arc02 · 043-The_Hope_Mio_Grasped_1
Episode 43: The Hope Mio Grasped (1)
Azuma Mio remembered her past life at age five.
The trigger was falling on the stairs at home and hitting her head. Thankfully there was no major injury—just a bump—but inside she was full of confusion.
(Eh, I'm————Mio? Who's Mio? Me?)
By her own understanding of it, she'd blacked out in a bus crash and, when she woke, she was a child.
(Scary. Where is this? Who are these people? Why am I a child?)
She desperately covered it up so the two people who were probably her parents wouldn't get suspicious.
Her head throbbed. Her memories were hazy. Even so, she thought as hard as she could.
In a little while she'd understand both this child and herself. Thinking that, she fell asleep.
What she learned after a night's sleep was that she'd become a different person.
(Right now I'm Azuma Mio. A five-year-old child……)
Surely she had reincarnated.
A name and appearance different from her past self.
The house she was born into, her parents—all people she'd never known.
Her last memory from the past life.
- She'd been on a bus during a trip. That bus crashed and went over the edge.
What she remembered was up to the moment it fell.
Then when she woke next, it was the year 2000. She was in a child's body.
(I guess this is what they call reverse reincarnation. I don't feel like I died, or like I was reborn—nothing at all.)
With no explanation from anyone, she'd gone back in time and a new life had begun.
◇
The new home was a wealthy one.
Her father was a part-time investor who held an elite position as a company employee as well, so money was never an issue.
Her mother was a full-time homemaker, and she had an older sister and a younger brother.
It was what you'd call a happy family.
But childhood was the most exhausting period for Mio.
Pretending to be a child when she'd been thirty-one in her past life was quite the ordeal, and dealing with her sister and brother, who really were children, was extremely tiring.
The innocence peculiar to children, their inexhaustible energy. Her older sister in particular had a mischievous streak, and getting dragged into all sorts of things was rough.
Such was her early childhood, but Mio didn't merely go along with children's games—she looked into all sorts of things about reincarnation and about this world.
As a result, she learned that despite things like dungeons that were straight out of a game, the world was progressing just as it had in her past life.
Of course there were differences in the details, but by and large all the historical events had happened, and what would be popular, which companies would get big—that too was mostly as she knew it.
Because of that, she put in a little word about her father's investments.
Around 2000—the peak of the IT bubble, and after it burst—she argued forcefully about a foreign company that was on the brink of management crisis with its share price at rock bottom: "You should absolutely buy this. It might look iffy at first, but in ten or twenty years it'll be incredible."
It was a company that, by the time Mio died, had become a Big Tech firm supporting society's infrastructure.
At the time Japanese company stocks were still strong, and a company on the decline no less—her father showed reluctance, but he decided to buy a little, since his daughter had taken an interest in investing.
At this point Mio herself wanted shares too, and asked her father to open a brokerage account for her. Minors apparently had various restrictions.
Her father was understandably surprised, but since an interest in investing couldn't be a bad thing, he decided to teach her from scratch.
After that, the companies Mio picked as investments kept growing, and in no time she was enormously rich.
Mio herself had no stock knowledge from her past life—she'd only picked companies even she knew—but it was still a huge success.
Her whole family rejoiced with arms raised, but Mio alone couldn't be honestly happy.
By middle school she already had plenty of money, but only emptiness remained.
◇
She graduated middle school.
By this point Mio's heart had sunk quite far.
Mio had always been a negative sort, and because she'd become rich, she could no longer trust any of the people who flocked to her.
Nothing in particular had been done to her—some had even just come up and talked to her normally, trying to be friends—but Mio couldn't tell the difference.
Having graduated, she could now go to the dungeon she'd always been curious about, so she registered as an adventurer.
Her family objected, but she used spring break to quietly go alone to the Shibuya Guild.
The first entry grants stats and a skill.
What Mio got was 【Plunder】 and below-average stats.
Looking into it, it was apparently a hell of a dud skill.
Whether she could manage with below-average stats was unclear, but she had money to buy equipment, so she judged there was a chance.
Mio was a negative thinker, but when there was something she wanted to do or know, she became proactive.
What Mio wanted to know was this world's secret.
There had to be a god, or something like one, in the dungeon. That's what Mio thought. Because her own reincarnation and the dungeons themselves were far too removed from reality. And if she could meet such a being, maybe she could hear all sorts of things.
Why had they reincarnated her, did she have some mission, what were dungeons, what was this world—she had mountains of things to ask.
Hearing the answers might clear her anxieties a little. That's what she thought.
◇
Her challenge of the dungeon ended after just one attempt.
She'd prepared D-rank equipment, bought potions and everything, and went in fully equipped—and she truly couldn't do a thing.
Her body kept shrinking back, and her legs were shaking. When a horned rabbit slammed into the shield she held up, she couldn't withstand the impact and fell flat on her rear. Mio ran immediately.
As for the giant centipede, she turned on her heel the moment she saw it.
In the end she couldn't get even 100 meters from the Floor 1 entrance.
Mio gave up.
◇
Her high school years passed without her making friends, same as middle school.
Instead she soaked herself thoroughly in the world of the internet.
She was drawn especially to the occult and to conspiracy theories.
Perhaps because of that, around this time she began spinning even more negative delusions.
If a god wouldn't appear, maybe this was an artificial phenomenon.
If so, what could be considered? In her past life VR and AI had advanced. She had a feeling some work had trapped only consciousness inside a game world. A little further in the future, that might be possible.
What if she were in a vegetative state, unconscious, and this world was actually a virtual world convincing enough to mistake for reality.
What if she'd been shut in this world for some experiment, and was being observed.
She was so, so scared.
At first Mio dismissed it as her own delusion.
But as the days passed, she came to convince herself that such a delusion might be reality.
Mio's heart was at its limit.
◇
Do what she could.
Having decided that, after graduating high school Mio began living alone, installed a high-performance PC and 3DCG software at home, and set to work on CG production.
She didn't go on to university, and thanks to the stocks she had no need to work.
Naturally her parents objected, but she said she had something to do and pushed it through.
Every day, all sorts of things happen on the internet.
But as ever, everything other than dungeon-related matters was stuff she already knew.
In other words, the world Mio knew would keep coming.
She also knew that in a few years VTubers would blow up on OurTube.
Then if she got ahead of it herself, something might happen.
Mio didn't think she was the only reincarnator, or the only test subject.
Because she couldn't understand the point of preparing a world like this and leaving just one person who could do nothing in it. Being one among many—that was the natural way to think.
So surely, if the world's first VTuber was different from the V she knew, someone would react.
That's what she thought as she prepared.
She hadn't been a VTuber in her past life, just one listener among many, so she had no know-how at all, and it took longer than expected.
3DCG production too—things she could do in her past life she couldn't do yet, and there were various inconveniences.
There was no way an individual could do motion capture, so she made animations from scratch and dubbed voices onto them to pseudo-reproduce it.
◇
The result was a failure.
- The originator would show up this very year, so she uploaded the video during spring, but there was no reaction from anyone.
The view count didn't even reach 10,000.
(No comments, no DMs. Not a single peep. What on earth am I doing……)
◇
She could no longer communicate properly with her family either.
Maybe they were NPCs too. Thinking that made her smile stiffen.
"What am I supposed to do… Somebody, help me…"
Having reached her limit, Mio finally decided to rely on fortune-telling.
Apparently there was someone who would divine using the power of a skill called 【Astrology】.
The online reputation was tremendous, and the fee was unbelievably high.
One million yen a reading.
That's absurd, she thought—and also thought that at this price it must be accurate.
She made a reservation at once and headed to a multi-tenant building in Shinjuku.
She was impressed—they must be making enough to keep a shop in the city center.
Inside was a woman in a suit.
A bright reception room. It didn't feel like a fortune-telling shop at all—it had the air of a detective's or lawyer's office.
"Um, I'm looking for someone. No, it might not be a person… I have something I've wanted to ask for a long time, and I want to meet a being who might know, or someone who could be a clue."
"I understand. Let me look."
The woman facing her nodded at Mio's words, stared intently at Mio, and moved her hands in some way.
She must be using 【Astrology】.
"Let's see… the ○th day of ○ month, at ○○ Park in Saitama. It would be good to wander around that park around evening. The other party appears to be a young man. If you're nervous, it might be good to have a drink before you go."
"I-is it really that specific!?"
"Yes, well. I can't see a thing when it comes to myself, you see. But for other people's fortunes, I'm at a hundred percent so far."
"I-is that so. Understood. Thank you very much!"
"Fufu, I'll be waiting for your next visit."
Mio had finally moved forward, if only slightly.