Today was the 372nd day of No Nut November.

I had fought a great battle that pushed my focus to the limit. I resisted, and I won. Then I transformed the power accumulated inside me into cosmic energy and offered it to the gods. They accepted my offer and rewarded me in return.

I could walk now.

I found out that my birthday was November 7th. While everyone at home was busy preparing something for my birthday, a tall, muscular black man was looking for me. His name was Nazir. He was a half-elf, an old friend of my father’s, and also my bodyguard, or should I say knight?

When I was 6 months old, I started crawling everywhere in our big mansion with the wonderful feeling of freedom. After some time, my parents got tired of following me every day.

About two weeks later, I met Nazir. My parents could have assigned one of the servants, but I think they wanted someone who could protect me. He usually carried a great sword with him at all times, but he didn’t have his weapon with him now. I wondered where it was.

Actually, that wasn’t important. The important thing was that I didn’t have a reflection. I was in my father’s office, which could also be called his library. There was a small mirror there, and ever since I had seen this mirror and realized I didn’t have a reflection, I had been coming back to look at it for a while. I still couldn’t get used to this situation.I wasn’t a vampire, my teeth were normal, I didn’t crave blood, and the sun didn’t harm me.

I was also still trying to understand how different this world was from my old one. Yes, there was magic, but how far they were technologically advanced was very important.

When I was looking around, I found two or three copies of the same book, which meant they had at least passed the age of the printing press. The toilets flushed, and they seemed to have a sewage system, so they were close to a modern level of hygiene. As far as I could see, their paintings, sculptures, and artistic approach surpassed the Renaissance period.

I didn’t know if colonization had happened, but sometimes my father drank something similar to coffee—maybe there was a coffee-like fruit in this world.

And this flat rock in my hand with the green markings on it was a runestone.

Lamps, flushing, showerheads, heating, and many other things were powered by these magical stones. These runestones contained an element within them, and I thought you could activate them using your mana. There was even a job called runestone engineering.

I threw the runestone on my father’s desk and stood up slowly. I still couldn’t get used to this small body; I felt like I could get injured at the slightest mistake. Anyway, Nazir had been wandering the hallways for a few minutes, I’d better find him before my parents got worried.

I looked back at the door of the room and saw that it was ajar.

Oh, it looked like he had found me already.

When I left the room, I saw Nazir waiting by the door. He greeted me with a nod, his voice thick but his tone gentle. “Have you been looking at your father’s books, my lord?”

I would have liked to say reading, but I tried not to seem too suspicious, so I just nodded, and he smiled. “My lord, Lady Aurelia asked me to find you. Do you want me to carry you to her?”

I nodded again and raised my hands. After holding me gently, he sat me on his arm, and I placed my hand on his chest.

Nazir was tall—really tall. In my old world, I was sure that with his height and physique, he could have been either a famous basketball player or a fighter. So, I liked it when he carried me. Everyone around me looked like a giant because I was still very short, but when I was on his arm or shoulders, everything felt normal again.

“Do you like books, my lord?”

“Yes.” Even though I couldn’t fully read any book yet, as I was still trying to understand their words, reading was my only hobby at the moment—there wasn’t much else to do here.

“Can you understand the things you read?” he asked with curious eyes. I answered instantly, “Non.”

He chuckled, and as he kept walking, I looked around. White walls, paintings, vases, and statues—even the hallways of the house were filled with elegance. It was a mansion I couldn’t have even dreamed of back then. A PC would be nice, though. I missed watching videos while eating.

I sighed and Nazir looked at me in surprise “Is something wrong, my lord?”

Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.

“Non.”

He watched me silently for a while, and then we came to my parents’ room. Nazir tapped twice on the white door, waited for a moment, and then opened it. My mother was sitting on her bed, and next to her were small clothes in purple and white. She turned toward us, and her eyes widened.

“Come here, love.” She was as happy as always.

After Nazir put me down gently, I walked like a penguin to my mother, and Nazir left the room.

She opened her arms, I hugged her, and she picked me up and placed me on the bed. “Your cuteness will kill me one day.” She kissed me on my cheeks several times and then began to take off my clothes.

“What were you doing in your father’s office?” she asked as she held me.

“Books.”

We made our way to the en-suite bathroom to the left of the room.

“What did you read?”

“Red one.”

I was trying to answer her questions in the way a child would, even if it bothered me sometimes.

“There are lots of red ones, was there anything on it’s cover?”

“Gold dragon.”

“Subjugation of the Dragons?”

She was always talking to me—not just her, actually, but everyone in the house was talking to me all the time. It was probably something they did to help me learn the language, but I felt like I was suffocating. That was one of the reasons why I went to my father’s office all the time.

The bathroom in their room was quite large and looked like a modern bathroom, with black and white walls. They had a large rectangular marble bathtub at the end of the room, a white toilet bowl on the left, and a blue glowing runestone faucet with a small square mirror on the right.

After my mother sat me down in the middle of the tub, she reached her hand over my head, and a warm stream of water began to flow from her hand. There were no incantations or anything like that. I thought that, in this world, when someone wanted to cast a spell, they just had to imagine and focus. But when I had tried that before, it didn’t work. I thought I still didn’t have enough mana, because when I tried to create a fire in my hand, I felt a tingling in my palm.

My mom kept talking while she was washing me, and I, being a sweet boy, kept answering. “Close your eyes.” She even put something like shampoo from a glass jar next to the bathtub on my hair. It was a strange pink liquid with what looked like pink petals in it.

After a short cleaning session, we went back to the room, and my mom dressed me. I was wearing a comfortable silk robe in purple and white, with a small short purple cloak. For someone who used to have six of the same black oversized t-shirts in his closet, these clothes were a great improvement. My mom put on a long black dress, took me in her arms, and we left the room. We headed for the garden and came to a place I had chosen not to go before because I thought it was the basement of the house.

Mother opened the big white door in front of us. There was a staircase leading down. As we went downstairs, I began to look around. It looked like a Roman bath, with marble walls. Warm, comforting water ran down the left and right sides of the room, filling little pools, and there was a light steam.

But most importantly, there were dozens of people in there. As soon as they noticed us, they all turned to look at me, and a strange feeling filled my nose and chest.

“Happy birthday, Altevia!” They all shouted at the same time.

I remembered the first time my friends came to my house to celebrate my birthday. From my childhood to my depression, I had spent every birthday with my mother—either I would go somewhere with her, or she would prepare a surprise party for me at home. Those were good times, rare moments when I felt special. But as beautiful as they were, they were also a bit sad to think about. Besides my mom, the only other friends who celebrated my birthday did so by giving me a hentai game as a gift.

When I left home for university, my first years were spent with my own thoughts and loneliness. The day my friends knocked on my door with a cake, I stared at them in confusion. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing—it was a really big surprise and brought me so much happiness.

I knew my parents were going to prepare a party for me; it wasn’t a surprise. But I was really happy that they had prepared so much for a toddler. There was a blue birthday cake in the center of the room that looked like a big wedding cake. Eight muscular, half-naked men—, probably gladiators, stood in a line on the left side. Dozens of people I didn’t know filled the room, and my father was holding the leash of a red beast.

Standing on four legs, it was a creature with a dragon-like head and big red scales, but it had no wings. I’d consumed enough fantasy content to know what that creature was: it was a drake.

“Aaah, he's scared.”

A middle-aged man with short orange curly hair and a beard came up to us and took me in his arms. He was a very energetic and happy man. He was my uncle, Pedro, one of the two or three people my father would chat with.

We went to the center of the room, near the cake, and I looked at my father. He gave the creature’s leash to Nazir and took me from my uncle’s arms.

“He is confused,” he said as he looked into my eyes and then kissed my forehead. He was wearing a long robe in black and gold.

I looked around me again. Although I knew almost no one, there were a few familiar faces, like Lady Bear and my uncle’s daughter, Orea. She was a girl about 10 years older than me and used to bring me toys so I wouldn’t get bored lying in my cage. But apart from them, I think I only knew Iris, my grandmother. She was my father’s mother, an elf with classic blonde hair and blue eyes. She had a long blue snake earring that was always in her left ear. I didn’t know anything about my mother’s parents, but my father’s father was already dead.

“I think we can begin.” After my father looked around and said this, he glanced at Nazir, who grabbed the drake by the neck and laid him on the ground.

Begin to what?

My mother came to us with a strange turquoise dagger in her hand. Father gently put me down, and everyone formed a circle around me while my mother placed the dagger in my hand. The dagger was too big for me to hold, so she helped me.

The drake lay on the ground, waiting to die. I had never killed an animal in my life, and I wasn’t sure I could move my hands with the drake looking at me out of the corner of his eye.

“A sacrifice to Lady Morta, my love. Go on.”

With my mother’s help, I slowly thrust the dagger into the beast’s neck, where my father had pointed with his finger. I was about to look into the drake’s eyes again, but my mom wouldn’t let me move my head. When the tip of the dagger touched his scales, it made a small hole, and the beast tried to move. This dagger was too sharp.

My mother slowly moved my hands forward, thrusting the dagger deeper. And as the beast’s blood started to flow into the pool and he stopped moving, I knew he was dead. The dagger fell from my hand, and my mother caught it and handed it to the servant behind her.I thought it was over and wanted to get away from the drake. It was very strange—everyone around me was watching me with curiosity. I wasn’t sad or happy. I was curious too, and also shocked. As I took a few steps backward, my mother pushed me forward and made me touch the creature’s chest.

“You'll feel a tingling in your hand.

Do you see this red smoke?”

“Smoke?”

She kissed my head, “A flow actually but it looks like a smoke.”

There was indeed something that looked like red smoke coming out of the beast’s body, and I noticed people had started whispering amongst themselves.

‘He has guardians.’ ‘Yes, but how many?’

Guardians?

“That flow, a piece of mana of the drake is yours. Take it.”

After holding my hand on the beast for a while, I felt a strange sensation, and the red smoke started to move toward my hand. It was a special sense, like seeing, hearing, or touching. I could do it, but I didn’t seem to have complete control over it.

After I gathered all the smoke in my hand, my father took the dagger, and Nazir lifted the drake up. He made a cut on the drake’s neck with the dagger, and they poured its blood into a bowl.

My mother looked into my eyes with a smile on her face and kissed me on the forehead. She smeared the blood under my eye and then on her own forehead. Then everyone started clapping. My strange sense of curiosity was growing. I never thought I’d experience something like this in my whole life.

I just participated in a pagan ritual.