World Embryo, Volume 1

World Embryo (Japanese title ワールドエンブリオ) is a seinen science-fiction battle manga created by Daisuke Moriyama, following his earlier work Chrono Crusade. It ran in Shonen Gahosha's Young King OURs from 2005 to 2014 and was collected in 13 volumes. This is Volume 1, the opening of the story. The protagonist, Riku Amami, is a cold-mannered, habitually lying sixteen-year-old high school student. Two years earlier, his sister Amane went missing after a fire (some say she died). One day Riku receives an email signed by Amane, with a photograph set in a long-abandoned hospital and a single line: "Come find me." Following the clue to Kazama Hospital, he meets Yohei Takebe, a childhood friend who seems oddly familiar, and then the stern-faced girl Rena Arisugawa—and so steps into a world parallel to everyday life. At once every mobile phone erupts in a piercing static, and anyone struck by this electronic noise mutates into a monster called a Kanshu; those who can fight them are the Blade-Banner wielders. Riku is gravely wounded by a Kanshu in the chaos, but is saved when he touches a mysterious "cocoon." Back in the everyday world, he discovers he has brought the cocoon home, and the little girl who hatches from it is the spitting image of Amane as a child—so Riku, all unawares, becomes the "daddy" of a girl named Nene. The story unfolds layer by layer around Amane's fate, the cocoon's origin, erased memories, and the truth of the parasitic infection. With his distinctive technique of marking every lie in quotation marks, the author keeps readers asking: is this line actually true? This volume establishes the tone and principal character relationships of the whole series, and is the starting point for understanding later foreshadowing.