As soon as she finishes speaking, I feel my consciousness start to dissipate. My vision starts to fade to black, and I lose the feeling of my body. I forgot to ask her how reincarnation works, but I need to keep my focus on not disappearing. Picturing my body or soul, whatever I have left now, to my center seems to be working. Lights are flashing and passing in my peripheral, but it’s taking everything I have not to lose control over myself.

  After what feels like hours, I don’t feel like pieces of me are floating away anymore. Relaxing control, everything feels attached and centered at my core. I don’t feel anything, my arms, my legs, or any other part of my body. The lights stopped at some point, so I’ve been sitting in darkness for a while now. If my reincarnation worked, maybe I’m currently a newborn who hasn’t developed sensation or sight recognition yet, maybe. Hopefully, this doesn’t last too long. I’m pretty sure this would count as a form of torture for prolonged periods of time.

  Well, she did say this world works like a video game, so let's try some of the more common mechanics. I don’t feel a giant source of foreign energy inside my being, so I’m probably not the chosen one to fight some demon king with broken powers. Focusing really hard on my core probably kept my soul together while I was reincarnating, so I can try that again. Picture the outline of a human body and focus on the core. I focus as intensely as I can, imagining power being channeled into my core. After thirty seconds, I finally feel something, a source of energy that seems to move around my core as I focus on it.

  I don’t feel anything changing in the current state of my body, so I’ll count this as my breakthrough in magical progress instead of a biological function. This energy doesn’t seem that strong, but that should be fine if I’m still a newborn. It’ll probably grow with time or practice in harnessing it, something along those lines. I was able to move my magic energy, calling it mana from now on for simplicity, so maybe I can manipulate it outside of my body. Focusing internally again, I picture the mana at my core moving away from the center. I can feel it coming out in clusters, but as soon as it gets too far from the core, it stops moving out, and I can only manipulate it inside that small range. Instead of sending large amounts of mana outwards, what if I decrease the amount of mana? Picturing my mana as thin strings, I try to send it out again. My mana strings reach the same range as before and then continue to go even further. I can even feel my mana collide with something solid.

  So, sending out my mana in small amounts allows it to go farther, and larger amounts have a much more limited range. Now it’s time to see how many strings of mana I can use and how thin I can get them. I put all of my focus on this and manage to create thin strings of mana that I can’t completely perceive, even though I made them. I send them all out at once to see how far they go and they start colliding with everything around me, including straight down. If I’m a newborn, there should be something right under me, but I don’t get a reaction to my mana instantly as I expect. As I’m thinking about this, a monochromatic blue-tinted image forms in my mind after my mana starts interacting with my environment. I’m not in a room, I’m in a cave with rugged stone walls, a ceiling, and a floor. I can tell distance now, but my mana strings only manage to go ten feet out in every direction. It seems I can change that if I focus on one direction more than others. The cavernous stone walls and ceiling are a few feet away from me, creating a twenty-foot-wide tunnel with ten-foot ceilings. And then there’s me, floating in the center, not as a newborn human as I thought, but as a small, dimly glowing ball of fire. And then I realized, I've been reincarnated into another world as a wisp.