Reincarnation (1)
Waaah! Waaah!
A newborn baby's piercing wail burrowed into my consciousness and dragged it up from the depths of sleep.
Setting aside how loud it was, there was something about the sound that stirred an inexplicable unease. Worse still, the room seemed to be sealed shut — the sound waves bounced off the walls, filling the space completely and driving the unpleasantness to new heights.
God, that's obnoxious. What is the kid's mother even doing?
I decided to just close my eyes and let time solve the problem.
But strangely enough, the raw ache creeping into my throat and the sluggish, sedated heaviness weighing down my body refused to grant me sleep.
Ha. Who on earth keeps—huh?
Unable to bear the swelling discomfort any longer, I finally opened my eyes. Might as well get a look at whose kid this was.
What greeted me was a world so blurry I couldn't make out a single thing clearly.
Eyes must still be asleep.
A perfectly reasonable logical conclusion. I had no idea how long I'd been out, but it felt like no small amount of time had passed, so I calmly waited for my vision to recover, refusing to panic.
However, after a little while, when my eyes had recovered at least somewhat, what they captured was a reality difficult to believe.
"Eh?"
Even peering left and right through the hazy blur, I could make out short, stubby limbs. A head so heavy it was hard just to move properly. The warm, toasty body heat unique to infants, and soft, pliant skin. And swaddling me — clothing made of some gentle, yielding fabric.
Every piece of evidence pointed to a single fact.
I've... become a baby?
Not a vivid nightmare — an undeniable reality. The shock of it was enough to stop my crying entirely.
Damn it. What the hell is this all of a sudden...? Oh! Right. I definitely...
Only then did my experiences come springing back from the far reaches of memory. Death in a traffic accident. And a chase through a strange space.
When the compressed memories flooded in all at once, the headache alone was almost unbearable.
Waaah—!
A baby's body is honest. It responded to the pain instantly, and the crying I had just managed to stop burst out again, entirely against my will.
I tried desperately to hold back the most unwelcome sound in the world, but my body, so devotedly loyal to instinct, simply would not listen.
Fine. Cry. Just cry it out.
After a good long wail, I'd surely calm down.
In a strangely detached state of mind, I surrendered myself to instinct and squirmed about, bawling.
Ooooh... hnnghh...
I cried until my throat grew raw.
They say a child's cry is a request for help from those around them, don't they? I wasn't sure whether that theory extended to newborns, but in any case, once the crying yielded no results, my body naturally shut its mouth.
Wait, is no one coming?
When a baby wails like this, someone usually shows up — yet after a good long stretch of crying, not a single soul had deigned to appear. This didn't seem like a particularly good environment.
Consoling my hiccupping body, I looked around. "Around" meant little more than a narrow, cramped cradle — narrow enough that even a baby's body felt confined — but I managed to gather some information nonetheless.
Beep... bweet...
The single most striking detail was this sound. Having lived in modern society, the mechanical signal tone was deeply familiar to me — audible, just barely, in the background.
It was coming from the floor beneath my back. Twisting my body this way and that to wedge myself toward the corner, I finally managed to glimpse what it was.
I knew it — a machine.
Unlike the rest of the cradle, which was featureless and perfectly smooth, this section of the floor had something like heating coils laid into it. Rolling myself back into position, I felt fresh warmth spreading up through my whole body. Apparently it doubled as a warming unit.
Technology roughly on par with the Earth of the era I used to live in.
Sweet jackpot~
At the very least, I wouldn't be born into the Middle Ages and suffer through life the hard way.
Fsss—
Just as I was chuckling to myself and imagining my bright future, the cradle's firmly sealed lid suddenly opened.
Along with a faint hiss of vapor, the stale, stuffy air escaped and fresh air flowed in. Backlit against the light, I couldn't see clearly, but someone leaning over the cradle lifted me out with careful hands and cradled me against their chest.
I was beaming brightly, hoping to make a good first impression...
Finally, time to see my parents' faces... huh?!
The moment the backlight cleared and the face above me was revealed, my expression froze solid.
It was as if someone had peeled the skin straight off a human face, leaving grotesque blood vessels and muscle utterly exposed. And the eyes — hanging on by the barest margin in all that wreckage — amplified the terror a hundredfold.
"Hnngh!"
When that ghastly, goblin-like face drew closer, I finally lost control of myself and wet the bed.
...
No matter how I look at it, I think I'm doomed.
Cradled in the android's arms as it fed me baby food, I sighed inwardly.
Thankfully, the thing that had opened the cradle and lifted me out was no monster. Just an ordinary(?) bipedal android. The problem was... its body was an absolute wreck, from what must have been years without maintenance.
The face I'd mistaken for a monster's at first was simply the aftermath of its outer shell falling away and exposing the components underneath.
Ahem! Well, it's kind to me at least.
The android washed my dirtied body thoroughly, then filled a baby bottle with formula and began feeding me. Its joints creaked a little — apparently not in the best condition — but it moved with a delicacy suited to a baby's fragile body, and occasionally patted my back gently to coax up a burp.
Setting aside the nightmarishly hideous face straight out of a horror film, the android behaved just like a mother.
...I felt a little guilty continuing to call it a robot or an android, so for now, let's call it the Nanny.
It's not like I can call it Mom, right?
Once my hunger and sleepiness were somewhat satisfied, I finally had the mental breathing room to think deeply about my situation.
What exactly is this place...? Nothing about the atmosphere feels right.
From my vantage in the Nanny's arms, this appeared to be a kind of newborn nursery. Rows upon rows of identical cradles stretched out in a line — dozens of them. But unlike mine, which now stood wide open, all the others were sealed shut tight.
Perhaps because the Nanny maintained them, not a speck of dust could be seen, but the cradles — powered off entirely and grown cold — sent a chill crawling up my spine.
Apparently, I was the only baby here.
...No matter how I turned it over, I couldn't reach a pleasant conclusion. To begin with, it was strange that an android hovering on the edge of total malfunction was serving as a nursery robot at all. The rest of the equipment — clean, but clearly old — looked deeply suspicious too.
"Bwaaah!"
Lost in one thought after another, I realized my stomach had filled to bursting. I spat out the bottle, and the Nanny obediently collected it, wiped the formula dribbling from my mouth, and tucked me back into my original cradle.
The lid closed again, and a warm temperature — different from the relatively cool outside air — settled over me.
Sleepy...
It was astonishing that I could be sleepy again after all that sleeping. But I couldn't afford to nod off now. There was something far more important to do.
Checking out my talents!
The talents I had snatched in that strange space I arrived at after dying in the car accident. The girl had reclaimed a large portion of them, sure — but I'd still managed to escape with a considerable haul.
Right after regaining consciousness I'd been thoroughly disoriented, but the memories trickling back were teaching me how to handle it.
"Whew..."
When I focused my mind inward, my latent talents began to surface one after another in my heart's eye. Not a status window — a talent window, I supposed. And since it played out in my mindscape rather than through any visual effect, I could see it clearly regardless of my blurry eyes.
A wondrous sensation that no one of the five senses could express. Being my first attempt, I fumbled a little, but before long it gradually took shape within me.
[!#$@$@]
[%#^@!!!!]
[ADSA1%@]
.
.
.
...What is all this?
Heart pounding, I had examined my inner talent window — only to be struck speechless by the rows of vividly rendered, thoroughly broken characters.
Even when I scrolled the list downward with my thoughts, endless strings of corrupted text stretched on and on. And when I poked at them, not a single one was considerate enough to pop up a helpful description.
This is a problem...
What's more, the damaged talents didn't even seem to be activatable.
I'm guessing getting attacked was the issue?
My soul, which had taken a merciless beating from that unidentified girl before reincarnation. Given that, it made sense that the talents clinging to it weren't in one piece. Maybe I should count myself lucky I salvaged even fragments at all.
Still, it wasn't as though there was no solution at all.
At the very bottom of my consciousness — in a corner of it I couldn't control — I could sense energy pooled together. Delicate, and for that very reason, pure. A primal power that felt as though it could be used somehow, some way. Amid this absurd situation, it offered a single hint.
Some kind of points? Ones that could restore broken talents?
Zhlick...
As if to prove my guess correct without even needing an experiment, a new number etched itself into the very end of the staggeringly long list of talents.
> [1,012P]
How considerate of it.
Though that oddly precise number feels suspicious.
It was a peculiar figure, to say the least, for a "benefit" supposedly granted to me.
Hmm... what should I do? I can't tell what's what, so I'm reluctant to spend the points recklessly.
Considering the sheer, breath-stealing volume of talents on that list, restoring a random one was essentially gambling.
Thankfully there were no losing tickets — efficient growth was off the table, though.
...I'll put off spending points for now. I don't need to just ye—huh?
As I was sweeping my gaze over my talents with that lingering regret, something strange caught my eye: one talent, perfectly restored.
What's this one about?
...
Life here was simplicity itself. Eating, sleeping, and excreting — those three things chased each other's tails in an endless loop. Still, the Nanny was fulfilling its duties to the fullest, so there wasn't a single inconvenience. Thanks to that, I got to fully savor the baby lifestyle: doing absolutely nothing and living purely by instinct.
"Enhanced Human, hm... seems to be an innate talent. Something like a genetically engineered body, maybe? I really hope they didn't touch my lifespan, though..."
I strolled the newborn nursery in tiny shoes the Nanny had custom-made for me. In this place without clocks or any distinction between day and night, tracking the passage of time was a hopeless endeavor — but by my own reckoning, it took only a few days for my body to achieve a perfectly stable gait.
Because of that, a new item — the daily walk — joined my simple routine. And as a bonus, my previously blurred vision had fully returned.
"Status window."
Phat!
The moment I murmured it quietly as I walked slowly, a hologram-like window rose up before my eyes. At first, I'd had to close my eyes and meditate just to glimpse my talent window. But after repeating the process dozens of times and growing familiar with it, it now materialized in front of me as something only I could see.
Talent window was technically the more accurate term, but out of a little personal romance, I'd decided to go with "status window."
I'd just always wanted to say it once.
Anyway, careful not to bump into the other cradles, I looked down at my status window. There was only one thing on my mind right now.
The points.
> [1,012P]
"Yep. Not a single point more."