Chapter Text
The moment the stone cracks off Gen, he knows - before he even falls forward into blinding daylight - that something is different. The world hums. His connection, usually a faint thread humming beneath his mind, is now a roaring current. The air itself feels electrically charged, as if it’s trying to drag his power out of his chest and spill it into the open. Spirits surge toward him the instant he breathes, a tidal rush of whispers crowding his senses.
Boundless sky endless forest unconstrained sea change is coming change is here who are you why are you who -
Gen forces the rising dizziness down. Instinct tells him to react, to answer, to ground himself in the spirits’ babble - but he’s long trained himself not to respond unless he’s certain he’s alone, and he’s not. Someone stands behind him, solid and heavy, a presence with weight unlike the drifting spirits that coil around his skull.
So instead he plays it cool. “What’s this all of a sudden? My manager didn’t stop a prank?”
“Today is the year 5739,” a voice says calmly, although there is an odd hollowness to it. “Although you’re still nineteen years old.”
Gen knew it. He’s not alone here. He turns around.
The spirits chant in warning, wind and earth harmonizing in anxious dissonance. Careful careful careful -
“Wait, aren’t you the guy I appeared on that psychological magic program with?” he asks. “Dear Shishiuo Tsukasa?”
Tsukasa looms over him, dressed in a cloak of what looks like lion skin. There’s a hardness to his eyes Gen doesn’t remember seeing before, like a mountain lake that has frozen over in the depths of winter. When they met, Tsukasa had mostly seemed sad, like he was watching his life play out without his input.
“Here, let me enlighten you,” Tsukasa says, gesturing behind him. Gen’s breath catches. A field of stone figures stretches out like a frozen crowd caught mid-roar - hundreds, maybe thousands. A petrified tsunami of humanity, each statue a moment of fear or resolve, all looming over him.
“Gen,” Tsukasa says. “I knew of your abilities as a mentalist, and I revived you for a reason.”
Gen swallows. At least it’s for his mentalist abilities. He’d had a moment of terror that Tsukasa knew of his connection. He’d spent millenia in stone; someone aware of Gen’s deepest secret that his grandmother had taken to the grave suddenly didn’t seem impossible.
“I am pursuing someone,” Tsukasa continues, his eyes cold and hard, like rocks in the depths of the earth. “And I need you to predict that individual’s thoughts. I was sure I had ended it, but if the man called Senku somehow still lives, you need to track him down. The one I murdered with my own hands; the first man killed in this world.”
He lives, the spirits inform Gen. Senku lives.
Aw fuck, Gen thinks.
ᨒ↟
Gen’s parents didn’t really like anyone, least of all each other, and certainly not their only son. What they did like were their careers, the glitter and momentum of Tokyo, and the convenience of sending Gen away every school break to stay with his maternal grandmother in the outskirts of Sapporo, far to the north in Hokkaido.
Technically, she lived in the greater Sapporo area, but only in the loosest possible sense. Her house was tucked deep into the mountains, isolated enough that reaching the nearest bus stop required a forty-minute walk on narrow, moss-slick paths. Even then, the bus only came once every hour, and sometimes not at all if snow decided otherwise. Her world felt like a place the city had forgotten to claim.
She wasn’t anything like the chic grandmothers of his classmates at his upscale private school - the ones who wore pearls to school events, toted designer handbags, and kept their hair aggressively styled. Those grandmothers moved through the world like polished museum pieces.
Gen’s grandmother was nothing like that.
She spent so much time in her garden that dirt seemed to have been permanently absorbed into the deep creases of her hands. Her silver hair was always tied back with an embroidered headband, the kind woven with old regional patterns. Thick stone-and-silver jewelry clinked on her wrists when she worked. She embroidered her own clothing in looping patterns that echoed waves or ridgelines, shapes suggestive of nature without ever depicting it literally. She slaughtered her own chickens without ceremony. And she regarded most people with a level, unimpressed stare that could shrivel a politician.
She was the one who taught Gen about their connection.
Someone else might have called it magic, or a power, or a gift. But she never used any of those words. “It’s simply what we are,” she told him. “A conversation between us and the land.”
The spirits of the place - root, leaf, cloud, river, stone - spoke to them. And they could speak back, even command to a gentle extent. Gen’s grandmother could coax stubborn plants into flourishing, call a storm’s attention until it gathered overhead, or listen to the wind mutter news from distant hills. She said every human had a connection to the earth’s spirit, but most were deaf to it. Gen and his grandmother, though - theirs ran deep. Deeper than reason, deeper than blood.
On hikes through the thick forest around her house, spirits would leak from tree trunks, peer from between boulders, stretch like shimmering heat above ferns. Sometimes they followed them at a distance, curious. Sometimes they whispered warnings about bears or sharp turns. Down by the river, water spirits would break the surface in flickering shapes, offering cool handfuls of themselves for a drink.
“Nature tends toward entropy,” his grandmother once told him as they chopped radish on her porch. “And she loves cycles. Birth, growth, death - forward motion. It’s easier to ask a spirit to move along its cycle than to demand that it defy it altogether.”
In Sapporo’s outskirts, Gen could feel their connection like a second heartbeat. The spirits told him where mushrooms hid under the duff, when the weather was preparing to turn, how the fish were moving upstream. It felt like his identity seeped outward into soil and bark and flowing water until he was woven into the land itself.
In Tokyo, it was another story.
His mother hated when he even mentioned the spirits. “Your grandmother is insane,” she would snap, as if embarrassed by her own origins. And every time Gen returned from Sapporo, the city hit him like cold water. The concrete and glass muffled everything. Spirits existed there, of course, but trapped in potted plants lining corporate offices, imprisoned in trees boxed into narrow sidewalks, compressed into the sterile fountains of shopping plazas. Rivers were straightened and forced into culverts where their voices were thin and tired.
It was like developing full hearing in Hokkaido, only to go stone-deaf in Tokyo.
As Gen grew older, he began to chafe at the life he associated with his grandmother’s connection. Gardening in the mountains, living half-feral, eating the same hardy vegetables year-round - it wasn’t for him. He loved neon light, crowds, noise. He loved the stage, the thrill of misdirection, the adoring gasps of an audience. The connection felt like something childish, one more thing to hide. He used it in small ways during magic acts - flowers were happy to vanish when asked politely - but he had no intention of becoming a hermit witch in the woods.
He loved his grandmother. But he didn’t want her life.
And when she died - quietly, without warning, before he could visit that season, a year before he debuted - Gen told himself he was relieved. He mourned her, yes. But he was relieved that the one person in the world who knew the fullness of his secret was gone.
No one else would ever know. No one else would expect anything from him.
He left Hokkaido behind like a shed skin, returned to Tokyo - he buried the connection deep, ignored the faint spiritual static that tugged at him in subway tunnels or rooftop gardens.
And sometimes, in dreams, he saw his grandmother standing on her mountainside porch, looking at him with that steady, unimpressed gaze, as if she knew exactly how long he could ignore the land before it came calling again.
The thing about cycles is that they always loop back to their start. Gen couldn’t deny the ties he had forever.
ᨒ↟
Gen shrugs into the kimono the girl - Yuzuriha, wasn’t it? - made for him. It fits surprisingly well, soft and sturdy at once, the fabric smelling faintly of smoke and fresh leather. She watches him with bright, earnest eyes, her expression a mix of awe and excitement.
A fan, he decides immediately. Wonderful. He needs fans if he’s going to survive this new world, and so he gives her his most charming, glossy smile. She flushes and looks momentarily dazzled.
He’s beginning to piece together the shape of things in this strange, reborn era. There’s Tsukasa - a self-fashioned king, radiating charisma and brutality in equal measure, ruling his chosen few as though the world were clay in his hands. There’s Senku - the man Tsukasa speaks of with an intensity that borders on reverence and terror, someone he claims to have killed but doubts stayed dead. And then there are Taiju and Yuzuriha, who insist Senku is dead, who stand at Tsukasa’s side with stiff postures and eyes too careful.
But the land, the air, the spirits murmuring at the edge of Gen’s awareness - they all say Senku lives.
So here he stands in the middle of a war he never asked for, 3,700 years out of time, with spirits swarming around him like moths to a flame. And he must pretend he can’t hear a single one.
“Thank you,” Gen says, adjusting the sleeve. “Dear Yuzuriha, right?”
“Yes,” she says quickly. “I’m a big fan of your books.”
“Aw,” Gen beams, laying it on thick, because people like her always respond to sincerity - real or fabricated. Her cheeks pink again as she busies herself with a pile of leather scraps. “I look forward to working together.”
“I heard you’re looking for Senku,” she says abruptly, her voice too light. “He is dead. We buried his body.” She meets his gaze, and Gen can tell instantly - she is not someone who enjoys lying. Her expression wavers just enough.
Liar, the wind hisses around his ears.
“I know,” Gen soothes, keeping his tone gentle. “I suspect this is for dear Tsukasa’s peace of mind.”
She swallows, throat bobbing. Gen bows politely. “Well then, I must go meet with dear Tsukasa before I leave.”
Tsukasa hadn’t been a complete tyrant about it - he’d offered Gen rest, food, time to settle into this new existence before sending him into the wilderness to hunt for a supposedly dead man. But Gen had insisted that in wartime, every moment mattered.
The truth: he needs space. Silence. He needs to breathe without the pressure of human eyes and expectations so he could finally listen to the spirits properly. They are crowding him, tugging at him, whispering too loudly for him to ignore.
As he follows Tsukasa into the forest, toward what the man calls the Miracle Cave, Gen’s thoughts twist into unease. The path winds through ancient trees, their roots swollen and gnarled, spirits peering from between leaves like faint glimmers. The world here hums with raw, unfiltered power.
Part of the problem, Gen realizes, is that he has no real sense of how strong his connection actually is. His grandmother had always seemed pleased - more than pleased - by how quickly spirits came when he called. She had once said he moved through the spirit world like a torch through darkness: obvious, bright, impossible to ignore.
But even the wild outskirts of Sapporo had been gentler than this. Tamed, compared to a world untouched by civilization for millennia. Here, the spirits don’t whisper. They clamor. They brush against his mind, demanding attention, pulling at him like insistent children who’ve just discovered their parent has returned home after a long absence.
“Here is where he awakened,” Tsukasa says, gesturing to a tree.
Gen steps forward, and stops. His breath catches.
Carved into the bark is a date: April 1st, 5738.
He approaches slowly, as though drawn by an invisible thread. As his fingers lift toward the carving, the tree’s spirit peels itself out of the bark.
Tree spirits have always been Gen’s favorites. They resemble people only loosely - headless, rounded bodies with thick limbs and glowing green eyes, like they’re attempting to mimic humans and not quite getting the proportions right. This one has the carved date etched into its own chest, as though it took the mark into its being.
April 1st. Gen’s birthday.
He isn’t a superstitious person - not as much as someone who can speak to spirits should be- but the coincidence makes something tighten in his chest. It feels meaningful. Like his connection had nudged him into this moment, at this tree, at this time.
He runs his hand along the carved date and murmurs, “What’s he like?”
If Tsukasa hears, he’ll assume Gen is just preparing himself to analyze Senku’s mind and movements. But Gen is really asking the spirit.
It touches his shoulder with a rough, bark-textured arm. A blurred impression washes into his mind, more feeling than image, but clear enough: a young man crouched here, carving the date with determined strokes, sharp concentration in every line of his face.
Senku.
Gen feels a jolt of surprise. He’s striking - handsome, even. Bright red eyes like polished stones, wild hair flaring upward, tinged green at the edges as if nature itself left fingerprints on him. His face is angular and sharp, something clever and brilliant to every movement.
“Oh,” Gen breathes before he can stop himself.
He feels more than sees it - the loneliness, the intensity, the stubborn resolve. Senku steps back from the carving, wiping sweat from his brow, tension tight in his mouth as he studies the date he carved.
The tree spirit withdraws, and the image fades. Gen inhales deeply, grounding himself as he looks down at his bare feet. He hadn’t wanted shoes. He needed every advantage he could get from his connection in this new world.
“You can’t underestimate him, if he’s alive,” Tsukasa says behind him, voice edged with warning.
“I don’t doubt that dear Tsukasa wouldn’t achieve something once he set his mind to it,” Gen replies lightly. “So obviously this Senku must be dead.”
He isn’t. He can’t be. The wind, the earth, the sky have all told Gen otherwise - so had the tiny hitch in Yuzuriha’s breath when she lied.
But more than any of that, Gen saw it in the spirit’s vision. Someone with eyes like that doesn’t simply roll over and let someone kill him.
“Senku is a genius,” Tsukasa says coldly. “And he wants to bring science back. In a pure world, that is a risk.”
Gen looks around and notices the fragments of shattered statues scattered among the trees. Not crumbled by time, but cleanly broken. Intentionally. Most belonged to older adults - wrinkles, age lines, soft features frozen in stone before being smashed apart.
Tsukasa longs for a world that never truly existed: uncorrupted, innocent, perfect. A world of the young, the strong, the untouched. Gen knows you can’t find purity in age or youth; it doesn’t grow from years but from choices. His grandmother had embodied everything Tsukasa claimed to want from humanity, and if she were alive now, he’d crush her statue without hesitation, entirely blind to the way she could speak to the land more deeply than this self-proclaimed king could ever dream.
Gen keeps his expression serene. He’s got the advantage here, as long as no one finds out about it. The land likes him. It remembers him in a way that feels older than his own lifetime. If he’s going to survive this, he’ll have to lean into that connection again, pick up the conversation his grandmother started and that he abandoned in favor of neon lights and stage smoke.
He’s spent years avoiding it, he thinks as Tsukasa hands him a small packet of dried meat and berries. Years pretending his connection was nothing more than a charming quirk. In the modern world, with the earth smothered under concrete and glass, it was little more than a party trick.
But here, where civilization has been dead for millennia, where he can’t feel even the ghost of a skyscraper beneath his feet, suddenly he wishes he’d taken those lessons far more seriously.
Spirits slip from the trees as he walks down the path in the direction Tsukasa suspects Senku would have gone, peeking from cracks in stones, rippling up from the soil. Their eyes - bright, expectant - follow him.
He thinks through what he knows:
One: The world ended over 3,700 years ago. Nothing modern remains.
Two: Tsukasa wants to keep it that way and will kill at even the hint of technological progress.
Three: Gen, for all his connection, is a delicate flower who very much enjoys luxuries like cola, electricity, and indoor plumbing.
Four: Senku wants science back - enough that Tsukasa murdered him for it. Or tried to.
Five: Gen absolutely cannot let anyone know how deep his connection runs.
He tries to think through what his grandmother had been capable of. The woods would show her which plants were safe, which paths were stable, how to avoid predators. Rain came when she called. Wind shifted when she asked. She once claimed she’d nudged a lava flow away from a village, though Gen always suspected exaggeration - until now, when it suddenly doesn’t feel so impossible.
She could accelerate a plant along its cycle to make it flower or die. She could coax healing into skin, knitting wounds shut with hardly a scar. She could sense danger long before it arrived. Sometimes she spoke of deeper things she never dared teach him - things she said were not for children, or perhaps not for anyone who didn’t intend to dedicate their life to the land.
Gen’s not sure how much of that he can do. He didn’t really try in the modern day. His breaks in Hokkaido felt like hazy dreams, and the connection was shut off the moment he landed back in Tokyo. But now he needs it.
“Can you tell me where he is?” he asks when he’s reasonably sure he’s far from Tsukasa’s camp.
Tsukasa has a right-hand man - Ukyo - who everyone says has exceptional hearing. And clearly he does. But Gen sees the things others cannot. He knows it’s more than mere skill: the wind favors Ukyo, delivering sounds to him like offered jewels, stabilizing his arrows, extending his perception beyond what should be physically possible. Ukyo likely doesn’t realize the wind’s loyalty, but Gen does. He’ll need to be careful.
The earth presses into the sides of Gen’s bare feet, rough and grounding. He leans into it, letting the pull of soil, stone, and root guide him along the winding forest path. The spirits drip from the trees, stir in the underbrush, ripple up from the soil. Their voices are not words, but impressions - feelings, textures, a haze of movement that coils around his mind.
He follows them instinctively, letting the whispers of wind and the pressure of roots underfoot direct his steps. Sometimes a breeze curls around his fingers, warm and insistent; sometimes the soil vibrates subtly beneath him, as if urging him forward. The land itself seems alive with expectation, aware of the living target he hunts. Step by step, it nudges him towards someone who should be dead but who the world insists can’t be.
Senku.
And for the first time in a long while, Gen feels the vast, unexplored potential of the connection he had spent years trying to ignore.