For a long time there was only darkness. Not the darkness of a moonless night, or a room with the lights out. No, it was an utter void. I couldn't tell how long it was before I saw any color. Even then, I still felt like I was dreaming. Like I was looking at a blurry slideshow or watching a poorly filmed home movie.

I was dimly aware that I was hungry. I ate. I was tired. I slept. Sometimes people talked to me. I listened.

My first clear memory was a young Japanese girl standing in front of me, holding out a ball of rice. Not having any idea of what else to do, I took it from her. I took a bite.

I stopped chewing as I realized that the girl in front of me was very young. Perhaps four or five years old and cute as a button. Despite that, I was looking up at her to see her eyes.

We were standing on the edge of a dirt road. The only traffic passing by was a man with a basket strapped to his back. There were no electrical wires, telephone poles, or automobiles. Which was just as well, as the road looked like it would crumble the first time anything heavy passed over it.

Suddenly, a flood of information washed over me. I blinked in shock, frozen in place as two unique sets of memories warred for priority, each trying to overlap the other as the “real timeline.”

The girl who had handed me the rice ball was my neighbor. She was the only daughter of a prosperous family of merchants. She was cheerful and generous, as shown by her spontaneous decision to share her food.

I lived in what seemed to be a well off neighborhood, but I did not come from such happy circumstances. I lived under the care of the widow of a prosperous merchant, a woman who insisted that I and the other four orphans under her care call her Mama Matsu. My own parents had passed away long ago. I didn't have even the vaguest memory of what they had been like.

I resumed chewing as I considered what to do with this information. While I ate, I studied my neighbor's smiling face. She was open and friendly, with a good heart and a charitable spirit. I, though, had no interest in being a charity case.

I didn't need a rich acquaintance, somebody who would toss scraps my way when their conscience moved them. I would much rather have a rich friend, someone who would sponsor my ambitions and treat my own needs as their own.

I swallowed the first bite. Despite being unseasoned rice, it tasted wonderful. Hunger truly was the best sauce. A dull ache that had been lurking in the background this whole time was soothed away by that first mouthful. Despite that, I resisted the urge to take another bite. Instead, I held out the rice ball towards my neighbor.

She crossed her arms. "I gave it to you."

I smiled and nodded. "You did. So it's mine now, right?"

She looked uncertain, but nodded in agreement.

"So I can do what I want with it?" I asked.

She nodded again.

"Well," I said, "I want to give it to you."

She frowned in thought for a moment, but the logic was air tight. Reluctantly, she reached out and took the rice ball from my hands.

I was distracted from my moment of triumph in outwitting a small child when I realized that we hadn't been conversing in English. Though I had understood what she was saying and expressed myself as though we were speaking my native tongue, the actual language we had used was different.

If I had to guess, judging from her appearance and my dim memories of watching subtitled anime, we had been speaking Japanese. I had somehow learned the language during my fugue like state. All things considered, I was most likely in Japan. Add in the fact that I was somehow shorter than a small child, and something supernatural was obviously afoot.

Unfortunately, look around as I might, there was no grey-bearded wizard to explain the situation. It looked like I would have to figure things out for myself.

I searched my memories. Not only were there no telephone lines or power wires in sight, but in my entire new life I couldn't remember seeing a single device that was powered by electricity. Washing had always been done by hand, down by the river. Cooking had been done over a fire. It could be that I'd been reborn into a group of very dedicated historical reenactors. I thought it more likely, though, that I'd somehow been sent to the past.

I was jarred from my thoughts by a rice ball filling my field of vision. I reached up and pushed it back. "It's yours."

She gave me a serious look. "I can decide what to do with it. I want to give it to you."

It seemed I had celebrated my victory too soon. I studied my neighbor through narrowed eyes as I took the rice ball from her, hoist on my own petard. I took a bite and handed it back. She accepted it without protest, taking a bite and giving it back to me in turn. We worked through the whole ball of rice like that. In the end, I'd only avoided half of the charity on offer.

My neighbor smiled at me once we finished. "I'm Kana."

"I'm Hana," I said, returning her smile. The name had come as easily to me as the language.

We stood there, smiling at each other. I could feel it as the silence slowly passed from comfortable to awkward. A bead of sweat trickled down my back. I didn't know how to make small talk with a small child. Even if I was a small child, whatever intuition had delivered the language and my own name to the tip of my tongue was steadfastly refusing to help me socialize.

Fortunately, the silence was broken by a yell from Kana's house. She gave me a wave before scurrying back home. I waved back. For lack of anything else to do, I turned and headed back inside my own new home.

It seemed I arrived back inside just in time. Mama Matsu certainly didn't waste a moment before pressing me into service helping to prepare dinner. When I focused, my memories told me that while I was allowed to run around unsupervised for much of the day, even at this young age I had a well defined set of chores.

It was only to be expected. Mama Matsu had taken us in off the street. She was compensated for it by the goodwill she experienced from the rest of the village, but that was hardly enough to balance out the expense of clothing and feeding a group of orphans. She naturally had to make up the difference by putting us to work. At my young age, apparently the highest and best use of my labor was to help in washing the rice.

Dinner was a simple affair. Nobody talked, which my memory assured me was normal. When we finished, I was again put to work helping to clean up.

Shortly after we finished putting away the last of the dishes, I felt a burning sensation just behind my navel. I couldn't contain a grunt of pain as I brought both hands down to rest against my stomach as if I could smother the internal blaze.

"What's wrong?" Mama Matsu asked me.

"My tummy hurts," I said. "It's burning."

My first thought naturally went to the ball of rice. It was the only thing that I had eaten that hadn't been shared with anybody else in the house. Since I was the only one feeling ill, logic suggested that Kana had inadvertently given me a case of food poisoning along with half a meal.

"Is it a tingly feeling," she asked, kneeling down and poking me right below my belly button, "right here?"

"Kind of," I said. There was a tingle to it, now that she mentioned it, but it paled next to the feeling of heat that somehow wasn't actually setting me on fire. I was curious how she had pinpointed the exact spot that was troubling me so easily.

"Oh, this is wonderful news," she said. "Your magic has come in!"

"My what?" I asked. My grasp of this new language didn't extend to whatever term she had just used.

"Your magic," she repeated. "It's what the daimyo's best troops use to jump over hills and cut down enemy armies."

"I don't understand," I said. It seemed like she was suggesting that I was going through something supernatural. Well, supernatural to my old world, but apparently perfectly normal here. I would have dismissed the idea as a peasant superstition, but something real was causing me to feel the way I was.

"Hmm," she said. "I should change your bedtime story."

It was embarrassing to listen to a story as I went to sleep as though I were a small child. As I was a small child, though, I didn't have a choice. Searching my memory dredged up the recollection of a series of fairy tales that she liked to rotate between until her audience fell asleep. At least, they resembled the fairy tales from my old world. In this new world, though, it seemed I would have to abandon my preconceptions.

If there's ever a time to give up on your old beliefs of the limit of the possible, it's after you've died and been reincarnated in a different world.

As I listened to the new bedtime story, I slowly came to understand. Magic meant magic. Superpowers. Mutant abilities. Many different terms in my old world could be applied, all meaning roughly the same thing: while most of the people born into this new world were bog standard human beings like those I had known in my previous life, some few of them were born with extraordinary abilities.

Well, that might be an exaggeration. According to Mama Matsu's stories, the power of magic was only available to those born with it, while extraordinary abilities were reserved to the even more limited few who went through special training to develop their skills. You needed a lucky quirk of genetics and a lucky family background in order to have a chance to become a sword saint.

Once you did, though, the world was your oyster. At least according to the bedtime stories. Sword saints stood at the pinnacle of martial prowess. A legendary fighter like Shibadai Katsuie could cut a bullet out of the air. He could jump into the forest canopy and run along the branches as though he were racing down a well-maintained road. He cut could through ordinary swordsmen like a reaper in a field of wheat.

By contrast, without any training, I could look forward to generally improved health and fitness. I would also be somewhat resistant to disease. Those benefits were nice and all, but I couldn't help but hunger for more.