Published at 24th of February 2024 10:31 am

Chapter 1

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When I first opened my eyes, it was to stare down in confusion at the thin, grubby, dirt-smudged fingers of a child far too old to be a newborn. My hands, somehow, impossibly. They should have been the soft, pudgy digits of a freshly born infant, not even an hour old, but instead, I had months and months, maybe even years of memories of my new life.

Something had gone terribly wrong.

The invocations I’d laid into my soul should have sparked my previous life’s memories with only the barest brush of mana to trigger them. If not for my new body’s memories, my first thought would have been someone had detected my passage through the reincarnation cycle and trapped me in a mana void for years. Just looking around was enough to dispel that line of thinking. The truth was both simpler and stranger, it seemed.

There wasn’t a speck of ambient mana in the air around me, not a drop in the dry, dusty earth. I was sitting in a garden, a place that should have been bursting with life, but each row of plants was sadder than the one that preceded it. They barely clung to life, sad, wilted, shriveled things starved for the mana they needed to flourish.

It appeared I’d been reborn in a desert, one that had been devastated by some cataclysm that had scarred the land. It had taken my new body years to generate enough internal mana to trigger the soul invocations that would awaken my previous life’s memories. There’d been no mistakes, just ill fortune that had seen me reborn on a swath of dead land.

“Gravin.”

This was probably a blessing in disguise. If there was so little ambient mana in the environment that it had taken years to trigger the soul magic, I wouldn’t have been able to do much during those initial years anyway. At least this way, I’d been spared the tedium of having to live through them. The memories alone were bad enough, fragmented and disjointed as they were.

“Graaavviiin,” a voice cooed.

I was going to need to adjust my time frame. Internal mana was going to be my only source of power as long as I was stuck in this mana desert, and I was physically too weak to survive on my own. It would be months before I built up enough mana to ignite my core. Damn. What rotten luck to be reincarnated in a place like this.

“He looks so serious,” a different voice said. “Look at that scowl on his face.”

“Come here, Gravvy,” the first voice said, and suddenly a shadow appeared over me. I looked up just in time to see a plain-faced woman wearing rough home-spun leaning down to grab hold of me. My mother, if the memories of my new brain were to be believed.

“Did you have fun?” she asked. Without waiting for an answer, she whisked me away towards what could generously be described as a hut and said, “Come on, let’s get you cleaned up and we’ll have dinner.”

My mother said her goodbyes to the other woman, a neighbor by the looks of it, and carried me towards a nearby hut, one of dozens lined up next to a dirt street, our home if my new body’s memories were to be believed. They were more or less identical, all mud-fired bricks of some sort with a woven thatch roof. I took that time to consider my mana core. The more I thought about it, the more I was sure something had gone wrong. Even in this desert, I should have generated enough internal mana to awaken far sooner than I had. I couldn’t recall the exact averages for mana generation rates in babies, but I should have produced enough well before reaching two years of age.

I didn’t realize we were inside the hut until I was plopped down on a table and the woman carrying me started tugging at my clothes. “Arms up,” she said in a little sing-song voice. My body reacted without my conscious decision, and she pulled my shirt off.

I needed to figure out this mana situation immediately. Otherwise it was going to be a long few years.

***

My memory wasn’t perfect, but I hadn’t been an archmage for nothing. I’d done the math, repeatedly, and the results just didn’t make sense. I would have said my mana core was crippled in some way, but I could sense it perfectly. It was as flawless as any other two-year-old’s. Even if my math was somehow way off, I could sense it generating mana. It should have only taken about twenty hours before my core had enough mana to awaken my memories, not over two years.

Something was interfering with my mana generation. That was the only explanation that made sense, but I couldn’t for the life of me fathom why. Even if someone found the records of my experiments, it was impossible to trace the flow of my soul through the afterlife to my new body. It would take a grand magus invoker to examine my soul here and now to note anything unusual, and judging by the conditions I’d apparently been living in, I doubted there was one within a thousand miles, let alone one bored enough to spot check random babies for soul modifications.

I could only speculate for now. Until I learned more, the best I could do was start working on building up enough mana to ignite my core. Given how pitiful my mana generation was at the moment, that was going to take a month just for the mana to form, and I’d need more than my core was capable of holding. I’d have to invest some time and mana into building a storage crystal to feed my mana into.

Another frustrating delay. I could scarcely picture a way in which I could have started my new life in a worse position. This process should have taken me a few hours at most, not weeks and weeks.

My new family appeared one by one. First, my older sister showed back up just as Mother was finishing dinner, followed swiftly by my father. I had memories of both but, perhaps unsurprisingly, a baby’s memories didn’t provide clear pictures. I wasn’t even sure how old my sister was, though she certainly didn’t have more than a few years on me. Gravin felt a baby’s love for the parents who nurtured him, and perhaps curiosity at his older sister more than anything else. I supposed a bit of acting was in order.

Fortunately for me, Gravin was a quiet child with a tendency to stare at whatever caught his interest. If anything, he seemed a bit timid. That should be easy enough to copy for the time being. Once I’d ignited my mana core, things would have to change, of course. That was several months away, and without an abundant source of ambient mana, my progress was going to be agonizingly slow.

Dinner was a simple affair of humble food prepared with more love than skill, and, unfortunately, no seasonings at all to help the taste. I focused my efforts on fine motor control, which was surprisingly difficult to accomplish and somewhat exhausting. Who would have guessed that eating a meal without making a mess all over myself would turn into such a grueling test? It wasn’t even that it was hard to accomplish so much as it was that my stamina was non-existent.

The whole while, my new sister nattered on about what she’d learned that day, which I did my best to tune out. Basic numbers and letters weren’t exciting when I had been the one learning them thousands of years ago and they weren’t exciting today. More and more, I despaired of how tedious my life was going to be for the next few months. It wasn’t until after dinner was done that something interesting happened.

“Good job, Gravin!” my mother said. “You barely need to be cleaned up at all. How about we go to the square early today and you can watch everyone while we wait for the Collectors? We’ll be right near the front of the line this time.”

“That’d be a relief,” Father added. “We can all go to bed early tonight.”

My sister’s round little face scrunched up at that, but she didn’t say anything. At first, I thought it was the early bedtime that she had a problem with, but somewhere in Gravin’s fuzzy memories were visions of a group of people all lined up in front of tables, moving forward every few seconds. It was hard to pick details out of it, in part because of Gravin’s habit of fixating on things. I had one memory with a clear picture of a man’s mud-stained boot in front of me, but no clues as to why we were in line to begin with.

I supposed I’d find out soon enough.

***

The village was one of those little huddled specks on the landscape, a collection of fifty or so huts surrounded by fields that barely grew enough for the people to survive. Everything was dry, dusty, and hot. I didn’t get to see much of it during our short walk to the square at the center, but what I did see was not reassuring. These people were one crop-ruining storm away from being wiped out.

More importantly from my perspective, there was no ambient mana at all. I would have said it was impossible if I wasn’t seeing it myself. Everything had mana in it, even the world itself. Living things were the best source of mana, but even in a desert like this, there should have been at least a little. Instead, the whole village was bone dry. Not even the people had any mana coming off them.

They had mana, of course. Each and every one had a dormant mana core, but not a single one of them was full. Maybe it was just that they were all coming back in from a hard day’s labor. I could see it being common around here to spend mana on physical invocations to aid in farming. The techniques would be as basic and bare bones as possible, just a simple conversion of mana to energy, but it would explain why not a single person was producing ambient mana from a full core.

While I studied the villagers, they started organizing themselves into four lines that stretched across the square. Families chatted with each other as they waited, though I wasn’t able to tell what exactly it was we were all gathered for. Whatever was going on, it was common enough that nobody felt the need to discuss the details.

The north side of the square had a wide, squat building, more than five times bigger than any of the huts various families had emerged from. It also had a single wooden door, which was the first one I’d seen so far. The huts had all used rough cloth to drape the entryways.

The door opened and eight people walked out in groups of two with tables carried between each of them. Those were lined up in front of the building, and four more people emerged. They were carrying large black rocks, probably about forty pounds or so, close to their chests. Without talking, they all stepped up to a different table and placed the rock down. We were close enough to the front of the line that I could easily make out the details.

Draw stone. Of course. I should have guessed.

The lines started moving, people placing a hand on the stone for a few seconds, receiving confirmation from the attendant and having their names ticked off a list on a nearby sheet of paper, and moving out of the way for the next. Each person’s mana core was emptied into one of the draw stones, and within a minute, it was my family’s turn.

Father went first, then turned to my sister. “Come on, your turn,” he said.

“I don’t like it. It makes me feel tired.”

“I know sweetie, but everyone has to contribute so the barrier doesn’t come down. The monsters will get in if we don’t donate our mana.”

My father took her hand and gently pressed it against the draw stone. What little mana she had drained out of her over the next few seconds, and she swayed on her feet. He scooped her up and carried her out of the way so my mother could take her turn. From what I could tell, he wasn’t handling the mana drain much better than my sister.

My mother let the draw stone take her mana, then knelt down and boosted me up so I could reach it sitting on the table. “Just put your hand here, like we practiced,” she said.

All around me, the other lines were moving forward. Behind us, more villagers were waiting their turns. No one was objecting, at least beyond some fussing from the smaller children. Everyone thought this was perfectly normal. Had I been reborn inside some sort of cult? And what barrier were they talking about? I would have noticed something like that.

Her hand over mine, my mother guided my hand to press down on the draw stone so that it could steal what little mana I’d managed to generate.

To hell with that.

***

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