The metallic tang of copper and the scorched-ozone smell of spent cartridges were the final sensory memories of Haruhiro Tsukishima's first life.
As a high-ranking JSDF officer, Haruhiro had lived by a code of absolute, unwavering duty. He had died in a chaotic hail of gunfire during a high-stakes escort mission, his body serving as a human shield for the VIP he was sworn to protect. As the life drained out of him, he felt a grim, professional satisfaction that his sacrifice was successful—the target had escaped and his duty was fulfilled.
Yet, as the darkness closed in, a singular, gnawing regret consumed him. It wasn't a lack of medals or unsaid goodbyes; it was the unfinished business of a devotee.
I never got to finish the final stage of Crisol: Theater of Idols, he thought, his fading mind clinging to the memory of the game's gothic, blood-soaked interface. I spent hundreds of hours mastering the 'Sacrificial Ammunition' mechanics... and now I'll never see the end.
******
The void didn't last. The next thing Haruhiro knew, he was screaming—not from pain, but from the shock of cold air on newborn lungs.
He had been reborn as an infant in a quiet village during the waning years of the Meiji era. His parents, humble folk who saw a strange, focused intelligence in their son's eyes, named him Haruhiro. It was the same name he had carried in his past life, a lingering tether to the man he once was.
As he grew, the memories of modern Tokyo and the JSDF remained vivid, but they felt like a distant dream. He didn't want to return to that world. He had reached the upper echelons of military command once; he had seen enough war to last ten lifetimes. He was tired of high-stakes escort missions and being a tool for the state. He wanted a slow life.
"I've taken enough lives for the sake of 'duty,'" Haruhiro whispered to himself as a young man, looking at his reflection in a rainwater barrel. "In this life, I'll save them."
He decided to become a traditional doctor. He traded the path of the warrior for a simple yukata, swapping his potential command of soldiers for the study of traditional herbalism. He spent years as an apprentice to an elderly physician, learning to heal with herbs and needles rather than destroy with lead. By the time the era shifted into the Taisho period, he had become Doctor Tsukishima, a man known for a calm demeanor that only a veteran could possess.
However, his peaceful life was haunted by the "incurable." Cancer—the "hidden rot" that even his modern memories couldn't solve with the primitive tools of the 1910s—still claimed his patients, mocking his desire to save everyone. He found himself obsessing over a cure, driven by the same perfectionism that had once made him a high-ranking officer.
One afternoon, while trekking through the high peaks for medicinal roots to treat a terminal patient, he found it. Tucked beneath a sun-drenched ledge, swaying in the mountain breeze, was a cluster of luminous, translucent blue flowers blooming under the midday sun.
To Haruhiro, this was no legend; it was a botanical miracle. He saw a flower with a chemical structure that hinted at unprecedented cellular regeneration.
"This could be the key," he muttered, his fingers trembling as he reached for the glowing petals. "A biological panacea for the rot."
******
The breakthrough was a miracle of the Taisho era. By meticulously distilling the bioluminescent petals of the blue spider lily, Doctor Haruhiro Tsukishima had achieved the impossible. His clinic became a place of pilgrimage as terminal patients—those once rotting from the inside with incurable tumors—walked away with their vitality fully restored. Haruhiro had finally found the purpose of his second life through the quiet triumph of medicine.
But the irony of his existence was a cruel one.
While Haruhiro spent his days monitoring the recovery of others, he had ignored the dull, persistent ache in his own side. It was only when he coughed into a silk handkerchief and saw the vivid crimson of internal hemorrhaging that he performed a self-examination.
The diagnosis was a death sentence. Unlike the patients he had treated, his own cancer was an aggressive, mutated strain—a cellular wildfire that his standard elixir couldn't dampen.
"A high-ranking officer... a doctor... and I didn't even notice my own flank was compromised," Haruhiro whispered, his voice thick with a soldier's self-loathing. He felt a profound disgust for his own negligence. He had been so focused on the mission of saving others that he had failed the first rule of survival: maintaining the asset. He felt like a failure as a physician for letting his own health deteriorate to this point.
Desperate and unwilling to let his second life end in a hospital bed, Haruhiro returned to his laboratory. He didn't just brew the medicine this time; he pushed the distillation to its breaking point. He created a concentrated elixir, using every remaining petal of the blue flowers, intending to force his body into a state of hyper-regeneration.
He drank the vial in a single, defiant gulp.
The reaction was instantaneous and violent. It felt as though his veins were being replaced with pressurized steam. His vision fractured, and he felt his entire molecular structure being rewritten, his humanity stretching and snapping into something new. The heat was unbearable, a physiological reconstruction that felt like being forged in a furnace.
Then, silence.
Haruhiro collapsed, sweating and gasping on the floor of his clinic. As the sun began to rise, he gingerly stood up. He felt... perfect. The ache in his side was gone. The weight in his lungs had vanished. He checked his reflection in the surgical mirror; his skin was clear, his eyes sharp, and the "rot" had been completely purged.
"Was I wrong?" he murmured, flexing his hands. "I felt like my whole body was changing... but I seem fine."
He stepped toward the open window, bracing for the sting of the morning light, but the warmth was pleasant. He had conquered the sun.
Relieved and convinced that the strange sensations were merely the stress of the procedure, Haruhiro straightened his white coat. He had a clinic to run and patients to see. He decided to continue working as a doctor, entirely unaware that while he looked human, his biology had become a high-pressure reservoir of power—a "theater of sacrifice" that would eventually demand a price for his survival.