Forced Reincarnation in the Name of Salvation
The hulking man I had pegged as Wrath was the first to bare his teeth.
"The hell?! Which little shit talks like that without even showing their face—"
The mouth that had been booming snapped shut with a completeness that was almost disappointing.
Creator.
I frowned.
A god, then.
If so, a thoroughly warped one.
"One moment."
I raised my hand as neatly as if I were requesting the floor in a meeting.
"Before anything else, I would like an explanation of why we have been gathered here."
The god seemed, for a moment, to consider it.
The last of it, however I listened, was nothing but the Creator's own petty grievance. I did not point that out.
"Yes."
I swept a look around me. A human beast. A cannibal murderer. A woman who had poisoned her own family for the insurance money. The rest of the human refuse that had plastered the news. And me.
"Those people have all killed someone."
"I have not."
I pointed to my own chest without a shred of shame.
"I have never committed murder, and I have never committed a crime. I paid my taxes, every one of them, on time. So why should I be standing on the same line as them?"
A brief silence followed.
I lifted my chin, just slightly. Of course. At the very least, the facts had been properly grasped. A more reasonable god than I had expected—perhaps one could actually talk to this one.
"So you do know."
In that instant, white light flared over my head.
All six pieces of human refuse turned to look at me at once. More precisely, at the space above my head.
"What are you looking at?"
The cannibal killer's eyes glittered, raking the air over me.
"A crown."
"What?"
"There's a crown floating over your skull."
I looked up on reflex. Naturally, I could not see the top of my own head. But the reactions around me suggested it was no lie.
Wrath. Gluttony. Greed. Envy. Lust. Sloth. And—
…Pride.
The last piece of the puzzle dropped into place with an accuracy that was genuinely unpleasant. It was real. This really was the Seven Deadly Sins.
The god's voice pressed down upon the whole white expanse.
I frowned hard.
"Are you telling me my logic was wrong? That effort is enough?"
"Then what, exactly, is the problem?"
"I didn't kill him."
"…"
A short silence.
"…Even something I only thought counts as a sin?"
I did not answer. For a moment I analyzed the situation in earnest, and no matter how I turned it, I arrived at the same conclusion: this was outrageous.
"Even so, something is off."
"That I'm prideful—fine. I'll concede it a hundred times over."
That did not mean I accepted it. I was granting the premise, for the moment, so that a logical conversation might actually advance.
I jerked my chin at the sinners around me.
"But why should I be set on the same scale as that trash? People who tore others apart, chewed them up, and killed their own families for money?"
"…What?"
Not the answer I had expected.
"Then why gather us in one place?"
"…"
Had I misheard?
Beside me, Wrath lost patience first and flushed dark with rage.
"What kind of bullshit is that! Why the hell would we get saved!"
For the first time, my opinion and that blunt instrument of a beast aligned perfectly.
"Us?"
I indicated our surroundings, openly incredulous.
"These people are serial killers. There's a cannibal among them."
"Cannibal's a bit much. How about gourmet?"
The party in question muttered it while licking their lips. I ignored them.
"Surely you don't mean to wash the sins clean."
I narrowed my eyes.
"Again?"
"Reincarnation?"
In that instant a cost-benefit calculation spun through my head. I was already dead, and they were offering me the chance to live again. What's more, given that I still held this conversation in memory, it seemed I would be taking the previous life with me intact. Viewed only that far, I had no reason to refuse.
The problem was the terms.
"Hold on. Why is living again while still carrying our sins supposed to be salvation?"
I frowned.
"Useless?"
"Where do you intend to send us?"
Wait. The explanation was wrong.
"How is that salvation? On the terms alone, hell would be better."
"…And when it does, you're telling us to go find a god?"
"So the substance is correct. No—you just said we were to figure it out by living. If a monster chews us up the moment we're reborn, what exactly are we supposed to figure out? Is there an initial grace period?"
"Any safeguards for survival?"
"Have you at least handed us off to the party that's meant to receive us?"
The unease hardened into certainty.
"Then how, exactly, are we supposed to live?"
Too dumbfounded for anything else, I let out an empty laugh.
"That isn't salvation. That's dumping us in the wild without a permit."
That was the moment. White light welled up from beneath my feet like heat shimmer.
"Wait."
My body grew steadily lighter. No—it felt as if an invisible hand had seized me by the collar and was dragging me off somewhere.
"Don't tell me you're sending us this instant."
"I haven't even agreed to the terms."
"I haven't signed anything! Even a forced reincarnation ought to require the consent of the party concerned! What kind of Creator has procedures this shoddy!"
The light climbed to my chest. One by one, the sinners around me began to lose their outlines. Wrath poured out a torrent of curses. Greed shrieked at them to hand something over—anything. And through all of it, Sloth, flat on the floor, slept as if the world were none of their concern.
"Wait! At least some kind of perk for survival—"
The god's voice drove deep into my mind.
The light rose to my chin.
A needle of cold shot up my spine.
"Why would you drop a condition that vile right before the contract!"
The light swallowed me whole.
"Appeal! You should at least let me read the terms through to the end!"
The god's voice receded into the distance.
The world detonated in white.
I opened my eyes.
The first thought that came was exactly one.
Son of a bitch.
My perfectly legitimate appeal had been dismissed in full. Forcing a person into reincarnation in another world without so much as showing them a consent form. The so-called Creator apparently had no concept of basic procedure.
But soon a problem far more serious than that complaint came into view.
…Huh?
My body wouldn't move. No—it moved. It was simply so sluggish I could hardly believe the thing was mine. I tried to lift an arm. Short. The hand was small and plump, a baby's, and the fingers were stubs; I could barely close them into a proper fist.
Don't tell me.
I turned my head with effort. A bed—more precisely, wooden cradles identical to the one I lay in, set out in a row. One. Two. Three. …Six. And inside them, infants, squirming.
One was already flailing arms and legs in a temper, as if picking a fight with the baby beside them. Another was sucking on their own fingers with mindless concentration. The one at the far end slept deeply, with a face that said the world could end and they would still not be getting up.
"…"
No.
I counted again. Six. And me. Seven.
Those specimens of human garbage all got bundled up and reincarnated with me?
A despairing fact. But there was a far more fatal reality I needed to confirm before anything else. I looked down at my body. Small. Slender arms and legs. And—
"…Ah?"
Even the sound that escaped me in surprise was not mine.
"Ah… buh…"
Only a witless babble came out. For a long while, the fuse in my head simply blew.
I had been a man. From the day I was born until the back of my skull split and I died. But now, however I looked at it—
…I'm a girl?
In that moment, I understood. The god was a far more vicious bastard than I had thought.
A creak. An old wooden door was opening.
My vision was still cloudy, and my body still would not obey, but I dragged my gaze around with effort. Black cloth. A white wimple. What leaned in over my cradle was a woman in a black nun's habit.
A nun. Then this was a cathedral, or a church.
"They were found at the door, just before dawn."
A young nun's voice came from beyond the cradle.
"Seven newborns, tangled together in a single large basket. No one knows who the parents are."
Dawn. A doorstep. One basket. Seven of them. Parents unknown. A few short sentences summed up my situation perfectly.
"Mother Superior."
The voice was thick with distress.
"Do we really have to keep all seven?"
No answer came.
"We barely have enough firewood to last the winter. Seven nursing infants…"
"I know."
"Wouldn't it be better to keep two or three, and send the rest to another convent…"
"And which convent do you imagine will take in nursing infants?"
The young nun's words died.
"The houses nearby are worse off than we are. Send letters if you like. Winter will arrive before any answer does."
"Even so…"
"Whoever left them at the door surely knew that much."
The woman I took for the Mother Superior let out a long sigh.
"…We must take it as the Lord's will."
Despite the words, there was not a trace of joy in her voice.
I stared up at the ceiling, hollow. Seven orphans, parents unknown. A convent that did not even have enough to feed them. Nowhere to send them on, so in the end this place would shoulder them all. The Lord's will. It was so absurd I could not even laugh.
That bastard didn't even complete the handover. Just dumped us.
They really had thrown us at a door and left. My head was turning over perfectly well, but my mouth could not even manage a proper babble. I forced my head around and glared at the next cradle. The man who, in his previous life, had torn people apart with his bare hands was drooling at the corner of his mouth, sucking away at his own fingers.
From now on, I would have to live under one roof with those lunatics.
…This is the worst.
No. It was not over yet. A unilateral change of terms, and forced execution without consent—a clear breach of contract. I wanted to slam an appeal down on a desk that very moment. Regrettably, a backwater like this was not going to have anything resembling a direct line to the Creator's customer service.
If there was no place to file, only one method remained. Accumulate the documents. Gather the proof, line by line, that I had not been dropped here because I was proud. Sooner or later, that bastard would look down again.