When I eventually came too, I found myself lying face first in some murky, very unclean water, my entire body cold as ice.
Sputtering, I tried to push myself up only to be unable to move my arms, while my eyelids grew even heavier with each passing moment.
A quick look 'inside' this new body of mine confirmed a few things.
He was uh... certainly dead before I took over; death by an incurable illness or something, by the looks of it.
Besides that, I... hah... his Core wasn't even unlocked yet?!
How old is h- oh, this body is around 10... damn.
A year or so to go until that useful little organ awakens itself.
Naturally, anyways.
I wasn't about to die so quickly after getting here; not after having just managed to escape from Thanata Osir, one of the highest ranking Goddesses in existence and one that has an incredible amount of power.
Yeah, I have no desire to return to her so quickly, so...
Time for me to bust out a few of the tricks I learned along the way~!
See, a Core unlocks at around your 12th birthday; it's a nifty little organ that draws in mana from the world and allows you to use magic.
Specifically, magic that has been decreed by the Guardian Spirit 'living' inside your Core; in my previous life, I had a hybrid Fenghuang, a type of bird that is normally meant to be a healing type, but mine was a special one that did the opposite...
My little guy liked to watch things burn, to the point that we found a way to burn people's souls...
That was my partner, my Guardian Spirit in my previous life, so I was a tad curious to see what this brat might have gotten, but...
Well, my trick wouldn't let me crack that secret open just yet; I could, however, jolt my body into regenerating quicker and allowing me to not lie in what smelt like sewage water...
See, you just needed to do a bit of this... a dash of that... aaannnddd a little of this..?
Right?
Gasping, I sputtered out the small amount of blood that was left inside my throat and pushed myself up, my heart pounding wildly as I managed to crawl away from the dirty sewer line, leaning myself against the brick wall.
As I got my breathing steadied, I looked around myself and took in the alleyway I was in, making sure I was 'safe' before doing anything else.
The sun was hiding above the clouds, leaving this alley shrouded in dim light and giving me a semi decent look at the trash and waste water besmirching this passageway.
The bricks were covered in grime, whilst trash piled against the walls and littered the path, water pooling around the piles of garbage and submerging this place in a putrid stench...
No one else occupied this expanse of the slums, though I could hear people walking and talking nearby, suggesting I was just off of a main road for the city.
As for me, I was wearing a drenched, rough tunic that made my skin itch something fierce, whilst my trousers were tattered and caked in mud and other grime, suggesting a manual labor 'job'?
I did have 'shoes' on as well, some basic wooden sandals covering the bottom of my feet, but those did little to protect me from the elements or from anything else, really...
My skin was slightly tanned, further adding to that assumption of manual labor as well as potentially peddling, and my arms were already riddled with scars from living on the streets.
This body belonged to a street urchin through and through, doing whatever he could have to survive...
Taking a deep breath, I sighed as I slowly got to my feet, my body still weak from the sickness as well as having been left to rot in this alleyway.
I glanced at my hands before brushing everything off, using the walls to scrape the worst of it off, before I reached up and brushed everything out of my black hair, grimacing as I felt the various tangles of knotted hair plated together with sweat and sewage water.
I was an absolute keeper of a young lad wasn't I~?
Chuckling softly, I wrinkled my nose as I spit out another globule of blood and... other things, my tastebuds bathing in terrible flavors.
So far, for a rebirth, this was... horrible.
But manageable, really.
With this, I had no obligations to anyone, no expectations, no eyes following me...
People overlooked street urchins, especially after you reached a certain age; you lost the pity that you might have had as a child once you hit double digits...
By then, most lads and gals are working beneath someone, acting as an apprentice and earning a wage whilst also learning a trade, eventually getting themselves something steady to do.
Some awaken to some rather good Guardian Spirits, others find out they have a talent with weapons, and others do impressive things with the mana they have.
Most though just take on some merchant job, work as a tradesman, farm...
There's enough work to go around for everyone to find something to put food on the table, but obviously some go down darker paths, becoming criminals...
Something that might be a tad worrisome for me, considering I was most certainly in the slums right now...
For the moment, all my knowledge about... well, everything was useless if some power tripped idiot stumbles onto me and decides to make themself feel better by torturing someone weaker than them, so I needed to be careful for now; lay low and get back to a decent form before plotting my next move.
I had things I could certainly get rolling once I was, y'know, not half dead and caked in disgusting grime.
For now though, I took another deep breath of the terrible air and began to move, sticking close to the wall and making my way deeper into the alleyway, towards one of the large piles of trash.
You gotta start somewhere, and the amount of things people toss out that are actually valuable would surprise you!
I mean, I once threw out a single drop of Celestial Teardrops worth thousands of gold... well, it was on accident, since I threw out an entire chest worth of items that were left over and useless, but still..!
Surely someone could throw out something I needed at this moment, right?