Waking up in another world can be a wish of many people. Dreams of breathing fire and throwing meteorites with weird eyes or just using swords to cut souls and such.
This always seemed extremely attractive... but believe me when I say that the feeling of real rebirth... is amazing.... usually.
It might have had something to do with the fact that I still had my memories and awareness from my past life, but even so, everything went pretty normally.... at least until I was placed in some kind of capsule a few hours after my birth.
I remember hearing what sounded like a woman's scream, probably my mother, but the childish feelings didn't have much of an effect on me at all.
Then I felt quite a few needles piercing my limbs, and let me tell you.... those damn things hurt like hell.
It took me a few months to realize that I was in a strange capsule under surveillance. There was barely enough energy in a child's body. Apparently, even my cheats could only do so much until my own body developed.
This brings us to the cheats, wishes or abilities I received before I was dumped.... here.
This is the first thing that all reincarnators and transmigrants think about, right?
Well, I had something too.
Something that was supposed to make me imba.
I wonder if you noticed the word "supposedly" in my previous statement?
I use this word because the abilities were nerfed... and harshly.
When I was asked to roll the dice to decide how many Entities I could choose, and I got a six, I was overjoyed… until the smile of that.... DEVIL told me that something was wrong.
Apparently, my body and soul were not strong enough to withstand the power of all the Entities I had chosen, and so their power was severely reduced.
Well, at least that's the explanation I got.
The fact that I was thrown into a random world and a random family also somehow does not fill my heart with joy, considering my stay in a capsule and not in a cradle, like all decent babies.
Sure, I was offered the usual cheats, but if I can't relive the moment of my birth, what's the point?
Although if I knew that I would be put in a cage like this, I would have chosen Entities that would help me avoid this situation, and not something to become an MC and lead a lazy life of a nagibat.
The entities I chose were:
The essence of the binder.
She had the ability to bind anyone and make them as loyal to the binder as the user decided. The one who is bound can also bind others, and this could give me a potentially endless army at my disposal.
The link was also nearly unbreakable unless the one being linked was ordered to commit suicide or was inherently too opposed to the orders they received. The link could not be altered by anyone but me, and it was also impossible to track.
I could even revive any dead person linked to me, as long as I had their body, soul, or even something very close to that person, and I could repeat this countless times, since once linked, the souls become my property, and I can call them to me at will. It was a cheat that allowed me to conquer almost any world with the least amount of work.
Instead, what did I get?
The number of people I can bind has been reduced to one per year, which will increase as I age, but I will only be able to bind people who are close to me or below me in strength.
Fortunately, other aspects of this power were hardly affected.
But such limitations made the Essence of the Binder almost useless, since the newborn was not very strong, and I did not even have the ability to touch anyone to bind.
It's fucked up from the very beginning.
The second Entity I chose was,
The essence of a broker.
Basically, she allowed me to make any deal I wanted, and it would be honored no matter what. I just had to get the other party's consent, and they had to do it of their own free will, knowing the full terms of the deal. I couldn't just... say, Imperius them and make them do whatever I wanted.
The deals could be almost anything, and about anything.
Pretty damn imbalanced, right?
By the way, beating someone and verbally forcing him to sign something or agree to a deal was considered fair, since it was done of his own free will.
Free will was debatable here, but according to the "DEVIL" (I refuse to call him anything else), even if the other party is beaten, they still have the opportunity to refuse.
Well, who am I to argue with him? After all, it's in my own interests.
However, this power was again useless at the moment, because…. I needed to be able to speak and write in order to make a deal.
Well, fuck all this.
The third Entity chosen was…
The essence of the archmage.
It was supposed to make me a cheater-class wizard, like Solomon or something. A magical energy generator on legs that could produce any type of energy I wanted: mana, spiritual power, chakra, ki, etc... and perform magic with just the power of my will.
With such an Essence, I should have started at a level that would allow me to use high-level spells for several hours before I even got a little tired.
Also included was super intelligence and the ability to create, as well as analyze and recreate any magic.
Instead, my strength was greatly suppressed due to my body being extremely weak.
And I couldn't use any magic right now since I still needed the theory of the spell or just know how it works.
The fourth Entity I have chosen…
The essence of the mad doctor.
Basically, she made me a mad scientist, and honestly, that was what I was hoping for.
The entity also gave me knowledge of alchemy and medicine, as well as the ability to make potions for almost anything. And by "anything," I mean literally anything.
Immortality, Regeneration, you name it, and it's brewed. I was also now immune to most diseases and poisons.
However, the biggest deception in this case was the ability to create ingredients for potions or anything related to the Essence.
The ability to create ingredients now scaled according to my mana pool... which, to be fair, was pretty modest for a baby.
The Fifth Essence, thanks to which I expected to survive wherever I ended up, was…
The essence of the king.
She gave me endless stamina and willpower.
Or rather, it was supposed to give.
Instead, the Entity is currently changing my body, and I will likely have inhuman amounts of stamina when I reach adulthood.
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Chapter 2
However, right now it has also done me good.
Along with this, the Entity also gave me an immunity to pain, which I can safely say hasn't set in yet, because those fucking needles were digging into my ass pretty badly.
Then came peak human physique and inhuman amounts of charisma.
But then again, a baby in peak form... was still a baby, and I don't think my baby charisma was helping me that much right now.
However, I was very much counting on the possibility of creating a family tree, which this Entity gave me, of course, within reasonable limits.
I went the meta-tech route and chose a mix of Heracles' bloodline that gave him seven lives, Saiyan's Zenkai, and super regeneration.
To be fair, it must be said that this wish was not accepted.
Instead, I gained an extra life for every year I lived, up to seven. If I died, the extra life was restored in a year, and without immunity to whatever killed me.
I also got a weaker version of the Zenkai Saiyan, but without the regeneration. However, I negotiated for myself that my blood cannot be used by anyone else without my permission. No blood theft. Fuck you, Danzo, Orochimaru and the like. I will not share my sweet blood with anyone unless I want to.
The Last Entity was…
The essence of the workpiece.
She didn't give me any super special powers or anything, she just removed all the restrictions from me.
I can learn to do something even if it is not supposed to be possible, say, without a pedigree.
For example, I could learn the Ice Kekkai Genkai even if I didn't belong to the Yuki clan in the Naruto world.
However, this Entity also came with the caveat that I would have to bust my ass for it.
I will be able to develop my abilities to unnatural levels, and nothing will stop me because of incompatibility.
So there I was with all my cheats now locked in a capsule trying to figure out what and why, and also planning my eventual escape and then maybe world conquest if I had enough motivation by then.
Well, I could have put up with it if that "DEVIL" bastard hadn't thrown me into a random world because he took away my privilege of choosing a world as compensation for saving my life.
Then the bastard had the nerve to tell me that I could take the Essences with me instead of just drinking it all at once.
Well, next time, put it in the damn user manual.
And that's the short story of how I'm currently floating in a capsule of greenish liquid that hurts my eyes if I try to keep them open for long.
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- Time skip –
Two years have passed.
How was I supposed to know?
To be honest, I wish I could say I was counting the seconds, but as cool as that would have been, I didn't do anything like that.
I already had more than enough worries without counting.
For example, the experiments that were done on me, whatever it was that was put into my body, and the reactions it had on me.
Honestly, I think that without the Mad Doctor's Essence, I would have been dead meat by now. I could hypothesize a few things about what was injected into my bloodstream, but without actually conducting any experiments, there's no way to say for sure. In any case, what I could say for sure was that the Mad Doctor saved me.
I'm almost certain that the drugs they pumped me with would have poisoned even adults, let alone a newborn.
And I would already be a corpse if I didn't have immunity to all poisons.
I don't know if they discovered my immunity to poisons or something else, but in the end they increased my dosage.
This does not mean that I have done nothing at all over the past two years.
I concentrated on my body and found that even without my built-in Archmage Essence energy generator, there was some kind of energy within me. It was harsh, chaotic, and extremely difficult to control.
Its quantity seemed to be decently large... but again, I have nothing to compare it with.
What I needed first was to figure out where I was.
Sounds pretty simple, right?
Well, there was a slight problem…. I'm still sitting inside the same fucking capsule.
Well, there was a ray of hope, though, because now that two years had passed, I had two extra lives.
Those two years were the worst I've ever been through, and as I said, the King's essence really helped me get through them because my resistance to pain grew, and the endless willpower obviously made a difference because I can still think, which means I haven't broken down yet.
Any man would go half crazy if he was stuck in a child's body without any extra help, and that's assuming the child is getting proper care and there are other people around to keep him company.
Man is a social being.
Fanfiction and anime that show MC being a badass and practicing chakra control straight from his mother's womb without any theory.... big fat lie.
This is where the King's Essence helped me. Because of its infinite willpower, it kept me from losing control of my sanity and helped me focus on what I wanted to do.
So what did I want to do?
Try out your Archmage Essence.
This ability allowed one to theorize about any imaginary force and recreate it given enough time.
So that's exactly what I did.
I needed information, and for this I needed mainly to hear, see and feel well.... in general, to observe my surroundings in every possible way.
And so we remember Reilly's teaching about Observation Haki.
I close my eyes and concentrate on my surroundings.
The fact that there was no one to hit me with a stick and that the capsule was supposedly soundproof was also an obstacle, but I somehow overcame it.
I focused on my own heartbeat, the sounds of the drugs and food solutions being injected into me, the sound of the air I was breathing from the oxygen mask on my face, the movement of my hair on my head, the way the air bubbles that sometimes appeared in the liquid touched me.
Air bubbles hitting my body and popping were a major part of my training.
Well, I can proudly say that it only took me two weeks (based on the fact that I was being fed four times a day) to feel when the bubble was going to hit me next.
This skill, however, was insanely difficult to polish.
Observation Haki did work on the principle of creating hypersensitivity and forcibly awakening the sixth sense, at least that's what I theoretically assumed.
It took me about seven more months to feel anything outside my capsule.
At that moment, the world appeared before me as it was in thermal vision... only in my version there were many more colors.
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Chapter 3
I noticed that my own body had a reddish-black energy, the same as the few personalities that sometimes appeared in the room.
Judging by their height, they were adults, at least I really hope that the local doctors didn't just let the kids play doctor with me. The amount of reddish-black energy they possessed was different for everyone.
I assume it's some kind of magical power, maybe mana or chakra.
The few people around me had several times more energy than me, although I am quite sure that if I use my energy generator, I can beat them in a few years.
However, this thought very soon flew out of my head.
That day I met someone whose energy source was about a hundred times greater than my own.
I almost instinctively rolled back my observation hacks so as not to attract the attention of the "creature" that was next to me.
It was like a bucket of cold water had been poured on me, which made me reconsider my plans for the future.
Was this monster the strongest here?
The mission to gather information suddenly became much more difficult.
It took me almost all my waking hours for another five months to expand the radius of action to about ten meters around me.
The change in color of the people around them showed the change in their emotions. If someone was sad, the aura around them would change to a different color.
It took me a while to theorize that Observation Haki was heightening my senses to a ridiculous degree and forcibly switching my sixth sense into hypersensitive mode, thus activating the ability to see into the future.
The advanced version of Haki manifested differently in different people.
I could see people's auras. Their brightness and size reflected their strength and quality. The color of the aura around a person represented the emotions they were experiencing, as well as the type of energy they could hold within themselves.
It must be clear that a person's aura and the energy he contained within were completely different things.
The fact that I could understand how they felt made it much easier for me to gather information.
However, it was at that moment that I realized a very serious problem.
I have no control over my own emotions.
I'm sure they're monitoring my heart rate and all my vital signs. A chill ran down my spine as I realized that whatever had visited me had probably noticed my nervousness in its presence. I wouldn't want to draw any more attention to myself (if that was even possible).
What if they just extract whatever information I have in my head and then turn me into a drone?
That thought alone chilled me to the bone. I should have taken the Essence to protect my mind, damn it.
So what to do now?
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It took me a whole day of reflection to decide on my next course of action.
It was necessary to study Occlumency.
A magical science that was rather vaguely described in the Harry Potter universe.
Not only did it protect someone's mind, which I desperately needed right now, but it also helped me control my own emotions quite well.
I need both.
Thus began my long journey of theorizing about Occlumency, recalling everything I knew about it from everything I had read, and using my archmage nature to squeeze some meaning out of the available knowledge.
However, this required a lot of work.
I remembered to clear my mind.
This part turned out to be difficult... much more difficult than I thought, although I still had nothing to do except swim around inside the capsule.
My brain was working too fast, and superthinking isn't always a good thing, especially when you can calculate several thousand things that could go wrong at any moment during my experiments.
Fear of the unknown is something that is extremely difficult to ignore, and being locked in a fucking capsule didn't help with calm.
This time it took me a whole month to make any progress.
What progress have I made?
I learned to free my mind.
But apparently, to create Occlumency shields, I need to attack my defenses, which is quite difficult. I'd rather no one ever try to look inside my head.
How do I even put up any protection?
Where should I put it?
Trust me when I say that fanfic heroes who can do anything straight from their mother's womb.... are all fucking liars. It doesn't work like that.
Even with my cheat skill, Archmage's Essence...
I tried to theorize as much as I could, but how can I prepare a dish if I only know its name and that it should taste sweet?
It's simply impossible.
There are literally countless mistakes I can make by just shooting the breeze.
If I had an example of how some of my thoughts were pulled out, I could understand and feel how and what needs to be protected.
What to do to prevent this from happening.
However, at the moment I had no idea how to deal with this.
So I tried to work with what was available to me.
As Bruce Lee once said, "I don't fear the man who has practiced 10,000 punches once, I fear the man who has practiced one punch 10,000 times."
Bruce Lee, bro, I seriously hope you weren't just kidding.
It all started with me constantly thinking about different things that were completely unrelated to each other, so that my thoughts were impossible to track.
Something changed after about two months, when the rate at which my thoughts changed increased significantly.
When you have nothing to do but focus on one job, endless willpower and the essence of nothingness, everything gets mixed up and becomes fucking broken.
Constantly changing my thoughts gave me a pretty crazy amount of control over my mind.
Then again, that wasn't a foolproof method either. I could overwhelm someone's mind with a hundred thoughts a second, but.... whoever these monsters were outside my capsule, they weren't human.... or normal humans. Who knew if that would be enough to crush them?
But there was a thought that stopped me from doing it altogether.
I was supposed to be able to bombard someone with random thoughts.... but they would immediately have a question....where and how did I even get these memories from.
The second point…. I didn't know exactly where I was.
What if I find myself in a world I know and bombard someone with memories of it?
.... I know the chances of me having memories of this world are astronomically small.... but that doesn't change the fact that the possibility does exist.
Of course, I could try to change the thoughts with the help of endless expanses of individual colors, for example, first white, then black, then yellow, and so on and so forth.
This decision, however, also had its pitfalls.