"Life is an 'equivalent exchange.'"
I will pay you with opportunity.
I remember the moment of birth.
A hazy world filled with noise. Unbearable cold. The first breath I took, struggling like a fish thrown out of water, felt like it would burn my insides.
At the moment of birth, all the world gave me was pain.
Wrapped in warmth, seeing a wavering figure before my eyes—probably a person—I thought.
Am I born again?
"Again?"
Surprised by my own natural thought for just a moment, I soon realized.
This was to be expected.
Even though I couldn't remember anything, I knew that one fact. I was a being called "me" who had existed before.
"Hello, 'Etsu.' Dad really wanted a daughter!"
"Kosuke, newborns can't talk."
"The second child is a girl."
"Is this my sibling?"
The world was surprisingly full of strange noises. I wondered why I couldn't hear such sounds in my 'previous life.'
Among these noises, between the occasional foreign languages, I detected the words I needed to hear. A baby's instinct or perhaps intuition.
So 'Etsu' is my name.
'At least this isn't where I used to live. However...'
...I decided to live on for now.
There was no reason to reject this world yet.
I don't remember everything after birth. And a child's time passes unbelievably quickly, so rather than feeling those moments, I recalled that such things happened by looking back on the past. It's like I had no present sense of time and memory.
I wasn't living in the present but feeling the past.
As I grew, as I became accustomed to the noise of the world itself, as I became able to understand people's voices, my 'memories' gradually revived. Not as if they were emerging, but with a sense that I had always known them.
Like snow piling up,
These memories of a previous life.