Nao woke up to beeping machinery.

Judging by the sound and rhythm, it was an EKG monitor. Nao could feel a pulse oximeter clipped onto his finger. There was an IV and a power cable. He also felt a cool cloth on his forehead and a cool pad on his belly. He wasn’t too concerned about any of these things.

The things that had his true attention were the dryness of his throat and the emptiness of his stomach. He didn’t think he’d ever been quite this thirsty and hungry before. It was horrible. He scrunched his eyes up, groaning quietly.

There was the sound of someone standing from a chair. The cloth was removed and a warm palm pressed against Nao’s forehead; he forced his eyes open and was met with Rin’s. Nao suddenly felt that the hunger and the thirst weren’t too unbearable.

“How do you feel?” Rin asked, keeping his voice low.

Nao tried to swallow and failed. Rin turned and walked to the water dispenser, then filled a paper cup and brought it back to Nao. The water did wonders for his throat, and he was finally able to answer Rin.

“Mostly normal.” His voice was scratchy.

“And?”

“. . .Kind of hungry,” Nao admitted. Recalling the events leading up to his loss of consciousness, he asked, “Where’s Xulong-ge?”

“He had to go home,” Rin said, looking through his bag. “His curfew is eleven.”

Nao’s eyes widened slightly. “. . .What time is it now?”

“About twelve thirty,” Rin answered expressionlessly. He pulled a simple lunchbox from his bag and set it on Nao’s lap. “Here, eat this.”

After handing over the lunchbox, Rin took his tablet from his bag and messaged someone. Nao was silent for a moment, torn inside, before biting his lip and mumbling, “Thank you, Rin-san.” He accepted the food without further fanfare and resolved to bring Rin a lunch in return once school started back up on Tuesday.

The food was clearly made with care and attention, arranged in a way that pleased the eyes. The largest section of the lunchbox was filled with curry, and the second-largest with rakkyōzuke; the last two, of equal size, contained umeboshi and shimotsukare.

Nao was ravenous, so he didn’t take too long to admire the appearance of the food and only began to eat. Rin locked his tablet, then spoke up.

“After you passed out, the nurse examined your condition and found signs of non-exertional heat stroke,” he said. “The staff performed a thorough inspection of the equipment you used during your simultest and found that the calibration was faulty. The suit overheated, and the currents used to manipulate your senses were slightly too strong. Combined with the stressful atmosphere of the test, it caused an adverse reaction, but there won’t be any lasting effects.”

Nao was a little relieved to hear that he, for once, wasn’t the actual root of the problem. “So is that why I threw up?”

Rin smiled tiredly at this. “Who knows?”

Nao smiled back, but his heartbeat picked up. . .and so did the beeping of the monitor.

Rin’s smile melted into a concerned frown. He pressed two fingers against Nao’s wrist. “Do you feel okay? What’s wrong?”

Nao laughed nervously and waved his hands, blushing. “Oh, um, I was just—wondering if we passed our simultests or not! It would really suck if we failed after all of that, that’s all!”

Rin sat down again. “Oh. . .Yeah, we did fine. I had points reduced for being wounded, but I did well in combat regardless, so I still got an A. You and Long-xiong both got A+s.”

“. . .I didn’t get points reduced for passing out afterward?” Nao asked. The beeping of the monitor slowed as his heart calmed down.

Rin shook his head. “No. If there hadn’t been faulty equipment involved, then they would’ve reduced points, but because it was an error on the school’s part, it would’ve been unfair. You got to keep full marks.”

Nao cheered up slightly. But this didn’t last long before he realized he’d missed his shift, and his face fell once more into gloom. This was the second time in his first month of work that he’d slipped up and inconvenienced everyone. He’d more-or-less managed to start eating regularly, but something had still gone wrong. Nao wondered, not for the first time, if this second life was nothing more than punishment for some past sin.

. . .But I have friends now, he thought after a moment. I have a job that I like with a manager who’s nice to me—even though I mess up a lot.

He had a future, didn’t he?

Everyone’s beginning in life was rough—that was human nature. Humans were creatures that would forever reach for things they couldn’t touch, striving to get just half an inch closer than their forebears, striving for just a sliver of the dreams they held in their hearts. And in this way, though the paths were long and hard, paved in sweat and tears, humans had transcended thousands of their own limits.

Nao had even helped to pave those tough paths himself, spending countless hours picking his own brains for the answers to problems he hardly understood. He’d felt like he was groping around for straws in the dark, but in the end he had grabbed them in his own hands and opened the road for humanity’s future. There had been many times when he thought he couldn’t do anything and wanted to give up, but the hands of his teammates had held him up and pushed him forward until he succeeded in each endeavor.

If they saw him now, he had no doubt that they would do the same thing. Just as they had acted as his backbone for those many years of intense studying, researching, formulating, conceptualizing, creating. . .he was sure that if his old friends were still here, they would support him as faithfully as they had then, even when the only difficulty he faced was his own life. They were no longer a part of this world and couldn’t help him anymore, but. . .wasn’t Rin sitting right here next to him, even though it was past midnight? Hadn’t Wen Xulong stayed for as long as possible before leaving Nao’s side? And hadn’t they both done their best to calm Nao’s nerves and protect him during their test, even though it was just a simulation?

There were indeed still many things Nao had to learn, and he was constantly making mistakes. It was indeed still hard for him to integrate into modern society, and he was indeed still picking up the pieces of himself and fusing them back together. But that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. It was rather like an old artisan carefully using kintsugi to repair a fragile vase.

Perhaps he wasn’t perfect. Perhaps he was still naïve and inexperienced on the whole.

But he had a future. He had a job and a nice manager. He had Rin and Wen Xulong. . .and he had a lunchbox full of really tasty curry.