The ride home was wrapped in silence, broken only by the sound of the car's engine. Junsei sat by the window, his gaze fixed on the passing scenery. Momo watched him for several minutes silently before finally speaking.
"Junsei," she said carefully, "why are you really acting like this?"
He turned toward her.
"You can talk to me and Mr. Sai like a normal person. You're very smart. Even if you're missing some basic common sense, you do understand most of what's going on around you. So why are you acting like this in front of our classmates"
"I don't like the idea of being in school," he replied. "I don't want to make friends or be close to others. I want them to keep their distance. But you keep making excuses for me."
"But why?" Momo asked. "I don't understand why you want to be alone."
"I can't explain…" Junsei said
There was a pause then he continued "And I'm going back to the forest after my agreement with your father is over. Why should I befriend anyone?"
Momo stared at him.
"You plan to go back?" she said softly. "Junsei, you're a person, not an animal. Your place is here, among us. I know you don't have good memories about people, but you can make new good ones."
He did not answer.
Momo sighed and leaned back in her seat. Moments later, the car came to a sudden halt, the jolt sharp enough to throw her forward. At the same instant, Junsei felt a stabbing pain in his chest. He opened the door at once and stepped out, Momo following him in alarm. The chauffeur had already left his seat.
Junsei's eyes went to the road ahead. A cat lay there, its small body twisted, blood staining its fur as it breathed shallowly.
"It jumped in front of me out of nowhere," the chauffeur said, shaken.
"The poor thing…" Momo whispered. "It's in pain. Let's take it to a hospital!"
Junsei did not move. He stared at the cat, his senses going on overdrive. Since learning to sense and connect with simpler, microscopic life forms, the way he sensed other creatures changed. Now he could feel the life within the cat, he can feel it slipping away, little by little. And he felt that life was drifting slowly toward the chauffeur.
In that moment, he understood a new aspect of his senses and connection to other living things. The pain he felt when living things died by humans was not only the pain of the animal itself. It was the movement of life leaving its body, crossing into a human presence. The cat would die. Its life would seep into the man standing nearby, the one who killed it.
Junsei stepped forward instinctively.
Without a word, he knelt beside the dying cat. His hands moved gently to its head, and in the next moment, to Momo's horror and the chauffeur's stunned disbelief, there was a sharp snap.
Momo screamed. "What did you do?! Why would you do something like that?!"
Junsei did not react. His attention remained fixed on what remained of the cat's life. Instead of continuing its slow journey toward the chauffeur, it drained downward, slipping into the earth beneath Junsei's feet, fading quietly away and along with it the pain he was feeling.
Momo rushed toward him, fury and shock burning in her eyes.
"How could you do that?!" she cried. "You killed it!"
"No," Junsei replied calmly. "It was dying slowly. Painfully. There was no hope it would live. So I saved it."
"Saved it? You killed it!! And you don't know if there was no hope!" Momo shouted. "We could have taken the poor thing to the hospi…"
Junsei stood and turned to face her. His expression was unchanged, but his eyes glowed faintly, stopping her mid-sentence.
"But I know," he said coldly.
His gaze shifted to the chauffeur, and for a brief moment, an urge rose within him to kill the man. The chauffeur, sensing something terribly wrong, stumbled back a few steps then averted his eyes, not daring to look into Junsei's.
Junsei clenched his fist. The glow faded. He turned away and returned to the car without another word.
Momo and the chauffeur both released shaky breaths, relief washing over them.
"Miss," the chauffeur said quietly, "please go back into the car. I'll… I'll put the poor thing in a bag and bury it later."
Momo nodded and climbed back inside.
She sat across from Junsei, studying his still face.
"Junsei," she said softly, "I'm sorry I screamed at you. I didn't mean to. It was just… a shock. I don't understand why."
"I can feel what it feels," Junsei replied. "I know its state. Snapping its neck was the best thing."
"You felt its pain," Momo whispered. "And its death?"
Junsei did not answer.
"I'm sorry," she said again.
He remained silent, his mind kept repeating what just happened. In his mind, he saved the cat, he saved its remaining life from being taken by the human, but why did that happen in the first place?
The pain he always felt due to human killing was life getting robbed from him and the other creatures, it was life leaving the dead body and moving to the killer. Was this why when he or other animals were killed by other animals he didn't experience that same pain? When animals kill, life goes back to earth, but when humans do the killing, life enters the humans.
His mind drifted to the night he killed the men years ago, he felt something entering him, filling the emptiness inside him, was that the life the humans took, returned to its natural place?
——————
The weekend passed in unusual quiet even for Junsei. He did not leave his room unless he had to, and when he did, it was quick. Most of his time was spent before the glow of a screen, his eyes steady as he scoured the vast internet in search of answers.
The first field he examined was biology, and just as quickly, he dismissed it. Biology spoke only of what could be weighed and measured: of nutrients broken down, of elements absorbed, of muscles strengthened and cells repaired. It explained how the human body functioned, but not why life felt the way it did when it ended. It offered no answer to the sharp, painful sensation he felt when something died. So Junsei closed those pages and moved on.
He turned instead to what most people of this era had abandoned.
Religion. Philosophy. Old beliefs spoken of in joking tones and polite dismissals. He read of how different cultures understood life and death, of how they treated animals, of rituals surrounding slaughter and consumption. Some prayed before killing. Some refused to eat meat at all. Others believed animals offered their lives willingly, while a few believed every death left a stain upon the soul.
The explanations differed wildly, yet one idea appeared again and again, clothed in different words but sharing the same spine:
'We become what we eat.'
Many claimed that meat carried a spiritual weight, that something of the animal passed into the human who consumed it, unseen but influential. Strength. Aggression. Instinct.
Junsei frowned at that.
Such talk was easily dismissed in the modern age. It lacked proof, structure, certainty. Even Junsei did not believe it fully. He could not tell whether those who spoke of it had uncovered a hidden truth or were merely grasping in the dark. Yet he could not deny one thing.
There was a connection between life and humans.
But it was not eating.
If consuming meat transferred life, he would have sensed it by now. Food passed through humans without leaving the echo he felt so sharply. No, what he sensed, what burned against his awareness, came only at one moment.
The moment of killing.
And only when the killing was done by humans.
His thoughts drifted to the stories of human origin, to the tale of Adam, born not through evolution, but placed into existence whole. Humans had not risen slowly alongside other life. They had arrived separately.
He remembered a thought that had followed him for lifetimes, one he had never quite been able to understand: humans evolved too fast. Faster than anything else. Faster than he could follow. Faster than the world itself.
What if that was the reason?
What if humans advanced so quickly because of all the life they had taken into themselves?
They were the most efficient killers on the planet. No other creature slaughtered with such intent, such scale, such ingenuity. No other creature killed not only to survive, but to dominate and have fun.
Alone in the stillness of his room, Junsei finally spoke, his voice barely more than a breath.
"Humans don't become what they eat," he said softly. "They become what they kill."
Then, after a long pause, another thought followed.
"So what would I become," he murmured, "when I kill humans?"
His mind couldn't come with an answer. At the same time, he felt as though the world itself was listening to him as his eyes began to glow without him realizing that.