Maybe I had ended up inside a light novel.
It could have been a manga. I had long since left open the possibility that it was a dating sim.
If so, then this world was probably a contemporary romantic comedy or some kind of coming-of-age story.
Or maybe it was simply Japan in a parallel universe.
Lately, I had been leaning more and more toward the latter.
Anyway.
That was the point.
Despite everything this strange world had thrown at me, I was doing my best to live a decent life.
There was once a man in his twenties who checked a stock-trading app every chance he got.
What would a man like that do first if he went back in time?
Invest, obviously. It was the only way to get even with the lunatics who had called him a doomsayer.
So the moment I regressed, I got online.
The parents I had never had before suddenly materialized out of nowhere, and being younger put limits on what I could do, but I could not afford to miss an opportunity like this.
Once I convinced my parents to get me a brokerage account, I would be set.
Changing my nationality to Japanese did not matter. I was sure that if I used even half the knowledge in my head, I could coast through the rest of my life.
…Or so I thought, until I discovered that this world had no Google, no Apple, nothing I recognized.
It had major corporations, of course.
Their names were all unfamiliar.
The entire business landscape was different, too.
Several companies were still fighting tooth and nail for control of the operating-system market.
The smartphone and platform markets were a complete free-for-all.
And if I started counting every minor difference, there would have been no end to it.
At that point, even if I found a company I recognized, I would hesitate to invest. The information I had was simply too compromised.
So I gave up on investing altogether.
Instead, I made a plan for my life.
My previous life had not exactly been successful.
It had been unusual, and I had been reasonably satisfied with it, but it had also been hard.
To put it bluntly, I made far too little money. There were stretches when I earned nothing at all, even though I was not slacking off.
At the same time, I made enough to cover my living expenses, so taking a part-time job never felt strictly necessary.
I had been an orphan with no parents to fall back on, and I had still kept myself afloat. That alone should have made the situation clear.
But in the end, I still earned less than I would have at a part-time job.
That was the problem.
Looking back, I should have gotten one. I would have had more peace of mind, and I probably would have done better at my actual work, too.
Over the last few years, I had come to understand, painfully, how important a stable career was.
And stable careers usually required an education. Even if all you wanted was to take a certification exam, it helped to have kept your mind sharp while you were a student.
I was someone who believed that even effort required talent, but I was smart enough.
If I devoted all my time to exam prep, I could get into a top university. I might even scrape into medical school.
Fortunately, I had parents now, so I could focus on studying without having to worry about—
“I’m sick of both Saito and Touji. Just leave me alone already.”
“Dad’s sorry, Touji.”
At least one parent was still around, so I could focus on studying without having to worry about—
…
My birth mother had divorced us, saying she was sick of her husband and son. She had been Hiiragi Rei. Now she was Ito Rei.
Still, I understood how Rei felt.
Honestly, my biological father, Hiiragi Saito, was not a proper head of household.
A head of household was supposed to bring home money. If that basic condition was not met, there was no point discussing anything else.
If you had no intention of raising a child, you should not have had one in the first place.
It was not as though Saito had no income at all.
His earnings just came in less regularly than mine had in my previous life, and there was less of it.
Rei had gotten pregnant as a minor and had a child before she knew what had happened. She probably had not realized while they were dating that there was nothing especially admirable about a person being obsessed with painting.
With her husband’s income unstable, Rei had carried the household on her own for roughly seven years before finally leaving.
It was a little unfair that I had been lumped together with Saito as one half of the unbearable duo, but when people were pushed to their limits, they naturally wanted to blame everything in sight.
Since I was older than Rei in actual years, both then and now, I could not help understanding.
The same went for Saito.
Honestly, Saito was not a good father. If people called him trash, he would not have had much of a defense.
No, objectively speaking, he was trash.
The most important thing for a child’s emotional development was a connection with their parents.
To a child, their parents were their entire world. Only when that world was stable could a child protect themselves from the shocks waiting outside it.
Otherwise, they would grow up warped in one way or another.
Abuse was not limited to physically beating a child. Neglect was abuse too.
So what Saito was doing was, in its own way, abuse.
Even so, I could not bring myself to hate him.
Because I was the one he had neglected.
Not a little boy, but someone with the mind of an adult.
A parent’s divorce would have been a life-altering disaster for an ordinary child, but I had never thought of Saito and Rei as my parents in the first place.
When they divorced, I had only just arrived in this world. I did not even have the faint sense of familiarity I felt toward them now.
They had felt like complete strangers.
Now, though, they felt more like friends my own age.
So when I looked at Saito, I saw a little too much of my former self in him.
That hurt.
But I could not hate him for it.
I had gotten sidetracked.
In any case, because of circumstances like these, my life plan had gone off the rails from the very beginning.
Saito did try to play the role of a father, but he had no intention of giving up painting.
With that man as my father, even getting regular meals was difficult.
It was a brutal environment for a child who had only just started elementary school.
But who was I?
My body might have shrunk, but my mind was still intact.
Was I not practically a master detective?
Adults were supposed to earn their own keep. I could not assume my parents would support me forever.
So I decided to work.
I quietly brought out the skill that had barely kept my past self afloat—a skill I had planned to use only as a hobby in this life.
“You really wrote this novel?”
Fortunately, things worked out.