It was an unfortunate accident.
A cargo truck suddenly swerved onto the sidewalk.
The misfortune was that I happened to be standing in its path.
At that moment, I was fully engrossed in my smartphone screen, captivated by an exciting part of the popular boy’s comic, “Fixer”.
A 10-ton mass of steel barreled toward me at merciless speed.
By the time I noticed it, it was already too late.
The truck driver had his head slumped down.
Maybe the cause was drowsy driving.
For someone like me who never jaywalks, it was a bolt from the blue, a calamity out of nowhere.
And when I came to my senses, I found myself in a strange, unfamiliar body.
Since I’d always had a big interest in subcultures like comics and anime, I quickly realized that this was what they often call reincarnation.
But life is full of unexpected twists.
Things rarely go as you wish.
Soon enough, I was confronted with two rather troubling issues.
The first was that my voice wouldn’t come out, as if I had a severe injury on my throat.
The second was… that I now looked unmistakably like a young girl.
Reincarnation was one thing, but to be reincarnated as a mute little girl?
Like the Little Mermaid who lost her voice in exchange for legs,
Perhaps I’d sacrificed my voice and gender to be revived.
‘Hmm… thinking about it like that, it does seem like a pretty fair trade. Well, if I’m back alive, who cares about my voice or gender.’
Positive thoughts spiraled in my head.
Coming back to life in any form was better than ending for good.
Plus, being reincarnated as a person with intact limbs and not an insect or plant…
What a blessing that was, especially since I have a big fear of bugs.
If I’d reincarnated as something like a caterpillar or centipede… I’d have crawled straight into the water without hesitation, hoping for a reset.
‘So, where am I, anyway?’
After concluding that reincarnating as a mute girl was more of a gain than a loss,
I crossed my soft arms and looked around.
The place I’d woken up in was a stark, white room, bleak and desolate.
All that was there was a bed, a door, and a light.
The white walls and floor, without a single window, made it feel like a hospital room.
Considering I was dressed in plain, unpatterned white clothing,
Maybe that wasn’t too far from the truth.
‘There doesn’t seem to be much information here. I guess… the only thing to do is go outside.’
Naturally, I approached the room’s only exit, the door.
After checking for any cameras that might be watching,
I cautiously pressed my ear against the door.
I didn’t want to risk opening the door and potentially causing irreparable trouble,
so I was trying to gather as much information as I could.
‘Nothing… I don’t hear anything.’
However, there was no sound from beyond the door.
It was as if there was nothing outside at all.
Still uncertain, I kept my ear to the door and waited for a long time.
Only when I was sure that nothing would change did I finally reach out and place my hand on the doorknob.
My plan was to open the door very slowly and gently, making sure no sound would leak out.
‘Hmm? It’s not moving.’
Contrary to my expectation, the doorknob wouldn’t budge.
Unless it was just a decoration, it was clear that the door was locked.
This was a serious problem.
The only exit I’d counted on was locked tight.
I started to grip the doorknob with increasing force.
But even when I put my entire body weight into it, the doorknob showed no signs of moving.
‘So, how am I supposed to get out of here?’
Realizing the full gravity of the situation,
a memory from a news story I once saw flashed through my mind.
[Man in his 20s was found dead in the bathroom after a bicycle fell in front of the door….]
It was a very bad situation.
I was fated to starve to death here unless I received outside help.
Naturally, my gaze drifted around, looking for anything useful.
Of course, in a room with nothing but a bed, there was no useful item in sight.
The only notable discovery was realizing how high the ceiling was.
‘If I dismantle the bed frame and make a tool… but with these weak arms, it doesn’t seem likely.’
No matter how I looked at it, my chance of escaping on my own was zero.
Especially since my current arms were white and soft, like a child’s, without a single muscle.
There was no way I could break down the locked door and get out.
‘I’m completely trapped in this barren room.’
But strangely, even as my mind fully grasped the situation,
I didn’t feel any fear or despair.
Instead, a strange sense of certainty filled my heart.
It was a feeling like that of an athlete, convinced they could clear a particular distance.
Following my instincts, I raised my hand toward the doorknob.
And when I felt as if my hand and the doorknob were connected as one,
I twisted the doorknob with an invisible force.
Creak…!
The doorknob was crushed, deformed like it was caught in a press.
At this rate, the door wouldn’t open; the knob would just break and fall off.
Instinctively, I reached up with my other hand to hold the area around the doorknob, thinking:
‘If it’s come to this, I might as well break it completely.’
The invisible force following my will didn’t just warp the doorknob;
it began to wreck the entire structure inside the door.
And when the door was thoroughly mangled beyond recognition,
it finally started to twist and tilt, showing signs of opening.
It was my escape from this stark, white room.
Peeking through the gap in the badly deformed door,
I saw a hallway on the other side.
It was a white hallway, so obsessively clean and sterile it reminded me of a laboratory.
The wide, windowless corridor was completely empty, devoid of a single person, creating an eerie, ghostly atmosphere straight out of a horror story.
‘No one’s here. I don’t see any cameras or anything like that….’
But maybe because my emotions felt oddly dulled after reincarnating, I didn’t feel much fear in this unfamiliar place.
Maybe it was because I wasn’t fully grasping the reality of this situation.
Still, getting tangled up with anyone would be bothersome.
I stepped out into the hallway as quietly as possible, careful to make no sound.
Even if something troublesome happened, I had the telekinetic power I’d used to open the door, so I’d be fine.
With senses on high alert, I walked down the hallway.
The people who would trap a healthy person in a room wouldn’t be in their right mind, so I aimed to detect them before they noticed me.
But despite my efforts, I found no one, nor even an exit, no matter how far I walked.
I turned corners, went up and down stairs countless times, and it felt like I was in some kind of maze designed to confuse and trap people.
Realizing I wouldn’t find an exit just by wandering around, I changed my approach.
‘There haven’t been any windows around here, but I did notice some strangely tall staircases. So… this might actually be underground.’
It was just a theory based on guesswork, but if this place was underground…
Considering the vastness of the area I’d wandered, there had to be some kind of ventilation duct connected to the outside.
After roaming the hallways for a bit longer, I finally found a ventilation grate on the ceiling.
‘There it is. Hmm… it’s a bit high up.’
The height looked to be around 3 meters.
It was well beyond what I could reach with my current small, young body.
But that wasn’t a problem.
I had telekinesis now.
If I could wrench off the locked door, unscrewing a simple grate would be no trouble at all.
Using the removed grate as a foothold, I climbed up.
Carefully adjusting my telekinesis, I slipped into the ventilation duct.
Unlike the wide hallway, the duct was narrow and dark, and I could feel a faint breeze brushing against my cheek.
‘This is it.’
The presence of wind meant there was a connection to the outside.
I crawled upward, inching my way along the duct.
Of course, the ventilation system wasn’t designed with people crawling through it in mind, so the passage twisted and turned unexpectedly.
But telekinesis made navigating the tricky route a lot easier.
By pushing against the walls with my feet, I could slowly but surely climb.
After what felt like dozens of meters of vertical crawling, I finally reached an exit.
Outside the vent was a dark, forested night.
The cool sensation of grass on my bare feet greeted me.
Considering how vast and deep the facility seemed, the fact that it was hidden in the woods was puzzling.
It was likely a concealed location, out of sight from others.
‘Is this some kind of secret base? What could they be thinking… huh?’
I idly entertained such thoughts, glancing around, when suddenly, something in the distance caught my eye and I froze in shock.
Even from afar, a tall skyscraper loomed with an unreal presence.
At the top was a symbol that was all too familiar.
It was the world of ‘Fixer’, the popular boy’s comic I’d been reading before the truck hit me.
A city where otherworldly races and humanity coexisted on a fused Earth—Nighthaven.
The symbol of a dragon unmistakably signified Nighthaven.
‘No way… reincarnated into the world of a comic?’
Possessing the body of a character in the manga I’d been reading just before my death.
Was this something to be glad about or despair over?
I could only stand there in dazed silence, staring at the skyscraper with a vacant expression for a long time.