’Man, it sure feels good to be a human again. After dying over and over again in the body of many animals and monsters, you really do gain a new appreciation for life as a human.’ Seth breathed in and out, making sure to appreciate every single one of his breaths, no matter how difficult it was to do through his tiny nostrils.
The lights were far too bright for Seth to open his eyes, but when he felt himself being placed in the warm embrace of someone he instinctively knew was his mother, he calmed down and understood the entire situation.
‘So this is how it feels to not be abandoned at birth.’ Seth thought to himself as he quickly became drowsy and instantly fell asleep.
[Author’s note: *””* is used when someone speaks in a language Seth does not understand.]
*”Congratulations Rhea… It’s a boy.”* A woman wearing a nun’s uniform bowed slightly toward the woman who had just given birth.
Rhea, the woman holding Seth, looked beyond exhausted. However, her radiant smile told a completely different story despite her exhaustion.
She looked at the sleeping Seth with a motherly smile before she raised her hand and caressed his cheek.
*”It was truly a miracle, nun Diveen. I must thank you again; without you…”* Rhea’s eyes filled with tears as a few women held her hands and stood beside her. The people who had watched over her childbirth were her closest friends, so everyone understood her silence. After all, they were helping with childbirth, too, to the best of their abilities.
The childbirth had been rough. Everything went as planned at the start. Despite Rhea’s agonized screams, everything was normal, and she kept pushing. The real problem only occurred once the baby became limp.
The birth went from a 30-minute procedure to a long and tiring one that lasted for hours.
Everyone tried their best to keep the baby alive, but the situation didn’t seem to improve despite their efforts. However, as if some kind of switch had been flipped, not only did the baby’s condition suddenly improve by a hundredfold, but so did Rhea’s.
Rhea was a beautiful woman in her 20s. She had beautiful blonde hair that was disheveled and messy, yet she was practically glowing despite it. It almost looked like she hadn’t given birth at all.
*”It was the work of the lord, young child. I swear to you, I saw a glowing green light as he came out.”* The nun raised one hand and placed the other on her heart, yet no one took her seriously.
Of course, she wasn’t lying about what she saw, but Diveen was known to be one of the less cunning nuns in the town. She would joke freely as if her life was not bound by the chains of her nunhood.
*”Where’s my husband?”* Rhea suddenly asked while furrowing her brows.
*”He’s over there.”* One of the women at Rhea’s side pointed toward a collapsed man who lay on the cold floor of their bedroom, drooling on the hardwood, and had remained like that for several hours now.
Everyone laughed at his dismay, but after congratulating Rhea for her new baby and her amazing effort, they eventually returned to their homes and daily routines.
***
‘Man, the life of a baby sure is easy. No responsibilities, no worries, and best of all, no stress.’ Seth sighed as he relaxed into the bed while laying between both of his parents, who were sleeping on either side of him.
A few days had passed after his birth, and he was enjoying his current life.
It was as if a heavy burden had lifted off his shoulders the moment he had become a baby. At the same time, he enjoyed having parents for once. Sure, he was adopted by a nice family, but that family was only ‘nice’ in the material sense.
They didn’t care for him. After seeing his talent for retaining knowledge and understanding things far beyond his age, all they wanted to do was to groom him into a top scientist before milking him in the future for all the money he had… It was truly a shame that they had become his first subjects for an experiment he was performing.
Ever since then, he never truly had a parental figure. According to all the tests he completed on himself, it affected his general sense of morality since, in the eyes of others, what he deemed normal would have made him a monster beyond redemption.
If he didn’t know better, he might have even labeled himself a psychopath.
‘On the other hand…’ Seth looked up at the ceiling. He wasn’t too surprised to see that this was a medieval world. Everything from the furniture to his family’s clothes pointed toward such a conclusion, and since he had just died and reincarnated several times in the past few days, he thought nothing could surprise him.
That was until he saw how unhygienic everyone was.
“You’d think they’d all be dead by now…” He muttered to himself before grimacing when the voice of a baby came out.
A month passed in the blink of an eye, and he hadn’t really left his room much, not that he had the bodily strength to do such a thing on his own.
However, even though he wanted to do nothing but relax, after a month of nothing, he felt like he was going to die of boredom.
In his past life, he always had something to do. He dabbled in everything from science to basic cooking. The phrase ‘jack of all trades, master of none’ would have perfectly described him if he had not mastered every single practice or field he entered.
Nevertheless, since now he found himself unable to do anything useful or productive as a baby, he became a silent yet observant baby, to the point where his parents had called the woman in a nun attire several times to check up on him since he didn’t cry, laugh, or even react to the people around him.
He simply watched them all like hawks.
One of the first things he understood was that his name was Silas. He thought it was a weird name, but after learning the names of everyone else in his family, he quickly understood that such names were common in the world he was in.
He began learning the language his parents spoke, and since he didn’t have anything else to do, he picked up on it at a speed that would have been considered inhuman to anyone else.
Another month passed, and for the first time since his birth, he was sitting at the table with everyone else in his family.
He was sitting on his mother’s lap, barely looking over the table. Until now, he hadn’t gotten much practice crawling or walking, so he was struggling to keep his weak body upright without the assistance of his mother.
Other than him and his mother, three other people sat at the table.
Lochras, his father, wore a short beard and a tightly tied ponytail. His hair was jet black, yet his eyes were a glistening silver. His stature reminded Seth of the stature of a soldier.
On the other side of the table sat two girls.
While Keira was a woman in her early 40s who released a calm aura, Syra was an energetic little girl who barely reached the age of four. Both girls had blond hair like Rhea, yet while Syra had silver eyes like her father. Keira’s eyes were amber.
Seth watched them all make a little prayer before digging into the food.
He watched on with a bored expression. He didn’t have enough teeth to eat anyway, so what was the point of bringing him along?
But that’s when it happened…
“Ow! Mommy! I hurt my finger.” Syra teared up while holding her burnt finger up.
‘Man… I forgot how annoying children can be.’ Seth immediately thought when his sister opened her mouth. She had tried to play with him in the past, but he had always ignored her, causing her to finally relent and leave him alone for good.
“Aww, sweetheart, come over here. Mama will fix you right up.” Rhea smiled warmly at her daughter and waved her over.
When Syra finally stood before her mother, Rhea extended her index finger and waved her finger in the air while chanting a few words.
“In the name of Gilea, the mother of all, I ask you to seal the injuries of those I care for and bring invigoration to those who are wounded. Healing.” Rhea chanted with closed eyes, yet after a few seconds passed, nothing happened.
‘Ah, I see. It finally all makes sense. I live amongst cultists.’ Seth sighed, already imagining all the rituals he would be forced to be part of in the near future.
Sure, he would have loved it if magic was real, but that simply was not the case. After all, how could he have stayed in a world of magic without seeing a single person use magic around him? Plus, magic was a folktale. Scientifically, it simply could not exist since there were laws in the universe that-
However, before he could fully accept that fact, he saw something appear in front of his mother’s finger.
He couldn’t believe his eyes… No, it didn’t make sense. Were his eyes lying to him? Was he becoming delirious?
Seth watched on in amazement as a green circle appeared above Syra’s finger and began healing it. It was split into four sections and had a smaller circle in the middle where he saw a rune…
‘Wait… I recognize that rune.’ Seth thought and leaned in slightly to get a better look.
While the rest of the sections in the circle had simple rune-like letters, there was one rune in the middle that was more complex than all of them combined, and at the same time, was the only rune Seth recognized
After all, what lay in the middle of that circle wasn’t any normal rune… It was a rune that he had studied for more than a century.
It was one of the runes that made up the life equation, and it did the very thing he had spent 2 decades trying to achieve.
‘I-It’s healing!’ Seth exclaimed with joy, and in that very same moment, something inside him clicked, while a spark shone within his soul, igniting something that he had lost the day he became the destroyer of Earth.
It was a spark that reignited his unending hunger for knowledge, as well as the spark that allowed him to finally understand something about the life equation that no one else in the universe had truly understood.
[Life equation Assimilation: 100%]
[Assimilation Complete]
[Soul integration shall now commence]
‘I always assumed that most of the stories Lochras and Rhea read to me were fiction, but if they are based on reality, then… The possibilities are endless!’
He once lived in a world where every roadblock he found himself in was due to the laws of physics. There was so much he couldn’t do because of the limitation that these laws put on him, yet now that he lived in a world where something like magic existed, didn’t that mean that these factors that limited him in his past life were no longer doing so in this one?
‘I truly hit the… Jack… Pot.’
And just when Seth thought he was going to have another enlightenment, his thought process became fuzzy before an overwhelming drowsiness threw him into a deep slumber.