At the lowest level of Tartarus, after the last life had been reclaid, Junsei finally felt sothing change within him.
For the first ti since his rebirth as a human, the emptiness inside him disappeared.
The hollow sensation that he had for so long, the quiet void he had been compelled to fill, was gone. In its place was sothing familiar and warm.
And above all, he felt whole.
And with that wholeness ca sothing he had never felt since awakening in a human body: a quiet desire to live, to continue existing, to grow older with the passing years rather than simply enduring his existence.
Until now he had only acted according to mory and fear of death, guided by the fragnts of countless lives and mories that had co before. His choices in this life had never been driven by desire, just fear.
But now his heart beat strongly in his chest.
Junsei lowered his gaze and placed a hand over the spot where the gem rested beneath his clothes. Even through the fabric he could see a faint blue glow shining through.
Warmth spread from that point through his entire body.
Then he felt it.
A call.
Junsei slowly lifted his head.
Sothing was calling to him from far away, beyond the steel and concrete walls of Tartarus. It was distant, yet unmistakable, like a quiet voice echoing through the world itself.
It ca from deep within the ocean.
Without hesitation, Junsei began walking forward.
The thick prison walls offered no resistance. His fist struck the reinforced tal and concrete, tearing straight through it as if it were nothing. Another wall followed, then another, until he had carved a path through the prison's deepest layers.
Soon he broke through the outer barrier entirely.
Cold seawater rushed inward as the final wall collapsed, but Junsei stepped forward into it without pause.
Drawing upon the aspects of breathing and movent beneath water, his body adapted instantly. Then he began swimming.
His speed was extraordinary. Faster than the fastest fish in the ocean, faster even than a sailfish cutting through open water. The currents bent around him as he shot forward through the dark sea.
He continued like this for nearly two hours.
At last, the seabed beneath him began to drop away into an imnse chasm. A trench carved into the Earth's crust itself.
Humans had nad this place the Mariana Trench.
Junsei descended.
The deeper he went, the darker the world beca. Not even the sunlight could reach this place. There was only endless darkness
Yet the call grew stronger.
Junsei began emitting a faint blue light from his body, illuminating the surrounding darkness as he sank deeper and deeper until he finally reached the very bottom of the trench.
The pressure here could crush steel. But Junsei didn't even register it, his focus was solely on the call.
He moved forward across the seabed until he noticed sothing unusual: a narrow opening in the ocean floor. A tunnel descending even deeper beneath the earth.
The call ca from there.
Junsei entered the opening and followed the narrow passage until it expanded into a cavern beneath the seabed.
What he found inside made him pause.
The cave was illuminated.
Eleven kiloters beneath the surface of the ocean, where no sunlight could possibly reach, the cavern glowed with a soft blue radiance. Countless stones on the ground emitted gentle light, bathing the chamber in an otherworldly glow.
Junsei stepped forward slowly, examining the strange environnt.
As he moved, the stones began releasing faint trails of blue steam that drifted upward like mist. The glowing vapor curled around his body and danced through the air.
Then everything changed.
Without warning, the cavern disappeared.
Junsei found himself standing in an endless black void. There was no sound, no gravity, no sensation of space or ti.
Only darkness.
Then a single beam of light pierced the emptiness.
More light followed, spreading outward in every direction. Gas clouds ford. Rocks collided and condensed. Stars ignited in the newborn universe, filling the void with radiant fire.
Junsei watched as existence itself unfolded before him.
Galaxies spiraled into being. Planets ford from swirling dust and molten elents.
Within that vast and expanding cosmos, a small wisp of blue light drifted aimlessly through the darkness.
Junsei floated behind it, watching.
The wisp eventually descended toward a blue planet.
Earth.
It entered the planet's atmosphere and continued downward until it reached the deepest part of the ocean. The sa place where Junsei now stood in reality.
The wisp settled there in the darkness.
Ti passed.
Junsei could not asure how long it remained there, but he could feel sothing happening. The light was not dormant.
It was growing.
At first the breath of life was faint, barely noticeable, but it slowly strengthened with each passing mont. The blue glow expanded outward, illuminating the surrounding darkness.
Then Junsei saw the first creature.
A tiny organism drifting through the ancient sea, resembling an insect-like form swimming through primordial waters.
The blue light condensed into a small glowing stone that fell still into the sea bed. The stone released a small wisp of light that followed the creature and entered it.
The creature divided, splitting into two identical beings. One of them carried the faint blue glow.
Junsei followed it.
The pattern repeated.
Life multiplied and evolved. The light moved from one organism to another, growing stronger each ti, sotis splitting, sotis condensing into a blue stone, always continuing forward.
Junsei watched as the oceans filled with new forms of life.
He saw creatures crawl onto land, watched forests rise and disappear, witnessed entire eras pass in monts. Species evolved, adapted, and vanished, but one always carried fragnts of the blue light forward through ti, while leaving sotis blue stones in its wake..
Then he saw sothing familiar.
A mont from an unimaginably distant past.
It was the mont when a small creature first beca aware of itself.
The mont when mory awakened.
Junsei recognized it instantly.
It was the beginning of his own awareness, hundreds of millions of years ago. Junsei's eyes widened as he realized this was a mory older than his own awareness.
From there, the visions continued.
And Junsei kept watching the countless lives he had already lived.
Junsei continued drifting behind the wandering blue wisp as it carried him across the endless span of his past. Life after life unfolded before his eyes, each one a fragnt of a cycle he had lived countless tis.
In one of those lives, he beca a seed.
He watched the small seed fall into dark soil and remain there in silence. Slowly, it began to grow and eventually the small sprout beca a magnificent tree.
Junsei rembered this life faintly. It had been one of the quietest existences he had ever experienced. There were no eyes, no ears, no taste or sll. Only the awareness of sunlight above and the temperature around it.
It had been a peaceful existence.
But sothing new happened during that life that Junsei didn't know about.
One day, a creature approached the tree.
Junsei stared at it in confusion. He had never seen anything like it before. It was neither insect nor bird nor animal. It was the most unnatural thing he had ever seen.
The creature possessed four arms and four legs. Its body stood upright like a trunk with limbs branching from it. Atop its shoulders was a single head, but two faces were set back-to-back upon it, allowing the creature to look in opposite directions simultaneously without turning.
Four ears protruded from its head. And beneath its torso were two sets of sexual organs.
Junsei observed it carefully, a quiet realization forming within his mind.
This thing was not born of life.
It was sothing else entirely.
The creature walked toward the tree and reached upward with one of its many arms. From among the leaves it plucked a fruit that glowed with faint blue light.
The creature bit into it.
Imdiately its body was bathed in blue radiance. The strange form began to tremble and distort as the light grew brighter.
Then, before Junsei's eyes, the creature split into two.
Where one had stood, now there were two familiar shapes.
A male human.
And a female human.
They stared at each other in shock, their faces filled with confusion. Their mouths began producing sounds Junsei could not understand, strange noises that carried no aning to him. After a mont they both turned and pointed toward the tree.
Junsei looked into their eyes.
What he saw there was unmistakable.
Greed.
Boundless hunger.
At that mont the sky darkened.
Thunder rolled across the heavens, and a bolt of lightning struck the tree directly. Fire erupted across the branches, consuming the leaves and splitting the trunk.
The two humans fled in terror and dropped to their knees at a distance, screaming toward the sky as the flas devoured the tree completely.
As the fire died down, the blue wisp quietly drifted away from them.
Ti moved forward once again.
Only a few lives later, Junsei found himself observing another familiar scene. This ti it was a mont he already rembered clearly.
It was the place where he had first encountered humans in that distant age.
Junsei stood silently beside the body of his past self and watched events unfold exactly as he rembered them.
Humans erged from the forest.
Among them were two older figures whose faces he imdiately recognized. They were the sa male and female who had once been a single creature split by the blue fruit.
Ti had aged them.
Beside them walked two younger pairs of humans, two males and two females who strongly resembled the older ones.
Their offspring.
Junsei watched as the scene progressed.
By the ti his past self realized what was happening, it was already too late.
The humans attacked, their wooden spears piercing its body. The humans rushed and tied his old self. He watched himself resisting helplessly and dying.
Yet sothing different happened this ti.
The blue wisp did not leave imdiately.
Junsei remained standing above his fallen as the humans surrounded him talking amongst each other. Then they descended upon him, tearing into the flesh without hesitation, they began devouring it.
Junsei watched the humans' bodies glow faintly blue as they ate. Their muscles shifted subtly. Their bones adjusted, their skin color changed lightly. They were changing.
But the humans themselves did not seem to notice.
They were too consud by their hunger.
When they finished eating, they skinned the remains of his body to make clothing. The bones were collected and shaped into weapons.
Then they left.
Junsei stood there for a mont, staring at what little remained of him.
Soon a faint glow rose from the blood-soaked ground. Light gathered together and condensed into a small blue stone. From that stone another wisp of light rose into the air.
Just before Junsei followed it, sothing else caught his attention.
A crow descended from the sky.
The bird landed beside the stone and stared at it quietly. Then a single tear fell from the crow's eye. After a mont the bird picked up the stone in its beak and flew away into the distance.
Junsei watched the crow leave before his awareness followed the wisp.
Again and again the sa pattern repeated.
In each life, when he encountered humans, they killed him, and they devoured his remains. It did not matter if he was a large creature or a tiny insect.
They always ate him.
Junsei noticed sothing strange about their behavior. It was not simple hunger. It was as though they could not resist the desire to consu him. A deep instinct compelled them.
And every ti they did, sothing within them changed.
Junsei felt a cold realization settle within him.
He was wrong, humans had evolved faster than any other species not rely because they killed.
They evolved because they killed him.
He had been the source of their rise.
The foundation of their domination.
Life after life passed before his eyes, and almost every one of those lives ended in the sa way: at the hands of humans. Each ti they consud him, a small blue stone remained behind.
Junsei began noticing another pattern.
Animals always ca to retrieve the stones.
Birds, insects, mammals, creatures of every kind would arrive quickly and carry the stones away. Junsei suspected they transported them across the world, eventually bringing them to that deep cave beneath the ocean where he had first seen the glowing stones.
But there was sothing even more disturbing.
So humans consud his remains more than once in their lifeti.
Those individuals began developing unique powers.
One could command snakes to obey him. Another walked across the surface of the water. Others displayed abilities that defied the nature of their kind.
Junsei understood.
Humans who consud him repeatedly began developing what the modern world called quirks.
Ti continued flowing.
Junsei watched countless deaths, many of them painful, many of them cruel. And the rate of which humans were involved in his deaths, only grew.
He saw his life as a rat again.
He saw Okina.
He watched every mont unfold exactly as it had happened.
Eventually the blue wisp moved forward one final ti.
It entered the body of a human unborn child.
Junsei watched as that child was born.
Himself.
At last the truth beca clear.
He had not been born as a human by chance.
For countless ages humans had devoured him, generation after generation, absorbing fragnts of his existence. Through that process their bodies had changed. Their descendants inherited the power.
Quirks.
Humans had evolved through him.
They had shaped their species through the endless consumption of his lives.
Junsei had not been born in their image.
They had evolved into their current image through him.
And now he existed inside a body created from the long, brutal history of his own torn life.
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