Chapter 1

That day was my tenth birthday.

The dinner table was lined with the usual shellfish and fish soup, along with skewers of river shrimp.

It was a scene from a poor but peaceful fishing village family.

Our house was like a simple hut with only one room.

The walls were made of stone, but the roof was thatched with straw.

In the center of the house was an irori hearth, and we were sitting on the floor around it.

Father had his long black hair tied into a bun on the top of his head, and his upper body was bare.

He wore a rough linen cloth fundoshi like underwear.

My outfit was almost the same.

In fact, this bare-upper-body look was the default attire for the men in this village.

Mother had her long chestnut-colored hair tied at the back of her neck, wearing a front-overlapping shirt made of linen cloth and a skirt-like garment of the same material.

In her younger days, it was a poncho-style garment.

Once her body grew larger, she started wearing the front-overlapping shirt.

This was the default style for women.

Father talked about fishing, and Mother talked about the neighbors.

It was just an ordinary evening moment in a fishing village family.

But suddenly, abruptly, out of nowhere, all at once, I remembered.

My memories from my past life.

My previous life’s memories.

Yes, this is… isekai reincarnation!!

In my previous life, I was a hired manager at a convenience store.

In the winter of the year I turned 32, with part-timers going home for the holidays and an influenza outbreak, we were short-handed.

I kept filling shifts day and night until I lost track of how many consecutive days I’d worked.

In the end, I collapsed face-down at the desk in the back office and became someone who would never return.

It was what people commonly call death from overwork.

Due to the sheer shock, I stopped eating and sat there in a daze.

My parents looked at me suspiciously.

Oh crap, both of them are younger than me!

The parents who until yesterday had seemed like adults suddenly looked childish.

Hmm? What’s this?

I clearly have memories of living in this world up to age ten.

And yet, I also have memories from my previous life up to age 32.

Is this really isekai reincarnation?

Or is it a tripper type?

Or maybe just memories flowed into me…?

“Omi, what’s wrong?”

“Did you get a fish bone stuck?”

Both parents leaned in to peer into my eyes.

I quickly lowered my gaze.

Yes, in this world, I’m named Omicron.

Most people call me Omi.

I don’t have a family name.

Because I’m a commoner.

To be frank, it feels shady.

These two have literally put their bodies on the line to raise me for ten years.

I felt like my dirty soul had snatched away the fruit of their love.

“It’s nothing… By the way, how old is Father again?”

“Me? I’ll be 28 this year. Mother is 26.”

(Seriously…)

When I looked at Father, he had tanned brown skin, broad shoulders, and a flat stomach.

He looked nothing like my previous self.

I had been unhealthily pale with a flabby belly.

The reward of eating discarded bentos from my own store and drinking Strong Zero.

Looking at Mother, she was overall slender with a girlish figure.

Her facial features were quite refined.

Since this was without makeup, if she put on makeup, she would definitely transform a lot.

If I looked closely, her chest area too…

I shook my head vigorously.

No, that’s not how I want to look at Mother.

“What’s wrong?

Aren’t you happy about turning 10?”

“O-o-o-of course I’m happy!

You’ll let me hold a harpoon now, and I can go out to sea, right?”

In this village, children under 10 aren’t allowed to spear fish with harpoons.

Because they could be swept away by big waves or get injured.

The main job for kids under 10 is picking shellfish around where the river flows into the sea.

In this world, it’s customary to count age by the traditional method.

But because of this village’s custom, they use the actual full age.

In other words, I’m 10 in full years.

By traditional counting, I’d be 11.

“Yeah, tomorrow you’ll come out to sea with me.”

“Omi, listen carefully to what your father says, and don’t take your eyes off the sea conditions.

Be careful, okay?”

“Yeah, got it.”

I quickly finished dinner and went to do my daily chore of tending the chickens.

If I kept talking, I might end up saying something weird.

I went to the kitchen and finely chopped vegetable scraps with a knife made from a shell.

Once that was done, I went outside and retrieved the basket that had been placed on the roof.

In the basket were dried fish offal and guts.

Next, I finely chopped those with the knife and mixed them with the vegetable scraps from earlier.

This was the chicken feed.

I scattered the feed on the floor of the chicken coop and whistled.

The chickens that had been out in the yard came inside.

Watching the chickens peck at the feed around my feet, I thought.

Are these memories really reliable?

I turned my thoughts to my previous life’s memories.

After graduating from vocational school, I joined an advertising agency that was insanely black company.

Sales quotas and a storm of scoldings.

I quickly developed mental health issues and returned to the convenience store where I’d worked part-time in high school.

Then I went from part-time leader to store manager.

As manager, my income increased and stabilized, but days off disappeared.

I planned to save a bit, quit the convenience store, job hunt again, and get a proper job.

But my parents moved to a nursing care apartment, the previous owner of the convenience store passed away and I took over operations, and in the midst of all that chaos, I passed 30.

A girlfriend?

For a guy like me who came from an all-boys school, that was out of reach.

At first, I tried somewhat casually hitting on the high school girls who worked part-time, but I was avoided as sexual harassment.

When girls kept quitting, I had no choice but to keep my distance.

Even though I was supposed to be the top dog, the atmosphere became incredibly uncomfortable.

The part-timers treated me coldly, the part-time housewives gave me dirty looks, and headquarters indirectly pressured me about compliance and such.

I had no choice but to give up on workplace romance.

After that, I peeked at matching apps, but compared to people my age, I didn’t earn much, had no dating experience, didn’t know fashion or gourmet food, had a belly, and no fixed days off.

I didn’t want to blindly follow a beauty and have scary big brothers show up, so in the end, I never met anyone.

Occasionally, when old high school friends came to shop, I’d laugh and say “I’ve finally become a wizard lol,” and then I dropped dead just like that.

Could a ten-year-old boy in a fishing village come up with such a spectacularly pathetic and sad story?

No, impossible.

These memories are definitely mine.

Then, are the memories of spending ten years in this fishing village wrong?

No, that’s not it either.

Look at this body.

Slim shoulders, slim stomach, slim arms.

Even comparing to my previous life memories, it’s fully that of an elementary schooler.

Then, suddenly, someone called out to me.

“Omi, it’s already dark?”

Father had come to check on me worriedly.

It’s grateful that he’s concerned for his son who has a mental age of 32.

Somehow, I can’t quite sort out my feelings, but to repay these parents who love the ten-year-old me, I’ll do my best to live in this world.

That’s what I resolved in the chicken coop.