Chapter Text
Yara spent the first years of her second life in a state of complete despair and cried far more often than she liked to remember.
Dying from a sleeping pill overdose during her fifth year of medical school had already been ridiculous enough on its own. Waking up afterward in the body of a child somewhere in the middle of filthy, stinking slums only elevated the situation from tragic to outright nightmarish. Becoming an orphan on top of that. One without the slightest chance at proper food, decent shelter, or even basic safety, felt less in the way of a beginning and more as the opening chapter of a very slow apocalypse.
To her credit, Yara figured out the orphan part fairly quickly. It was difficult to miss, considering nobody nearby seemed particularly interested in feeding her, checking whether she was alive, or at the very least throwing a blanket over her shivering body.
So yes. Things were bad. Extremely bad.
What unsettled her most was the fact that she genuinely had no idea what exactly she had done to deserve reincarnation in the first place.
Belief had never come easily to Yara. She trusted almost nothing, including herself. Which made the whole thing feel frankly laughable
The religions of her previous world had offered an entire collection of explanations regarding death and rebirth, but none of them survived contact with reality. If reincarnation truly existed, then where exactly was the grand wheel of samsara, and why had it decided to dump her into a glorified drainage ditch? Some beliefs claimed the soul moved endlessly from one life to another, but Yara was fairly certain people were not supposed to retain all their memories, emotional damage, and corroded pieces of past experiences along the way.
And yet there she was, carrying the entirety of her previous life around inside her skull like unwanted luggage.
If this place was hell, then it was a strangely disappointing version of it. The air smelled of saltwater, mildew, sewage, sweat, and cheap tobacco rather than sulfur, and there was a suspicious lack of boiling cauldrons. Although, in fairness, Yaara could confidently say this was definitely not heaven either.
After all, she came to the conclusion that death was neither an ending nor a beginning. It was simply some kind of irritating mistake — a flaw in reality itself, perhaps biological in nature, perhaps something closer to a quantum malfunction.
The fact that she remembered the sensation of dying in vivid detail did absolutely nothing to improve her mental state, turning her existence into one long, exhausting episode of déjà vu. More than once she found herself wondering whether consciousness was merely an anomaly that occasionally refused to disappear when it should have. Humanity had invented countless theories about the origin of the universe, after all. Statistically speaking, at least one of them had to be accidentally correct.
Especially because the world surrounding her already seemed fundamentally wrong.
At first, Yara tried to classify everything around her according to the technological logic she remembered from her previous life, but the longer she observed this world, the less coherent it became. The entire civilization resembled some absurd construction assembled from incompatible historical periods. Primitive sailing ships shared harbors with bizarre machinery that functioned without recognizable engines, while animal-drawn carts rattled across streets beside fully operational crane systems powered by mechanisms she could neither identify nor explain.
The lack of telephones, internet, and even stable electricity in residential districts strongly suggested something close to the nineteenth century, yet newspapers were printed with suspiciously advanced typography and casually referenced inventions that sounded indistinguishable from science fiction. Progress here did not advance in a straight line. It stumbled violently from one extreme to another, skipping entire stages of development while obsessively refining others.
The world itself felt as though a Frankenstein creation stitched together from scraps of completely different centuries.
In the end, the only thing that prevented Yara from losing her mind entirely was biology.
Somewhere in an old textbook from her previous life, she had once read a simple truth: under harsh conditions, an organism only has three options — adapt, migrate, or die.
Dying for a second time was prevented by a stubborn mixture of pride and fear. Leaving the island without money was impossible. Which left adaptation as the only remaining choice.
And Yara intended to adapt.
She started with the body she had inherited, which felt alien in every conceivable way — unfamiliar, uncomfortable, and far too noticeable for someone trying desperately to survive unnoticed. A tangled mass of bright red hair combined with mismatched eyes, one brown and the other a piercing shade of blue, attracted attention far too easily. Yara had no idea whether it was simple heterochromia or evidence of something stranger, but she understood one thing perfectly well.
In slums like these, unusual beauty rarely remained harmless for long. Sooner or later, it became either merchandise or a corpse.
Beauty itself was not the problem. Human beings were.
Yara was willing to bet every last coin in existence that, regardless of the world, the situation surrounding vulnerable girls remained depressingly universal. There was no magical place where they were guaranteed safety, and the same truth applied to women, the weak, and anyone unfortunate enough to become convenient prey for someone stronger.
Some patterns transcended worlds a little too easily.
So, in order to survive, she hacked her hair short, leaving her bangs long enough to cover her blue eye, smeared soot across her face, and deliberately trained herself to slouch in ways that made her appear smaller, filthier, weaker, and altogether less memorable. Fortunately, or maybe, unfortunately — vanity had never occupied a particularly important place in her priorities. Clothing scavenged from garbage heaps bothered her far less than starvation ever did.
Using false names stolen from old television shows, books, and cartoons she still vaguely remembered from her previous life, Yara gradually erased the image of a strange, pretty child and replaced it with something far safer. A hostile-looking homeless boy nobody bothered to look at twice.
And as is the case with most stray children in the district, she eventually drifted into a local gang of street kids, where she learned how to steal food, avoid beatings, and, more importantly than anything else, understand the language of the world that refused to let her die properly.
It took far less time than Yara had expected.
At first, she learned to understand people almost entirely through external cues — facial expressions, gestures, tone of voice, posture, the way someone’s mouth tightened before shouting or softened before offering food. Surprisingly, that part came easily to her. Whenever an adult tried speaking to her directly, Yaara’s first instinct was usually to run regardless of their intentions. It did not matter whether they wanted to help, scold her, or drag her somewhere “safe.” She had no desire to be taken in, adopted, pitied, or folded into someone else’s family.
She had already had a family once.
Losing them had been painful enough the first time around. She doubted she could survive becoming attached to people like that again.
Of course, there were also situations where running was not an option. Usually when someone caught her stealing food. If the situation did not seem immediately dangerous, Yara simply lowered her head, nodded a few times, and pretended to feel guilty enough to avoid getting hit too badly. Social interaction itself did not particularly interest her; she had never been especially talkative even in her previous life. Still, understanding people remained an essential part of survival, so eventually she stopped resisting the necessity of it.
Reading, however, proved far more difficult.
At the start, newspapers were little more than incomprehensible sheets covered in strange symbols, and Yaara relied mostly on illustrations and scattered visual details to piece together fragments of meaning. Even then, those newspapers became the first real evidence that this world differed drastically from the one she remembered. Names, locations, technologies, political structures — everything felt vaguely distorted, as though reality itself had been assembled incorrectly.
Eventually, the other street kids noticed her struggling. Somewhere between petty theft, scavenging through trash heaps, and dividing stale leftovers between themselves, they unexpectedly decided to teach her how to read.
The local writing system initially looked completely insane to her — a chaotic collection of crooked, drunken-looking symbols bearing no resemblance whatsoever to either Cyrillic or Latin script. Progress came painfully slowly. She stumbled through syllables, mixed up characters constantly, and spent weeks sounding out words one agonizing letter at a time.
But sooner or later, something clicked.
After that, every discarded newspaper she managed to dig out of the garbage became a genuine treasure.
Because now she could finally understand what the world around her was saying. It was through those torn scraps of newspaper that Yara began noticing something far worse than simple inconsistencies or unfamiliar details.
Not differences.
The recognition that made her lose her mind.
Island names that had never existed on any map from her previous world somehow sounded disturbingly familiar. The names of certain people and titles carried the same exaggerated grandeur as characters from old adventure stories. References to the “Marines,” the “World Government,” and pirates with bounties worth millions appeared so frequently that, at first, Yara dismissed them as some bizarre mixture of folk tales, translation issues, and her own lack of understanding.
It could not possibly be what she thought it was.
That simply should not have existed. Not in reality. Not anywhere.
Yet for all that, the more words she learned to piece together into coherent sentences, the clearer the horrifying picture became.
This was not an alternate version of history. It was not some parallel universe born from quantum explosion or cosmic coincidence. The world surrounding her had once existed as fiction — a setting imagined by someone else and filled with impossible creatures, monsters masquerading as humans, and people so powerful they bordered on the divine. Entire nations, wars, and histories had once been nothing more than concepts arranged around an author’s plotline.
And now she was inside it.
Yara herself had become trapped within a “story” she only dimly remembered in fragments.
Well.
Fuck her life.