“Where is this…?”
A white palace, towering buildings…
“Welcome back, my little sister…” A white-haired, violet-eyed little girl was slowly walking toward her from afar… She had a perfect face that had no place in this world. Yueye stared at her, stunned.
“…Mm… Looks like you still haven’t gotten your memories back… But at least I’ve found you… It’s only a matter of time before you remember!… You’ll remember… But until then, you’ll have to stay by yourself a little longer… Big sis has some things to take care of… I just created a main plane, so there’s still some work to do… My little sister… You’ve had it rough. You’ll have to be alone for just a little while longer…” The white-haired, violet-eyed little girl, with her enchanting beauty, pulled Yueye into her arms and stroked her hair… For a moment, Yueye felt safe and cared for—or maybe it was the feeling of having family?
For a moment, Yueye didn’t resist. She didn’t even pay attention to the changes in her body… It felt as if this had always been her body… Though she’d once been male, the change felt strange… It was like losing something she’d always had, yet not wanting it back… leaving her conflicted…
“Hehe… Silly little Baiyue… You’ve always been a girl, you know… Don’t turn into a boy again, okay? Wait here for big sis!”
In an instant, the scene around her dissolved into mist… Yueye felt a sudden, inexplicable pain in her chest… Her voice, as beautiful as celestial music, cried out in anguish before she could stop herself… “Big sis…!”
Reflected in the violet eyes of the little girl she’d somehow called her big sister was a white-haired, red-eyed little girl… Yueye couldn’t help but freeze for a moment… But when she came to, the girl in front of her had already disappeared…
“Big sis!”… She weakly reached out, then opened her eyes, which had been tightly shut for who knew how long. Blue sky and green grass met her gaze… The air was crisp in her nostrils. It felt like she wasn’t on Earth…
“Wait… Not on Earth!?…” A sharp sense of smell, she didn’t know where it had come from, suddenly kicked in… She sprang to her feet.
“Hey… Not bad… You really are a reincarnator.” A young man’s voice came from behind her.
“…Who are you?… Why have I turned into a girl!?” Long blue hair, blue clothes, a delicate face more beautiful than a doll’s… That was Yueye now. After having that vivid dream, she’d checked herself as soon as she woke up… She didn’t look like the girl in the dream, but… why was she still a girl…?
“Because this is what you really look like… Or, to put it another way, this is where you were always meant to be. You can think of your life in that other world as a dream… This is the real you. To put it in a way that’s easier to believe… Every living being has a soul. When a soul lives in a world, it uses its power to shape a body. The body’s strength and background are determined by the soul’s power. Your soul is strong enough that, after shaping a powerful body, it could shape another one when you were caught up in a crisis in another world… Clearly, this is the world where you were meant to be born. The other one was a world where your soul was born by accident… And now, this event’s ritual has awakened you in this body…”
“Then what happened to my old body?”
“That’s why something went wrong when you were born. The two worlds collided, and the impact sent you back here from that other world. A soul can only choose one body, so your old, weaker body was discarded…”
“Then what about the event?”
“Heh. The event… Have you even looked around?” The young man chuckled.
Yueye turned to look around… They were in a clearing in the woods, and students lay unconscious all over it… They weren’t just students from her school, recognizable by its uniform. Nearly all of the city’s more than ten thousand high school students were here…
“This is…” Her lovely, slightly timid voice trembled… A bad feeling rose in her.
“This is a qualifying round… All of you in that other world are dead. We’re giving you a chance to come back to life…”
“Of course, you’re originally from this world, so you’ll have an advantage… And I’ll give you a little bonus, too… For now, let’s wait for the others to wake up… Their bodies and souls are clearly nowhere near as good as yours. It’s a wonder we managed to save them at all…” The young man smiled as he looked at Yueye…
“……” Utter silence… Yueye chose not to speak… In that huge clearing in the woods, only two people were standing…
“Where the hell are we?!” After a long wait, a jarring voice broke the silence of the clearing again. Following the voice, they saw a boy with dyed blond, spiky hair staring in their direction with an “I’m the most important person in the world” look on his face…
“……” Yueye fell silent… She was the most unusual one here, wearing a blue dress like something a European lady would wear, with long blue hair… She clearly wasn’t from Earth… After the boy from No. 3 Middle School shouted, more and more people began waking from their sleep, all wondering where they were… Yueye crouched down. Since she already had the body of a little girl, she didn’t draw any more attention from people farther away… The crowd grew louder and louder. The rising chatter made her a little restless.
“Looks like everyone’s awake… Then I’ll explain your situation.” The young man’s voice suddenly sounded in their minds… It was as if he were speaking right beside them. His voice wasn’t loud, but they could hear him clearly.
“First of all, everyone here was selected… And you weren’t selected because you stood out. It’s because you’re already dead in your original world…” The young man spoke about life and death as calmly as water. He didn’t care at all how the more than ten thousand people present reacted…
“Now, you’re all here to take part in a qualifying round—or you could call it a ranking match… I’m sure you’re ready… Just think ‘Open status screen’ and you’ll see your information and the system that supports you. Everyone starts with 100 exchange points. You can see for yourselves what you can exchange them for, so I won’t go into that. You can earn exchange points by killing beasts and monsters. And if you kill another person…” The young man paused, leaving them hanging…
“You can get 30% of all their reward points. So whether you kill someone or not is up to you… The ultimate goal of this event is to make it out of the forest. Of course, if you want to end the game early, you can always take your own life…” The young man made a not-very-funny joke.
“Lastly, you can form teams to improve your combat strength… And one more suggestion… Don’t head in the direction of the setting sun. If you try to leave the forest that way, you won’t survive long…” As soon as he finished speaking, the young man disappeared… But Yueye noticed the almost amused look he gave her as he vanished, as if she were some curious plaything…
“What the hell?… Is this some kind of live TV show? Are you messing with us?”
“Isn’t this illegal…?”
“Can someone come save us?”
The crowd erupted all at once, like an explosion… Yueye was already feeling overwhelmed by the confusion and panic when she spotted a familiar figure from behind.
“Zhu Yue!” Yueye called out. Her clear, songbird-like little-girl voice made the girl in front of her stop and turn around…
“You are…?” Zhu Yue looked at the little girl in front of her, curious…
“It’s me, Yueye…” The blue-haired little girl in front of her looked incredibly fragile… Long blue hair fell across her face… What was this, cosplay? No matter how she looked at her, Zhu Yue couldn’t connect the girl in front of her with her old middle-school classmate…
“Yueye, from Class 5, Grade 9, No. 5 Middle School?” Zhu Yue asked again to make sure… She could only think of one person named Yueye.
“Mm… I don’t know why I turned out like this either…” Yueye shook her head, tossing her hair to either side and revealing a face of breathtaking beauty…
“…You’ve got to be kidding…” Zhu Yue was almost a head taller than Yueye now. She picked Yueye up and lifted her into the air… “How am I supposed to believe you?”
“Hey… Put me down already…” Yueye’s face turned as red as an apple, making her look so tempting you could almost take a bite…
“I won’t put you down until you give me a proper explanation…” A playful glint entered Zhu Yue’s eyes as she held the little blue-haired girl high in the air.
“Then… should I tell you?”
“Go on…”
“Back in middle school, you had a crush on Yang Yufeng… He was our class monitor… You even said you wished I were a girl… And then you also said…”
“Stop.” Zhu Yue’s mouth twitched as she listened to this whole string of embarrassing memories…
“I believe you, I believe you. But you really did turn into a girl?” Zhu Yue teased.
“I don’t know why either. I woke up like this…”
“All right, let’s put that aside for now. We need to find the rest of our teammates… This so-called system has a lot of features… At least the teammate recommendations are people we know, and it even marks their locations… You’re the first one on the list, since you’re closest to me. After you, there’s…” Zhu Yue noticed how awkward Yueye felt, so she stopped giving her a hard time and changed the subject.
“Why are they all our middle-school classmates…?” Zhu Yue looked over the names in the teammate search feature and voiced her confusion.
“Because, well, I think our middle-school classmates might actually be better. At the very least, I’ve had a really bad feeling about my high school.” Yueye’s expression darkened a little as she suddenly remembered some things from earlier.
“Same here. I don’t like my high-school classmates either…” Zhu Yue looked at the several green dots marked on her system’s map. They represented the teammates the system had recommended.
“I feel like I haven’t laughed sincerely since starting high school,” Zhu Yue added.
“Come on. We should go back to our middle-school days and see what everyone’s like.”
“Do you think they’ll want to team up with their middle-school classmates?” Yueye looked at the green dots on the system map and asked curiously.
“How would we know if we don’t try? As far as I know, those few have always been on good terms.”
“It says here that these are the teammates we’re most compatible with. I didn’t notice at first, but quite a few of them don’t have much to do with our class. I really don’t know how this system decides.” Zhu Yue took a closer look at the system and realized that not all the names on it were her middle-school classmates.
“Let’s find them first, then talk it over.” Yueye rubbed her sky-blue hair… Her eyes were full of confusion.
