Saiki Kusuo in Jobless Reincarnation

Volume 1: The Early Years

"I am the world's unhappiest man who has had everything snatched away since the moment of my birth."

— Saiki K

I was inside a tunnel of light. Not the gentle kind people write about — this one felt like a long, twisting shaft where everything slid past at a speed that made your stomach cheat. I was supposed to be doing one thing: go back in time and stop Touma from finding out about my psychic powers. Practical, tidy, boring. Exactly the sort of job I didn't want to mess up.

At first, the corridor was steady, like walking on a moving floor. Then an explosion cracked through the tunnel. A rent opened in the air ahead, and a force like a hand grabbed me. I braced, pushed back with everything I had, but inertia doesn't care about wishes. The pull ignored me.

There's that small moment before everything goes black where the brain lists facts like it's checking items off a list: cold, pressure, a sour taste in the mouth. I reached for telepathy out of habit — a reflex more than a plan — but there was nothing. No current of other minds, no pinprick of someone else's thought. Silence. Then the world folded.

When I opened my eyes, the light stabbed through. It hurt. I squinted until the lids adjusted.

A blurry figure leaned over me. I could only see a bright yellow blur where her head was. Beside her stood another blurry shape, a dark, broad mass. My baby eyes couldn't focus yet, so I couldn't see their faces clearly.

They spoke. Their voices were warm and quick and meant things to each other. To me, they were only sounds — melody with no map. Not Japanese. Not anything I could decode. I listened the way one listens to a foreign radio: clear signal, no meaning.

Habit pushed me to try telepathy again. Nothing. Dead. No whispers, no cheap little invasions of thought. For the first time in a very long time, my mind was completely quiet. I did not expect to feel glad about that, but I did. The quiet felt like a little clean room where I could breathe.

However, my physical body felt different. It felt incredibly heavy, but not just because I was a baby. It felt like a battery filled to the top, with a strange, warm electric current buzzing deep under my skin. I ignored it. I tried to sit up. My tiny body refused.

The man bent and picked me up in one smooth move. At first I thought, absurdly, that he must be lifting a tank — my old body would have weighed a lot — then reality corrected itself: of course I was small. Of course, I was a baby. The world rearranged itself to that fact like a map being updated.

To my left, the woman held another baby. Brown-blond hair, pale skin. He cooed when she kissed his forehead and smiled as a normal infant would. The sight of him being calm made the room feel safer, for what that's worth. Maybe that was a mistake on my part; without telepathy, I couldn't peek under that calm. Being fooled by outward smiles is dangerously easy.

A month passed in a blur of feeding and warmth and small, repeating days. The memories from my previous life clung to me — flashes of city light, the taste of too-sweet convenience store coffee, the faces I had known. I might have expected that to be unbearable. It wasn't. The real relief was the silence in my head. No constant stream of other people's stray thoughts. No involuntary reading of every passing mood. For the first time in ages, I had a private mind. I almost laughed inside.

The house told me where we were faster than any sentence could—no electric hum. No gadgets. Chairs and plates were roughly hewn from wood—a maid in an apron scrubbed at the floor with a cloth. A lamp on the table breathed oil. This was not a modern town. The place smelled of smoke and wet earth.