Soul † Sakura

Volume I: Destiny Unveiled

Part One: Bittersweet Sixteenth

† Chapter One: Origin †

THERE IS NO TRUE HOPE in this world. It is to no amazement that we were all born alone and shall return to the womb of death in that same manner. I should know, for I have accomplished this very task of life, death, and rebirth for over one hundred generations.

Yet, I find myself doing it again. Perhaps this shall be my last time. It would seem so. The Kimi lineage will die if I shall die in this new body, this unborn infant about to be dragged through the tunnel of darkness and into the cursed light of the world.

In my own strange way, I fear for her. If I could control her body from before birth and if I wasn't condemned to find my box, I might have killed her from inside the womb and spared her the cruelty of living.

Sadly though, I am not allowed such control, not yet, at least. I must wait, until she turns of age, until she journeys through her rite of passage into womanhood and ripeness. Until then, I can have no control of her body. I must lay dormant; an entity that shares its being with the body it wears. I simply sleep in nothingness until my time comes.

When Aneko was killed, I had to make my next move immediately. It just so happened that Aneko's younger sister, Emiko, was enduring hours of labor up to the moment of Aneko's death.

"Aneko! Come quickly to the hospital! Her water just broke!" Goro, Emiko's husband, had shouted excitedly through the phone.

That was almost six hours ago. Aneko's cell phone had rung a moment before my awakening. She answered it and was happy to hear that her kid sister was having her first successful pregnancy after two miscarriages.

The Fates turned on her that day, though. Just as Goro announced the arrival of their first—and more than likely their only child—Aneko had just discovered the man who molested her was just released on bail. My, was she infuriated.

She had worked terribly hard to put him in prison in the first place, and for a measly thirty-thousand dollars, he was getting out of his twenty-two year sentence for molestation of a thirteen-year-old girl.

Aneko snapped at that point. She finally unleashed me and since she had reached womanhood, so had I. I was allowed my own body and I set out to do what I have attempted to do for thousands of years: find and open my box.

I am amazed that she didn't let me have control sooner. She never even tapped into my powers once before she reached ripeness. For two and a half years, this "family friend" had molested her, asked her to do things for him, told her to keep it as just their "little secret." During those moments when he would touch her in the most inappropriate of places, I would leave her mind. Even I did not want to bear witness this suffering along with her. How she, a mere mortal, managed to survive and overcome the experience still bewilders me.

At any case, it was better to be released later than never, correct?

Unfortunately, I had waited too long. The Masuyos had already plotted my next move. They knew where I was going to go. They knew I would come looking for them.

Aneko wasn't prepared. Her body was too weak for me, too fragile. Her heart, grieving with the memories of those appalling months, detracted from my state of being. Why, with the powers of the Masuyos, they nearly snapped her body in half. I saved myself the experience of such physical torment by leaving her body and going to the next.

I wonder what they shall name this one.

I left Aneko's body too quickly. The transition was like a bolt of lightning, sharp and jolting. I wasn't prepared. My soul, the essence of my being, is immaterial and therefore, it acts like a wisp of smoke that lingers even after the fire has been extinguished. Separated from my previous body in such urgency, I left many things behind in Aneko, like my memories. Right now, everything is vague in my mind, unclear, unfocused. I am having a hard time of remembering things I used to know so well . . . But this is how it always is. My memories are gone until I have grown to sixteen, with the body.

It has been ages past since I was once in my original body. Since my multiple resurrections, my memories continued to become confused and intermingled with those of the bodies I am born into. Eventually, after repeating this task for eight millenniums, you could imagine what would happen to my memory bank. It has been filling up for so long; I'm running out of room for my old ones.

Like files on a computer, the empty space in my mind is crammed with new documents and continue to be compacted into a smaller size, erasing the older files as they go, and replacing them with the new ones, until eventually, "I", the being that has been enveloped within the essence of another's body, finally cease to exist.

I suppose my time has come. I have lived long longer than any creature should, immortal or not and still, here I am, being reborn once again.

This has never happened before. Throughout the Kimi lineage, never has a child been born on the same day that I have died in a new reincarnation. Perhaps this heralds some new meaning.

Ah . . . I feel the coldness of the air outside. Why is this world so cold? That, I have never been able to understand.

Her legs are being gently slid out from her mother's uterus. Although a newborn is colorblind, I am able to see the brilliant white light of the immaculate room. It hurts my eyes, yet another reason I don't prefer to live in this world if I had been given more of a choice.

They say that this event, this "birth", is the miracle of life itself. Sometimes I pity mankind for their folly. When I want to enjoy a good laugh, I listen to them and their reasoning. They are so silly.

Hmm . . . so it would appear that I must leave the darkness of this place to enter a darkness in another world that conceals it with an artificial image of light. And people wonder why I opened the box.