I stared at my hand. Weird to be back in a little kid's body. This world had me living life from near the beginning all over again. In this world, we'd just moved into the house I'd lived in for all but two of my memories.

"Hey, kid, whatcha doin'?" dad asked.

I looked at him and said, "Staring."

"Fair enough. Your sister and I are going on an adventure, want to come?"

"Sure."

As we walked out of the house, I noticed the computer was missing. I didn't say anything about it, but followed my dad and sister out to the woods, where we followed the creek for a while until I got tired and we turned around.

I lived a relatively boring life, moreso than before because I didn't have video games to play. At least, it was more boring until the first weenie roast after starting this life. My dad piled the chopped logs high and, rather than getting lighter fluid and matches, he brought my sister and me over and lit the fire with magic, demonstrating how he did it.

After that, I learned magic from my parents, then by myself after I rapidly used my adult mind to more easily grok what my parents were telling me than if I were still a normal child. Grade school was a breeze for the same reason, and I ignored my classmates in favor of figuring out more magic. How to fly, create matter, induce electricity and magnetic fields, whatever I thought of, I spent days to weeks figuring it out.

Magic had fully replaced electronics as my source of boredom replacement.

Eventually, I made it to college, focusing on magic. There was some sort of ranking system in place, and I tested for the lowest rank because I didn't know official terminology for almost anything I was doing, even if I could actually perform stuff properly.

I joined a magic racing club and quickly showed everyone I was ranked incorrectly. In my first race, I obliterated everyone but the highest ranked seniors, a couple of who were actually capable of slowing me down and prevented me from getting first place.

All the classes were super easy, if tedious due to needing to learn the formal words for stuff, with me having been taught the material by my parents or learned it on my own. The only thing useful was the library, since the internet didn't exist for me to reference instead. Christmas break came around and I got ranked first among the student body. I expected it to be by a wide margin, but it was actually pretty close. I'd only been getting high Bs and low As due to the classes being too boring to pay attention to most of the time, but my actual magical ability was undeniable.

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Over the break, I learned just how strong I actually was. I didn't actually do so, but it rapidly became apparent that if I went on a rampage on school grounds, only the teachers would survive, and I'm uncertain if they'd have been able to stop me. I also did something I thought might have been impossible before now, due to it not being in the library.

I figured out soul magic.

Inside me, there were hundreds of millions of little spheres where I could place my soul, each one already labeled for what it does. My soul was already inside the generalist sphere, so I left it there, uncertain what moving it would do. I'm not certain what made me think of it, but it made me remember the multiverse. So, I took a few hours to figure out some magic that could reach across the multiverse and pluck another soul out of the other versions of myself.

They were interested in the magic systems and I shoved them in the generalist sphere because I still wasn't sure how much of an impact the other spheres would have on me, and the generalist sphere seemed to affect everything, to some degree. By the time break ended, I had a little more than 100 souls in me.

When I returned to school, the only teacher I liked noticed what I'd done - or, at least, that I'd messed with absorbing souls - and got worried I'd done something permanently damaging. Soul magic was dangerous stuff. She was surprised I'd even survived my second soul, let alone got all the way to school with as many as I did.

Apparently, not having at least one soul in the generalist sphere would have killed me. She explained most other spheres, though I only remember healing and bodyguard. Healing increased my natural regeneration while bodyguard increased the resilience of my body.

She also explained that keeping an uneven balance between the spheres should degrade the spheres, eventually rupturing them, and killing me. I checked the integrity of my generalist sphere and there was nothing wrong with it. After explaining exactly what I'd done and pulling in yet another version of myself as demonstration, we hypothesized that there wasn't any problems because the other souls were exactly identical to mine, excluding the memories of other timelines.

If anything, it was like each soul was empowering each other soul, in an exponential increase in power per soul.

I woke up around this time and tried furiously to get back.

And I succeeded.

I told the other mes, which now numbered in the thousands because of how much faster that world's going than this one, what was going on and they said I was 100% free to come back. Well, they said it like I would if I didn't think for a second, "Sure, we don't need you anymore, feel free to go back to your own life."

Coming from anyone else, I'd 100% not know if they meant that in a mean way, a gaslighty way, or the way they/we actually meant it: To make sure I knew I was free to go.

So, I woke up.