"I'll be eighteen before long!"
Kuta leaned back against the broken wall behind him and looked up at the setting sun amid the fiery clouds. A trace of nostalgia surfaced in his eyes.
"Remember when I first came to the dojo?"
Before he knew it, more than fifteen years had passed since he arrived in this world.
Fifteen years was half his life in his previous world. Here, he was only just becoming an adult, and his life was only beginning.
And his adventure, in truth, had only just begun.
When he first arrived in this world, all he wanted was to travel through it, then find a place to live an ordinary life with Kuina.
But after setting out to sea and seeing a world more real and more cruel, he began to want to abolish slavery and destroy the Celestial Dragons.
Later, as his control over his powers grew, his ambitions rose with it. His unheard-of, overwhelmingly powerful command of space even led him astray for a time. For one brief moment, he wanted to use that power to return to his previous life.
Around then, he had begun to feel above ordinary people.
He disliked that feeling, but he could not control it. It came naturally with power.
Power could strengthen a person's confidence, but confidence that swelled too far could devour their soul. His experience across two worlds kept his rapidly growing power from consuming his mind.
Even so, it could change who he was.
If he forged blindly ahead without knowing where the road led, he would lose himself like so many others. His power was growing exponentially, just like the Space Domain he controlled. In the end, he might become the very thing he had hated from the start: a cold, unfeeling god.
He