Chapter 2: Childhood - 1’...I have to say, I’m grateful that I’m still male in this life.’
’Not because I’m sexist or anything, I’d simply rather remain the way I was before I died.’
Blanc, now known as Shunkan Isshun, monologued silently as he watched his parents leave for work, waving them bye with a smile.
’While I appreciate the trust you have in me, Mom and Dad, why are you leaving a five-year-old to his own devices just because he’s ’a little smart’...?’
Now alone in the house, Isshun wandered into his father’s study.
Both of his parents worked relatively normal office jobs and were financially stable. There was little Isshun could reasonably ask for.
In fact, being born into the Shunkan family was close to optimal for both his personal circumstances and his Quirk.
Isshun had awakened his Quirk at the unusually young age of two. On the surface, it wasn’t particularly impressive.
Without the Shirai Kuroko Template, it would have been borderline useless—or at least not worth developing in his lazy ass opinion.
His mother, Shunkan Kako, possessed the Quirk Retrocognition.
This Quirk allowed her to perceive up to five seconds into the past.
Rather than replaying events like a recording, it reconstructed recent occurrences by analyzing present conditions such as object positions, residual forces, sound decay, and other environmental traces.
The accuracy of this reconstruction depended entirely on Kako’s ability to process and quantify environmental data, placing an extreme computational burden on her brain.
Over time, the Quirk forcibly enhanced her neurological capacity for calculation and probabilistic reasoning, which naturally led her to pursue a career as an actuary.
His father, Shunkan Genzai, possessed the Quirk Hypercognition.
Hypercognition dramatically increased Genzai’s ability to process real-time sensory input through all five senses, allowing him to recognize patterns and causal relationships almost instantly and respond with exceptional efficiency.
However, rather than increasing raw intelligence, the Quirk accelerated perception, thought, and decision-making.
Genzai experienced the world with virtually no perceptual latency, similar to a supercomputer evaluating every viable outcome based solely on incoming sensory data.
Because the Quirk functioned almost passively, prolonged exposure to unfamiliar or stimulus-dense environments caused severe information overload.
When overload occurred, Genzai’s nervous system would forcibly shut down via induced sleep as a protective mechanism.
As a result, whenever he left familiar environments, Genzai relied on a combination of ear mufflers, blindfolds, and masks to limit sensory intake.
While this made him ineligible for a driver’s license, his profession as an appraiser required minimal physical travel.
Shunkan Isshun, inheriting traits from both parents, was born with a Quirk officially classified as Precognition.
At least, that was the doctor’s conclusion.
In actuality, Isshun’s ability did not truly allow him to "see" the future.
Instead, it functioned by aggregating sensory input, performing high-speed probabilistic calculations, and projecting the most plausible near-future outcomes.
However, Quirk was classified as an Emitter-type rather than a cognitive derivative of his parents’ abilities.
The reasoning was simple: labeling it as a Mutant-type cognitive Quirk implied permanent neurological alterations that would place an unacceptable processing burden on a child, which was unrealistic just looking at Isshun’s rather painless, bored expression.
Emitter classification allowed the ’Precognition’ to be treated as externally generated phenomena, theoretically reducing the risk of neural overload, which would explain why Isshun didn’t experience any visible burden.
The doctor suggested reassessing the Quirk once more data became available, but both Genzai and Kako declined further testing.
As long as their son was healthy and safe, they agreed to revisit the matter when Isshun was older.
What neither the doctor nor his parents realized was that Isshun’s Quirk had been a Mutant type from the very beginning.
The difference was that the Level 4 Calculation Ability granted by the Teleportation Template allowed Isshun to absorb and process information without immediate neurological strain.
More importantly, continuous forced Quirk-assisted analysis caused Isshun’s computational capacity to grow gradually to accommodate the information, reinforcing itself through use rather than overwhelming him all at once.
So while the Precognition was technically passive, due to Isshun’s Level 4 computational ability, it allowed him to see much further into the future, or not see it at all.
With Isshun’s computational ability surpassing multiple high spec computers, this ’technically’ allowed for further advancement for Teleportation.
The ’technically’ was in quotation marks for a reason.
Isshun understood that within the Toaru universe, teleportation operated through interaction with the 11th dimension, requiring precise mathematical formulas to interface with it.
Fortunately, ROB had provided the same 11th-dimensional interaction formulas used by Shirai Kuroko as part of the Template.
Unfortunately, that was all he had been given.
Without knowing what each parameter represented or how to supply correct values, Isshun was forced to deconstruct the equations piece by piece until he fully understood their function.
Complicating matters further, Isshun remembered almost nothing about mathematics beyond a high-school level.
Which meant that he had to effectively start from the beginning.
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Isshun looked with a dead expression in front of the computer, rubbing his platinum blonde hair in frustration.
Linear algebra.
The actual bane of his existence.
While he could brute force calculations, if he didn’t understand what each calculation did, then it was effectively pointless.
It may have been relatively simple to just relearn things he had previously learned, when venturing into new territory, it was rather annoying.
He’d tried to brute-force it earlier, but the pencil he attempted to teleport had ended up partially spliced into a coloring book, fused cleanly through several pages.