"Matthew!"
Three years had passed since he woke up.
Matt? Who was that? His name wasn't Matthew or at least, he didn't think it was. Struggling to recall anything. He crawled towards Anabelle like the other kids, where she kissed him on the forehead and spoon-fed him some warm soup.
Before she drew away, he held the steel spoon with his tiny hands.
"Awwww. Do you like the soup I made?" She asked, but he was preoccupied.
A legion of questions flooded his thoughts as he stared at the reflection on the polished surface of the spoon.
He expected to see his reflection staring back.
What met him instead was an unfamiliar face: dark hair, pale skin, and common brown eyes.
It wasn't a bad face, but it wasn't his. The small, scrawny, little figure reflected back had replaced his athletic body.
Every move he made, the reflection made.
That was when the realization dawned on him. This wasn't a dream. This was real.
#
Listening to the nurse's conversations, Matthew started to understand things bit by bit.
It took him under a year to fully grasp the language. Later on, he started paying attention to the conversations between the nursemaids. And then he heard a lot of terms not familiar in his vocabulary.
Especially the country names, district names, and various location names. Some proper nouns he had never heard before.
Maybe this place is… No, he was certain of it. This wasn't Earth, but some other world. A different world.
At this moment, he had a flash of inspiration. …If it's this world, perhaps I can achieve it.
Maybe it is a world different from his previous life and what he knew as common sense; perhaps he can do it.
He could live a life like the protagonist of those books he read about, saving people and killing a demon king. Becoming a King!
Calm! Calm down. I'm still a baby right now, one step at a time…. He lamented his physical condition but quickly consoled himself.
"Anabelle, the pissant, soiled himself." One of the nurses shouted, and Anabelle rushed over.
Anabelle… He remembered her name.
Maybe it was because of this body's young age, but he could quickly remember things.
Though… a keen mind wasn't the only thing he discovered about his young body. He also couldn't control his bodily activities and sometimes would soil his own pants.
I'm a grown man, y'know…. It made him feel very shameful, but he accepted it as Anabelle took care of his predicament.
Soon enough, he was able to walk, albeit wobbly.
Being able to move was a wonderful thing….. He smiled gleefully. He had never felt such gratefulness for being able to move.
"He'll run somewhere else when I move my eyes away from him." One of the nurses would say.
"Isn't it good he's active? I was so worried when he didn't cry at all after he was found." Annabelle said between needle strokes.
"Even now, he doesn't cry." The first nurse replied.
The nurses had this discussion when they saw him crawling everywhere.
It bothered him, but not too much. After all, they still believed he was just a child, not some reincarnated man, two and twenty years old.
He understood a lot of things. First of all, this was an orphanage.
The building was a three-story brick house, and there were over five rooms on each floor. They had three nursemaids managing each floor, except the third with a single nurse.
Once he turned five, he had been moved to the second floor, meant for toddlers.
From the scenery he could see from the windows, the sun was wrong. It was an angry, pale, weeping red eye twice the size of earth's sun.
It baked the streets, turning the low brick structures into the walls of an open-air oven, rippling the air with whorls of heat visible to the eye, but there was a certain dry and dusty chill that accompanied it.
A sky dappled grey and bleak, streaked with high and constant clouds.
The city itself was an enigma, a low sprawl. Its buildings—most no more than two or three stories high—stretched like clustered insects over an equally low landscape.
The ground was concrete with patches of moss, and a wall far off was the horizon.
Once or twice he caught sight of the sea beyond the wall, peering at him from down crooked streets and over the matted roofs.
Only it too was wrong. The waters shone a dusty red, patched here and there with orange and silver, with dark, spindly, long structures rising from its depths as if trying to hold the sky.
You could see the Fortress, though, standing above the low mass of the Coliseum and a horizontal obsidian structure weaving between the three minarets of the Sanctum with its gold dome and ivory bastille.
The Fortress was built atop a high hill, the tallest and only hill of the city. And the orphanage had been built on a high elevation point; that's why he could see much.
And it was unlike anything he had ever seen. He had truly reincarnated in another world.
But there was one thing that was truly painful. This civilization was clearly lacking in technology; there weren't any electric wires, lamps, or anything similar.
It was painful for him, who had been brought up in an age of modern civilization and astonishing technological growth.
Even if it was reincarnation, he still wanted to access the net.
Because of that he was greatly bored, and there were no books to read either.
Shuuuuuuu…
If it weren't for Anabelle Bricker—the nurse in charge of his designated room—he might have died of boredom.
Just when he was thinking of that.
"Hello children!" Ms. Anabelle sang as she entered; no doubt she was about to narrate one of her very interesting stories.
Valentine and Arthur giggled in delight when they noticed her. The two were Matthew's roommates… or crib mates.
Val was a playful ball of energy; she'd steal Matt's toys to get him to chase. Arthur, on the other hand, was quiet and loved play fighting and physical games.
By the time Matthew turned six, Valentine was seven, and Arthur was five. So she began treating him like an underling.
Tch… I'm older mentally. Matthew would hiss if she tried to prove superiority.
"Mee ish awa be ere," Art would mutter when Anabelle Bricker came to tell one of her stories.
They were quite informative and helped Matt gain an understanding of this world.
Although Anabelle was an excellent storyteller, she was horrible at her job.
Sires and Dames would come into the establishment looking for kids to adopt, and for seven years not one of the three in her care was adopted.
The kids in other rooms got adopted very fast and very quickly. No one turned six before getting adopted, and here they were, the oldest kids in the orphanage.
The other nursemaids berated Anabelle over and over again.
She said a million sorries, but never a genuine apology.
Val turned eight, and they were all moved to the highest floor.
Anabelle didn't mind at all; she seemed to love taking care of the three, almost like they were her own children.
She taught them Anglish, Franc and Datch–The three common languages—and also a little Amaric.
She also taught a little arithmetic.
Arthur was smarter than Val, but he cried too often. She was the big sister, and Matt was just the in-between.
Though to him they felt like children. Not for long, though.
They seemed smarter than children their age on Earth. Incredibly smart, almost like geniuses.
To the point, he was actually ranked last in languages and arithmetic among the three.
At some point he wasn't sure if they were fellow reincarnators like him.
Sometimes he'd whisper some words in English to them to see if they would react.
But they'd have a puzzled expression on their faces.
The 'What did you say?' face. Something like that. And he would just pretend nothing happened.
Then Matt turned 8 and discovered something about himself.
One night when he was about to sleep, he tried recreating the ritual that brought him to this world.
He entered a cognitive trance like state, and slipped out of his body.
He found himself hovering, staring down at the shell he had just left behind.
His body slouched awkwardly on the bed, head tilted slightly.
'Whoa.'
He drifted closer to his body.
From up here, his face looked strangely unfamiliar—hollow and fragile, as if a corpse.
It was strange, staring at a face that wasn't his, but a vessel he'd been reincarnated into.
And then it happened. His projected self and his physical body locked eyes.
Suddenly, he was looking at Matt looking at him.
His astral eyes and physical ones stared into each other, yet each perspective remained his own.
He was looking down at himself from above while also gazing upward through half-closed, sleepy eyes.
It was like holding a mirror up to another mirror, the reflections hurtling toward endless infinity.
Then the thoughts came.
They weren't his—or perhaps they were, but multiplied and twisted.
Each side of him—astral and physical—became acutely aware of the other's thoughts, emotions, doubts, and fears.
*Why am I doing this?* *Why are you doing this?* *What am I seeing?* *What are you seeing?*
Versions of himself, thousands—each layered over the last like translucent film, each one more distorted and grotesque than the last.
Face melting and reforming, limbs stretched and coiled like serpents, and his expression flickered from curiosity to terror to…nothingness.
And yet, he couldn't break away.
His thoughts locked into a shared spiral.
He tried to scream, but his other mouth remained still.
The sound bounced back into his own head—a scream that became a whisper, that became silence, that became another scream.
He felt his mind cracking under the strain, the weight of infinity pressing down like a collapsing star.
And through it all, a singular thought clawed its way to the forefront:
*End it. End it.*
With a violent effort, ended the connection. The feedback loop collapsed in an instant.
He briefly experienced the feeling of free falling; his heart beat quickened, and his breathing became deeper.
"Haaa~ haaaa."
The night was still quiet.
He looked around and noticed his clothes were drenched in sweat, his fingers shaking and eyes jittering.
"What in the—