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You aren't entirely sure what is happening. The last thing you remembered before this was bright lights. Which must have belonged to the truck that hit you. Weirdly you couldn't move but you could feel pressure all over your body.

You wondered how long it would take your consciousness to go away. If that's what this is. If you are stuck like this for the rest of eternity, which given the fact you are still stubbornly conscious seems like might be the case, it will be pretty depressing.

Suddenly the pressure on you crushingly increases and you feel like you are moving.

What happens over the next few hours is something you will not forget. It is also not something you realised was happening for some time.

You were being born.

The details are hazy. When you open your eyes whilst you can see, making sense of what you were seeing was an entirely different manner but you didn't hold it against yourself. It was the first time you were aware whilst being born it was a lot to handle.

It did become apparent rather quickly that you were crying. You thought this was understandable and seemed like the thing to do at the time. Being wiped down was deeply uncomfortable. Whoever did the wiping was very focused on efficiency and less so on the fact that your skin had never actually been touched before and was, to put mildly, sensitive.

After that experience was done you felt yourself being wrapped in a pleasantly warm and soft fabric. You assumed this would lead to you being handed to one of your, parents? It was odd to think that given you remembered your original; first; previous life's; actual parents? You weren't sure which term fit. You had no idea what was happening, was this a time loop, did your mind get sent back into your baby self? Or was this the good old fashioned reincarnation type deal. You kinda assumed some figure was supposed to talk you through this.

As much as you tried, it was hard to not realise that though all of your pondering no one had checked on you. The room was loud and everyone was speaking a language you didn't understand. That could be because of the baby of the situation or it was just a language you didn't know.

Where was everyone?

You thought babies were supposed to be given to their mothers to hold.

Someone appeared in your view and stared at you. It was a man about your age. Your previous age? He was mid to late twenties. Could be your parent you supposed but seemed young, probably a doctor or nurse. He reached down and scooped you up, as he did you noticed he was glowing softly.

At that point you realised you had stopped crying which babies weren't supposed to do this quickly. You started crying again and felt a reassuring hand on your back. For a baby with a baby brain it would have been reassuring, for you with your adult brain in a baby body it was rather disconcerting to have a hand as big as your back patting you.

He spoke softly into your ear then cradled you in his arms. You presumed you were about to be handed to a parent but you weren't. In fact you were taken out of the room.

This seemed very odd to you. Though you didn't really understand the whole process so maybe this is normal. The man put you down into cot and a woman appeared. You didn't think a woman who just given birth would be moving around this quickly. So you guessed she was a nurse.

You tried to look around for the man but couldn't. You tried your arms and legs and all that got you was utterly uncontrolled flailing. It took a few panicked moments before you remembered you were a baby. Just because your brain is an adult doesn't mean your body is.

This lead in itself to something you were not expecting to experience. You didn't have control over your body, or its functions.

You put the next few minutes into the memory hole and made a mental note to potty train yourself as soon as humanly possible.

With that complete you were then feed and put back in your cot. Against your expectations you almost immediately fell asleep.

Time passing as a baby is, to be understated, boring as hell. While the toys you were given would no doubt keep a baby occupied they did not work on you. Thankfully after, what you think was a month, the people who cared for you figured that out as well and your time was occupied by people talking. You had a faint hope you would understand them but in the end it did turn out they were speaking a language you didn't know.

With nothing much to occupy your time you got to work on figuring some things out.

First. You hadn't gone back into your baby self. The man you are assuming is your father does not looking like your original father. That did not however mean you didn't go back in time because you couldn't help but notice a total absence of electrics. All the lighting was by candles and there was no indication there was any source of electricity. You also had wet nurses so it was difficult to nail down a time period since both electronics and powered baby milk or the ability to store breast milk itself was relatively new.

Second. The only people you saw were the man who you were assuming was your father, and the various women who looked after you. You were pretty sure none of them were your mother. After some more time you put together the roster and assumed they were all wet nurses. Where your mother was you had no idea but her absence did certainly lead you to one conclusion.

Third. There is magic. Whether it is related to the glowing that everyone has you don't know but presumed is the case. The way you confirmed that magic exists was entirely accidental. During a moment where you were desperately hungry you attempted to get your nurses attention and explain the situation. It was rather difficult since you couldn't talk and were still shaky in your limb control. She did not grasp your intention and instead offered you a rattle. Your inability to communicate finally got to you and you threw the rattle, embedding it into the roof. The man you assume to be your father appeared shortly after and looked rather proud of you.

Fourth. You absolutely had to get some sort of control over your body. So while your were not being observed, a baby methodically testing their limbs might be a bit too weird, you did just that. Trying to make incremental movements to your limbs. Initially it did no good. Any attempt was met by wild flailing but after some time you did manage to get some degree of control. You couldn't walk or anything but you could more or less control the flailing.

So to sum up, you don't know what, when, why, or how you got here. And beyond this room the where was pretty shaky as well. Still you are both alive and possibly have the rest of another life to figure things outs. Pretty high on that list was going to be figuring out the why.

You remembered in your previous life pondering what being reincarnated into a new world would be like. In retrospect it was a lot more waiting around than you thought.

"Adequate." Your instructors words were encouraging.

As the boulder twice your size turned to dust in front of you, you tired to think of how to improve. You were ten years old and were still just adequate at everything you attempted. Every skill you took up you learned at what you thought was an unusually rapid pace. No one made any comment about it so you put it down to just being in this world, magic does enhance physical ability so it seemed reasonable to assume it enhanced mental ones as well. Initially you were disappointed, every talent and advantage you thought your previous life would give you and you were still just an adequate specimen.

In your previous life you would have found that demoralising, in this one it was perfect, it meant you always had room to grow yourself and your magic. Your father helped greatly in that respect. He always encouraged you, the moment you showed even a passing interest in a subject he would find someone to teach you all they could.

Looking at your hand you patted away the rock particles that were clinging to it. Initially you were surprised by how naturally you fell into thinking of him as your father and yourself as his son. While it was literally true you were still an adult mind so falling into that relationship so easily took you by surprise. Over the years your relationship grew remarkably well. You learned you a part of some sort of aristocracy, though your father never went into any detail of how your family fit into it. That aristocracy may however be a problem. Your family estate seemed to be isolated so, as yet, you had not interacted with any other nobility. Nor did you have any friends. You were so focused on developing yourself you hadn't had the time to feel lonely, and besides there were still staff members and teachers you interacted with. Honestly given your minds age you doubted you'd really be able to make friends your chronological age so not feeling lonely suited you rather well.

Looking at the falling rock dust you contemplated improvement. The spell itself was something you had come up with entirely independently, thinking it would be impressive. A spell that destabilizes the atom structure of an object making it disintegrate. When you had showed your instructor on a rock you could hold in you hand she seemed surprised. For a moment you thought you had done something then figured out the surprise must be from you only being able to destablise a palm sized rock. You'd gotten the idea after repeated failing to enchant or imbue anything with magic. Every time you tired the subject object did one of three things, violently detonate, catch fire, or just melt. You figured you'd lean into the failure rather than keep failing.

Bigger is always an option but at a certain point it just becomes redundant. In theory you could destablise a mountain but all that mass would still be there so it would likely just stay as a mountain.

So, not bigger.

You looked at your instructor who patted her pants to get rid of some dust. Another thing you learned in this world is that unlike your previous one, women had a much stronger presence. Almost all of your teachers had been women, though you hadn't engaged in any sort of political examination so you didn't know how far this gender flip went.

Why not try and control the destablisation? So far you had just been disintegrating the entirety of an object, focusing the disintegration held potential. But how to do it.

You looked around your training ground. It wasn't on the estate's main lands instead a quarter days journey into the forest that surrounded it on three sides. Given the destructive nature of today's work you figured being around buildings or causing a dozen trees to fall over could be disastrous. Looking around the only objects left to experiment on are the trees. You had been **** to use this spell on them. Disintegrating a tree also includes its root system and that seemed unsafe.

You walked over to the closest one and tried to focus on just the bark. If you could get enough control to do this then you could refine it.

Reaching out a hand and running it over the wooden surface you concentrate on the texture. Pushing your magic though it and pulling it back over and over until you got a good understanding of how it moved through the bark but not the tree beneath. Then you pulled out all the magic, taking the atom's covalent bonds with it. You were trying to keep it small just around your hand but you misjudged. As you stood there a cascade event happened and the bark turned to dust. spreading from your hand print it was a matter of seconds before the entire tree was stripped bare.

"Well at least it worked." You mutter as the bark dust rained down on you.

"Young Master?" The concern in your teachers voice was followed by her appearance at your side. "Perhaps that is enough for today." There wasn't even a hint that what you had done had impressed her in any way. Yet another adequate showing. How can you improve?

After that day your father restricted you from venturing too far from the estate. You couldn't blame him really, if you had been any more careless it mightn't have just been the bark that disintegrated. Being crushed by a tree you made fall would be a rather inauspicious end. Also it was nearing winter and your academic pursuits were about to move away from the practical anyway.

It had become apparent several years ago that summer was for activity, winter was for huddling near a fire and learning the less physically demanding of things, though your father gave you freedom to explore any skill that took your fancy. In your first years of competence that meant mathematics.

A part of your thought process had been that this could lead to some level beyond adequate. If nothing else you had thought to blow someones mind with pi, or that you could steal Pythagorean theorem for yourself. All that did was get the expected congratulations of averageness. Honestly that could mean a few things. From it already existed and apparently every pre-teen figured it out, or no one understood the implications of the formula. It could also be that you just didn't know the theorem well enough to actually explain it beyond a surface level. It made you decide to try and compare this world's current state to your previous world's history, hoping to intuit some indication of why you were here if not to steal a few mathematicians ideas.

Technologically the world, or at least this part of it was at your best guess early medieval. While it was impossible to effectively equate your previous life's history with your current world, given magic and how it unquestionable impacted the state of this world you did your best. One of the biggest indications happened when your father had taken you to observe the sowing of that years crops. It was an event that solidified the reality of your adequacy. Ten women simply split the earth and men followed planting the seeds by floating them out of their bag and planting them in an instant.

The absence of the heavy plow was clearly due to it's irrelevance which could mean this world might be technologically stagnant. Better technology was developed in your previous world to cope with deficiencies in food production compared to population and to improve combat effectiveness. In this world that need was moot. You didn't need a better plow if you can split the earth with a wave of your hand and who needs a gun when you can throw a mountain at someone.

Aside from that the only books your father had or could acquire for you were all hand written. Mostly they were biography's or clearly biased histories. Interestingly you never received any religious texts. Whether because of your father's choosing not to bring them to you or that they did not exist you did not know. You guess that since people can throw fireballs, religion may not have as strong a hold in this world as your previous. But hand written meant no printing press.

That had given you an idea. You may be adequate at magic and academic studies, but you had something no one else did. Knowledge. So this winter you decided to test it. The most basic of which was to build a simple steam engine. You thought of a printing press but it could be a bit too much. Revolutionizing the written word might be too much for a ten year old, you should at least wait until you were an adult. It also gave you the chance to work at the smithy, something you had been curious about even in your previous life.

The steam engine was a bust. Though impossible, like the mathematics, to figure out if that was due to lack of grasping the bigger picture or that it is simply a technology like a heavy plow, wasn't needed.

It did however make you consider how magic would effect things. If you can make a mundane steam engine, could you make a magic one. The idea then led you find out if materials were better or worse at containing magic. A part of you had hoped that it would turn out your previous failures at enchanting were down to materials failing rather than your own. This quickly diverted you from the magic steam engine and you spent the rest of the winter trying to figure out some way to empirically measure different objects magical properties.

You were terrible at it. No matter what you tried every object, every material, every combination of materials either fell apart, exploded, or burst into flames which was interesting since it told you that magic excited the atoms of some materials more than others.

You father eventually brought in another tutor who talked you through everything. Yes different material did have different magical compatibilities. Some were better at enchanting, other at channeling, a few at focusing, and the rarest at storing. You were just fundamentally unable to put any of your magic into something else.

This teacher also taught you about the ever present glowing everyone was surrounded by. You had figured out how to turn yours off on your own when you were one or two years old. Everyone you looked at had their glow closely held around themselves but since you couldn't see your glow just kinda feel its edges you knew your extended far beyond the norm. With some focus you were able to pull your own towards you but given that everyone who looked at you had to squint you figured you were supposed to make it transparent. No body made any comment about it but being constantly squinted at was unpleasant so you pulled your aura closer and had just ignored it since.

Turns out you were missing a rather significant part of the world. The glow is called aura. It is cast off magic, that which cannot be or is chosen not to be contained inside you, like steam off hot water. It is utterly harmless and largely up to the person to control. You teacher was able to shape hers into numerous patterns and colours. Often she would radiate beautifully hued ethereal flowers. You were not even close to that competent. Focusing all of yourself, all you were able to do was form your aura into an ambiguous blob that almost totally obscured you.

On a slightly depressing note you did learn that your ability to simply switch off you aura was unique. It was something you were told made you not just average but were unable to think of in a positive light. It meant you had so little aura compared to even the average you could totally conceal it.

With the winter passing and you trying to recover from that depression by doing other things you only passingly considered your magic steam engine again, instead you focused on the summer. You were to begin your swordsmanship training, your father finally accepting you were old enough to being.