At first, she thought it was a dream, but the cognitive friction of reality didn’t take long to ignite.
Morning in the Tanaka household should have been a scripted event. 6:00 AM. The smartphone alarm pierced the bedroom with its sterile, digital staccato.
Tanaka Misaki, a high school junior, forced her eyelids open and attempted to drag herself out of bed. But the sensation that struck her in that instant was so sharp it cut through her sleep-fogged brain like a scalpel.
“…Kh, it… hurts…”
The moment her feet touched the floor, a dull ache radiated from the back of her knees. Her body, usually light as a feather, felt as if its skeletal frame had been backfilled with lead.
It wasn’t just the mass. Her field of vision had shifted—dropped by a few centimeters—and more importantly, the hands emerging from her pajama sleeves were not hers. The fingers that should have been white, slender, and radiant were gnarled, the skin of the knuckles taut over bone, with a faint map of blue veins surfacing on the back of the palms.
Misaki choked back a breath and lunged for the bathroom. Or rather, she tried to lunge; her limbs refused to synchronize with her intent. Trembling with an escalating visceral dread, she stood before the mirror.
“…………What?”
The entity in the mirror was not Misaki. Standing there was the forty-year-old mother she had said “goodnight” to just hours before—Tanaka Ayaka.
Misaki pressed her palms to her cheeks. The mother in the mirror mirrored the gesture. The widened eyes, the trembling lips—the synchronicity was absolute.
“This is a lie… Why, Mom…? What’s happened to me!?”
The voice that clawed out of her throat was not her own high-pitched soprano. It was a settled, slightly husky adult resonance.
A wave of unadulterated terror crashed over her. Seventeen years of luminous skin, a body packed with future potential, the “Self” she had taken for granted—all of it had been bypassed in a single night. She had leaped twenty-three years forward into decay. Misaki collapsed, unable to maintain her postural equilibrium against the sight of her “aged self.” Her fingertips shook. Was she condemned to exist as “Mom” forever? Her youth had barely reached its opening act.
“…Misaki? Is that you, Misaki?”
A voice came from behind—a voice Misaki knew intimately. It was her own.
She turned to see “herself” standing there in pajamas. Her ponytail was disheveled, her eyes wide with shock. But the intelligence dwelling within those pupils was unmistakably that of her mother, Ayaka.
“Mom…?”
“Misaki… what is the meaning of this? I looked in the mirror and…”
Ayaka (in Misaki’s form) stared at her hands, then at the version of Misaki (in Ayaka’s form) reflected in the glass. Within Ayaka, alongside the confusion, a different sensation was blooming.
Light.
The chronic shoulder tension, the weighted drag in her lower back, the stagnant fatigue that had greeted her every morning for years—all of it had suffered a total atmospheric evaporation. As she took a deep breath, she felt oxygen saturate every corner of her lungs. Her skin possessed an elastic, magnetic resilience.
(How… beautiful.)
It was the “radiance” she had lost to entropy. An instinctive euphoria sparked in the corner of her brain—the realization that she had regained the invincible armor of youth.
But the thrill was instantly followed by a crushing surge of guilt. Before her, her own daughter—now wearing Ayaka’s aging anatomy—was trembling, shattered by despair.
“I’m so sorry, Misaki. It’s like… like I’ve stolen your body from you…”
Ayaka reached out with her daughter’s youthful hands to embrace her own likeness, but she froze before contact. Was she not, at this very second, actively consuming the girl’s vitality? For every gram of “lightness” Ayaka felt, Misaki was forced to shoulder an equivalent gravitational debt. While Ayaka felt the thrill of “rejuvenation,” her daughter was weeping in the shadow of “senescence.” For a parent, there could be no greater atrocity.
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