The afternoon sun beat down on the synthetic turf of the school’s open-air sports deck, casting long, geometric shadows across the pitch.
It was the weekly Physical Education class, a period Victor usually spent trying to blend into the background or hiding behind the equipment sheds to conserve his energy.
Instead, he found himself marooned inside the penalty box during a chaotic inter-class football match.
As a high schooler who craved nothing more than a quiet, comfortable, and completely ordinary life, his primary physical exertion involved avoiding responsibility.
He had absolutely no business being here.
“Victor! Head it! Head it in!” Dylan yelled from the sidelines, waving his arms like a madman.
I am going to strangle him with his own gym shorts, Victor thought, his internal monologue dripping with venom.
It was entirely Dylan’s fault.
Dylan had begged him to fill in for their missing classmate, promising the P.E.
teacher wouldn’t notice if he just stood around and looked busy.
“A cozy, low-stakes game to burn off some steam,” he had said.
Yielding to peer pressure and a misguided sense of loyalty, Victor gritted his teeth, tracked the arc of the ball, and leaped into the air.
For a fleeting, glorious microsecond, he felt like the hero of a teen sports drama.
His form was perfect.
His hair caught the breeze of the field’s climate beautifully.
Then, he looked to his left.
Time seemed to dilate into a slow, agonizing crawl.
Looming beside him wasn’t just a player from the rival class—it was the brute of Class 3-C.
A guy who looked like he had been built in a heavy-machinery lab rather than grown in a human home, rising for the exact same header.
His shoulders were broader than Victor’s future academic prospects, and his expression was one of pure, unadulterated competitive fury.
Oh, fantastic, Victor mused smoothly as the brute’s massive forehead rapidly filled his entire field of vision.
Goodbye, cruel world.
Goodbye, my beautifully symmetrical face.
Dylan, I leave my vintage card collection to the school janitor, just to spite you.
May your automated kitchen forever burn your morning toast.
He closed his eyes and comically accepted his impending doom.
CRACK.
The world went instantly, blissfully dark.
A soft, rhythmic chirp…
chirp…
chirp…
gradually pulled Victor out of the void.
It wasn’t a harsh alarm, but the gentle, synthesized birdsong of a standard-issue medical monitor.
The air smelled faintly of lavender and sterilized ozone.
A soothing, lukewarm weight pressed against his forehead—a smart-gel ice pack adjusting its temperature to perfectly match his swelling bruise.
Victor slowly blinked his eyes open, squinting against the warm, amber glow of the school infirmary’s ambient lighting.
The ceiling panels were decorated with a moving projection of soft, floating clouds, designed to calm stressed students.
He groaned, a phantom ache tightening in his chest.
For a split second, before the fog in his mind cleared, a heavy, suffocating sensation washed over him—a fleeting shadow of a past life’s exhaustion, of stage lights that burned too bright and melodies that broke his soul.
He didn’t remember the music, the betrayal, or the trauma explicitly, but his body remembered the exhaustion.
He shook his head slightly to clear the strange mood, rationalizing it as just the aftereffects of the collision.
The room was completely quiet.
There were no nurses, no footsteps, and no students buzzing around—just Victor, alone in the dim, tranquil sanctuary of the school infirmary.
As he stared up at the drifting holographic clouds on the ceiling, the dull throb in his forehead suddenly shifted.
The physical pain vanished, replaced by an abrupt, violent surge of pressure behind his eyes.
It felt as though a rusted floodgate deep within the recesses of his mind had just been blown off its hinges.
The ceiling panels blurred out of focus, and a torrent of uninvited images crashed into his consciousness.
He saw blinding, oppressive stage lights that didn’t feel cozy at all—they felt like interrogation lamps.
He heard the deafening roar of a crowd, but it didn’t bring joy; it brought a suffocating, paralyzing anxiety.
The loss of family members.
Hurtful breakups.
He felt the cold weight of an analog microphone in his hand, the bitter taste of betrayal by people he had trusted, and the crushing weight of a soul completely hollowed out by the cutthroat machinery of the music industry.
Flash after flash of a past life tore through him—the endless sleepless nights, the broken promises, the agonizing realization that his passion had become his prison.
And then came the final, ultimate indignity: his death.
He didn’t go out in a blaze of glory.
He hadn’t been hit by the legendary, noble Truck-kun while saving a stray kitten, a fate that would at least grant him some pop-culture dignity.
No, after a miserable late-night studio session, completely numb with exhaustion, he had simply stepped off a curb and plunged straight down an uncovered, gaping sewer pipe.
A degrading, foul, and utterly unheroic end.
The memories receded as quickly as they had arrived, leaving Victor gasping for air.
The phantom ache in his chest was no longer a mystery.
It was a scar.
He hadn’t just disliked art and music in this life; his soul had been actively fleeing from it.
He lay perfectly still for a long minute, his heart hammering against his ribs.
He felt utterly lost, untethered between who he was now and the ghost of who he used to be.
A profound sense of sheer, unadulterated irritation washed over him.
Slowly, the overwhelming weight of the cosmic revelation settled in the room.
Victor closed his eyes, let out a long, ragged exhale, and allowed his oldest defense mechanism to take the wheel.
“Fantastic,” he muttered to the empty room, his voice dripping with dry, venomous sarcasm.
“I get a magical, once-in-a-universe reincarnation package, and instead of inheriting a trillion-dollar space empire or cheat-code superpowers, I inherit a severe case of musical PTSD and a giant lump on my forehead. And a sewer pipe? Seriously? Couldn’t even give me a delivery truck or a stray lightning bolt. Thanks, universe. Really stellar writing. Five stars, would absolutely recommend the open-drain experience.”
Victor lay back on the infirmary cot, staring blankly at the ceiling lights.
If the cosmic rules of web novel reincarnation applied here, the degrading sewer death should at least have bought him some high-tier compensation.
Where is it?
He thought, narrowing his eyes.
Where is my golden finger?
My overpowered cheat?
My system daddy?!
He sat up, ignoring the dull throb in his head, and began testing the universal triggers.
He cleared his throat and whispered to the empty air, “System? Status window open.”
Nothing happened.
The ambient lights floated lazily above him.
He tried a different approach, waving his hand around like he was trying to swat an invisible fly.
“Log in? Character sheet? Quest log?” Still, the room remained dead quiet.
After trying several things, frustrated, Victor decided to lean into the classic tropes.
He puffed out his chest, pointed a dramatic finger at the ceiling, and proclaimed in a deeply serious, echoing theatrical whisper, “Awaken, Ancient One! Grant me the Celestial Idol System!”
The electronic sliding door to the infirmary hissed open right at that exact microsecond.
Victor froze.
His arm was still extended toward the ceiling, his finger pointing rigidly at the light bulb.
Standing in the doorway was Nurse Brenda, the school’s head nurse.
She was holding a tray with a fresh cup of automated hydration tea, and her eyes were locked onto Victor.
For three excruciatingly long, silent seconds, the two of them just stared at each other.
The only sound in the room was the soft, rhythmic hum of the building’s ventilation system.
Slowly, agonizingly, Victor lowered his arm.
He cleared his throat, patted his messy hair down, and pulled the thermal blanket up to his chin, trying to look like a perfectly normal, functional high school student who definitely hadn’t just demanded a celestial entity to manifest in a nurse’s office.”Ah,” Victor croaked, his voice cracking slightly as a brilliant crimson blush crawled up his neck.
“Nurse Brenda. I was just… stretching. For the theater club. It’s a vocal and physical warm-up technique. Very avant-garde.”
Nurse Brenda didn’t look convinced.
In fact, her expression shifted from mild surprise to deep, professional concern.
She slowly set the tray down on the bedside table, her eyes tracking Victor’s twitching facial expressions like a hawk.
“Victor, dear,” she said, her voice dropping into the overly gentle, cautious tone one might use with a confused toddler or a volatile wild animal.
She reached out and lightly tapped the side of her own head.
“When the student from Class 3-C collided with you… did you happen to see any bright flashing lights? Or perhaps hear voices instructing you to, say, conquer the galaxy?”
“No! No voices,” Victor squeaked, dying inside.
“Just a regular, non-magical headache.”
Brenda sighed, pulling a handheld medical scanner from her apron pocket.
She began waving the glowing instrument over his temples while looking at him with immense pity.
“I’m going to run a deep-brain diagnostic scan, just to be safe. Sometimes severe impact trauma can cause temporary delusions, retrograde amnesia, or… acute chuunibyou tendencies. Don’t worry, we have excellent neural-soothing jellies for your brain.”
Victor wore a thoroughly defeated expression, completely accepting that Nurse Brenda was now entirely convinced he had a few screws loose.
He sank back down into the thin infirmary mattress, going limp as a wet noodle.
He didn’t even have the energy left to summon a sarcastic remark.
Why bother?
His pride was already torn to shreds, and his reputation was currently circling the drain right alongside his past-life memories.
He closed his eyes, preparing to drown in his own embarrassment.
But it was at that exact moment, through the slight crack of his eyelids, that he caught sight of Nurse Brenda’s hands.
She was gesturing fluidly, her fingers weaving shimmering lines of light through the air as if she were sketching a masterpiece onto a canvas made of nothingness.
A jolt went straight through him, and he froze.
Right.
He had been so caught up in his past-life existential crisis and his missing “system” that he had forgotten something absolutely vital.
This wasn’t his old, boring Earth.
This world was magical.