Prologue: Transported to Another World

I died. This wasn’t just something I felt physically, but an awareness that pierced through the fog of my thoughts as well. I had no clue how I’d died; I only understood that I had.

My consciousness ebbed and flowed, adrift in the sea of death, but through that I could feel a faint shadowy weight on my mind. The umbra gradually spread across me, its heaviness increasing until I could acutely recognize what it was—sorrow and regret.

I hadn’t been able to become the best kendoka in Japan. After my mother’s passing, the only thing that had kept my father going was training me to rank first in the nation, but I was never able to achieve that goal.

After that failure, I had given up on my own dreams and had become a teacher, thinking I could at least inherit my father’s ideals of passing down knowledge to the next generation. Yet over time, even my desire to teach essentially became a curse that ate away at me. I thought that if I couldn’t achieve my own dreams, maybe I could at least help students attain theirs. That didn’t work out either.

The more desperate I got to make an impact, the greater the backlash I received from my students. The conflicts between my fellow teachers were difficult to deal with too. Also, as a new educator, I was at the mercy of impositions from teachers with seniority on top of unreasonable demands from parents. But what weighed on my mind now more than any of that was the regret of not being able to live up to my father’s expectations.

If only I had a chance to redo everything... If only I had a chance to become my ideal self...

As my earnest wishes emerged from my painful memories, my consciousness dissolved, fading away like a mist.

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When I opened my eyes again, I could make out the ceiling of what appeared to be a log cabin. It glimmered red, interspersed with dark shadows. The sounds of a crackling fire melded with the sweet aroma of burning wood. The air carried the faint smell of skin from a wild animal too.

I didn’t really have any feeling in my body, so I simply surveyed my surroundings and discovered that I was lying on top of what seemed to be a white pelt. The room was slightly smaller than an average Japanese b