It was the last hour of New Year's Eve, and tomorrow would dawn the 907th Year of Ascension.

Yoshiko yawned and struggled to stay awake, but she looked at her crystal timepiece through bleary eyes and steeled herself. She couldn't just let the change happen in her sleep: nothing exciting ever happened in [Kanpeki-no-Tokoro] Takasane-machi.

Well, that wasn't entirely true, there had been the nami-tsuchi-namakemono stampede of 774, and they weren't really all that far off the metropolitan edge of [Murasaki-no-kanmuri] Yoshio-shi, the capital though not the largest city of the great and expansive land of Mikata-no-kuni. But for nearly a thousand years, Takasane-machi was really just a "perfect place" for ... nothing to happen.

No duels. No great battles. Not the slightest bit of real conflict.

That's why the Izumi clan had set roots here, so Yoshiko could have a quiet place to grow up until she attained her legal twenty years of majority.

Thus she went from her creche, through her mandated education, with one of the few unusual things about her being her relatively rare status as a pure-born human. No antlers, no furry ears, no atavistic or fae or plane-touched traits of any kind.

Just regular black hair that only looked shiny if she used the right conditioner, regular skin that held a tan only if she stayed way too long in the subtropical Mikata sunlight, and a frame that made most people assume she was half-grown and not the adult she was about to be in one hour. Hey, she liked putting her hair in twin pigtails!

Yoshiko was a vanilla human, and in the Ascended World, this was weird.

That was even before her parents told her of the prophecy that she would be one of those rare folks to be blessed upon her majority. Something about an umarekawaru-tamashii. A reborn soul? Yoshiko hoped they wouldn't be too awful. Some folks who did that reacted really strangely. She'd read up on the few examples, and she really hoped the soul she got was going to be a gentle one. It seemed really random, but at least she was forewarned ... a little?

At midnight, she would come of age, and Yoshiko couldn't wait, because she was bored of this country town. Well, not entirely. Takasane-machi did make the best sausages in all Mikata-no-kuni. But there were no dungeons here, no fast travel nodes, and hardly any wandering beasts ever got into town, and their farmland was not excessively remarkable as to produce gold-quality morokoshi or tama-morokoshi field crops. That certainly wasn't what she wanted to spend her life doing anyway, but Yoshiko was no adventurer either. Well, not a dungeoneer, anyway, that just seemed too strenuous and violent and all she really wanted to do was get out.

She had gained a few levels in the Manamono, Umonotsukai and Kemono-ososhi classes, just so she wouldn't be thoroughly outclassed by the rogue monsters that occasionally crossed the ancient highway between Takasane-machi and the capital, and because she'd always wanted to see distant lands and, well, taste all their foods.

Plus Umonotsukai and Kemono-ososhi were pretty much mandatory for a farm family anyway.

Though, maybe not to the point of wrangling wild washikemono for her parents to plow their fields, or taming that katsurugitora to watch their barnyard animals ... that might have been overkill?

There was also no sense in doing anymore than that until she knew for sure what this soul was like.

Yoshiko watched the time tick down, clearly not having learned the lesson that a watched pot never boils. Patience wasn't really a virtue she had cultivated quite yet.

Please let them be a traveler.

As Yoshiko struggled to stay awake, she saw it was 11:59. Almost time for the Starfall Celebration, which she normally never stayed up for.

Yoshiko let a stray thought cross her mind in the waning moments of her boring old life.

Please don't be lewd.

Okay, maybe a little?

[Tamashii no sube- OVERRIDE SOUL MERGE INITIATED]

Wait, did the System just change languages?

*pop*