Fleshy walls rippled over my entire body as if a great monster had swallowed me, only to find out I wasn’t edible.

That is birth in a nutshell.

Not beautiful, not a miracle, not life’s greatest moment.

The only thing I thought about it was, to put it nicely, an odd experience.

To put it more bluntly, it was utterly disgusting and creeped me out.

No wonder babies always cry right after they’re born.

But still, it was necessary.

Believe me if I say I tried to change it, but failed every single time.

When I tried bypassing it, creating a body and attaching a Soul directly without the need for birth, it would merely be a shell of a being.

Only a hollow representation, missing the greatest thing that defines life: the mind.

Everything is tangible to me, but for some reason, the mind had always been outside my supposedly all-powerful grasp and beyond my understanding.

The only way life could exist was through evolution; the most I could provide were the ingredients needed to start life, like water, oxygen and many other things.

That doesn’t mean I needed to go through the birthing process to exist.

I could create a shell and then inhabit eat, easy as that.

Meaning that this awful experience was entirely of my own volition.

It isn’t hard to guess why I did this.

After all, I was never really born.

I merely wasn’t there one moment, and then poof, I were.

No parents, no siblings, no family.

I never even experienced youth; I was an adult the moment I existed.

But now, during this ‘rebirth’ of mine, I want parents.

I want brothers and sisters.

I want a family.

I want to live the life I never could and birth is the beginning of it all.

To have all that by merely going through an unpleasant experience is a small price to pay.

I’ve paid more pain for less gain.

However, I was not the only one being born at this moment.

Allow me to list them all:

The first to arrive was sister Lana: blond hair, golden eyes.

The second was sister Lucia: equally blond hair and golden eyes.

The third was brother Pavo: once again, blond hair, golden eyes like his sisters.

The fourth was brother Rade: see above, finishing the pack of quadruplets (appearance wise).

The fifth was brother Lovro: the first one to break away from the pack with brown hair and brown eyes.

The sixth was sister Cila: blond hair, brown eyes.

The seventh was sister Sara: brown hair, golden eyes.

The eight was sister Mila: brown hair, emerald green eyes.

The ninth and last was me, Miro : brown hair, emerald green eyes and twin to Mila in appearance.

A batch of nine children in total.

Since we were of a race slowly evolved out of cats into humanoids, it was common to have twins, triplets and even quadruplets.

The size of one ‘litter’, for lack of better word, is anywhere ranging from 1-6, averaging at about four.

But, six is as uncommon as twins for ‘normal’ humans.

Seven is as rare as having triplets or quadruplets.

Eight is having quintuplets or sextuplets.

And then there is nine.

Nonuplets.

A word so rarely used I only encountered it a couple of times in the many, many books I’ve read through the ages, and even then they were in encyclopaedias and the like.

In rarity, it would be the same for seven children to born at once for humans.

Normally, having so many children would not only be catastrophic for the one giving birth, it also often meant that children would die almost immediately after birth.

However, evolution for the cat-people – they called themselves Covek, meaning ‘the people’ – had a solution for this.

Since evolution has accounted for an average of four, it meant that those born were very small, about the size of a hand somewhat larger than average.

So although nine was a bit of a stretch, it wasn’t impossible.

Just very, very rare.

So rare that I could almost say that everyone present at the time had ever heard something about a mother having nine children at once, aside from those in the weirdest of folk tales.

So it was obvious that the room was quiet bustling with noises of busy midwives, urgent commands of the doctor and a whole lot of panicking from my mother and father.

Now I couldn’t yet see anything that happened around me since my eyes were closed firmly, but in the noises of people running, ordering and panicking, there was one thing that caught my attention.

Rather, it was the lack of something that caught my attention.

Despite all the sounds thrown at me from every direction, hurting my still wet, recently born ears, it wasn’t as much noise as I was expecting.

After all, nine babies had just been born and what do babies do when they are born?

Indeed.

They cry.

A lot.

Now imagine nine little kitten-like babies being born so closely after each other.

What would one hear?

It would sound like the world was exploding.

This wasn’t a quirk of evolution on the Covek side.

Their children, although small, were even more annoying and loud than other races, as if they were compensating for something.

I’ve studied it thoroughly from every single race known in existence.

The sounds of recently born Coveks is like the sound of a cat being strangled.

And now that there were nine in one room, it seemed almost eerily silent compared to normal births.

Perhaps that is why there is so much noise of running people, panicking parents and a hint of controlled worry in the doctor’s voice.

In a situation like this, the absence of sound is more horrifying than hearing nine strangled cats.

For me, it was easily explained.

Although the air hurt my tender skin, the light burned my still-closed eyes and the noise pricked my ears, I didn’t feel the need to cry out.

After all, this is but a slight discomfort compared to the things I’m used to.

For the other eight, however, it is not as easily explained.

The reasons why babies cry are listed above: pain and discomfort.

Of course, there are exceptions.

Babies tough as nails refusing to cry as if their lives were on the line, and babies silent because their lives were on the line.

Now there were nine babies refusing to cry.

No doubt one of them should, purely by chance, be in serious danger, right?

That is what a doctor would think.

But they’re wrong.

I already noticed that my recently-wiped Soul had absolutely zero extra powers in it.

No inherent Magic whatsoever.

So sensing others through any form of Magic is impossible for this body.

But, I am a cheat.

Curiosity arrived and, since there wasn’t anything better to do except for being carried around and treated like a slab of meat, I was quickly tempted in indulging it.

I distanced my mind slightly from my body and Soul, allowing me to use all the powers I’ve created as easy as wiggling your finger.

What I saw was both surprising and as expected.

The cause of it went far back, just shy of fifteen billion years ago.

Although I had allowed life to flourish at that point, I was still busily experimenting trying to create the mind.

Naturally, I was unsuccessful, but there was one thing that remained from my many experiments.

I tried to see if I could capture a mind by creating a loose Soul untethered to the new Furnace I created and send it through the process of birth.

It failed, but that left me with Souls unconnected to the Furnace and thus Immortal Souls.

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While their bodies would die with age, their Souls would not, staying behind and wandering the earth like ghosts.

I never wanted others to suffer because of my experiments (aside from those that, in my eyes, deserve nothing less), so I solved it in the form of a gift.

Instead of tethering them to the Furnace like everyone else, I allowed their Souls to stay Immortal, meaning their mind and (most of) their memories would remain after dead.

Once their body perishes, however, they would be dragged through a different system and be ‘reborn’ with all their power and memories intact.

Basically, your standard reincarnation.

Of course, it wasn’t perfect at once, so as time passed by I added some features.

Since I know the burden of living to long, although recently very much lessened, I gave them a percentage of a complete memory wipe each time they died; memories reside in the Soul, so I could easily interfere with them, although not as much as being able to change someone’s character.

The more time one died, the higher the percentage, although it would never reach higher than 25% after a hundred thousand years or so.

This allowed for minds to feel young again and lift the burdens memories carry without destroying the minds of its owner.

Another thing I added was the restriction, but also guarantee, of one Magic power.

It was to make sure they had more control of their lives, since power meant control.

I wouldn’t want them to feel they are doomed for eternity because they don’t have the power to change their own fates.

The third thing I added concerned my eight siblings.

Whenever there is one person reincarnated in a person carrying multiple births, there is a 75% chance the other one, too, is destined to be a reincarnated person.

It was both to give people someone they could relate to, as well as a way of meeting previous reincarnated friends, even though the chances were still very slim.

However, this is not all.

If one out of three is a reincarnated person, then the others both have a chance of 75% chance to be a reincarnated person.

If luck is not with them, both will be normal and the reincarnated person left alone.

If another one becomes a reincarnated person as well, it gives another chance of 75% to the remaining one to also get a reincarnated Soul inside the body.

In simpler words, another dice-roll for each reincarnated person.

Now, in this room was undoubtedly at least one person originally meant to hold a reincarnated Soul.

Meaning the remaining seven – of course excluding myself, since I was a special case – all had a 75% each to become inhabited by a reincarnated Soul.

Then, another one becomes a host for said Soul and the remaining bodies get another 75% chance to become such a host.

Do this over and over, and the chance for all eight of them to become reincarnated people is rather high.

This was what I expected.

One reincarnated person gets others through the Laws I have placed, and soon enough, all my siblings are Reincarnated Souls.

It was what I created, so it wasn’t weird that, once I scanned all their Souls, I found out all of them were these holders of Reincarnated Souls.

Still, despite this logic, the fact that my single Soul would wind up in a batch of nine simultaneous births where one person was a Reincarnate and thus all of them were, made me surprised.

The chance is quite literally astronomically small.

In the whole entire universe, there is only one me and at most a couple million Reincarnated amongst the so many billions times a billion Souls there are in this world of mine.

It was almost like I intended for this to happen.

The fact that it didn’t made me shiver.

What else can I call this other than fate?

I do not believe in coincidence.

Everything is a reaction to previous actions, which in turn is a reaction to another action etcetera, etcetera.

But I didn’t let it bother me too much.

After all, me worrying doesn’t change anything.

After the birth and during the lack of cries, a couple of other people came in the room, carried us away, cleaned us, wrapped us in tiny towels and examined us.

It wasn’t necessary, of course.

There was no doubt any of us were unhealthy, it’s just that we were tough compared to other babies for obvious reasons.

Since they didn’t know this, I could hardly blame them.

What I could blame them for was the incredible way to over-the-top care of those in charge.

Not just for days, no, they kept us for weeks in this either church or hospital.

Four weeks they kept watching over us, barely allowing any contact at all.

Even the contact with our parents were at a minimum, allowing us only breastfeeding once a day, supplying the rest of our needs themselves.

I can understand why though.

If we were truly the frail, weak things they thought we were, exposure to outside is better to be kept to a minimum.

After all, who knows what diseases could harm our little bodies.

Although I was pretty irritated at not allowing much contact with my first set of parents I ever had, I didn’t mind all that much to be honest.

From research I already knew the first two months were going to be boring as hell.

Since the Coveks were born tiny and frail compared to other equally as evolved creatures, our brains and senses didn’t work as well.

Although my eyes could now just barely peel themselves open, all I saw was blinding spots of light.

And although I could hear, sound was still painful to the ears, making words unable to be understood properly.

So we all sat there, remaining stoic for four entire weeks without so much as a single cry or noise of complaint to be heard.

It felt almost like a challenge, really.

‘The first one to break is a loser’, we seemed to have bet.

But, after four weeks, I heard a familiar sound.

It was the voice of my mother I had come to know during breastfeeding hours.

Although her words still eluded me due to the sharpness of sound, I could easily pick it out from the group of men and women watching over us day and night.

She basically came barging into the unknown room we were held while nearly yelling curses at those that followed her and were present in the room.

There was little doubt our keepers were eager for her to come in here, but their voices were low in what I guessed not only to be the fear of getting between a mother and a child, but also a sort of respect hidden more deeply within their voice.

Mixed in the soft voices of people trying to dissuade her, I also heard the voice of a man trying his hardest to diffuse the situation.

Since I was locked in here with nothing better to do, I could immediately tell the voice belonged to someone outside of the group of caretakers.

The voice was sounded somewhat kind though commanding to my wounded ears, but I could also hear he did, in fact, support my mother.

Little doubt it was my father.

The footsteps kept coming closer and closer, the voices becoming louder and louder, the sound of it grating against my ears.

“…and by God, if any of you try to stop me, I’ll make sure you’ll burn before you enter hell!”

The first words I heard in this life and they were already filled with death threats and promises for the afterlife.

This sounds promising.