Kagura Kiryu transmigrated.
He stood stunned outside the wooden door for two hours before he finally understood his identity.
If he wasn't mistaken, he should have transmigrated to the era before Duel City in the Yu-Gi-Oh! DM period.
This was because the newspaper he snatched from a child on the street contained news such as "Duel Kingdom Champion Yugi Mutou" and "Kaiba Corporation's New Duel Disk Released."
He felt his vision go dark. He had merely brought his Black Magician deck, which he had played with since childhood, to a card shop for a tournament and was then brutally defeated as if he were a primitive man.
Then, in a daze, he heard a sweet and lovely female voice from his deck: "Please, Master, go save the world!"
And just like that, he appeared in front of this two-story building, carrying a pink suitcase.
The Yu-Gi-Oh! world is a very distorted world, because according to the setting, the universe of this world was likely created by a single card.
Therefore, the underlying logic of this world is cards.
When in doubt, duel first:
If two people like the same girl, duel! Only the winner can marry her.
Police catching a thief? Duel! Only the winner can make the arrest. If the thief wins, then sorry, you can only watch them run away.
Company shares? Duel! Only the winner can become the CEO; the loser can only leave with nothing.
The rule of this world is: the winner gains everything, and the loser loses everything.
After a brief moment of panic, Kagura Kiryu felt a strange sense of reassurance.
This was because he remembered that when he wasn't playing casual decks, he was a master duelist with Diamond rank in Master Duel and had even reached Duel King in Duel Links.
With his dueling skill, wouldn't it be easy to dominate in this world where primitive people were everywhere?
In this world, summoning a monster with 3000 ATK, comparable to a Blue-Eyes White Dragon, was considered a high-level play worth boasting about for a lifetime.
Just as he was happily fantasizing about beating Yugi Mutou and stepping on Seto Kaiba, he suddenly remembered something.
Didn't the protagonists in the anime all print cards?
Kagura Kiryu fell silent. What if he pulled out a Tearlaments, and his opponent casually pulled out a Macro Cosmos, and then a few forbidden cards to clear his field completely...
And then beat him to death with Sapphire Dragon attacks, what then?
Forget it, forget it, let's check his deck first.
Huh? Where's my deck? Crap, I don't have a deck, do I?
No! Cards in this world are not only expensive but also incredibly hard to collect! How am I supposed to duel without one?!
Just as he was feeling pessimistic, the red wooden door in front of him suddenly opened.
Facing him, a red-haired woman poked her head out.
Her hair was vibrant red, reaching her waist, with a braid on the left side of her head, resembling half a wreath. At this moment, she was half-squinting her cream-colored eyes, suspiciously sizing him up.
Kagura Kiryu's pupils contracted sharply, because this woman gave him a sense of familiarity; her appearance closely resembled Aki Izayoi, the female protagonist of Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's!
Mio Yozaki carefully recalled the person in the photo, confirmed it was correct, and pulled open the door: "Are you the child those bastard parents of mine adopted from outside?"
Kagura Kiryu was shocked by this setting: "Huh?"
That's right, he had indeed deduced that he was a boarder staying with relatives, but he hadn't expected such a peculiar setting.
Mio Yozaki saw his dazed expression, and her furrowed brows relaxed a bit. She smiled: "Don't just stand there foolishly, come in!"
After speaking, she directly walked over, grabbed Kagura Kiryu's arm, and pulled him up to the second-floor partition.
"This will be your room from now on. If you need anything, you can come to me, though I definitely won't buy you anything expensive."
Kagura Kiryu nodded with a face full of black lines. Although this was the attic where various protagonists in Japanese anime often resided, it was at least cleaned quite well.
Mio Yozaki, who looked to be in her twenties, was a decisive woman. She simply left with a phrase, "I need to catch up on sleep," leaving Kagura Kiryu to sort out his own lunch.
Kagura Kiryu sighed helplessly, picked up the small mirror by the window, and looked at himself. Sure enough, it was the same as what he had seen in the glass reflection earlier.
This was his appearance from his previous life, only his hair had been dyed white and had grown quite a bit.
He looked a bit like Ryou Bakura before he turned into the Rabbit Ear Demon King; in short, he looked like someone who was very good at dueling.
Even the moles and scars on his body were identical; he was certain this was his body from his previous life.
Kagura Kiryu shook his head, no longer thinking about these matters. Although he was very curious why he had physically transmigrated but was given a soul transmigration setting, none of that mattered anymore. Since he was here, he would make the best of it.
He began to pack his luggage miserably. As soon as he opened the manly pink suitcase, he couldn't help but feel his pupils contract once again.
The suitcase wasn't large; half of it contained changes of clothes, and the other half, surprisingly, contained a Duel Disk?
He took the Duel Disk out of the luggage and saw that a deck was actually embedded in the card slot area.
Kagura Kiryu felt a surge of pleasant surprise. So, this was his deck?
He eagerly flipped open the first card, only to see the character in the card art wearing black robes, with sharp eyes, grayish-blue skin, and a jewel-encrusted staff...
This was actually the alternate art version of "Black Magician" that appeared in the Yu-Gi-Oh! movie "The Dark Side of Dimensions"!
This, this, could it be the deck he used before transmigrating in his previous life?
If so, he was about to take off! He knew that his Black Magician deck had all sorts of reinforcement cards from later generations packed into it!
Although it was nowhere near as powerful as the various broken meta decks of modern Yu-Gi-Oh!, it would absolutely dominate this primitive era!
He couldn't wait to flip through the deck. The very top of the deck surprisingly contained three alternate art versions of Black Magician and one movie alternate art version of Black Magician Girl!
After admiring his childhood goddess, Black Magician Girl, for a few seconds, he continued to flip through, and his heart grew colder with each flip.
Good news: it was a Black Magician deck.
Bad news: less than a third of it consisted of Black Magician-related cards; the rest were mostly various Spellcaster-type and Warrior-type monsters, along with some accompanying Spell and Trap cards.
Kagura Kiryu even saw a few Normal Monsters (monsters without effects).
However, this deck was at least a cohesive deck with combos, and it could definitely be considered a top-tier deck in the DM anime.
Especially since it wasn't like the bricky decks of other anime characters that relied entirely on bonds to win.
As a modern duelist, Kagura Kiryu knew that the biggest difference between himself and anime characters was that he couldn't draw the cards he wanted to draw.
This was because he had once imitated Dark Yugi's deck and been brutally beaten by his companions in the village.
But in this world, maybe it would work?
Kagura Kiryu licked his lips, shuffled his deck, and muttered to himself: "Please, my deck, prove to me that you truly have your own consciousness!"
He put the Duel Disk on his right arm, inserted the shuffled deck into the Duel Disk, and gently placed his finger on the deck.
With the longing of his youth, he loudly shouted: "My turn, draw!"
Five cards were drawn one by one. Kagura Kiryu's pupils sharply contracted. After a moment of silence, he suddenly burst into an indescribably joyful laugh.
In his hand, three identical cards were lined up, none other than three "Black Magician" cards.