Awakening

"Mm... wh... where am I?"

Cain slowly opened his eyes. As he looked at the snow-white walls around him, a flicker of confusion crossed his mind.

"Hiss."

Just as he tried to take a good look around, a sudden wave of pain erupted in his mind, leaving him unable to focus.

After an unknown amount of time, the pain in his mind gradually faded, and Cain came to understand his current predicament.

But for now, Cain had no other thoughts. All he wanted was to get some rest. The pain had just drained every last bit of strength from his body.

Even though the sweat caused by the pain had soaked his clothes, making them cling to him in an unpleasant, sticky way, he couldn't even lift a finger right now, so he had to put up with it.

"In... out... in... out..."

Cain drew deep breaths of the foul air around him, which smelled of disinfectant. His chest heaved with each ragged breath, and he was sure he looked utterly miserable.

Once his body had recovered a little, Cain began to think about his situation.

From his memories, Cain knew that his current predicament was, to put it mildly, terrible.

Cain had originally lived in a small village with his loving parents and kind villagers. But one day, a group of men in black suddenly attacked the entire village.

All the adults in the village had been killed, while the children were brought here to serve as experimental subjects.

How did a seven-year-old child know all this? Because the pain he had just experienced had awakened the memories of his previous life.

There wasn't much to say about his previous life: he'd been a thirty-year-old NEET office worker who'd never been in a relationship.

As he continued to sift through the memories in his mind, Cain's expression gradually turned strange.

"Th-this seems to be the world of Fairy Tail."

At first, Cain hadn't been sure. But as more memories surfaced, a strange sense of familiarity began to rise within him. When that man appeared, Cain was certain he'd come to the world of Fairy Tail from his previous life.

And it wasn't Edolas, a world without magic. It was Earth-land.

The dazzling magic in his memories aside, the magic within his own body was proof enough that this was Earth-land.

He closed his eyes and felt the warmth of the magic within him, a comforting sensation. Cain mused, "Looks like awakening the memories of my previous life just now also awakened my magic."

Just as Cain was about to try out his magic, he remembered the situation he was in and forced himself to rein in his excitement.

"Phew, at least I ended up in Fairy Tail and not Naruto, One Piece, Bleach, or something like that. If I'd known I'd end up in Fairy Tail, I should've finished watching the anime back then."

Cain sounded regretful. The anime had gone on hiatus for a while, and he hadn't wanted to read the manga.

When it resumed, he watched the Grand Magic Games arc. Later, the anime continued from where it had left off, but Cain couldn't remember which episode he'd stopped watching at.

Still, he remembered the general plot. The final boss was the Black Dragon, Acnologia.

"Was that thing immune to magic? Whatever, I can't quite remember. Anyway, system, activate."

Cain folded his arms across his chest and smiled with confident calm. But as the seconds ticked by, the expected "Ding!" never came.

Cain didn't give up. How could a transmigrator not have a system? Even if he hadn't transmigrated bodily or as a soul, his memories of his previous life had awakened, so surely that still made him a transmigrator.

"Deep Blue? Xiao Ai? Tmall Genie? Eastern Emperor Bell? Chaos Pearl? Mom?..."

Unwilling to accept defeat, Cain tried calling out all sorts of names, but the system still didn't appear. He had no choice but to put the search for a system aside and look around instead.

He threw off the covers and set his tender feet on the smooth floor. Looking down, Cain saw that he was wearing only a thin outer garment, something like the surgical gowns used in hospitals in his previous life.

The room wasn't very big, maybe thirty or forty square meters. It was sparsely furnished; apart from a bed, there was nothing else.

Oh, no, that wasn't right. There was also a bathroom, where the people in the rooms could take care of their bodily needs.

The cool draft stirred by his movements made Cain realize he was completely naked beneath the gown. It made him deeply uncomfortable. After all, even though his body was only seven years old, his consciousness was already over thirty.

Cain suddenly remembered something and hurried to the bathroom. He lifted his clothes, saw that his little brother was still there, and let out a relieved breath.

"Thank goodness. I hear the ladies in Fairy Tail are all gorgeous. Heh heh heh."

Cain let out a strange laugh as he lost himself in his fantasies.

"Knock, knock, knock."

The sound of knocking brought Cain back to his senses. A person in a white lab coat, wearing glasses and writing something in a notebook, said to him, "Subject 115, come with me."

Then he turned and left. Cain froze for a moment before realizing that Subject 115 was him.

Cain obediently followed behind him, wondering, That's strange. Didn't they just finish experimenting on me? Why are they calling me again?

From his earlier memories, Cain knew that, as an experimental subject, he was scheduled for various examinations every week or strapped to a cold operating table for some kind of experiment.

When he'd first been captured, Cain had still seen the other children from his village. But after two months, all of his former companions had disappeared.

He, too, had been moved from a filthy, damp cage to the clean, tidy room he'd just woken up in.

The seven-year-old Cain didn't understand what was going on, but the Cain who was over thirty did. He had simply survived the earlier experiments, making him a valuable experimental subject.

After passing through seven or eight doors, the bespectacled man led Cain to a bed and said, "Lie down."

Once Cain was lying on the bed, the bespectacled man said, "Don't move," then began operating a machine nearby.

As the bespectacled man worked, a red light scanned down from above Cain's head. Just as Cain thought the scan was over and that would be the end of it, he felt a sharp sting in his right hand.

Cain turned to look. A needle was stuck into his right hand, and dark red blood slowly flowed into it.

After drawing the blood, the needle disappeared, while the bespectacled man continued operating the machine.

About ten minutes later, the bespectacled man looked at the test results on the screen, which showed that everything was normal, and deeply furrowed his brows.

But he didn't dwell on it. After returning Cain to his room, he went to a laboratory.

An elderly man in his seventies with thinning hair glanced at him and asked, "How were the test results?"

"Doctor, the results were all normal."

"Normal?"

The doctor was surprised to hear this. He'd noticed something unusual about Subject 115 in the monitoring room and thought the earlier experiments had caused an abnormality in the test subject. But now his assistant was telling him everything was normal, which was not what he'd expected.