After what felt like years, "it" finally gained back it's consciousness in proper form. However, what followed after was utter confusion.

Just what the heck was going on? What happened to me?

"It" entered a completely foreign vessel that was unable to maintain consciousness for long periods, and still wasn't able to properly recall information. Therefore "it" wasn't able to understand the sounds of a baby crying fading in and out along with its consciousness, nor why it felt a sudden shame each time it happened.

After some time, "it" finally got the gist of what was happening after the first memory it created, yet even then, it only further added to its confusion. "It" clearly remembered being on the rooftop of the Yokohama highschool. Snapping back to reality, "it" was faced with a familiar, warm creature grooming its hair. Memories kept resurfacing and the first word that came to mind to best explain the creature above me was the word "harpy".

An unexplainable situation. The multitude of questions and doubts kept piling on and on. Harpies were only supposed to be in fiction, works of mythology as a way to explain the unexplainable. Furthermore, the scene around me consisted of mountains covered in greenery. Forests that expanded like it the sea itself. I was in a large nest built of out bundles of twigs and ferns with me and the harpy taking residence. It would make sense if this was a hallucination after a major accident of some sort, but all of this scenery was frighteningly real.

Reincarnation…

It was a trope used often in the types of novels I consumed. I never actually thought it was a real occurrence that happened. Was I sent here as punishment, judged necessary by an all-powerful god? Was this a supernatural accident fabricated by the devil? I had no way of confirming any of my suspicions.

My mind was fully functional, but the same couldn't be said for my abnormal body. Instead of arms, I had wings with barely grown white feathers. Instead of hands, I had three foreclaws with talons embedded in each of them. Instead of legs, I had thighs of yellow tarsus and forefeet out of talons and claws. All of these parts I had yet to get used to, so all I could do is sit and be groomed by "it's" mother.

As seasons passed, I slowly grew accustomed to this body of mine.

During this time I was able to contemplate my situation. Only pieces and fragments of my past life came to me, mostly in non-chronological order. So far I wasn't able to recall my previous name or even gender. However, I do recall being from a country called Japan, as a few customs and cultural ideas had stuck with me. I attempted to recall previous family members, friends, and acquaintances, but their faces were a haze when I envisioned them. Most memories were like this, which only became even blurrier the harder I tried to recall them.

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Only one memory stood out from the rest. One clear feeling any creature could identify with at one point in their lives. The will to live.

Specifically, I felt this when I fell off the school rooftop, a dozen stories high. I was standing near the ledge looking out towards the busy streets and tall buildings in front of me. School ended and I waited thereupon a request of another student. That person was standing right beside me as we spoke to one another. Words were exchanged and lose ideas were tossed around, then solace laughter, but silence soon followed. As if planned we both stepped up on to the ledge and looked down below. We counted as if we rehearsed this multiple times before. Then the next thing I knew, I was already falling towards my death.

The cold winds and deafening noise all rushed past my ears and vision as I plummeted towards the concrete. My heart was bursting out of my body as my muscles tightened to brace for impact. The fear of death gripped me tightly before my vision finally went to black.

This painful feeling in my heart increased as an unknown pressure built up around me. This deep feeling in my chest, it was almost as if something had gripped my very soul. I didn't know if this was regret or something much more than that, but at this point, I stopped desiring to recall any more due to fear of the pain getting worse.

After some time, I've come to realize that this world’s language was structurally similar to my previous one, so I quickly came to understand my mother. Frighteningly quick in fact.

This was strange because I remembered being terrible at learning new languages. I figured this was due to this new body of mine, which was similar to getting new hardware or simply having a more capable brain to understand this information. Based on mother's explanation, it was because monsters supposedly mature at a rapid pace, being composed of this world’s magic and all.

Magic was a phenomenon that existed in this world. No, it was more like it was one of the major foundations for life and how beasts functioned and sustained life for more threatening creatures. Superior creatures that thrived living off of magical beasts were called monsters. All monsters are naturally gifted at an inherent magical skill to help hunt magical beasts. They also can learn and develop at an extraordinary pace to survive in this world to compete with other monsters. It was the way of this world as mother explained.

As I grew, I learned to be more wary of mother, for she wasn’t as compassionate as I had initially thought. According to her, I had two siblings before me. Both of them were born defective and she promptly had killed due to it. I was fortunate enough to have not shared the same fate as them for I had no problems growing up. All mother did to raise me was by feeding raw meat from various magical beasts in the forest and occasionally answered many of my questions. She shared this information freely and was impressed with my curiosity and vastly expanding knowledge of the world around me.

Eventually, the time had finally come where I grew fully accustomed to this body and had developed my wings to its full form. At mother's discretion, it was time for me to leave the nest.