeped into my skin, black veins spreading up my arm like a slow-moving poison.
The pain was unlike anything I had ever felt. It wasn't the pain of a wound; it was the pain of being rewritten. My bones felt like they were being ground into powder and remolded. My eyes burned as if they were being washed in acid.
The Gen Soldier lunged, the lance of light descending like a guillotine.
I didn't move. I couldn't move.
But the air did.
The space around me rippled. The silver lance didn't hit me. It didn't even touch the ground. It hit an invisible wall and folded—literally folded—like a piece of paper.
I looked up.
My vision was different now. I didn't see the world. I saw the strings. I saw the flow of mana, the fragile connections between cause and effect.
I saw the Gen Soldier for what it was: a construct of stolen energy.
I reached out my hand. My movements were slow, fluid, as if I were moving through water.
I touched the soldier's chest.
"I refuse your existence," I said.
The "Ketsubetsu" flared. But it wasn't a dull ache anymore. It was a command.
The Gen Soldier didn't explode. It didn't turn to ash.
It simply ceased to be.
One moment it was there, a terrifying predator of the void. The next, there was only empty air and the smell of ozone.
The effort cost me everything. The world rushed back in—the heat, the noise, the agony in my side. I collapsed onto my knees, my breath coming in ragged gasps.
The girl was watching me, her eyes wide with a mixture of hope and terror.
"You... you opened it," she whispered.
I tried to speak, but my mouth was full of blood. I looked at my hand. The black veins were still there, pulsing beneath the skin, a permanent mark of the deal I had just struck.
The village was still burning. The Gate was still open. My people were still dying.
But for the first time in my life, I felt... awake.
I looked at the girl. I looked at the jagged wood in my side. I reached down, gripped the splintered timber, and pulled.
I didn't scream. I just watched as the wound began to knit itself together, not with magic, but with a terrifying, unnatural efficiency.
I stood up. The world swayed, but I stayed upright.
Goro was staring at me from a distance, his sword shaking in his hand. He looked at me as if I were a stranger. As if I were something that had crawled out of the dark.
Maybe I was.
"Rai?" he called out, his voice trembling. "What did you do?"
I didn't answer. I couldn't.
Because at the edge of my vision, a new horizon was forming. A message, etched in the very air I breathed, visible only to me.
**[Protocol: Restoration of the Fallen. Objective: Survive the Harvest.]**
**[Current Status: Awakened Human.]**
I realized then that the girl hadn't saved my life. She had ended it.
The Rai Kurotsuki who ate dirt and prayed for a quick death was gone.
I looked at the sky, at the weeping wound that threatened to consume everything I had ever known.
"This is only the beginning, isn't it?" I whispered.
The girl didn't answer. She only pointed toward the center of the village, where a much larger shadow was beginning to emerge from the white light.
A shadow that made the Gen Soldier look like a flickering candle.
I gripped my fists. The black veins on my arm throbbed in anticipation.
I didn't know what I was becoming. I didn't know if I was a hero or a new kind of monster.
But as I stepped toward the flames, I knew one thing for certain.
The world had tried to reject me.
Now, it was my turn to return the favor.
Wait.
Behind the shadow in the gate, something else was moving. Something that shouldn't be possible.
A human voice, cold and familiar, drifted through the chaos.
"Is he the one? The one with the broken soul?"
I froze. That voice didn't come from the Gen world.
It came from the Empire.
I turned, but the world suddenly tilted. The blood loss, the transformation, the sheer weight of the "Key"—it was too much.
As my vision began to fade into black, the last thing I saw wasn't a monster.
It was a man in the white and gold armor of the Imperial Knights, standing amidst the slaughter, watching me with a smile that was far more terrifying than any demon.
And he wasn't there to save us.