Shades of the New World

Chapter 2: The Newborn and His Past

In a room filled with adults making relieved faces, a small life finally drew its first breath.

The newborn could feel himself being held in the arms of a woman as she gently caressed his head.

'She must be my new mother' the child guessed.

"The baby lives! He came back to life! Oh, blessings of the Empress!" cried a girl next to him and then he saw a silhouette of a burgundy-haired man hurriedly bringing out a brightly glowing blue rock. The light of the rock flickered and then dimmed by a slight amount, and then he saw the man emit a cold green shine. He felt a foreign energy run through his body, almost like some gaze was peeking through his everything.

The man nodded slightly and tried to call out to another man, but the latter's panicked voice interrupted the man, who was holding the now dim rock.

"What?! Miracles do exist! The Empress' blessings for this child! Aran!" the child's new father bellowed.

"I have checked his state through the World of Healing, don't worry. I can't understand how such a thing can happen, but the world is whimsical and miraculous. Let us thank the Empress for her benevolence," the mage named Aran explained.

"Lora, hear that? He's fine, the child's fine. You can rest easy now, bless your soul"

A soft acknowledging sound came from the woman holding the child as she struggled to keep her eyes open, but her arms hold the child so tightly and dearly, that one could never imagine her dropping it. The panicking father noticed the woman's weakened state and exclaimed again: "Mage Aran!"

"She's just tired, let her sleep. Elina, take the baby from her," the mage said to the girl who cried out, and she took the child from his mother's clutches.

"Yes, Lord Mage"

The newborn couldn't understand anything they were saying, but he didn't have to worry that much, since extreme fatigue suddenly hit his mind and he fell asleep soon afterwards.

***

Soon after the child fell asleep, its father and the mage were talking about some matters.

"The child is fine. I thought there would be something wrong with him, because of his apparent rebirth, but I couldn't really find anything wrong with him even with the help of magic. There were cases of certain parasites inhabiting newborn babies, but I found no trace of such occurrence in the child's body, so it is fine. I'll be back tomorrow to check on him again. May the Empress bless your boy with wisdom and health," the mage said.

"Thank you Aran, we will definitely repay you for all the help you have given us," the child's father replied.

"Don't bother. My spells have done nothing. It was only the whims of fate that granted your child his life back. Let the mother and child rest. Oh and also, the child seems to feel the glow of 'mana'. I'll bring a few lodestones tomorrow and check if he can perceive mana properly. But I'm quite sure you will have a talented mage in your family, Theor"

The mage's words shook the father, Theor, as the latter hurriedly replied.

"Are you sure? If that is true then our future will be set! I must tell my father when he comes back. I'm sure he will be overjoyed, he was always reluctant to leave Lora with me, at least he'll see that I have some good blood in my lineage."

Aran chuckled and continued.

"Don't get your hopes too high, I might've been wrong"

"How can you be wrong on anything related to magic? You're a mage of Arcvallen! Even when we were small, idiot children, you were always the smarter one. Sometimes, I still can't believe you came back to us," said Theor, shaking his head.

"Haha, I'm too softhearted to endure the plots of big cities, so life in this tiny town is the one that fits me the most. Besides, it's not like this place doesn't have any attractions"

Theor showed a knowing smile when he heard that.

"Hah, you and your Liza. Who thought the arrogant mage apprentice who left for the big world would come back for his childhood sweetheart. She refused every man that asked her for five years! You don't know how lucky you are. How is she, by the way? She just had little Arza, didn't she?"

Aran made a troubled face and continued.

"Never better, but Arza is such a pain in the ass. I never thought I would find something more troublesome than my academy graduation paper"

Theor laughed and said.

"Haha, if you didn't want the trouble, you shouldn't have had the brat in the first place"

"True that. Well, see you tomorrow, take care of Lora"

After Aran left, Theor couldn't help but be happy.

'If we get a mage in our family, then our future is practically set in stone. I won't even have to worry about anything other than his growth. I just hope the upper echelons of the kingdom will not send him to some meaningless war'

'I'll tell father and we'll buy introductory magic books. How do these things work in the first place? I must teach the kid how to read first. Damn, the little thing's got me all excited'

'I'll also have to talk with Lora when she wakes up. I heard her call him Eviendra. We can't have our little mage live with a foreign name. It would be fine if he was to be a hunter like his grandfather, but not if he's a mage'

Theor thought with glee while happily humming some random tune.

The day after, the newborn child woke up and found himself in his mother's hug. His mother's most prominent feature was her long, dark blonde hair that continued on to her shoulders. It was naturally wavy, decorating her overall appearance greatly. Her face was thin and round, and she had this goody-two-shoes atmosphere to her.

His father, on the other hand, was a slightly plump man with a constant smile on his face. With his burly black hair and a shining row of white teeth, he looked extremely amiable to the eyes.

He couldn't see too well, since his eyes haven't yet adjusted to the light, but his parents seemed to be quite young. As far as he could tell, he didn't have any other siblings in the house other than a teenage girl, but he could tell that she wasn't his sister, based on how his parents treated the teen. The teen had freckles on her face, and a short, thin hair.

So perhaps he was the first child of a young new family?

As for his house, it was a bit on the empty side. He could only see the terribly solid wooden bed that his mother usually left him on, a weathered wooden table with a chipped edge, a glass window with a wooden barrier, a small chair with a tilted back support and a stack of clothes folded neatly on a wooden platform.

Although every furniture looked old and used, the house itself was made very neatly. You could see that the wall with the window looked very clean and orderly, the limestone binder having basically no dents or rough spots. And the wooden details on the wall that separated his room from the others were so perfectly symmetric, he'd sometimes think that every wood in this world grew in the exact same manner.

Although his new house was in a bit of a poor state, it had a warm and cozy atmosphere, so he couldn't really complain.

As for himself, he seemed to have stabilized completely. That woman back on Earth did something to him when he had a breakdown and it calmed him down. But he could tell that it was just a temporary fix and that he would probably go crazy soon after, but this time, he felt like his reincarnation completely cured him with no aftereffects. Perhaps it had something to do with how his soul shifting into an entirely new body.

But the newborn himself wasn't really worried about it. Instead, he was focused on his future in this World. 

'Don't you usually use the information you get from your previous world to get rich and powerful, then live a life with no worries? Oh, there's probably a Demon Lord or something that needs to be defeated, he-heh.'

'That's not good. I don't want my town to be the catalyst that pushes me to my hero's journey. I'm also afraid I'll ditch the journey halfway through, since I would definitely find such a journey way too much trouble.'

'Why am I even thinking about slaying a goddamn Demon Lord? Even if there was one, I'll do my utmost best to steer away from such trouble.'

The newborn was regretful he spent his last century reading fiction and didn't read things related to technology and whatnot. If he was a reincarnated quantum scientist and not a useless ghost, he would probably be thinking about atoms and particles, instead of random Demon Lords.

He could probably become some sort of tycoon here with all the convenient items and inventions that he could introduce. Well, the idea was still there, so maybe he would still be able to do something about it. At least he would know which ideas would fail and which of them would prosper.

You would think that normally, if you could live for three hundred years, you would become a smart and educated person, knowledgeable in various fields and professions. Well, you would probably be right if the person who lived for such a long time could interact with others.

Humans are social animals. If no one else could acknowledge all your hard work, one would just fall into an endless pit of lethargy. Waiting for the next thing to relieve their boredom.

When he wasn't wandering some battlefield, or cemetery in hopes of chancing upon a lingering spirit like himself, his usual pastime was to spend days in various entertainment establishments like cinemas or libraries; or he would stalk some unknowing person, who he found interesting, or just had a random crush on.

The other not-so-happy-times... his feeble mind wasn't able to take the pressure of loneliness, thus he let his mind fall into insanity. He didn't know what he did during these lapses, but he always found himself in various interesting places after he regained his sanity.

He once found himself practically shivering to 'death' on top of a random mountain in the Middle East. As a spirit, he couldn't die, but he could definitely feel things, so that descent from the mountain was not something he wished to redo.

'What the hell was I doing back then?' he would think.

He also once found his sanity back on a skyscraper construction site, running on a steel beam hundreds of meters high in the air. He remembered that he suddenly panicked and almost fell down, but managed to find his balance in the end. Later he found that he had become a parkour professional. He didn't know how, he could simply knew exactly what to do with his body in certain situations.

'What the hell was I doing up there?'

He asked himself such questions so many times; he had lost count of it all.

He didn't know why his madness came in a form like that. A long period of sanity and a lapse of insanity that he could not remember any part of, no matter how much he tried to. He figured it was a way for his consciousness to take a rest somehow, so he didn't mind it that much. It wasn't like he was hurt in any way, in the first place.

'For me, my three hundred years was just a story of a man entertaining himself with anything or anyone he found interesting and occasionally going insane' the man snickered at his own joke inside his mind.

As the child continued to entertain himself in his head like he always did for a large portion of his undeath, his parents' discussion interrupted his ruminations.

The child tried to guess the contents of their conversation, since they seemed to be talking about something quite important. His father was trying to convince his mom of something, but she was adamantly refusing.

The child couldn't understand a word they were saying, so he just silently watched them as they argued.

'I should start comprehending the language in about two to three months, right? How long do these things take anyway?' he pondered.

The most he realized was that his mom's name was Lora, while his father's name was Theor. He also sometimes heard them call someone named Elina. Their names sounded a bit Western, but the language was anything but. Also, his name seemed to be Evindre or something since that was the first thing he heard after he was born.