The sudden idea revitalized Alex entirely. Even though he had no clue what would happen if he was successful, this experiment was actually interesting and gave him something to do.

There was only one problem though. He was f*cking three years old!

But having a new goal injected Alex with life. The gears in his head finally began to turn and he started with making calculations.

Currently it was the December of 2002 and he had little less than two years time. He vaguely remembered few places where Old Tony traveled during this period and the best chance to get to him was at home, but that was in Switzerland.

Even with the scarce Qi in this world, theoretically he could control a person long enough to get him to the airport and put on a plane, but the eight hour flight might get problematic since there was no way for him to manipulate all the flight attendants at the same time. In addition, if he suddenly disappeared, his foster parents would actually look for him and the missing child cases involved the FBI that would track him down quite quickly.

Alex brainstormed for over a week without any results until he finally got an opportunity to access William’s computer. It was inconvenient for him to use, but somehow by kneeling on the chair and awkwardly poking keyboard with his little fingers, within twenty minutes he managed to find out there was an upcoming children festival taking place in St.Gallen, Switzerland, in mid 2004. After quickly skimming through the available information, he decided that it will fit nicely as his potential destination and began to craft a detailed plan.

First of all he needed to get close to someone whom he could manipulate in sending him to Europe. The simplest way would be to use his foster parents, but not only they were not the traveling type – they were constantly expanding their work with the disabled children and even if Alex forced on them the idea to bring him across the ocean, most likely they would just change their minds the next day.

More reasonable was to allow a third party to discover Alex’s amazing talent and bring him along with a group of other children to the festival. The problem was – the festival was all about dancing, singing and eating bratwurst, but he had skills in neither of the first two and only didn’t hate the last one. Another problem was that from what Alex remembered in order to officially become a famous young talent in the states there was a huge competition.

Nevertheless he decided to make a small sacrifice in the name of the science and for the pleasure of killing Old Tony again.

To not cause unnecessary attention, at least for now, during the next two weeks he became more and more lively and active, and to the great pleasure of his foster parents asked to be brought to a place where the other children were. With clenched teeth he somehow lived through afternoon filled with traumatic experiences from the standpoint of any normal grownup, but very ‘suitable’ for a child. In the end he asked if there were interesting ‘things’ on TV where he could see the other kids playing.

At first Irene suggested he would simply play with his stepbrothers and stepsisters, but Alex outright refused. In order to not let him fall back to the state of complete of complete apathy, Irene, not without a mind stimulus from Alex, found something more ‘educational’ than foolish cartoons – it was a record of a concert of children from the local school singing and playing. It was all that Alex needed – he began to sing and dance along, completely shocking his foster parents, while deeply hating himself at the same time.

Needless to say, he continued to maintain his status of a disabled person in hopes it would increase the attention from the grownups. While it was not a hard thing to do, it was extremely tiring and Alex couldn’t wait to get to the next step of his plan.

Seeing how the autistic child was suddenly progressing with gigantic strides, Irene on her own thought of putting him in a dance group where Alex, because of the body size that didn’t fit his age, was paired with a bossy and moody six year old girl named Linda. It all would’ve been fine, but for some reason the only mind manipulation that worked on her was either knocking her out or making her disoriented. Alex was baffled by the fact that it was completely impossible to put any thoughts in her consciousness – almost as if she could not have any thoughts at all or lacked the capability of processing them.

Nevertheless, she was quite popular with Irene and William, and Alex had to dance with her. To a Qi practitioner and former Qi master/warrior like him the dancing itself was not that complicated. In a sense it was almost like practicing a martial technique, except with a partner.

But exactly the partner was the problem. Linda kept bossing Alex around, blaming him for all her failures and grinning in satisfaction at the same time. The little terror was so annoying Alex even caught himself at a thought of wishing to knock out her rabbit teeth in order to release some of the frustration.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

For whole two weeks he managed to hold on, especially motivated by their teacher who was certain they would make nationals already this year, but the day Linda began to step on purpose on Alex’s feet over and over only to amuse herself, he finally had enough. Leaving the little girl lying behind him unconscious on the floor, he sighed with relief and decided he had to come up with another way to get to Europe.

He blamed his own creativity for the time wasted and swore never have anything to do with the dancing again. Of course, if someone on their own was willing to dance for him, he would gladly make an exception, but, obviously, he had to grow up first.

The situation gave Alex quite a bit of a headache, thus, after a long consideration, he decided to become a genius first and find a way to get to Switzerland later. One morning he suddenly lost any last signs of autism, began to call Irene ‘mommy’ and William - ‘dad’. It surprised his foster parents greatly, but the success in the end was attributed to their earlier work and his recent social activities.

Seeing that the ‘soft push’ didn’t work, Alex decided to increase the pressure and few days later began to fluently read. Now that was a shock. For a three year old to recognize few letters or words is cute, but to read as easily as Alex did was completely abnormal. The fact that the transformation was so sudden made it especially unthinkable.

His thrilled to the bone foster parents began to bring him to various renown psychiatrists and child experts, but none of that actually helped to achieve Alex’s goal. All they did was used him for their own research thus he had to change tactics.

The turning point happened couple of months later on accident after William allowed Alex to use his computer, under his supervision, of course.

Simply on a whim by using the Yahoo search engine Alex looked up ‘reincarnation’ and as one of the top results popped out the psychiatrist, professor Ian Stevenson. To Alex’s great surprise the guy actually researched the reincarnation concept for decades and even had written books about it.

From what he gathered from the stingy online information, the professor mostly researched the actual cases of people remembering their past lives. From a scientific point of view it didn’t help one bit since in this field Alex was, probably, the most knowledgeable person in the world, despite the fact that he had no clue how the reincarnation actually worked, but it looked like the professor definitely could become useful.

The next day Alex suddenly began speaking German. Obviously it wasn’t as fluent as he wanted to since the last time he spoke this language was many decades ago, but it was enough to terrify his parents. It was understandable when a three year old by a miraculous chance learned how to read, but for him to speak a foreign language out of the blue was too shocking.

Alex didn’t stop and guided the thoughts of his foster parents to the subject of reincarnation and forced them to find professor Stevenson. Unfortunately that damned old guy was busy with another book and responded only six weeks later. And the answer was – he would visit them in the end of the year!

And then the hell broke loose. Being a ‘regular’ genius was still fine, but now all William did was meet up with different experts to show off Alex, but the latter only felt he was becoming more and more like a circus clown.

Interviews with psychiatrists, brain scanning and tests happened every other day.

There was even a bunch of guys from one of the universities in California who kept following Alex around for almost a week registering everything that went in and came out of him trying to understand how such wunderkind could exist. At first Alex intended to knock them out or cause a brain trauma to one or two, but then realized he had to watch himself – if more paranormal events happened with or around him, there was no telling from what crowds he would have to hide.

Luckily sooner or later everyone got the data they wanted and let Alex live in peace, except for the psychiatrists who kept pestering him about his childhood traumas.

Meanwhile Alex did try to find other people who seriously researched the concept of reincarnation, but everyone left impression of a charlatan or a religious psycho. Thus in the end the only thing left was to wait for Stevenson to finally show up while manipulating his parents thoughts making them respect his privacy.

Luckily professor Stevenson kept his word and showed up as promised. To Alex’s great surprise before the arrival he had even done thorough background check and knew everything there was to know about the child called Alex Sanders.

The profile of an abused autistic boy who suddenly awakened remarkable abilities fit the reincarnation case well. In addition, Alex was easily capable of describing his ‘past life’ in Zurich thus gaining a complete professor’s trust.

The last part was, obviously made up to force the professor to bring Alex to Switzerland to verify his story and for the foster parents to actually agree with it, and as it turned out – it was the most difficult endeavor. Alex had no idea that the manipulation of thoughts of three different people at the same time could be so tiring. Of course, large portion of the difficulty was the scarcity of Qi in the environment as well as his lack of practice with the mind techniques. In the end, after a long afternoon filled with awkward discussions and periods of silences, the grownups came to agreement that in the end of May professor Stevenson would travel to Zurich together with Alex.

Even though Alex would’ve liked to be done with the experiment sooner, this give him ample of time to prepare. During the upcoming months his favorite thing to do became longs walks, during which for some reason the pets of all the neighbors strangely passed away.

It came as a surprise that killing a living being, even a dog or a cat, was much harder than to make it pass out or to plant a seed of thought in its consciousness. This forced Alex to return to cultivation once again and once again he was disgusted by the lack of Qi in the world.

He quickly deducted that since Qi was the same thing as the force of nature, it could only mean that actually the nature of Earth was in a pitiful state. This, obviously, was nothing new – every educated person knew that the over-exploitation of the planet was degrading it, but to him, who had lived in the other worlds with rich Qi, it was much more obvious than to others.