a different point of view

Thankfully, by the time I’d transmigrated, Emmett’s grandfather had already done the deed and conceived two children, so I didn’t have to go through the absolute horror of that. However, as the years passed by, and as I got older, my condition started to worsen, in many ways.

First of all, after only a couple of years, I realized that I was finally starting to get affected by the Void’s emotion drain, however it was still very little since I was a foreign soul. I wagered that I could maybe last the entire time, but that was a risky bet to take, yet I had no choice but to keep moving forward.

Soon after that, my physical condition worsened too. I started to feel the wear and tear that natural aging brought upon a person, and I managed to tell myself that this was simply an avatar, but I still dreaded the time that would happen to me one day in my real body.

But the worst thing was the absolute boredom. I’d spent my days totally alone, as Emmett’s parents rarely checked up on me. Also, his grandfather’s soul was nowhere to be found, unlike Arthur who had remained there and waited patiently. I concluded that this must have been due to his decades of life in the void: The lack of emotion turned his body into a living corpse, making way for his soul to leave it. I didn’t know what exactly would happen to a soul that left a body that was still alive, though: Would it reincarnate? Fade away into oblivion? Who knows.

This left me to wander this dead planet all on my own. As I waited for Esmeralda to eventually put her plan into fruition, I had no choice but to wait patiently, and I spent most of that time alone in my room, with my own thoughts.

At first, I spent this time doing various different things: I wrote various books, some fantasy, some romance, but mostly all fictional. Other times, I started to paint, self taught myself through a large amount of trial and error and eventually saw some improvement. Of course, none of my works would ever see the light of day, and if somehow they ever would, no one would assume that Emmett’s grandfather had been taken over by a different person, and he would be credited for them.

However, these creative projects went from being a fun way to pass time, to an extreme struggle. The reason for this was quite simple and I deduced it almost immediately: Creativity goes hand in hand with emotion. When one’s emotion starts slowly getting drained, the creativity goes away with it. It started to take me hours to come up with a single sentence when I wrote, and when I attempted to draw, the result was not only back to square one, but even worse: An emotionless burst of colors randomly flung onto the canvas. This wasn’t satisfactory at all, so naturally, I quit.

I tried to turn to sport, but that didn’t click either. The passion and adrenaline that comes with them just wasn’t there, and left me with pure hatred for the amount of conditioning that left me exhausted. I quit that soon after as well.

Everything that I tried simply just failed. The most mundane of tasks simply didn’t cut it anymore, because it wasn’t evoking anything out of me anymore. My capacity to feel had been almost completely neutralized at this point, I knew it, and I could feel it slip away, but I could do nothing but wait. I couldn’t just leave now, after waiting all this time. Even if I left and came back, I might be sent even further back in time, which would make things even worse. How long would I be able to take this without going insane at some point?

After an almost infinite amount of time, the day finally came. Selphine and her men attacked the masked order. My original plan was to wait and hide in the shadows while observing, but I couldn’t even do that because of how broken down both my body and spirit were, at this point, as I had vastly underestimated the effects of the void. It had taken a lot more time, but eventually I had been drained just like everyone else here. Thus, Esmeralda made me wait in my room.

I was used to waiting, as I had done so for decades, yet for some reason, my impatience had resurfaced, I could barely keep myself together, waiting for some news, any. Since we didn’t know for sure if that body we’d seen in Arthur’s memories was the real deal or the fake, we had no guarantee for if our plan worked.

Finally, I heard a knock. I opened the door to find Esmeralda waiting with a smile. She crushed me with a hug, as we both celebrated: We had succeeded. Both Selphine and Arthur now assumed she was dead, leaving her free to interfere when the time came.

But now, we had a new problem to face: My body had a big chance of not making it to that day, as it was not at risk of shutting down at any given time. So we decided to transfer my soul to a new, suitable vessel.

“But we don’t have any vessel for me to transfer into!” I said.

“Don’t we? What about that grandkid that lives here?” Esmeralda suggested.

Emmett himself.

He’d lost his parents just days ago in the attack. Obviously, he didn’t know that. But he didn’t react at all. He didn’t cry, he didn’t get upset. He just…stared blankly.

“He’s already basically a corpse.” She continued. “I don’t think there’s any soul left in there for you to invade.”

“…If there is, we switch back immediately.” I said.

“Fine.” She agreed to this compromise.

And that’s how I ended up in Emmett’s body. Unlike Arthur’s temporary spell, Esmeralda set up a complete circle in order to make a perfect transfer. Sure enough, he had no soul, so I decided to remain.

Over the next few years, I truly became Emmett. I became the person I’d remembered from all these decades ago. He had been a fading memory at this point, but with every passing day, I started to remember, bit by bit. That feeling from days past. Why I’d done this in the first place. I started to remember my goal. I met Arthur and planted the seeds, becoming his friend.

And then, the time came. I met myself. My past self. The one stuck in Arthur’s body, the first day he transmigrated here. That was eons ago, and yet now, here I was, facing myself. I remembered it all, but now I was seeing things from a different point of view.