Darkness. Pressure. Discomfort, bordering on pain, to the point that I wanted to cry, but I couldn’t.

  I can’t breathe.

  Then, a shock, a jolt of pain. My lungs heaved full of air, and I wailed.

  I was born.

  At first, my senses were dull and I wasn’t able to move my body the way I wanted. Bowel control was a far-fetched dream. I would grow so uncomfortable from hunger that I couldn’t help but scream. Even if I had full control of my body, my mind was cloudy and I was unable to focus. If I lost sight of something, I would forget it existed. The first year of my new life was like an elongated and unending dream.

  Even as my vision started to improve and I regained object permanence, I struggled to make sense of what I was learning. I could replicate sounds I heard, but attaching meaning to them was slow-going. This too felt like a dream state, where what I thought was true a moment before constantly changed with new insight. It was hard to see those around me as real people, but I slowly started having moments of lucidity.

  By the time I was around two years old, I was starting to awaken from the dreaminess of my infantile brain. I started absorbing the local language. I quickly defeated my dependence on diapers, to the immense satisfaction of myself and my parents. I started to get to know my parents as people, rather than just the direct means of my survival. Shortly after, I began to be able to ask questions.

  I learned about my new world and my new life.

  “Tovar is such a bright boy,” one of the aunties told my mother at their regular sewing circle. There were other children present for these meet-ups, who I studied to make sure I wasn’t acting too far outside the norm, but events such as this were a goldmine for me to learn more about the world beyond the controlled flow of information from my parents.

  My name was Tovar in this life. Tovar, son of Hildan and Berrel. It was even reflected in my System.

  There was a small button next to my name with a drop-down menu that displayed a list of names, which at the moment was only Tovar and my name in my old life, Michael Carter. I was able to use that menu to change the name that displayed in my System. I debated switching it back, but I found that I wasn’t particularly attached to my old life, and instead planned to embrace my new one.

  Some of the information in my System was presented differently. Given that [Metasurvival] was one of the affected elements, I presumed these were somehow aspects of my System beyond the local rules of reality.

  I had gained a hidden level, or perhaps was adjusted up from the impossible level of zero to the normal default of one, by being born in this world. With that level came a single stat point in each of my three key stats, which was also likely the default since I couldn’t live without a body or a mind. As it turned out, I couldn’t exist in this world without at least one point in Will, as well, for this was a world where magic existed.

  The supernatural aspect of this world that my Will impacted was something called mana, which was a power that existed in all life in this world. I was curious how that worked, but it wasn’t really possible to delve into the specifics with my parents or the aunties at my current age without raising suspicion. I was able to learn the basics, though: mana could be used to power certain skills called “spells” and that it was possible to improve one’s mana through training, somehow.

  The prospect of training magic sounded incredible to me, but I quickly learned that it wasn’t something most people could do easily or bothered with. Upon further examination, this wasn’t a huge surprise; everyone on Earth in my past life could have trained their bodies to grow more muscle and gain more physical strength, but most people didn’t. Everyone could study—especially in the age of information, when so much was freely available online—but most people only used their access to entertain themselves mindlessly. Humans were creatures of comfort, and they generally only acquired enough strength or intellect to get by.

  In this world, the same was true of mana. Ignoring the issue of wealth disparity and access to education or the freedom to partake in training, even the people who did use magic mostly gained only enough mana to do what they needed to do and little more. A few people with the resources to take it further might do so, but only a small minority of obsessive types would attempt to push it to its maximum potential. As with the limits of the human body and strength training, even the most obsessive students of mana usage could only progress their powers so far given their lifespan.

  That would not be the case for me. I would retain my stats from this incarnation to the next. The progress I made could stack over lifetimes. It was in my best interest to spend as much time training as possible. Where some people might look back on all that effort as wasted at the end of their life, for me it would be just the beginning, and provide me a solid foundation in all my future lives.

  Beyond the existence of mana, this world wasn’t all that interesting, as far as I could tell. It was what I would call a basic “sword and sorcery” type of world, based on what I could recall in the haze of memories of stories from my first life. I remembered Gudell’s promise to place me in a good starter universe; I presumed this was chosen to be a decent tutorial, more or less, for me to acclimatize to the System, skills, and also the use of my Will stat which was foreign to me in my first life.

  My family lived in a small village called Redding which was part of a larger domain called Ivarnel. It seemed similar to a pre-industrial duchy on Earth.

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  In addition to belonging to Ivarnel, it seemed everyone in the village followed something called the Five Guardian Faith. Once a week, we attended a service at our local chapel. It was a simple polytheistic belief system, but as far as I could tell this was a religion like those of Earth: myth and storytelling to give explanations to natural phenomena and demystify the inexplicable, as opposed to something objectively true. After all, I already knew what came after death and the existence of the multiverse, as I had experienced it.

  That said, I didn’t voice any contention about the faith or complaints about attending services. The nail that sticks out gets hammered down. Instead, it—like everything—was an opportunity for me to try and learn and grow.

  “Come now, don’t dawdle,” my mother Berrel scolded me as she shoved me out the door on our way to service.

  I suppose I was dragging my feet a bit, I mused. Opportunity to learn and grow it may have been, but it still wasn’t my favorite place to be.

  My father Hildan scooped me up so they could walk a bit faster, since the bell had already rung and we were running late, and even at three years old, my legs were still too short to match their pace.

  My parents were young, at least from my perspective. My father had long brown hair and wore a matching beard, with dark eyes. He was primarily a hunter. He also farmed, though that was true for practically all the able-bodied people in the village. My mother had lighter blonde hair, which was often tied up in a tight bun, and hazel eyes. She was a seamstress. I was their first child, though Berrel was pregnant again now. I had inherited my father’s hair and my mother’s eyes.

  We quietly entered the chapel, where service had already started, and settled into a pew. I glanced around at the already familiar faces of the other villagers, and a few of the children I knew from my mother’s sewing circle waved at me. I waved back. They were good kids, though it was hard to actually form bonds with them when I was an old man inside.

  Service itself was somewhat informative, once I cut through the overly religious nonsense. Naturally, the System itself was attributed to the Five Guardians, the deities of the Faith, but I already knew it was not something so small as to be limited to the “gods and goddesses” of a single universe. I also assumed that this was just one interpretation of this world, limited to this region; as had been the case on Earth, had I been born on the other side of the world, I’d probably have grown up with a different belief system. Still, in their attempts to explain why it was a part of our lives, I was able to glean a little about how things worked from a more practical perspective in this world.

  “The Guardians gifted man the System so that we may strive to earn their blessings,” cantor Umbor sang in one such service. “We grow our bodies, our mind, and our will to achieve skills in their image. May these skills guide us to live lives worthy of their protection.”

  Blah, blah, blah. In summary: everyone could see their own System, and the numerical representation of their three key stats. These stats could be trained individually and would grow as a result. With the requisite stats, it was possible to learn skills that leveraged those stats. These were considered gifts from the Guardians, so in this world, they were guiding lights to our futures.

  It seemed that skill acquisition wasn’t fully understood in this world, which was why it was ascribed to a higher power. In part that was likely due to the fact that everyone’s System was private. Skills could be taught and learned, but sometimes it wasn’t clear why certain pupils failed to learn skills. Sometimes people seemed to randomly acquire skills, as well. These “random” skill gains were often attributed more directly to the Guardians of the Faith, and thus had a tendency to more firmly dictate the direction people lived their lives.

  I had one theory about that, which involved my level. My System clearly quantified my level, separate from my key stats, but as far as I could tell no one else seemed aware of this part of the System. This was not a universe where people actively “leveled up.” Yet, I learned from service that sometimes people would randomly gain one point in each stat, across the board. This was assumed to be a divine gift, like random skills, but it sounded like a possible “level up” bonus to me.

  Levels had to do something beyond just granting stats, since those could be earned from training, or so I figured. I would hopefully learn more if I could gain some levels myself.

  Unlike the games I played in my youth of my first life—memories that were muddled thanks to the minor scouring of my soul as I was drawn towards the Engine of Reincarnation before I acquired my System, but were also dim just from the passage of time and stresses in the latter part of my life—there were no hit points or mana points of any kind on my System.

  I supposed that made sense, since hit points don’t really work in the real world. If minor damage caused a minor drop in HP, repetitive minor damage would eventually drain my HP entirely and kill me even when the wounds and damage shouldn’t. Likewise, if getting stabbed in the brain didn’t cause enough damage to wipe out my HP, then I wouldn’t die when I should. Even with the existence of magic, reality had certain limitations.

  Not having MP in order to use magic was a bit more surprising to me, but when I started to think about it like real-world stamina, I came to understand it. With physical stamina, I could easily move a light weight over and over without much issue, only failing after a tremendous number of repetitions, but I could only move a very heavy weight a few times before growing so fatigued that I would fail. Even then, once rested, I could likely move it again. As I grew my overall strength, the amount I could move increased. I assumed casting magic might be the same. As I grew in Will, the number of times I could cast “lighter” magic would increase, and eventually I would be able to cast “heavier” magic. My stats would quantify this to some degree, but my state of mind, health and energy would likely all be a factor as well.

  If all that were the case, then training Body and Will would be fairly straightforward, at least once I had skills that let me use my mana. Training the Mind stat, on the other hand, seemed more difficult. Gaining levels would likely increase my stats by 1, if my theory about divine gifts was accurate—and since I didn’t really believe in gods and goddesses, it was the best fit I could figure—but Mind would always be my weakest stat if I couldn’t figure out how to train it directly.

  Meditation and study seemed like the best fit for training my Mind, but study was a difficult prospect in this world when my village of Redding was mostly laborers and farmers. Books weren’t widely available, and even if they were, I was still a young child, so access was limited. I often meditated and tried to train my focus, since I couldn’t train through study. At other times, I practiced memorizing whatever I could or tried to hone my perception of what was happening around me.

  Eventually, it paid off. Sometime in my fourth year of life in this world, I finally saw my Mind stat tick up from 1 to 2.

  As a proof of concept, I was pretty satisfied. It had been a dull year, but once my little sister Torra was born, my parents had less time to fuss over me and left me to my own devices more and more frequently, meaning I could train without question. My physical body had grown, and I felt a bit more confident about starting to train my Body stat more aggressively as well, now that I had raised my Mind stat.

  For normal children, time seemed to pass by very slowly. Each day was a significant percentage of their total life and lived experiences, so every day, hour, or even minute could feel like an eternity. Unlike normal children, I had already lived a full life. Where a day might feel like a lot of time to a child, to me it was just one of around thirty thousand days I had already lived. Just as they had towards the end of my last life, the days passed quickly in the youth of my new one, and before I knew it, I was six years old.