«Rewrite: New Life»

My name is Adamas Bonsu.

It means "invincible" or "unconquerable", derived from the Greek word "adamantos", which refers to a very hard material, often associated with diamonds in the modern age.

In ancient Greek mythology and literature, it was also associated with the hardest material known to the ancient Greeks, believed to be on the same level as the diamond.

You must be wondering to yourself, "Hey, that's a strange name for a Ghanaian." Well the truth is, my father was obsessed with Greek literature and mythology when he was younger and the word "adamantos" really struck him when he first learnt about it.

And so on that fateful day in Milos, Greece where he met my mother, he vowed to name his first son Adamas, and nothing will change that fact.

Life for me has been pretty average since my birth. As an only child born in England to a upper working-class family, I didn't have any major problems growing up. My parents loved me, I think, since Mom and Dad never said the magic words 'I love you' before they died, but they did show trhough little actions everyday!

I have always considered myself an introvert, a thinker. Whether big or small, my every decision had been made with conscious scrutiny. Sometimes at night before I went to bed, I would always think about the choices I made throughout the day and the actions I took, and whether they were right decisions to make in that moment.

I didn't think it was abnormal at that time, heck who does? I was a home-schooled kid anyways. It was only during my first few days in secondary school surrounded by children my age did I really look at myself and realize that 'Damn, I don't fit in at all'.

Don't get me wrong I wasn't some total social outcast, in fact I was fairly popular with everyone in my year group. Just above average in looks and regular grooming made sure that I wasn't some floaty presence everyone passes by and quickly forgets, a nobody who was just there to fill the class count.

On the outside, I was the guy that anyone could talk with, never fully part of one group, just someone that had mutuals everywhere. The only people that knew the real me where my close friends, Jordan and Serena, and funny enough the "real me" was just another fabricated mask...

I graduated from secondary with excellent grades and so did my friends. My connection with them, however, slowly withered with time as we had all moved to different cities for college.

At first, I used to call them once every two days, which devolved to once every week, which further devolved into once a month.

College was the same as secondary except with the added weight of semi-responsibilities coupled with the expectations from our parents to get top grades to then have the required qualifications to enter a top university. No wonder there was an aura of depression that hung in the hallways and corridors everyday.

The days became monotonous and long and the only thing that broke that rhythm was reading all sorts of stories, from fanfics and manga to light novels, manhua and manwha.

There was something about these stories that alleviated all those useless thoughts that plagued my mind as well a t

he depressive aura that had seeped into my bones.

I remember the first lightnovel I read was Reverend Insanity. The journey of the protagonist and his beliefs, especially his end goal, heavily resonated with me. Whenever I was on the brink of depression I would remember his conviction and be pulled off the edge.

And as a result, my childhood dream for immortality was revitalised. Now, like many my age, I was on the cusp of my journey into higher education, and ready to pursue a degree in Molecular Biology, with an emphasis on both Genetics and Proteomics at the University of Cambridge.

Brimming with ambition and dreams that surpassed the confines of the present era, I will make my mark on the world by uncovering the secrets of immortality and finding the cure for death itself!

When I told my only friend in college Tyrone, who was the one who got me into reading in the first place, he laughed at me! He knew it was an audacious goal, and he told me so but I was undeterred by the magnitude of the challenge.

As Fang Yuan once said "Humans only live for a hundred years, it is as unreal as a dream that ends in an instant. What is the point of a person living in this world? No more than just being on a journey, and witnessing interesting things. Although I do not want to die, I do not fear death. I am already on my right path, I have no regrets even if I die."

Although I very much fear death, the essence of the quote is still relevant to me. I believe the key to unlocking biological immortality lay within the genetic makeup of all living beings.

This belief isn't unfounded, however, but evidenced by the remarkable longevity of various unicellular and multicellular organisms, including certain vertebrates.

But none fascinated me more than the Turritopsis dohrnii jellyfish, which was capable of reverting back to its infantile stage and regenerating its cells, essentially becoming biologically immortal provided it was not killed by disease or predation.

If I found a way to harness this ability and apply it to humans, to achieve what many believed to be impossible - to live indefinitely without succumbing to the ravages of time.

Then my life would be truly complete.

***

(Narrator POV)

Adamas Bonsu.

This has always been his name in his previous life and now this one.

Yes he died before waking up here as Adamas Bonsu but...different. It was an absolute and unchangeable fact that he knew in his heart.

In the first few years of his new life, the familiarity of this name felt like a distant dream whose details where at the tip of your tongue but shrouded in enough fog that they slipped right back into the mind the harder you tried to recall it.

And yet it wasn't just his name that was familiar, everything he saw and heard in this new world was familiar, though not on the same level as his name. It was a vague feeling, as if he had...read it somewhere before.

Adamas was confused, rightly so, as currently he was just a baby. It wasn't that he had died and just opened his eyes as a teenager in a baby's body, no in fact he was a baby in the truest sense of the word.

In both mind and body.

However, even as he cried and cooed and shat himself, his brain was developing rapidly, though this didn't happen overnight. He had no trouble learning the language and as he grew up (albeit faster than a typical child on Earth) he spoke his first words at 18 months and grasped complicated concepts, for babies that is, quicker than most.

At two years old, more and more memories were gradually unlocked and then at three years old, one of the memories consisted of bits and pieces of a light novel called [Heroes Rise: Journey to Greatness], a cliche modern fantasy harem novel similar to the My Hero Academia in the sense that everyone had superpowers, no quirkless kids thats for sure.

The story was set 1,000 years into the future in the year 3023 in which the protagonist was a dense but handsome Ben Woods. And that was all that was clear to him.

Now Adamas was not one to believe in reincarnation or transmigration. If he did, he wouldn't have any inclination to pursue immortality in his previous life in the first place as it was, in a sense, a form of immortality. However, he did believe in a God and the notion of the soul and life after death.

At five years old, Adamas had finally realised that this world wasn't just technologically advanced version of Earth when he had gone to the living room to ask his parent to buy him a new toy.

Out of curiosity, he had glanced at the floating holographic television only to see an abnormally beautiful woman with long elf-like ears and a humanoid snake person reporting on the latest news about the opening of a school called Octahedran Academy.

Seeing all of this had a strong effect on the young Adamas, too much of an effect for his psyche.

As such, when his little but intelligent mind grasped the fact that he had somehow transcended the boundaries of space and time and ended up in a reality he had considered fictional, the shock loosened the little subconscious barrier placed by a certain Being, and thus all of his previous life's condensed memories that were slowly trickling into his brain were fully unleashed.

When the process was done, his eyes twinkled with a more mature and knowledgeable light.

There was no denying it - he had been transmigrated into the pages of the cruel and unforgiving novel, [Hero's Rise: Journey to Greatness].