I suddenly woke up from a strange, seemingly prolonged sleep. My head felt heavy, as if I had spent the night in a hot spring. The last thing I remembered was a deafening female scream, crying, drowned out by the screeching of sirens. These sounds were drowned out in the chaos as I was being taken to the hospital. The scream seemed strange. Why? I'm Ken Takahashi is a 22-year-old law student at Tokyo Graduate University and an orphan. Who could be calling for me so desperately? Perhaps it was the woman who accidentally ran me over? Logic was drowned in a sense of the irrational.

My gaze rested on the white ceiling. I sat up, looking around. The dim light from the window illuminated the familiar streets of Tokyo. Everything seemed as usual, but... something was wrong.

Suddenly, I felt a strange discomfort and unnaturalness in my own body. It seemed alien. I looked at my hands... small. Too small. In a panic, I tore the blanket off myself, looking at my legs. They were thin, childish. My throat felt tight and my hands shook as I touched my face.

" It's impossible... " I whispered, choking with panic. "It can't be true!"

The first thought that flashed through my head: I'm in a dream. I closed my eyes, muttering to myself that this is all an illusion, a delusion, a trap of the mind. But with each passing second this feeling became more and more real. No awakening.

Suddenly the door creaked, and I shuddered. A man in a white coat entered the ward. He seemed tall, but perhaps it only seemed that way to me because I was too small to perceive him differently. He approached the bed, took out a notebook and slowly sank into a chair.

"How are you feeling? " he asked in a calm, even voice.

-"As if this is all a dream, "I muttered, looking at my trembling hands in confusion.

He nodded as if he understood everything. There was something sympathetic, almost warm, in his gaze.

"You've lost a lot of blood," he began. "It's normal if you feel weak now. Everything will be back to normal in a couple of days. Your parents are coming tomorrow. They were worried about you, but now everything is fine."

'Parents. The word came out of nowhere. What parents? I'm an orphan. Where could I have parents?' I wanted to ask, but my tongue seemed stuck to the roof of my mouth. I just nodded slowly.

The doctor looked at me again with a gentle smile and left. 'I was left alone. My head was spinning with thoughts. This body. These parents. What is going on? The only explanation that seemed logical was that this was not a dream. This was not a joke. This was a new reality.'

I lay there, staring at the white ceiling. 'My mind slowly began to bring up images of the past - the orphanage. The smell of dampness, the cold that ate into my bones, and the endless indifference that made me sick. In the winter, the rooms turned into icy cells. I woke up at night with aching joints, trying to warm myself up, but the warmth never came. Sleep became a luxury, and the days passed in a fog.'

'Every morning I got up, with bags under my eyes, and trudged to class like a zombie. The children at the orphanage noticed this and did not miss a chance to laugh at me. Their laughter, their taunts, their crude jokes - all this made life even more unbearable.'

'But then, at the very bottom, I made a decision. I will break out of here. I will do everything to never return to these walls, these screams, this emptiness. I set a goal for myself: to enter the University of Tokyo.'

'Studying became my only salvation, my escape from reality. But getting in was almost impossible. Almost no one like me even made it to the entrance exams. But I... I did it.'

'Four years. Four painful, endless years. I didn't sleep at night, I worked part-time, I devoured textbooks, squeezing everything I could out of myself. Those years took everything from me: I had no time to waste on finding friends or a girlfriend. I became a machine that moved forward until there was only one goal left - a diploma. And with only a month left until it was over, I found myself here.'

'Now, lying in someone else's body, I felt tears welling up in my eyes. But I didn't let them spill. Not because I was strong. No. It was just that even tears seemed useless to me now.'

' All my life I had adapted to the blows of fate, adjusted, found a way to survive. But now… now everything was different. This was not just another blow. This was the destruction of everything I knew, everything I lived for. A new world, a new family, a strange body.'

'I closed my eyes, trying to drown out the thought that this was no longer life. This was emptiness. The only thing left for me was to wait.'