It had been three years since he had been reincarnated into his new world.
The bedroom they had given him was enormous.
High vaulted ceilings painted with faint golden constellations that seemed to shimmer when the morning light hit them, windows tall enough to let in whole slabs of sunlight that stretched across the polished marble floor like golden carpets.
His legs were short and chubby. But his mind was not a toddler's mind. It was sharp, and impatient.
He had spent the first year mostly watching and listening, trying to get a grasp on language and trying to understand those around him while he pretended to be a normal baby. The second year he had started speaking simple phrases.
Now, in year three, he had gotten bored of just lying around and acting like a toddler. So now it was time to go and explore.
He waddled to the heavy oak door of his room and pushed with both tiny hands, grunting at the effort as the door creaked open just wide enough for his small body to slip through. The hallway beyond stretched like a marble canyon that made him feel even tinier than he already was.
Crystal chandeliers hung every twenty paces, their light catching on the House Vace crest carved into every column and sending tiny rainbows dancing across the floor. Somewhere far off he could hear servants moving about their morning tasks, the soft clink of silverware being polished, the distant laughter of his sister Nadia playing in the courtyard. No one was looking for him yet.
Which was fantastic for him.
He waddled forward on bare feet, his short legs making the cold stone feel even colder under his tiny soles. The mansion was a labyrinth of endless corridors and towering doors, but it wasn't hard to navigate through it all due to the fact he had been through these exact hallways before, albeit while being carried.
He kept his steps quiet.
The library doors were twice his height and carved with swirling runes he still couldn't read. He had to stand on tiptoe, stretch his little arms as high as they would go, and shove with his whole body to crack one open just wide enough to slip through. Inside, the smell of old paper and polished wood rolled over him like a wave, warm and inviting. Shelves climbed at least three stories.
This place was huge.
Sunlight slanted through tall windows onto long reading tables covered in neat stacks of scrolls and tomes. A single librarian sat at the far desk, head bent over a ledger. She never looked up.
Nasir waddled straight for the children's section in the back corner. The books here were lower, thicker, and filled with bright illustrations exactly as he had hoped. He dragged a heavy tome off the bottom shelf, grunting again as he hauled it across the floor with both arms, his tiny legs working hard to keep up. Then he climbed onto a cushioned window seat—using his elbows and knees because his short legs couldn't quite reach—and opened the book across his lap.
The language was still new on his tongue, but the pictures made it easy. He had been soaking up spoken words for three years now, catching fragments from his parents' conversations, from the tutors who came to teach Nadia simple rhymes, from the servants who chattered while changing his bedding. But reading was different. Reading was the key that would unlock everything else.
He traced the large, flowing letters on the first page with one small finger, mouthing the unfamiliar shapes under his breath until they started to feel familiar. The book was a simple primer meant for children, full of colorful drawings of animals, fruits, and household objects. He pointed at a picture of a red apple and sounded out the word beneath it slowly, carefully. "A…p…ple." He repeated it three times, matching the sound to the memory of his mother saying the word while offering him a slice during snack time. It clicked.
He grinned, the expression small and private on his round toddler face.
He spent the next hour like that, page after page. A picture of a horse led to the word for "steed," then the longer compound word for "warhorse" that appeared in a later illustration of knights. He sounded each one out, whispering so quietly that even he could barely hear himself. Flipping pages with his chubby hands, committing the alphabet to memory one curving letter at a time. The runes on the library door outside started to make sense now; he could pick out the House Vace crest symbol and the word for "library" carved beneath it.
By the time he had worked through three different picture books his head was buzzing with new vocabulary. He understood basic nouns, simple verbs, and even a few connecting words that let him string short sentences together in his mind. He closed the last book, slid off the seat with a little hop, and waddled back to return each one exactly where he had found it. Then he pulled down a slightly more advanced volume, one with fewer pictures and more short paragraphs beneath them.
He climbed back onto the cushion and attacked it with the same focused determination.
He kept going until the midday bells rang through the estate, their deep tones vibrating through the stone floors and up into his tiny legs. By then he had the basic structure of the written language locked in his mind. He could read simple sentences. He could sound out new words from context.
He slipped back out of the library the same way he had come, waddling through the long halls on his short legs.
Back in his oversized room he climbed onto the giant bed, again using elbows and knees, and sat on the edge. The language part was done for today. Now it was time for the real prize he had spotted in the children's section: the books about power.
He closed his eyes. He found the warm knot behind his sternum almost immediately. The core. It had been there since he could remember, faint and waiting.
He pulled down the thickest mana primer he had managed to drag over earlier and opened it across his lap again. The first page was exactly what he had been waiting for.
First page: a simple diagram of a glowing orb inside a child's chest labeled "Core." Arrows showed energy flowing outward. He traced the lines with one small finger, mouthing the words under his breath.
"Core… mana… circulation…"
He flipped pages slowly, absorbing everything. The core colors ran in a strict order: Grey, Brown, Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Purple, White, Black. Grey was for those who would never awaken at all. Brown was where almost every child started at after awakening, and so on.
Beside each color were the ranks that measured control rather than raw power: Initiate, Adept, Expert, and Master.
He studied the diagrams of mana pathways running through arms, legs, spine, even the eyes. Simple exercises were drawn out step by step: how to wake the core, how to rotate the energy in steady loops, how to push it into your muscles so you could run faster or jump higher without falling over.
Nasir grinned.
It was like a video game tutorial.
He closed the book, slid off the bed, and waddled to the center of the room where there was enough open space. He breathed the way the book showed, slow and even.
He focused on the warm knot behind his sternum. It was there, faint and quiet like it had been sleeping. He wasn't thinking about diagrams or breathing patterns. He just reached for it the way you reach for something in a dark room, slow and careful, feeling around the edges of it, trying to find something to grab onto.
It shifted. Barely enough to notice.
So he pulled.
Nothing about what happened next matched anything in the book. The warmth behind his sternum stopped being warm almost immediately. It went sharp, then sharper than that, spreading outward through his ribs and down into his stomach and along his arms all the way to his fingertips. His legs locked up. His jaw clamped shut. He held on anyway, why? Because he was stubborn and the book had said this was supposed to work and he was going to make it work. He pulled harder. The pain spiked up his spine and hit the back of his skull and that was the end of his decision making for the evening.
The sound that came out of him was not a whimper. It was not a cry. It was a full yell, loud and sharp.
The yell cut straight through marble hallways and heavy oak doors and found every servant within range and brought them running. He heard shouting somewhere far away. Footsteps, fast ones. A door hitting the wall.
Then the ceiling tilted hard to one side and his legs stopped working entirely and the floor came up and everything went dark before he could form a single thought about any of it.