How do you keep your second chance at life from going the way of your first?
For Archmund Granavale, that involved a temper tantrum and locking himself in his room. He was nine. He knew he could get away with it.
Right now, he had one goal: Figure out what the fuck was going on.
He remembered some snippets from his past life, though more and more were coming back. He wrote as much as he could down — in English, so no one else could read it.
He had to reconcile what he knew from his past life with the circumstances of this life.
And somehow he had to turn that into avoiding “bad ends”: loveless political marriage, dying in a pointless war, or worst of all, rotting away in mediocrity in Granavale County until the end of time.
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What were his chances of an untimely early death?
House Granavale was in a comfortable position, for a two-member house. Their holding, Granavale County, was an insignificant county outside of the imperial core. It was not a breadbasket, a trade hub, or a crucial border. Its existence may as well have been a formality. He had a few options here: play the game of status and wealth to elevate the Granavale name through diplomacy, marriage, or other avenues of prestige, or abandon the title entirely and let it be absorbed by some other noble family.
He could go to the untamed lands and become a monster hunter, which was a lucrative but dangerous job. But he had no skill with a sword, bow, or Magic Gem, nor any understanding of what that job would entail — because the Granavale lands were so safe.
The House Granavale had lasted hundreds of years, but they had nothing on the pedigree of the Imperial Family, House Omnio, and were far poorer than the upstart Veneto, a merchant clan with several de facto trade monopolies and rumored underworld ties.
House Omnio descended from Alexander Omnio I, more commonly known as Alexander the Conqueror. He’d established the Omnio Empire, which was so successful that even now the country, continent, and known world were all called ‘Omnio’.
Magic was real. In his old life it hadn’t been. There was a University of Imperial Mages, which was insular, mysterious, and heavily regulated. He didn’t know a lot about magic in this world. It could have been a party trick, a weapon of war, a closely guarded secret, or something utterly useless.
It was annoying that he didn’t know. That was something he had to change.
One thing was for certain.
He was not in a video game — at least not obviously.
Magic spells didn’t have clear “mana costs”.
He couldn’t meditate to view a “stat sheet” on the back of his eyelids. He couldn’t clench his brain to open up an inventory screen. If he gazed up at the night sky, there was no “perk tree” awaiting him in the constellations.
If a System governed the world, it was hidden — for now. This was both comforting and frustrating. In his old world, he had no reason to believe that there was anything but random chaos governing everything. But this world had magic, which fundamentally changed the game.
Even if he had to figure out how himself.
In his past life he had studied financial markets. In those systems, you could make a lot of money by teasing out hidden patterns and making bets on them. Tease out the patterns well enough, and make the right bets, and you would end up rich.
Suppose that physical strength, manual dexterity, innate intelligence, and wisdom, charisma, and luck were fundamental driving stats for every living creature in this universe — a common system in video games. It wouldn’t make sense for a living, breathing world to function on a point-allocation system upon a discrete “level up”. But it did make sense for one’s skills and stats to increase naturally when used. Though perhaps he was just assuming this was how it should work given his knowledge of his old world.
There was an extremely simple way to test if the world functioned on a game-like system where doing strength activities built strength, and intelligence-like activities built intelligence. Do a hundred push-ups a day to build strength, and if the world functioned on exponentially scaling game logic, over the course of a year he would become superheroically strong.
If this didn’t work, he would still be physically stronger from having done a hundred push-ups a day for a year. This was a strategy straight from the writings of an author in his old world, Cal Newport — a “little bet”. Little bets were small, low-risk actions one could take with the possibility of huge payoffs if they were successful.
He had heard that nobles were stronger and smarter than the peasantry. He’d assumed this was natural before he’d awoken, classist propaganda since he had, but now he wondered if it was simply an extension of resources and self-care. In his old world, the idle rich were able to take care of themselves, buying expensive cosmetics and health procedures and spending significantly more time in education. If this world functioned on the growth logic of games, then one would hear stories of impossible feats of strength by the nobility — unless they were deliberately repressed.
He would have to track his personal progress. An untracked change could be illusory, wishful thinking of the mind. But he’d remembered a framework from his last life called “SMART goals” meant to make sure goals were achievable and not vague: specific, measurable, actionable, relevant, time-bound.
Task #1: do 100 push-ups a day for a year. Track how long it takes to do them and how many are possible consecutively.
Specific: 100 push-ups daily.
Measurable: how long it takes to do them total and how many were possible consecutively.
Actionable: it was, by definition, a physical action.
Relevant: push-ups to train strength.
Time-bound: he’d do it for a year.
A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
That was a start for the physical side of things.
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The second major point of order was magic.
Magic pervaded society, yet hadn’t transformed it into a post-scarcity utopia. Magic was rare if powerful yet common when weak. Magic was easy to use, hard to master.
Magic was accessed through Gems. Archmund had one on his desk. It was about the size of his thumbnail, and it cost roughly a year’s of a peasant’s wage.
It looked like a ruby, but was cut like a platonic tetrahedron, though not perfectly. He ran a finger over it. A faint electric hum, familiar yet brand new, flowed from a deep place in his soul through his finger to the Gem, which lit up with an orange candlelight.
The Gem had a complex official name, but this one he’d always called the Red Gem of Light.
He felt a little more tired than he had a moment before. Doing magic always made him feel this way.
His knowledge of magic was basic. As far as he knew, it was accessed solely through Gems. Gems came from the earth and the corpses of slain monsters. He didn’t know what monsters were, just that they appeared in Dungeons and the frontier wilds, but it was probably worth learning more.
Gems were rated on multiple dimensions. Density, size, and refinement of cut were the most basic, but Gemologists studied for decades to develop full understanding of Theoretical Gemology.
He didn’t understand why when simple metrics were stunningly effective: A denser, larger Gem would be more powerful than a smaller Gem.
Refinement and cut were nuanced, though. The more faces a Gem had, the more refined the cut. The more refined the cut, the more powerful the magic. A few chips or mis-cuts would weaken the magic, but not shatter it. In fact, sometimes intentional flaws would be introduced to create weaker spells.
There was a basic geometric innovation here. A square, a pentagon, a hexagon, a heptagon, and an octagon were all regular polygons. There was an argument from calculus. If you had a polygon, and you added more sides to it, it became more and more like a circle. In that sense, the regular polygon with infinite sides was a circle — though, since infinities were ugly to work with, strictly speaking the circle was the polygon as the limit of the number of sides approached infinity.
If you made the analogy, then a perfectly spherical and polished smoothed Gem might be immensely powerful. If it wasn’t already being done, why not?
The spell or enchantment associated with a Gem depended on three basic things. Its “element”, its density, and how it was cut. Any human could touch a magic Gem and charge it to release the spell it was enchanted with.
That was the limit of his theoretical knowledge. Unfortunately, he didn’t understand the practical side nearly as well either.
Why did he feel more tired when he used Gems to cast spells?
Was magic the normal kind of life energy that could be replenish food and was used for everyday tasks?
Was magic drawn from a limited spiritual pool, and if he ran through it all would be never be able to use magic again?
Or was magic something deeper, potentially tied to his soul, and doing too much magic could cause permanent damage?
He didn’t know, and didn’t know if anyone knew. Magic was rare, even among nobles — the comfortable House Granavale held maybe ten Gems in their estate, across all their holdings. There were maybe fifteen known Gems in their entire County. He only got to have one at all because of how spoiled he was. Rough and less dense Gems were probably obtainable from the mines, but dense and refined Gems dropped from monster corpses, which allowed adventurers and monster slayers to get richer and more powerful, which allowed them to hunt more monsters, and so on.
Was monster hunting the path to true power and freedom in this world?
Perhaps. But then again, there was an equal argument for pious ascetic study: There were legends that when sages and wise men died, they would leave behind no bodies, only perfect and dense Gems.
Task #2: Charge the Red Gem of Light to personal exhaustion over the course of the 100 days. Track how long it stays bright. Track how many days it takes to recover. Do this after the daily push-ups.
Archmund's Journal:
Year 0, Day 1.
Push-ups: 100 in 1.5 hours
Magic: Light lasts for 10 minutes
It’s so odd how I never questioned magic before, yet now I see all sorts of holes in it. What is magic? Does everyone have magic, or are nobles actually a separate species that can use magic? Why hasn’t magic revolutionized society beyond the pseudo-18th-19th century environment I find myself in?
I’ve set two goals: one physical, one magical. If this is a game, governed by a hidden system, I should find myself becoming immensely powerful through level-grinding.
But who can say if this is a game? Perhaps this is true reincarnation, like in Buddhism, and this is the realm of the hungry ghosts or the gods. Perhaps this is a physics-based simulation instead of a game, so grinding won’t work. Perhaps this is all a vivid delusion brought upon by surviving the Crylaxan plague — but that doesn’t explain how my knowledge of “English” is so internally self-consistent.
Perhaps this is all a dream. The worst kind of literary cop-out imaginable.
The Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi once dreamt of being a butterfly. When he woke up, he asked himself “was I a philosopher dreaming of being a butterfly, or am I a butterfly dreaming of being a philosopher?”
I will never know, until the illusion breaks. Until then, I must live as if this is my last and final chance.
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The day after Archmund began his exercises, his stats, in that distant and hidden sacred library, updated.
Archmund Granavale
Lifespan: 9/91 Stat Value Titles Achievements Bound Items Relationships Skills Strength 5->6 Granavale Heir Reincarnated Memories (*new*) Ruby of Light Lord Reginald Granvale, Father N/A Dexterity 5 Lady Sophia Granavale, Mother (deceased) Constitution 5->6 Amelia Granavale, elder sister (deceased) Intelligence 5 Linus Granavale, elder brother (deceased) Wisdom 5->6 Calla Granavale, elder sister (deceased) Charisma 5 Luck 5