The Dilapidated Place

 
 When I came to, the surroundings were submerged in darkness.
 My body still wouldn’t move. Seems it’s just my eyes that can move normally after all. However, even those eyes of mine had nothing reflected in them with the total darkness that spread out before me today.
 
 『Glooop』
 A warped round thing passed in front of my eyes. It took me a while before I realised that it was my own exhaled air.
 I’m ——— alive?
 
 
 Before I fell asleep, a pretty stone was implanted in my body, followed immediately by intense nausea.
 And then, that stone settled into my body without any discomfort.
 
 A foreign substance.
 
 Without a doubt, it was something that shouldn’t be in a human body.
 No… was I a human in the first place?
 
 I don’t know.
 
 But once I accepted that foreign substance, my body calmed down.
 It’s dark around me now, so I can’t even see that stone that’s ought to be implanted in my body. It looked like it was shining with a glittering light, but maybe that was just the light reflected on it…
 
 『Gloop glooop』
 Air passed by in front of me once again.
 I’ve noticed that I seem to be breathing steadily. Looks like I’m still floating in the mysterious liquid.
 With each shallow breath, the air exhaled floats up as air bubbles.
 
 My vision eventually grew accustomed to the darkness.
 And then, I opened my eyes wide at the disastrous scene that came to view. Probably taking a deep breath on reflex, and exhaling that air without thinking, my view was filled with bubbles.
 
 No, that’s not important.
 What the 𝚑𝚎𝚕𝚕 happened here?
 
 
 The surroundings had already become ruins.
 If I remember correctly, I was struck by drowsiness that time, and fell asleep just like that. And yet, even though I’d only slept, the state of my surroundings had changed in one go.
 
 My agitated exhalations grew rough, and bubbles passed by my vision frequently.
 No, to begin with, that’s strange.
 No matter how much time passes, it didn’t get difficult to breathe.
 
 When I tried waving it with my hand, the liquid’s resistance didn’t seem particularly big.
 … wait, my hand moved?
 Up until a little while ago, only my eyeballs should have been moving. I stared fixedly at the left hand that moved accidentally, right in front of me.
 
 The palm of my hand is… yep, it’s a baby’s hand.
 Gripping and opening… can be done without any particular discomfort. In a different sense though, it feels incredibly uncomfortable.
 
 I tried moving my right hand, and it moved similarly. Like that, I started turning my head, and looked down to see that it was attached. Yep, I’m a boy. Well, then it’ll be fine to refer to myself with Ore^[1].
 Good news. I, am a boy… or something. Sorry, don’t worry about it.
 I moved my body further.
 
 Left leg, moves. Somehow, it seems that the left moves intuitively first. Next, the right leg, alright, seems to move properly.
 After moving my body like that in the liquid for some time, an intense drowsiness struck me once again. Maybe I got too excited and moved too much?
 My body became strangely sluggish.
 
 As expected, a toddler’s body had no way of fighting that drowsiness, and I fell asleep in no time.
 
 
 
 When I opened my eyes, I saw the blue sky above me.
 I was still in the glass cylinder, submerged in reddish liquid. Even so, compared to before I fell asleep, my vision was lit up.
 At that time, had I looked up at the sky, I would surely have seen a pretty, starry sky. Or maybe it was the opposite, and my focus hadn’t grasped the sky’s starscape.
 
 Steadily, I tried moving my body.
 Yep, my movements have become quite smooth. But after all, I was made firmly aware that I was just a toddler.
 The liquid here might be culture fluid or something.
 Looking around more as much as I could, it didn’t seem like it’d hold up for long. It was completely powered-down.
 
 
 
 At night, I thought it was ruins, but now that it was bright I saw it clearly. Before my eyes was nothing less than a disaster scene.
 
 Of what must have been an underground building, the ceiling was splendidly blown off, leaving a space roughly 5 metres high right above me.
 I guess this was probably the result of some sort of large explosion.
 
 And, the centre of the explosion was me. No, it’s just a maybe.
 
 Since I seem to have become able to move, I tried looking around, but the surroundings were destroyed in concentric circles centred on the glass cylinder I was in.
 I think the pitch-black lump nearby is probably the woman, and the pitch-black lump a bit further away is probably the man. Both of them feel like they’ll crumble in an instant.
 Doesn’t this feel like a blast didn’t happen at all?
 Is there no ceiling because it was annihilated?
 
 No, in the first place, why do I know so many various things?
 
 I don’t know…
 That which I know, and that which I understand, are so detached from one another that I can’t make sense of a single thing.
 There’s no way for me to even know who I am.
 
 I looked out at the surroundings across the glass, and not a single thing was moving.
 There should have been many glass cylinders like the one I was in, but all of them were smashed and scattered as though they exploded from within.
 The centre of the explosion was here, but what actually happened was that each of the glass cylinders exploded… in short, is that what happened?
 
 There naturally shouldn’t have been anyone there who I could get an answer or whatever from, and so I had nothing to do but keep staring at the world across the glass.
 
 
 
 A lot of time passed since then.
 Strangely enough, I didn’t get sleepy this time.
 As morning and night repeated many times over, the liquid I was using didn’t seem to deteriorate or go bad. I thought that that alone was a good thing.
 Had that not been so, I’ve no doubt I would’ve breathed my last right away.
 
 Alone in a world with absolutely no one else, I patiently waited for change to come.
 Eventually, I was struck by drowsiness, and fell asleep as if fainting.
 
 I didn’t understand the sense of time. I knew how to count the hours. But I had no idea how long I’d been sleeping for.
 The first time I’d opened my eyes, my body had grown by double its size.
 
 And then again, day and night repeated itself for many days as I remained without sleeping.
 Again, drowsiness struck without warning, and my consciousness flew in no time at all.
 
 When I woke up once again, my body was about the size of a primary school student in the lower grades. I used the term “primary school student” because I know it, but I’ve got absolutely no clue what a primary school student actually is.
 In any case, after having slept, I always grew a lot.
 Of course, this time I also spent some time without sleeping as the days and nights repeated, and suddenly fell asleep.
 
 And then when I woke up, my body had already gotten so big that it barely fit in the glass cylinder.
 In the first place, I think the cylinder was roughly the size for a newborn baby to be put in. I knew that, if I kept growing in there, this would eventually happen.
 
 And then again, after repeated days and nights of not sleeping, I fell asleep as if losing consciousness.
 
 
 
 Luckily, when I woke up this time, I was free of the glass cylinder and was lying on the floor. Although, I was lying in a pool of blood.
 
 And then, I slowly got up.