At the lowest level of Tartarus, after the last life had been reclaimed, Junsei finally felt something change within him.
For the first time since his rebirth as a human, the emptiness inside him disappeared.
The hollow sensation that he had for so long, the quiet void he had been compelled to fill, was gone. In its place was something familiar and warm.
And above all, he felt whole.
And with that wholeness came something he had never felt since awakening in a human body: a quiet desire to live, to continue existing, to grow older with the passing years rather than simply enduring his existence.
Until now he had only acted according to memory and fear of death, guided by the fragments of countless lives and memories that had come before. His choices in this life had never been driven by desire, just fear.
But now his heart beat strongly in his chest.
Junsei lowered his gaze and placed a hand over the spot where the gem rested beneath his clothes. Even through the fabric he could see a faint blue glow shining through.
Warmth spread from that point through his entire body.
Then he felt it.
A call.
Junsei slowly lifted his head.
Something was calling to him from far away, beyond the steel and concrete walls of Tartarus. It was distant, yet unmistakable, like a quiet voice echoing through the world itself.
It came from deep within the ocean.
Without hesitation, Junsei began walking forward.
The thick prison walls offered no resistance. His fist struck the reinforced metal and concrete, tearing straight through it as if it were nothing. Another wall followed, then another, until he had carved a path through the prison's deepest layers.
Soon he broke through the outer barrier entirely.
Cold seawater rushed inward as the final wall collapsed, but Junsei stepped forward into it without pause.
Drawing upon the aspects of breathing and movement beneath water, his body adapted instantly. Then he began swimming.
His speed was extraordinary. Faster than the fastest fish in the ocean, faster even than a sailfish cutting through open water. The currents bent around him as he shot forward through the dark sea.
He continued like this for nearly two hours.
At last, the seabed beneath him began to drop away into an immense chasm. A trench carved into the Earth's crust itself.
Humans had named this place the Mariana Trench.
Junsei descended.
The deeper he went, the darker the world became. Not even the sunlight could reach this place. There was only endless darkness
Yet the call grew stronger.
Junsei began emitting a faint blue light from his body, illuminating the surrounding darkness as he sank deeper and deeper until he finally reached the very bottom of the trench.
The pressure here could crush steel. But Junsei didn't even register it, his focus was solely on the call.
He moved forward across the seabed until he noticed something unusual: a narrow opening in the ocean floor. A tunnel descending even deeper beneath the earth.
The call came from there.
Junsei entered the opening and followed the narrow passage until it expanded into a cavern beneath the seabed.
What he found inside made him pause.
The cave was illuminated.
Eleven kilometers beneath the surface of the ocean, where no sunlight could possibly reach, the cavern glowed with a soft blue radiance. Countless stones on the ground emitted gentle light, bathing the chamber in an otherworldly glow.
Junsei stepped forward slowly, examining the strange environment.
As he moved, the stones began releasing faint trails of blue steam that drifted upward like mist. The glowing vapor curled around his body and danced through the air.
Then everything changed.
Without warning, the cavern disappeared.
Junsei found himself standing in an endless black void. There was no sound, no gravity, no sensation of space or time.
Only darkness.
Then a single beam of light pierced the emptiness.
More light followed, spreading outward in every direction. Gas clouds formed. Rocks collided and condensed. Stars ignited in the newborn universe, filling the void with radiant fire.
Junsei watched as existence itself unfolded before him.
Galaxies spiraled into being. Planets formed from swirling dust and molten elements.
Within that vast and expanding cosmos, a small wisp of blue light drifted aimlessly through the darkness.
Junsei floated behind it, watching.
The wisp eventually descended toward a blue planet.
Earth.
It entered the planet's atmosphere and continued downward until it reached the deepest part of the ocean. The same place where Junsei now stood in reality.
The wisp settled there in the darkness.
Time passed.
Junsei could not measure how long it remained there, but he could feel something happening. The light was not dormant.
It was growing.
At first the breath of life was faint, barely noticeable, but it slowly strengthened with each passing moment. The blue glow expanded outward, illuminating the surrounding darkness.
Then Junsei saw the first creature.
A tiny organism drifting through the ancient sea, resembling an insect-like form swimming through primordial waters.
The blue light condensed into a small glowing stone that fell still into the sea bed. The stone released a small wisp of light that followed the creature and entered it.
The creature divided, splitting into two identical beings. One of them carried the faint blue glow.
Junsei followed it.
The pattern repeated.
Life multiplied and evolved. The light moved from one organism to another, growing stronger each time, sometimes splitting, sometimes condensing into a blue stone, always continuing forward.
Junsei watched as the oceans filled with new forms of life.
He saw creatures crawl onto land, watched forests rise and disappear, witnessed entire eras pass in moments. Species evolved, adapted, and vanished, but one always carried fragments of the blue light forward through time, while leaving sometimes blue stones in its wake..
Then he saw something familiar.
A moment from an unimaginably distant past.
It was the moment when a small creature first became aware of itself.
The moment when memory awakened.
Junsei recognized it instantly.
It was the beginning of his own awareness, hundreds of millions of years ago. Junsei's eyes widened as he realized this was a memory older than his own awareness.
From there, the visions continued.
And Junsei kept watching the countless lives he had already lived.
Junsei continued drifting behind the wandering blue wisp as it carried him across the endless span of his past. Life after life unfolded before his eyes, each one a fragment of a cycle he had lived countless times.
In one of those lives, he became a seed.
He watched the small seed fall into dark soil and remain there in silence. Slowly, it began to grow and eventually the small sprout became a magnificent tree.
Junsei remembered this life faintly. It had been one of the quietest existences he had ever experienced. There were no eyes, no ears, no taste or smell. Only the awareness of sunlight above and the temperature around it.
It had been a peaceful existence.
But something new happened during that life that Junsei didn't know about.
One day, a creature approached the tree.
Junsei stared at it in confusion. He had never seen anything like it before. It was neither insect nor bird nor animal. It was the most unnatural thing he had ever seen.
The creature possessed four arms and four legs. Its body stood upright like a trunk with limbs branching from it. Atop its shoulders was a single head, but two faces were set back-to-back upon it, allowing the creature to look in opposite directions simultaneously without turning.
Four ears protruded from its head. And beneath its torso were two sets of sexual organs.
Junsei observed it carefully, a quiet realization forming within his mind.
This thing was not born of life.
It was something else entirely.
The creature walked toward the tree and reached upward with one of its many arms. From among the leaves it plucked a fruit that glowed with faint blue light.
The creature bit into it.
Immediately its body was bathed in blue radiance. The strange form began to tremble and distort as the light grew brighter.
Then, before Junsei's eyes, the creature split into two.
Where one had stood, now there were two familiar shapes.
A male human.
And a female human.
They stared at each other in shock, their faces filled with confusion. Their mouths began producing sounds Junsei could not understand, strange noises that carried no meaning to him. After a moment they both turned and pointed toward the tree.
Junsei looked into their eyes.
What he saw there was unmistakable.
Greed.
Boundless hunger.
At that moment the sky darkened.
Thunder rolled across the heavens, and a bolt of lightning struck the tree directly. Fire erupted across the branches, consuming the leaves and splitting the trunk.
The two humans fled in terror and dropped to their knees at a distance, screaming toward the sky as the flames devoured the tree completely.
As the fire died down, the blue wisp quietly drifted away from them.
Time moved forward once again.
Only a few lives later, Junsei found himself observing another familiar scene. This time it was a moment he already remembered clearly.
It was the place where he had first encountered humans in that distant age.
Junsei stood silently beside the body of his past self and watched events unfold exactly as he remembered them.
Humans emerged from the forest.
Among them were two older figures whose faces he immediately recognized. They were the same male and female who had once been a single creature split by the blue fruit.
Time had aged them.
Beside them walked two younger pairs of humans, two males and two females who strongly resembled the older ones.
Their offspring.
Junsei watched as the scene progressed.
By the time his past self realized what was happening, it was already too late.
The humans attacked, their wooden spears piercing its body. The humans rushed and tied his old self. He watched himself resisting helplessly and dying.
Yet something different happened this time.
The blue wisp did not leave immediately.
Junsei remained standing above his fallen as the humans surrounded him talking amongst each other. Then they descended upon him, tearing into the flesh without hesitation, they began devouring it.
Junsei watched the humans' bodies glow faintly blue as they ate. Their muscles shifted subtly. Their bones adjusted, their skin color changed lightly. They were changing.
But the humans themselves did not seem to notice.
They were too consumed by their hunger.
When they finished eating, they skinned the remains of his body to make clothing. The bones were collected and shaped into weapons.
Then they left.
Junsei stood there for a moment, staring at what little remained of him.
Soon a faint glow rose from the blood-soaked ground. Light gathered together and condensed into a small blue stone. From that stone another wisp of light rose into the air.
Just before Junsei followed it, something else caught his attention.
A crow descended from the sky.
The bird landed beside the stone and stared at it quietly. Then a single tear fell from the crow's eye. After a moment the bird picked up the stone in its beak and flew away into the distance.
Junsei watched the crow leave before his awareness followed the wisp.
Again and again the same pattern repeated.
In each life, when he encountered humans, they killed him, and they devoured his remains. It did not matter if he was a large creature or a tiny insect.
They always ate him.
Junsei noticed something strange about their behavior. It was not simple hunger. It was as though they could not resist the desire to consume him. A deep instinct compelled them.
And every time they did, something within them changed.
Junsei felt a cold realization settle within him.
He was wrong, humans had evolved faster than any other species not merely because they killed.
They evolved because they killed him.
He had been the source of their rise.
The foundation of their domination.
Life after life passed before his eyes, and almost every one of those lives ended in the same way: at the hands of humans. Each time they consumed him, a small blue stone remained behind.
Junsei began noticing another pattern.
Animals always came to retrieve the stones.
Birds, insects, mammals, creatures of every kind would arrive quickly and carry the stones away. Junsei suspected they transported them across the world, eventually bringing them to that deep cave beneath the ocean where he had first seen the glowing stones.
But there was something even more disturbing.
Some humans consumed his remains more than once in their lifetime.
Those individuals began developing unique powers.
One could command snakes to obey him. Another walked across the surface of the water. Others displayed abilities that defied the nature of their kind.
Junsei understood.
Humans who consumed him repeatedly began developing what the modern world called quirks.
Time continued flowing.
Junsei watched countless deaths, many of them painful, many of them cruel. And the rate of which humans were involved in his deaths, only grew.
He saw his life as a rat again.
He saw Okina.
He watched every moment unfold exactly as it had happened.
Eventually the blue wisp moved forward one final time.
It entered the body of a human unborn child.
Junsei watched as that child was born.
Himself.
At last the truth became clear.
He had not been born as a human by chance.
For countless ages humans had devoured him, generation after generation, absorbing fragments of his existence. Through that process their bodies had changed. Their descendants inherited the power.
Quirks.
Humans had evolved through him.
They had shaped their species through the endless consumption of his lives.
Junsei had not been born in their image.
They had evolved into their current image through him.
And now he existed inside a body created from the long, brutal history of his own torn life.