Chapter 1:

A Second Chance

Life As An Ex-Convict Isn't Easy, Even In Another World


All I see is white.

Looking in every direction, I find that I am surrounded by a void filled with light so bright that my eyes can’t register it as anything but pure whiteness. I can’t even see my own body, though I do have sensations, so I know it’s there. I would expect that much light to burn out my retinas, but my eyes feel fine. Better than ever, really.

So, where the hell am I? Or should it be where the heaven am I? I can’t imagine hell looking this clean and bright. Then again, I also can’t imagine heaven looking this empty.

Maybe this is some kind of between place where people go before they are reincarnated.

If that’s the case, I would like to request to live out my next life as a giant tortoise. A hundred-year plus lifespan of just chilling and eating plants? Those guys have it made. Much better than I ever did as a human, that’s for sure.

Man, come to think of it, the fact that I’m here means I must really be dead, doesn’t it? I’m not sure how I feel about that.

I barely had a chance to live a life. Maybe I should regret having my potential cut short at such a young age, but my emotions on the matter seem to be trending toward apathy. I already ruined my own potential years ago. And it’s not like I was still a kid or anything, technically.

That said, I’m not exactly interested in waiting in this void forever. Somebody tell me what’s going on, please!

“You… You are Itten Seiji, are you not?”

As if on cue, a sweet, feminine voice rings in my ears.

It sounds like the bearer of the voice is standing directly in front of me. Startled, I jump back.

“You are the one I am looking for, yes?”

If the person speaking to me is as beautiful as her voice sounds… man, I wish I could see right now!

“Y-you’re looking for Itten Seiji? Yup, th-that’s me. Um… what’s your name?”

“I am called Tenshi,” the voice says serenely.

Tenshi, like the Japanese word for angel? Maybe I really am in heaven!

“This realm is not your final resting place,” Tenshi says, almost as if she were answering my thoughts. I wonder if she can read minds.

“I cannot.”

“Cannot what?”

“Read minds.”

“Then how did you know that’s what I was thinking?!”

“Angelic intuition,” she answers.

That sounds a lot like mind reading to me, but okay.

Suddenly I feel her forehead press against mine. I’m too stunned to move. What is happening here? What kind of a scene is this?!

“I see,” Tenshi says, a hint of sadness adorning her gorgeous voice. “You have had a very difficult life. More difficult than any person should have to bear. I am sorry.”

She can’t read minds, but she can read my… memories? My past? I can’t think straight with her silky skin touching mine.

“I-it’s not your fault,” I manage to breathe out.

The truth is, it’s mostly mine.

“But it is why you were brought here. I have the ability to offer you a second chance. An opportunity to live another life, in another place—to choose to be another person. Would that interest you?”

Interest me? Don’t make it sound like you’re offering me dessert after my main course at a restaurant. This is a big deal!

“I— I think, probably, um…”

“Just say the word, and it will be done,” Tenshi’s voice tells me.

Another chance at life, huh? I never thought the decision would be mine to make. What happens if I say no? Do I make a final post-mortem stop in angel town, or, more likely, the Devil’s fun house? Do I break free of the simulation—escape the matrix? Do I fade into nothingness?

As I ponder the possibilities, I start to reflect on my first life that brought me to this point. Maybe there’s a hint about what I should do hidden away in my memories somewhere.


When I was seventeen years old, I killed someone. That’s the biggest event in my past, the thing that changed everything. But to get there, first we have to start from the beginning.

I lived my entire life until that moment in a small apartment in Tokyo with my mom—Itten Shino—and my younger sister Hana.

More accurately, Hana was my half-sister. Shino got pregnant with her while my dad was away on a business trip, and when he got back and found out, he left her alone with a one-year-old kid and another on the way. Great guy. I hope he got hit by a car.

I wouldn’t know if he did. We never heard from him again. I don’t even remember what he looked like.

Shino did her best to raise Hana and me. She really did. She worked hard, harder than anyone else I’ve ever known. That left me with the job of taking care of Hana at home as soon as I was old enough to. Our mom didn’t have any family or close friends who she could rely on, so it was just the three of us against the world.

It was probably a side-effect of being in charge of her, but I was very protective of Hana. She was pretty shy in public, and when we started going to school she ended up getting picked on quite a bit. I got into a few fights with guys who were bullying her, and not infrequently got in trouble with school administration.

I was considered something of a delinquent. In Hana’s first year of middle school, I even had to go to family court after I punched a guy so hard it broke his jaw. I got off with just a fine, which wouldn’t have been a big deal if we weren’t already struggling financially.

Providing for two kids wasn’t easy for Shino. She didn’t have any special skills, so she scraped by on the income from multiple part time jobs. It was seriously stressful for her. She would often get drunk after work to take the edge off—I think she might have been addicted. Either way, the times she was drunk were also when she would get violent.

It was never as bad as it could have been. I got hit, but she held back enough that I never really got hurt. Not like I had done to jaw boy. She hit Hana less often, partly because I would get between them and take the beating instead when I saw her try.

We had to endure verbal abuse as well, but to Shino’s credit, she never once said that she didn’t love us.

Not that it made me hate her any less for it.

It was around that time that I started to refer to our mom by her given name. I can’t say any one thing caused it—it just became more natural for me to call her Shino than “mom” after a while.

In high school, I took up wood carving as a hobby. Bit of a weird pastime for a teenage Tokyoite, I know, but I needed something calming to distract me, and video games weren’t quite doing it.

I couldn’t afford to get my hands on real wood carving tools, so I just used an ordinary pocket knife. I made sure to keep it sharp.

On a certain Monday during my third year of high school, I had a particularly shitty day. I got in another fight, this time over something other than my family problems. Some guy was trying to take my wallet, and I wasn’t gonna just let him get away with it. In the end I got in trouble for roughing him up, while he got away scott free. Not my best moment. And I was going to have to deal with the rest of the school week after that.

I needed an escape, so as soon as I got home I went straight to my room and started taking my frustration out on a block of wood.

I tried to concentrate on the turtle I was carving, which went well at first. But then I heard Shino shouting from the main room. I thought maybe I could ignore it this time. As long as she wasn’t getting violent with Hana, it should be fine.

That lasted all of three seconds.

A loud smack resounded through the house. The fact that I could hear it from my room meant that Shino had hit Hana pretty hard. I immediately bolted for the door to get to them. I didn’t even take the time to put down the knife I was holding.

I saw Hana lying on the floor, tears in her eyes as she gazed up at our mother, who was standing over her, her back facing me. In that moment, something in me snapped.

At this point, there is something crucial you need to understand. Hana’s life was not in danger. Shino wasn’t actively attacking her. She had sustained no injuries beyond a red slap-mark on her face.

I didn’t act the way I did in order to save my sister. I did it because I was fed up with how Shino treated us, and I didn’t have strong enough inhibitions in that moment to hold me back.

In an instant, before even I fully knew what was happening, I had plunged the knife I was holding up to the handle between my mother’s shoulder blades.

She turned her head and looked at me with weak, trembling eyes, then collapsed to the floor. Hana screamed. My sister’s expression as she witnessed what I had done was one of pure fear.

The next few minutes were a daze. I don’t know who it was who called the police. It could have been my sister, or a concerned neighbor, or even me. Whoever it was, I was hauled away without a fight.

The court argued over what to do with me for a long time. The day I stabbed my mother was a few days before my eighteenth birthday, which I spent in a holding cell. Should I be tried as a minor? They could call it “close enough” to count as a specified juvenile—a sort of strange legal limbo between childhood and adulthood. I was eighteen now, after all, but I technically wasn’t when I committed the crime.

In the end, it was decided that, based on article 51 of the Juveniles Act, my sentence would be reduced from potential life imprisonment to only ten years. However, I would serve that time in an adult penitentiary.

Ten years. Alone. There were other inmates who I interacted with, but they were all at least a decade older than me, so we didn’t have much to talk about. My sister never visited. I honestly didn’t blame her.

Birthdays passed me by without fanfare or celebration. Twenty. Twenty-two. Twenty-five. And finally, twenty-eight. Ten years since my incarceration.

Once my time was finally up and I was released, I didn’t know what to do with myself. I tried to get a job using the experience I gained during work hours in prison, but most places were hesitant to hire an ex-convict.

According to a statistic I saw once, Japan has a shockingly high recidivism rate—almost fifty percent. As a result, most people are wary around anyone who has served time before. I got rejected from more jobs than I could count. For a while I was living in a net cafe, just eking by on odd gig jobs.

Eventually I found employment at a convenience store, and made enough to put myself up in an apartment even tinier than the one my family lived in ten years ago.

Having been apart from people my age for that long, social interactions had become difficult for me, and I didn’t have any friends. But at least I had a place to live and a paycheck to look forward to. For about two weeks.

I had just got off my shift and was walking home. It was late, and the streets were as dark as they get in the big city. I was ready to turn in for the day and hit the sack.

Suddenly, a person appeared out of nowhere and tackled me. He was wearing a mask, but I could see his wild, frenzied eyes staring at me like he wasn’t sure if I was real. He held me down with one hand, and with the other he raised a knife.

“Foul villain! The law may have pardoned you, but you will never earn the forgiveness of true justice! Hear the name of your executioner, and never forget it! For I am— hold on, if you’re dead you won’t be able to remember it anyway. Oh well.”

What’s this?! There’s no way I’m about to be killed by some wannabe vigilante superhero who hasn’t even practiced his lines properly. No freaking way!

That was what ran through my mind before I met the same end that my mother had. The guy in the mask stabbed me in the chest three times before I lost consciousness.


How much time has passed between then and my arrival in this empty white world I can’t say. All I know is that I, Itten Seiji, was killed by the worst vigilante in history, my life cut short at twenty-eight, and I barely even mind. I kind of deserved it.

But still, I just got that job! Give it back!

Now that I’ve had time to think, I’ve decided that non-existence isn’t all that appealing, nor is eternal torture. After what I did, I’d have to be crazy to think I would end up in the good place. Which really only leaves one option.

“When you bring me back, could I become a giant tortoise?” I ask Tenshi. I am serious about the idea.

Though I can’t see her, I can feel the warmth of her amused smile.

“No, Seiji. It doesn’t work quite like that.”

“Oh.”

No harm in asking, anyway.

I feel something touch my forehead again, but this time it is a pair of the softest lips I have ever felt (not that I’ve felt any besides my own). Then the contact ends, and Tenshi seems to back away. The spot where she kissed me burns with a pleasant heat. It slowly moves through the rest of my body, filling me up with warmth and light.

“Good luck, Seiji. Make the most of your second chance.”

As soon as the kiss-heat penetrates the farthest parts of me, my senses blur together, and I black out.

Sen Kumo
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Difayer Reivun
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