A long time had passed since I woke up in this new body to this strange place.

  I couldn’t tell how long it had been, honestly.

  Keeping track of time wasn’t exactly easy.

  It’s not like I had a calendar or phone to wake up to every morning.

  Waking up in the first place wasn’t that comfortable of an affair.

  What day of the week it was might have been the very last thing on my mind.

  I had to keep the rats from trying to gnaw on my bones, first.

  Maybe after I found a proper food source and a good place to sleep, I could start caring about the passage of time.

  All I could confidently say is that I stopped caring about how long I had spent here after the third week.

  Who knows how long it had been?

  It could have just been three months. It could have been three years.

  The intense starvation I felt on some of those days made it all smush together. Days and nights blended together and passed in what felt like seconds.

  And it was starvation. Not hunger. I refused to call it hunger.

  I was very annoying and particular about the word choice.

  There was a story there, of course, like there always is with these kinds of odd personality quirks, but there was neither the time nor space to be reminiscing about what I guess would now be my ‘past life’.

  Well, in the first place, I don’t think I even had the brain capacity to be reminiscing at that point.

  I would watch the sun rise and fall with hazy eyes and an empty mind, sitting on the side of the street or trawling through trash, hoping someone at some point, someone dropped a bit of bread or tossed away the last quarter of an apple.

  Then I’d suddenly become hyper-aware and dive for the leftover trash, spending what felt like hours nibbling on whatever scraps I could get my fingers on.

  And then after I finished, the world would once again pass me by in what felt like seconds.

  If I was lucky, I’d stumble across some rich district and shovel grass into my mouth. I wasn’t conscious enough to be able to tell how I got there or remember the directions. It just happened sometimes.

  I couldn’t stay, though. The residents would come and beat me up and physically throw me off their street.

  If I was extra lucky, there’d be a backyard or garden or lawn or something, and there’d be greens and fruits for me to take.

  And if I was extra, extra lucky, there would even be no one home.

  And if I was triple extra lucky, the neighbours wouldn’t be home either, and I could get away without injuries or spilling whatever little blood was left in my tiny body.

  I’m not going to lie.

  It was rough.

  Really, really rough.

  I wanted to cry. A lot.

  I think I probably did at some point, before I lost count of the days. Back when I was hungry and not starving, and there was still some brain function left in me.

  It hurt really fucking bad, probably more than any of the fellow beggars and peasants around me realised, because I once knew a better world.

  I wasn’t born into squalor.

  I didn’t grow up in a world where I was taught that I was worthless if I lost my home and job.

  I didn’t grow up in a world where I was taught to just accept injustice if it happened to me just because ‘that was how the world was’.

  I knew things could be better.

  I knew that the average person wasn’t cruel.

  I didn’t just know it, I lived it.

  I came across all sorts of friendly strangers in my travels. All of them helped me through tough times in foreign lands, joyous to share their life experiences with strangers.

  Even back in the suburbs I grew up in, there were so many random people, barely better than strangers – passing classmates and teachers, the neighbours and parents on the street I lived on – who just helped without thinking.

  But none of that knowledge or hope helped me here.

  Rather, all it did was harm me. Literally.

  All the crying and heartache that would have been avoided aside, my hope led me to beg more aggressively and pitifully than the other homeless people I had seen.

  All that led to was me getting my teeth kicked in more than they did.

  Seriously, what was wrong with the people there?

  Was the sight of a crying little girl who was barely more than a bag of bones wrapped in skin so kickable to them?

  Oh, right…

  There was that too.

  The whole ‘gender’ thing.

  To be honest, I didn’t really care much.

  Again, not that it couldn’t have been important, but if you asked me what I cared more about in this moment between being a boy again or having food again and forced me to choose only one of them to have, I would probably be actively looking for more genitals to chop off if it could secure me one more dinner.

  Maybe if I ever got out of this mess, and I got the time and space to just think and breathe, I could bother myself enough to care about the whole gender ordeal, but for now, I just wanted to live.

  And that was how I spent most of my days.

  Desperate, starving, barely thinking.

  It was kind of fucked up to say, but, honestly, in some ways…

  It really wasn’t all that bad.

  At least I didn’t have to think about the meaning of life.

  At least I didn’t have to sit in silence wracking with the gnawing guilt inside of me that never faded.

  I didn’t have to wistfully gaze over the horizon, desperately hoping that out there, somewhere on that unfathomably large planet, there was something that could bring joy and fulfilment to my life.

  There was no need to forlornly ponder upon the greater meaning of life; that was a luxury for those who weren’t struggling to just live.

  And so, the days looped, over and over.

  I woke up one morning to a terrible itch.

  Something – some things – crawled around on my legs.

  My hand reached out to swipe away whatever was annoying me before I even opened my eyes.

  I then smashed my hand into the dirt of the alley I was sleeping in, leaving behind some vaguely sticky substance on the underside of my hand.

  Left behind on my legs was a slightly irritating cooling itch

  Only then did I open my eyes.

  It was dark. Still early, it seemed.

  I raised my hand to my face.

  Ant guts.

  Great, I somehow decided to sleep right next to an ant colony.

  Well, I shouldn’t have been too surprised, they weren’t that rare.

  My lips weakly pulled into a disgusted grimace as I tried to wipe away the remaining ant goo on my hands.

  I quickly rolled away and stumbled as I picked myself up in a hurry before I let more ants crawl over my body.

  “Ow…”

  I rubbed my neck, wincing.

  There was a small, burning soreness there.

  My fingers brushed over a smooth, red bump.

  A bug bite.

  Honestly, I was just surprised there was still enough meat and blood in me to still appear attractive to mosquitos.

  I was kind of flattered if anything. I had to be doing something right.

  I scratched at it, hoping that would somehow make the irritation disappear.

  It didn’t. It just made it worse.

  Of course it didn’t, what the hell was I thinking?

  I sighed and rubbed my eyes with my non-dirty hand.

  Well, the less dirty hand, I suppose.

  I was strangely alert and conscious today.

  I wondered why that was.

  Maybe it was something to do with where and how I slept.

  On most days I’d just collapse onto the street and be woken up against my will by footfall and the scorching sun shining straight into my face.

  Last night I was actually awake long enough to find an alley that just so fortunately happened to contain a bunch of discarded paper, which I was able to fashion into a makeshift bed.

  It was amazing what a difference even just an okay night’s worth of sleep made compared to a terrible one.

  When I was still travelling the world, I used to pride myself on my kind-of-practically-useless skill of ‘being able to sleep comfortably anywhere in any position’. I would sleep standing up sometimes just for the sake of it.

  I really took that for granted.

  I wasn’t exactly a spry, energetic, athletic young man at the prime of my life anymore.

  Nonetheless, I seemed to be in a good mood.

  Maybe I would even manage to make some progress on that goal I had.

  That of course, being to get the fuck out of where ever this place was.

  I could never focus on it for that long of a time. Any time I wanted to, I would pick a direction to walk in for a few hours, then the delusions and haze of starvation would kick in, and I would nearly black out and forget where I was, and then the next thing I knew I was somewhere I absolutely didn’t recognise.

  There were other things stopping me as well. Sometimes if I felt like I was maybe making some progress, some asshole in armor or dressed fancily or something would spot the ‘undesirable’ walking around on their streets, then pick me up or load me into a carriage or something, and then toss me back into the slums.

  It had happened enough times that actually, I kind of did recognise the slums somewhat and know my way around them. I was actually even somewhat proficient in living in them when it came down to it.

  It’s just… well…

  It was that damned hope I held.

  The yearning. The ambition. The memory of a better life and the desire to chase it.

  I absolutely did not want to be stuck in a shithole like this for the rest of my life. I wanted to get out, run into the wilds, maybe live amongst nature for a bit.

  It wasn’t like I was a big ‘wilderness survival’ guy or anything. Despite being a traveller, I was kind of hopeless when it came to self-sufficient camping for extended periods of time.

  If I had to describe the kind of person I was, it would probably be a ‘pilgrim’. I was travelling around the world for some vague spiritual, religious journey, living off of good prayers, good faith, kindness, and optimism.

  It was to my detriment, really.

  I was really ill-prepared on my first journey. I got myself into a really bad situation and almost died out in the wilds because of my naivety. Luckily, my faith did pull through, and a bunch of natives pulled me out of there and brought me back to life.

  Since then, I made sure to always be stocked up on food and snacks whenever I went overseas. Over two-thirds of my preparations and supplies were dedicated solely to feeding myself. And of course, just in case I really needed it, I learnt a few basic skills in case I was in really dire straits.

  If I could just make it out of this city or whatever and find a nearby forest or something, I could probably live a much better life.

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  I never learned how to start a safe campfire without gas or a flint or some other kind of store-bought firestarter, and I was kind of shit when it came to assembling natural shelter, instead always bringing tents with me, but at the very least, I was pretty confident in my foraging.

  After that disaster, I had made it my goal to tell the difference between every kind of poisonous berry or mushroom before the next time I caught a plane.

  I didn’t know how to hunt or defend myself from animals, but if it came down to maybe running away from a bear or something and living off of wild fruits, vegetables and fungi versus spending the rest of my days on the streets begging for dirty breadcrumbs and half-eaten apple cores, I knew which one I’d rather choose.

  The problem, of course, was not losing my mind before then.

  Well, I should probably get going early, before the streets start to get chaotic.

  I picked a random direction and started walking, eyes focused on the far end of the street.

  It was still dark; the sun hadn’t risen yet. Footfall was light, but not nonexistent. I think I might have been in a big city or something, where some people had to commute across the entire city to get to work.

  A couple horse-pulled carriages passed me by, wooden boxes rattling inside of them. Probably a bunch of merchants getting their start early in the day or just passing through the city to make it somewhere else.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw one of the boxes pop open, something bright, round and deliciously red jump up and down.

  Apples.

  My eyes snapped towards them, taking in the sight hungrily.

  I think I might have drooled.

  “Grgh.”

  I grunted painfully, wrenching my eyes away from the carriage that was slowly disappearing from view.

  I was tempted to try to dive for them, but luckily, I wasn’t that delusional just yet.

  I was a child with stubby little legs on the brink of death from starvation. I wasn’t going to outrun a fucking horse.

  Still, though, the fantasy couldn’t help but play on repeat in my mind.

  I focused back on walking, doing my best to engrave every single corner of the street into my mind. Maybe after a couple dozen repetitions of this, I would be lucky enough to have built an okay map of the city in my mind.

  Something tingled at the back of my mind as the day wore on, the sun slowly rising and the streets filling.

  As more and more people filed onto the dirt roads, something about where I was walking started to… tick.

  The sight of people walking, the buildings around me…

  It seemed… familiar?

  Had I been here before?

  My eyes brightened a bit, a small bit of optimism filling me.

  That was a good sign, I think.

  I was getting closer to actually remembering where I had been.

  I pressed on, determination filling me.

  The hours continued to pass, and the feeling of familiarity grew stronger and stronger.

  Progress was slow. Much slower than I was comfortable with.

  But that was to be expected; my stride length was a tiny fraction of what it used to be as an adult. Progress being slow was something I just had to suck up.

  It was around noon when something clicked.

  And that something drained all the optimism from my body.

  “Ah, fuck…” I whispered to myself.

  I knew where this place was.

  I was on the road that would lead me to the slums.

  Shit.

  Well, there went all the progress that I thought I made.

  I grumbled under my breath.

  On the bright side, I was pretty lucid right now, and I was confident I would retain at least a decent amount of memory about the path I took.

  If nothing else, I had mapped out at least a small portion of the city leading to the slums.

  I sighed.

  At this point, I might as well head there anyways.

  I had been there enough times to develop a sense of where to find food there.

  And if I didn’t do it now, my situation would probably grow a lot worse throughout the day.

  It wasn’t like my stomach would grumble to remind me that I had to eat. I had long since passed the phase of starvation where my brain would still send the regular kinds of signals to my stomach that it needed fuel. All that was left behind was a primitive desperation and thought-devouring madness.

  Even if I really hated to waste my time while I was still lucid, it was probably better for me to search for food while I was still fully conscious than to put it off for dusk where I’d become what basically amounted to a wild animal.

  I trudged into the slums with a glower set on my face.

  The buildings around me started to become less polished and maintained. Paint started to peel. Wood started to rot. Nails started to fall loose.

  I made sure to stay clear of any sharp debris on the road.

  The people around me started to become more and more impoverished. Well-dressed, fully-clothed, clean people become just fully-clothed people. Then fully-clothed people turned into half-clothed people.

  I made sure to avoid their gaze.

  I spent the next few hours trawling around the slums in places I’d rather not remember doing things I’d rather not mention. At least I was able to get a decent amount of food out of it.

  By the time my stomach was… well, it wasn’t filled, but it was good enough for a while – anyways, the sun had started to fall from its zenith.

  I needed to make my way out of the slums.

  While they were an alright place to hunt for scraps, I found the slums were a miserable place to try and sleep.

  Aside from the obvious issue of the entire place being rancid and unhygienic and dirty and unbearably uncomfortable compared to the rest of the city, there was a far larger, much more insidious and dangerous problem.

  There was competition.

  All the so-called ‘undesirables’ lived here. And they were far, far better at living here than me.

  People would get into mad brawls over even the tiniest scrap of cloth to cover them or lay on as they slept.

  Hordes would fight to get underneath even a broken roof.

  At times, it seemed like small gangs would form among the particularly scrupulous, gatekeeping outsiders from prized locations.

  And in my current body, there was no way I could win a fight against any of them.

  At the very least, I think I could make it out of the slums without drawing too much attention to myself.

  Orphans weren’t that uncommon around these parts, and they were generally pretty harmless, so people didn’t pay attention to them. You would only have to worry about yourself if you were carrying something valuable, like food or clean clothes. Then overconfident assholes would fight you for them.

  Nonetheless, I was careful.

  I kept my head hung low to not draw attention to myself, stuck to the walls, and I waddled my way out of the slums.

  The danger was low, but not nonexistent. Especially for me.

  Pardon me for being a bit narcissistic, but if you were to wash my hair and scrub all the mud out of it, you would find that underneath all of the caked-on layers of dirt, this little girl had hair that was a beautiful shade of gold.

  Beautiful and desirable.

  It wasn’t just the ‘undesirable’ parts of society that stuck around here. There was a certain criminal element that lurked around every shadowy corner as well.

  Gangs, informants, drug cartels, assassins, mercenaries, the whole bunch.

  It was a particularly effective place to hide or to make your base of operations. No self-respecting human being would dare to come here. And if you weren’t careful about it, you would just make yourself an easy target.

  Only God knew how many people I’ve passed by who were carrying weapons with fresh blood on them, or how many times I’ve had to look away from some poor soul getting their face beaten in and extorted by a couple of gang members.

  Among them, there was a particular kind of person I was more terrified of than any other.

  I think slavery might have still been legal in this place.

  If not illegal, then it definitely wasn’t well-checked.

  There was always someone lurking around these parts looking for an unfortunate soul to make a quick buck from by selling them to some third party as some sort of labour or a twisted kind of pet.

  Why not, after all? It wasn’t like anyone would miss the people from around here. They weren’t documented, and no one was going to look for them.

  Sometimes the third party would be skipped altogether. Maybe the nearby gangs and cartels just wanted a new toy.

  I once found a relatively clean forgotten basin filled with water. I made the mistake of using it to wash myself. After I found my way to the slums somehow sometime later, I realised why that was a mistake.

  I never cleaned my hair again after that.

  That was another reason I didn’t want to resign myself to living here.

  Another hour or so passed.

  I was probably four-fifths of the way out of the slum by my estimation.

  The slums were a place that got progressively worse the further into its core you travelled. The outer edges like this place weren’t that bad.

  Unclean, yes, poor, yes, but still livable.

  It was a decent place to hide yourself and lay low in without having to surround yourself with the filth of the inner rings of the slums. There were even some semi-respectable stores and markets around.

  It wasn’t exactly safe still. These kinds of districts were where the extortion gangs thrived.

  People started to fill the streets again.

  Regular people, with jobs and families and lives and such. Poor, but getting by.

  My nerves started to tingle.

  I knew this particular street.

  Despite the surroundings being much, much cleaner than where I just came from, and the people far less threatening, I had really, really bad memories and impressions of this place.

  There was an orphanage nearby.

  That might have sounded nice, but it was anything but.

  It was an orphanage in name only.

  A naive orphan would have seen the place, seen the children inside looking relatively well-fed and kept, and seen the adults standing around them looking kind of responsible and gentle, and got their hopes up.

  Maybe they’d walk up to the gates and call out, hoping to be taken in and get some reliable shelter and food.

  That was when they’d fall into the trap.

  I nearly fell into that trap.

  It wasn’t this particular establishment, it was another one on the opposite end of the slums. They weren’t common or anything, but they definitely weren’t unique.

  The kids in these places were just being fattened up to be served on a platter.

  Most of them would be sold as slaves for cheap labour on God-knows-what.

  If you were particularly unlucky, a shady noble would come by, looking for a new ‘pet’.

  I was lucky to have noticed something was wrong with the adults in these kinds of orphanages. Thankfully, I kept my intelligence, maturity and understanding of other people from my previous life.

  Thank God for letting me keep that in the next life.

  Genuinely, truly, I had to thank Him.

  Some commotion happening off to the side broke my focus.

  I really wanted to keep a low profile, but against my better judgement, my head turned to see what was going on.

  It was inside the gates of the orphanage.

  A bunch of children were huddled together, surrounded by a few adults.

  Their gazes shifted around uncomfortably, most of their heads desperate to look away and ignore what was happening. They fidgeted nervously.

  The adults simply hovered near the children ‘protectively’, but made no move to stop what was happening.

  There was a little girl with greyish blonde hair. She was being pulled away from the rest of the children by two imposing men in neat, slim clothes.

  I recognised those clothes. That was the uniform of one of the local gangs.

  A bag of money was exchanged between two of the adults. A buyer and one of the caretakers at the orphanage.

  I froze, looking around.

  There were other people on the street. They all looked away, any conversation or small talk that was previously happening died down.

  The little girl screamed.

  “NO! I-I DON’T WANT TO GO! I-I WANT TO STAY!”

  The caretakers grimaced.

  One of them placed their hands on the shoulders of one of the children heavily, and smiled tentatively.

  “It’s okay, she’s going to be fine. The men will take good care of her. She’s just sad to say goodbye to all of her friends. Don’t worry about her… she’s lucky to have someone that wants to take her.”

  I couldn’t tell from where I stood whether or not the children believed her.

  I just know I didn’t.

  I looked around the street again.

  And I was pretty sure no one else did.

  It was bullshit to anyone with half a brain.

  But no one moved.

  There was very clearly something wrong happening right in front of them, but no one tried to stop it.

  I grit my teeth.

  It made sense. Of course, it had to make fucking sense.

  These were obviously gang members. And these were people that lived here. They couldn’t just stand up to them and stick their necks out for some random little girl they’ve never met before.

  That was an outright death sentence.

  No one was foolish enough to try and do anything about it.

  It sucked, it really sucked. There was clearly something immoral, evil, and probably illegal happening, but if they wanted to keep their livelihoods, they had to just let it pass.

  My heart broke.

  Why wasn’t anyone doing anything!?

  I screamed internally.

  What was I supposed to do?

  These were big, scary, fuck-off men who would beat the shit out of me if I even came close to them!

  How was I supposed to do anything here!?

  Why couldn’t someone else-!?

  …

  Oh.

  My thoughts cooled in that moment.

  The world seemed to slow down to a crawl as I came to a realisation.

  That must have been the same thought that everyone else on the street was having as well.

  I was the same as them.

  I was just as complicit as they were.

  They were just as weak and powerless as me.

  Just as desperate to look for an excuse as I was as to why it wasn’t their responsibility. As to why what was happening in front of them wasn’t their fault.

  There was nothing I could do.

  There was nothing anyone could do.

  Sometimes the world was cruel.

  Sometimes God would not give you a miracle.

  A ‘miracle’ would not be called as such if it happened every day to everyone, after all.

  I just had to accept it was happening.

  I lifted my head and stared at the little girl, tears in her eyes as she was helplessly dragged away.

  A carriage was waiting for her outside of the gates, parked firmly in the centre of the road.

  There was nothing I could do but witness it.

  I just had to watch it happen and engrave the memory into my heart, and hope that next time, maybe something would be different.

  My gaze flicked to the side for a moment, instinctively trying to escape looking at what was happening in front of me.

  There was a loose beam of wood that had fallen down from a nearby building. It splintered near the top, and had a couple loose nails hanging out of it.

  “...”

  An intrusive thought entered my brain.

  I couldn’t remember what happened next.

  I just remember that I blinked, and all of a sudden, I was running down the street as fast as I could with an oversized chunk of wood in my arms.

  If you asked me what I was thinking about at that moment, I would tell you I wasn’t trying to be a hero or anything.

  I wasn’t trying to do good. I wasn’t trying to save anyone.

  I wasn’t even angry or desperate at all at that moment. I don’t think I felt anything at all.

  I would tell you something really fucking stupid.

  I wasn’t thinking about the present at all.

  Instead, what filled my brain was a random, stray memory from the past.

  Long, long before today, before I died, before I moved out with my parents, before I met my best friend.

  It was stupid. It was a random, stupid, pointless memory to hang myself up on.

  I was four years old back then.

  I was in a hospital. I was outside one of the doors, sitting on a chair and swinging my legs back and forth.

  I got bored and hopped off, and jumped up and down in front of the door to look through the window.

  I couldn’t see much at the time.

  I remember the curtain was drawn. A shadow was painted across the blue fabric.

  It was a silhouette I recognised.

  My mother.

  She was bent over.

  I could hear the sound of faint crying from where I was then, stifled by the door, the walls, and curtains.

  Before I realised what was happening, I was back in the present, and I suddenly found myself at the gates of the orphanage, perfectly timed with the two men dragging the little girl.

  I heaved the wooden beam in my arms, dragging and spinning it across my frail body and smashing it into the legs of one of the men.

  He screamed and fell down. Nasty splinters and rusty nails tore into his leg.

  The little girl stopped crying, flinching in surprise at the sudden event.

  She spun around and looked straight at me.

  I looked into her eyes, crystalline tears being flung through the air from her movement, highlighting her wide, scared eyes.

  They were a beautiful, strange shade of yellow.

  I reached out for her arm, which was hanging loosely from the air after it found itself freed from the vice grip of the man.

  My hand snapped around her wrist.

  I shouted at her and ran.

  “RUN AWAY WITH ME!”

  I always was rather terrible when it came to letting things just happen in front of me.