Cleanup by Xant

The radiance of its life was shorter than the twinkle of a falling star, its flame of life was fleeting like a light snowfall.

Its death was peaceful with neither feeling, temperature, nor smell, it was merely black with no gravity nor horizon.

That person had died in darkness and grabbed the light of life presented, in that case wouldn’t his lived life and death be virtually nonexistent?
Because he had spent almost all of his short life in darkness.

…

I was born in an egg and lived in darkness until that day of my seventh summer when I was finally able to escape. I had been living in fear of ants and moles in the earth up until that time.

I thought that there was only darkness due to living in that environment for seven years.

The eternal darkness without end…but I trembled in joy when I finally met the light.

I greeted the morning mist that day as I broke out of my shell and for the first time learned about the thing called life.

Light.

The light of the newborn sun slowly started to reveal its true nature.

The soft pink rays of light instantly changed angle and color.
As the sun had ascended above me I was dazzled by its radiance to the point that my eyes saw white and the outside of my shell was burning hot from the scorching sun.

A powerful wind blew through like thousands of soft feathers, and the intense smell of grass cured my unreliable sense of smell.

Ah, how severe life was.

In the fierce sunlight my small and lidless eyes shook dizzily.

Light was certainly life. The life that shone fiercely.

Before I realized it I was flapping my wings in the sky.

I didn’t learn from anyone, my instincts knew how to fly.

How wonderful it was to fly in the sky…only those who flew would understand it.

Compared to the migratory birds that flew far high in the sky, the degree with which my small wings could flap was like crawling on the ground, but it was enough for the small me.

I ran around in a daze underneath the stagnating midsummer light. At that time, I was certainly alive.

At the bottom of the hot and heavy atmosphere, I flapped my wings to the point that they shook and continued to fly till midday.

Rain fell through the shade underneath the canopy of trees,

I often flew from the hungry beak of crows,

and I slipped through the nets of the bug catching children,

Flying, flying, flying, flying…

Then I realized that I was lying on the ground.

I recognized the group of hard working black reapers approaching me, I understood that this was my death even with my bundle of nerve fiber that couldn’t be called a brain.

My sight was becoming dark and I dimly looked back on my life.

Although it was only for a short time I had lived in the sky. I was one with the wind. I played together with the sunlight filtered through the trees.

Even though only a fragment of the wide world, I was able to travel.

In the soil I saw my companions lose their life in the middle of their emergence. Was I fortunate to finish my whole life?

The radiance of the three weeks for sure was a dazzling light that overwrote the seven years in darkness.

Therefore I was almost satisfied with finishing my life as a cicada.

…Almost?

Yeah. There was only one regret in my life.

The moment when the last light faded from my eyes, along with the last breath leaking from my trachea, I thought only of one thing.

Only once was fine, I wanted to copulate with a female cicada…

Without experiencing that…when I think that my life ended without knowing love, the instincts of a species, the desire to rise and be fit for copulation, I was tempted.
Before death my small as needle genital began to throb.

In my last moments I burned with desire, and inside the perfect darkness of death the embers kept smoking.

In hindsight, I think that the regret of that desire might have tied me to my next life.

The world after death.

Complete black surrounded me. There was no irregularity or gloss inside the black, however only one last fragment wasn’t painted over.

Was it an instant or was it an eternity? The everlasting darkness was once again pierced by a ray of light and my second life began.

Light.

So it was light.

The light was undeniably brought forth by the sun.

I was able to meet the sun again. I didn’t think I was going to get the chance to worship it a second time. Suddenly, like a tsunami, vast knowledge flowed into me.

The so called succession ceremony ended and I lost consciousness for a week.

One week passed. When all the gained knowledge finally stabilized in my brain, I realized many things.

The state of this world, the name of my existence, the reversible, the universal, everything was understood.

The small creature I was in my former life was called a cicada.

This world and the world I was in before were completely different worlds.

Various races including humans existed in this world.

There existed a being which reigned over all creatures in this world: the Dragon.

The huge island I currently inhabit was thousands of kilometers away from the continent that humans lived on.

The last true dragon of this world had lived on this island for generations, ever since ancient times.

Before its death, that dragon left behind all of its power and knowledge, placing it into an egg it gave birth to.

And hatching out of the egg…was me.

My insides were overflowing with sage level wisdom and infinite power.

Extending outside with the new light was the deep blue sky.

Before I had realized it I was spreading my wings in the sky.

My time as a cicada couldn’t compare to this body, my wings were incomparably stronger, flapping in the sunlight.

The earth rapidly became smaller and the sky gradually grew near.

When I passed through the lumps of clouds that my small cicada wings could never reach, I laughed from the bottom of my stomach.

Thinking of my previous life and how I was born again, I started laughing.

I wasn’t able to laugh because of my small cicada brain.

Look! This reborn body.

My hands and feet which were thin like a wire have become thick and strong, so much so that they could even lift a huge rock mountain.

My thin wings which were always blown away by the wind could now create storms when flapped.

My fragile outer shell was now covered in scales harder than any mineral.

My jaw that could only sip sap could now crush even the shell of an iron turtle.

The lowly creature called cicada had become a superior being, a dragon. Fate is whimsical, it seems?

A cicada, let alone a creature from a different world, didn’t need to know the reason why it inherited the body and knowledge of a dragon.

Now that it was a dragon such things became trivial.

I certainly still had the memory of my time as a cicada, however such a small memory would disappear from my mind immediately.

I’m a dragon.

It was foolish to compare this to my lifetime of a cicada, a long life awaited me now.

I no longer had to be frightened by insect nets or the beak of a crow, a powerful life awaited me now.

My newfound knowledge was speaking.

I’m now the strongest being in the world. All living beings on the ground can only tremble at my roar.

In this new world there is no one to be afraid of and I should enjoy this given life to the fullest!

I was now this sky’s…no, I had become this world’s king!

I sang with a loud voice for the beginning of the new life as a dragon!

Resounding in the world was my song of joy and courtship.

1. ↑ From Touhou wiki: A quote from the Juujuushin ron (十住心論, lit. “Consideration of 10 Classes of Mind”) written by Kuukai, founder of Shingon Buddhism. The translation more fitting to the original sentences is: As one repeats to live many many times, he only knows the start or living just like under the shadow. As one repeats to die many many times, he merely knows the end or dying just like in the shade. You should know one of the peculiar Buddhist dogmas is that all ordinary lives are embedded in the eternally rotated wheel except Buddha (or the enlightened monks ) — people always get to live as other persons after death, unless they reach the state of enlightenment (satori), the ultimate goal of Buddhism. The original meaning of the phrase is seen that ordinary people don’t/can’t realize what the life and death is (i.e. what the self is… what the ultimate truth of Buddhism is) even though they are repeating living and dying, and that Kuukai thinks that he is also one of them.