After they stopped crying, they fed me, bathed me and put me to sleep.

Yes, I ate in the way babies usually eat. I briefly thought I might be able to just starve myself, but no.

It seems my body instinctually knows what to do and despite how much I tell it to stop, it does what it needs.

As for getting aroused or ashamed... there's not a chance that would happen.

Sure, I have the memories of why I should be feeling both, but I spent centuries in bliss no physical sensation could ever come close to. Most of the human emotions don't feel quite the same after that.

The bath on the other hand was actually sort of pleasant. Kind of.

It reminded me of the warmth and comfort of the darkness. It couldn't compare, but it was absolutely as close as I felt since I left.

After that I expected to be put on the crib to sleep but instead I was rocked for what must have been close to an hour. Eventually, I realized they expected me to fall asleep first, which kind of made sense honestly.

I wanted to spend the night trying to think of ways to kill myself, but after an hour of being rocked I was getting kind of sleepy, so I decided to stop resisting and think of something tomorrow. I wouldn't come up with anything good tired and I needed to be well rested for one of the things I wanted to try.

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When I woke up, I was in the crib and I could see through the glass door the sun had just risen.

Looking at the bed I found that neither of them were asleep.

Maybe they were early risers? Or magic... probably magic.

Which is the next thing I want to try. I know it probably exists and I can think of a million ways to kill myself with it. Maybe I'll get lucky and it will be as simple as using all my mana or whatever they call it, I can remember that was enough in some stories.

Slight problem, I did not know how to do magic.

I didn't feel any energy in the air or coursing through me.

As far as I know, it might be something that needs a wand or contracts with eldritch monsters or something.

Still, seeing as I'm kind of stuck in place and can't move much anyway, I want to give it a try.

The first step in most magic systems, besides being born with talent for it, is always meditation.

I just need to clear my head of any stray thoughts and centre myself, whatever that means.

I never tried meditation in the before, but how hard could it be?

It's just not thinking and I was great at it in the darkness.

So breathing rhythmically in and out, I tried to think of nothing.

... I missed the darkness.

I knew it had changed me.

I knew what I was like before and that I wasn't the same anymore.

I knew that I would have found something pretty or funny or sad, but I didn't really feel it.

I felt something similar, almost like amusement and sadness, but not quite.

All the real emotions had been ground away by time in the darkness, leaving me with a shadow of them.

And me a shadow of myself.

The only thing that mattered and made me feel anything at all was the darkness.

I knew I should feel disgusted by it.

I knew I should fear it more than anything else, but I just couldn't.

I would compare it to drugs, but it would be unfair to me. It was possible to quit drugs, it was always hard and practically impossible with some of them, but still possible.

The darkness wasn't like that, there was simply no resisting it.

It was part of me, more than my body, more than my personality, my need for the darkness was me.

I remember a discussion I had in the before. If I had a button that made me feel happy by just pressing it, with no side effects of any kind, would I be able to resist pressing it forever?

At the time, I did not think I would.

Now? Now I knew I wouldn't.

So is ther-... Shit!

... I think meditation will be harder than I thought.

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After that pathetic attempt, I tried again several more times. All of them failed, my mind eventually going on a downward spiral similar to the first.

Ignoring what that might say about me, I decided to try something else since whatever I was doing was not working.

The idea came to me during my last try, I should try to keep a mental image while meditating. It would keep my mind occupied and let me relax a bit more if it worked.

Breathing deep, I closed my eyes and carefully pictured the place I felt most comfortable in. I knew it well, better than even myself. Perhaps because of that, it came easy to me.

With my eyes closed, it should have been hard to tell the difference, but I still did.

I was in the darkness now. A complete absence of light that closed eyes couldn't match.

I was floating in it, held aloft like ice on water.

It didn't feel me with love and joy, but it was so close I could immerse myself in the memory of it.

So, for a few minutes, I was just there.

I wasn't thinking now, but the mental image held strong.

And without me noticing, a current in the darkness I didn't consciously put there took me deeper.

Not in any of the three dimensions, the darkness didn't have those, so this one didn't either.

It took me inwards.

Minutes passed as I got more and more calm, only to be snapped out of it when something appeared in the darkness.

It wasn't something I'd ever seen in the real darkness and I hadn't put it there either, yet, it still floated in front of me.

It was a star, though not like any star I'd ever seen.

It was small. Sizes were strange in the darkness, but somehow, I knew it was smaller than me.

It wasn't hot. Unlike true stars, this one didn't emit heat at all.

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It's light was weird. Instead of the yellow of the sun I was used to, or even the blue or red I knew some stars could be, it shone with a pale purple.

In truth, it didn't look like a star by almost any metric, but as I looked at it, it just radiated so much energy no other name seemed right.

And it was mine.

I didn't know where that knowledge came from, but it rang true.

I knew it was right.

And that same knowledge pulled me towards the star.

Maybe I was still half-asleep from the darkness, maybe the star shocked me so much I wasn't thinking right, but I listened to it.

Slowly, moving in ways I never had before, I grew closer to the star.

I wasn't thinking then, the star, small as it was, seemed to fill my entire vision.

And in appeared to be a blink of an eyes, but that I knew had taken far longer, the star passed through me, finally resting where my brain was.

After a beat, the darkness shook as a ding so loud it could have deafened me if I were in a real body reverberated through it.

You have moved your soul significantly for the first time, allowing for connection with the Realm.

The square appeared in front of me, still inside my mind.

I could see it, but more than that, I could feel it.

I felt it's colour, I felt it's text, and further, I felt it's meaning.

I knew what it meant with no room for misunderstandings.

By absorbing the star, I'd moved my soul enough for the Realm, the very world I lived on, to connect to me.

What that did exactly was left vague, I just got the sense that at any point, I could call upon it.

So I did.

Characteristics Stats Resources Skils Unique Ability Age: 189 days Body 101 Shape Self Race: Human Spirit 103 Mind 163 1/1

That surprised me.

Perhaps it shouldn't have after the first box, but seeing a status completely shocked me.

There was something about systems that was just so clean and orderly that they just felt impossible in a way magic didn't.

Still, it only benefited me. It had the same effect as the first box in the sense that I felt it's meaning.

Age was just that, the age of my soul measured from the moment it came to this realm.

Race was obvious, though it only occurred to me now that I might have been something different. That probably ended it's fair share of relationships.

Stats were how much my soul enhanced each part of me.

Apparently, my mind was 63% stronger than it should while my body was only 1% better.

Resources were the energy held in each part of me.

Skills are soul mutations that could grant me abilities.

And last but not least, my unique ability. Everybody was born with one, and this one was mine.

What it did exactly the system didn't tell me, but it did tell me how to use it.

I thought about what to do for a moment.

I had gotten what I wanted, access to magic of some kind, but this changed things.

Going by it's name, it was probably a shapeshifting power. Maybe it would be hard to control, but I felt that I had a better chance of killing myself with it than magic I didn't know how to use.

Besides, if it didn't work, I could just go back to the magic, so really, I didn't lose anything.

I decided to follow the systems instructions.

I wouldn't be able to do it alone, I simply didn't know about all the parts of my soul it was telling me to move, but with it pointing them out, it was easy.

I tensed my soul in just the way it told me and the world narrowed.

Calmly, I opened my eyes. Looking around, I found that I was in the woman's arms and we were seated in a couch in a living room of some kind.

She was drinking tea and speaking with the man.

By the door, I saw a maid. Unremarkable except for the fact she was the first person I'd seen since I was born without counting the couple.

Even still, I felt nothing.

Not just about her, I felt no emotions at all. About anything.

Including the darkness.

Right now, it was like any other place I'd ever been on.

And I didn't feel anything about that either.

I was thinking more clearly than ever.

Things were so logical now.

I remembered my life with new lenses.

How I was in the before, my time in the void and the short time I'd been on this world.

And I couldn't help but find myself wanting.

I didn't put in the effort in my first life, I was satisfied with meaningless pleasure in the darkness and here all I'd done was desperately stumble about trying to go back to that same pleasure.

It disgusted me. Or it would have if I could feel it.

I knew what my ability was now. After using it and seeing what it did it became obvious.

The name was well chosen, it did exactly what it said.

It changed me. In a much more fundamental way than shapeshifting ever could.

The system probably did it on purpose, but ending up in the state I was in was very fortunate.

The mind is massively complex, so much so it is difficult to accurately describe the immensity of it. It had so many moving and not-moving parts that my ability could change at the drop of a hat, that even examples would fall flat of what could happen.

Using it showed me a lot, but even now I would be loath to make any significant changes.

Still, I recognised this version of me was temporary.

There was no shame or sadness to it. I just knew a life I'd consider valuable couldn't be made without feeling anything at all.

Returning exactly as I was before however, was inadmissible.

I could see it as clearly as glass, if I let myself go back unchanged, I would put my ability under lock and key and kill myself at the first opportunity.

Even without emotions, the very thought was revolting.

So weak.

So pathetic.

I wouldn't allow that.

I am loath to make any big changes, so a small one will suffice for now.

I will still be lacking, not as perfect as I could be, but I will be better.

My biggest problem is my obsession with the darkness and fortunately I have just the way to change that.

The state my ability put me on is extremely complex, much beyond what I'd be able to do without the system guiding me.

To be able to turn of all emotions is not as simple as turning a lever off, emotions are the result of millions of neurological and hormonal interactions. And even then, it's not all it's doing.

There are changes to the way I think, leaps in logic I could never make before became obvious.

I could remember everything I'd ever seen, the information taken directly from my soul with more clarity than the brain I was using should allow.

I could process information faster than humanly possible, not quite slow motion, but decidedly slower than I could before.

To change so much in such a fundamental way is something I doubt I'll be able to do without many years of training and careful experimentation with the skill.

But some things are much easier.

Changing emotions is hard, changing memories however? Much less so.

They were largely static and it was easier to change something that was standing still.

Even more importantly, they were isolated in a manner of speaking.

Not completely, because nothing in the mind was ever truly unconnected from the rest, but by definition, they had to be kept away from most of the it.

To remain unchanged with the passage of time, to be a legitimate record, they needed to be left alone.

In this case, this benefited me.

It meant any changes would have fewer ripples.

So I got to work.

Carefully, I erased the emotions out of the memories of the darkness.

It took a long time, there were hundreds of years worth of memories and I didn't want to do fuck it up, so I was specially slow.

But after a few hours, and many, many revisions, it was done.

With my work done, I changed my soul back to before I used the ability.

And opened my eyes to a new world.