The scent of blood permeates the air. I try to open my eyes and take in the surroundings, but my eyelids feel like they are glued together. It's not strange though. The eyes are always the most difficult to get a grip on. As I move throughout the body I try to assess how damaged my new meat suit is.
Without even opening my eyes, I can tell the back of my skull is cracked and bleeding, the spine fractured in various places, my left leg is bent to the knee and trapped underneath my body and…well, everything is pretty messed up. Not a problem! I have possessed worse. I once had to regrow most of my limbs so this body is nothing compared with all those other times.
All my other senses seem to work perfectly. That's a good sign. It means the body is slowly accepting me. It's been ages since I last possessed someone, but clearly, I haven't lost my touch.
I expand my energy all throughout the body, infusing every cell with my spirit. Bones start cracking as they begin fusing together. I sit up and straighten my left leg so it can heal properly. After my new body is completely healed, I can finally open my eyes.
It's nighttime. The place where I am at looks like an abandoned building of sorts. My body was sprawled outside the building, on the damp ground. I gaze up. The building seems to be ten floors high. From how badly damaged the body was, I think I must have fallen from somewhere high up.
Hm…was it a suicide? I try to find the previous owner's last memories, but there's no sign of them. Nothing.
The last moments within the body do not always stay behind after the soul departs.I would normally not care, but it will take some time accommodating to this meat suit so I have to figure out what happened.
When a soul departs, a copy of that soul's memories are left hidden in the depths of the brain, like an echo. The memories will disappear as the body decomposes, but if you possess the body only minutes after the original soul's departure you will manage to save those memories and use them if needed.
Oh,there they are!
Images begin to flicker behind my eyes, rapid and vivid, like scenes from a movie. This body belongs to a seventeen-year-old girl named Elena Valeras. She leads what most would call a normal life, attune with the quiet rhythm of the small town she lives in. Her family runs a modest shop just off the main street—her father oversees the business, while her mother takes on seamstress work to help make ends meet. So, they are not a well off family.
Elena's younger brother, only two years her junior, attends the same school as her. They share a good bond. Her parents come across as warm and attentive, the kind of people who ask about your day and actually listen. Everything seems… fine. Peaceful, even.
And yet, something is off.
Something beneath the surface of these memories doesn't align with the picture-perfect scenes flashing before me. A silence that lingers too long. A glance that lasts a second too many…
Among all the images flooding my mind, I also notice the absence of certain memories. Where are Elena's friends? What about her last year of life? And why are there so many fragmented memories…hazy and disjointed? As if the original soul tried to bury them, to wipe them clean—but couldn't? Getting a smudged, incomplete version, as if I'm staring through grimey window glass is so annoying!
I try to push through, to clear the images, but the moment I do, my body begins to tremble violently. Uncontrollably. Ah… interesting.
There's trauma here. Raw and unresolved. Something must have happened, something powerful enough to drive Elena to this abandoned building in the dead of night. Something dark enough to end in tragedy.
I'll have to look into the cause of her death and those blurred memories. In my experience, the guilty have a way of revealing themselves eventually. It may have been thousands of years since I last possessed a human body, but I've never truly looked away. I've been watching humanity. I've been studying these short-lived, greedy creatures quite closely.
To destroy your enemy, you must first understand it. And I have had all the time in the world to understand humanity. Erasing myself from their history and taking some time off into The Void has been the best decision I have ever made. I was sick of being shackled by them. Controlled. Forced to do their bidding. But now…now I'm free. I can do whatever I want.
I would have preferred not to possess a tiny teenage girl, but beggars can't be choosers. After plunging forward, I focused on finding a soul aligning perfectly with my deepest desire—the destruction of this world. And this is the result that I got. How did the two of us end up being a perfect match? Something tells me those blurry memories hold the answer to that question.
I get off the ground and try to walk. My muscles and bones ache. A lot! But, I have already used too much power to heal this body. If I use any more, I might end up destroying it entirely. I have already dimmed my essence a lot. Human bodies could never contain the entirety of what I am, at my full power and strength. I can only exist in this world at five percent capacity. Anymore than that and this body will, quite literally, explode.
I see I am dressed quite flimsy for a cold winter night. Just a pair of jeans and white T-shirt. Or better said, a torn up pair of jeans and a T-shirt, soaked in blood. I look like I was mauled by a bear. My clothes should not look this terrible just from a fall. What a shame that I don't have this girl's last memories. No worries, nothing stays hidden when it faces me. Especially something of a violent nature.
After all, I am chaos, destruction and pain.