"Thump!" The booming sound echoes, making everything around me tremble. Then a slow swaying spreads through the environment, accompanied by the constant sound of waves crashing and the creaking of the ship's hull.
My eyes begin to open slowly; I feel my eyelids heavy. I can't see anything around me, everything is far too dark to make out anything.
A feeling of weakness and exhaustion overtakes my body and mind. I try to move my hands, but even that feels exhausting, my limbs strangely heavy. When my senses begin to normalize, I feel a terrible cold that makes my entire body shiver.
Gathering some strength, I finally manage to lift my arm, and crawling, I try to feel my way around, only to bump into a cold surface.
I keep running my fingers along it and recognize it as iron bars of a cell.
'Was I kidnapped? Did they drug me?' Judging by the weakness I feel, that seems to be the most obvious answer.
I try to scream for help, but my mouth is far too dry, so only a low, miserable groan comes out, followed by a dry cough that scratches and hurts my throat.
I continue to grope and crawl around the place, trying to find anything, but I have no success in finding anything useful beyond an empty bucket and what seems to be an old, hole-ridden blanket that I use to protect myself from the cold.
Panting and breathing heavily, I sit down with my back against the metal bars. I feel that something is very wrong with my body; I feel far too tired even after doing only simple actions. I run my hand along my arm, and then I freeze.
'So thin…' I continue running my hand over the thin clothes covering my body, each second becoming more horrified by my current form.
'What happened to me?' I continue feeling my body.
'I was already thin… but this is too much,' I think, terrified by my state of malnutrition.
Feeling the bones in my body, I finally notice that I seem smaller, much smaller. The size of a child.
'How…?'
I begin to panic in the darkness, but I try to force myself to calm down. I take a deep breath and try to organize my thoughts, to remember something or have some idea of how I ended up here.
I manage to remember my day, everything ordinary as always: waking up, doing my morning routines, having breakfast, getting dressed, and going to school… I don't remember arriving at school.
Did something happen? I can't remember…
Then I feel a snap in my head, followed by a slight headache that is enough for my weak body to almost collapse. I feel that pleasant sensation when you remember something important, in this case, very important, since it's three years of an entirely new life…
Very unpleasant memories, to be honest. They're somewhat fragmented, but I can clearly remember the misery I lived through in those years: the hunger, the beatings, and the suffering.
They are things I lived through… not just memories implanted in my mind. I can feel that, even though it seems like I lived on autopilot all those years, as if a piece of me was missing to function properly.
'Did I reincarnate… or was I transmigrated?' I set that aside and focus again on the memory fragments.
It seems I was born in Brazil like before, since the few people I interacted with spoke Portuguese.
I was born to a couple addicted to drugs. At first, they still maintained some basic sense of things, but over time they became increasingly destroyed and broken.
My role for them was to go out into the streets to beg for some spare change and hand it over so they could buy drugs and sometimes a bit of food and water.
A month ago, I cut my foot on a shard of glass at home, and the wound healed quickly. My parents saw it, and blinded by any opportunity to get money to spend on drugs, they sold me to a human trafficker at a port.
There was a disagreement between them over the amount received, and then the trafficker shot and killed my "parents."
I don't feel bad for the two of them, nor do I consider them my real parents. How could I? I had a wonderful family before, and giving the same title of "my parents" to those wastes of people would be an insult to them.
Then I was placed in this cell on a ship, being taken somewhere I have no idea where it might be.
I was being fed daily, but now it's been about two days since the guy showed up… my body was already weak even before getting on the ship, and staying here only made everything worse.
Before, I could at least get some food and water by begging, but now I must be alive only because of that strange regeneration.
A few hours pass, and then I hear the familiar thunderous sound of the metal door opening. A man enters with a tray… a different guy from the one who used to come here a month ago… do human trafficking ships rotate workers? Or was the guy disposed of?
Either way, the man places the tray in my cell and… checks the bucket? Seeing that it was empty, he leaves without saying a word, just like the previous guy.
At least before leaving, he opens a curtain on the ship's round window, but there's no sunlight… it seems to be night, but it brightened this place a little at least.
My eyes turn to the food tray, my stomach growls loudly, and I start eating quickly.
For today, we have two bottles of water and two extremely hard loaves of bread, maybe even starting to grow some mold, not that I stopped to check.
Today's meal seems to have come doubled; they must have realized they left a malnourished three-year-old child without food for two days…
'I hope it's enough.' I keep eating, drinking water to help swallow the dry, hard bread, my worries fading into the background as I focus on filling my stomach.
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[A/N]:
Hey everyone, the first chapter is here! I hope you enjoy reading it <3