During one peaceful morning in Gallus Town, the mind of Andric Avantus stormed with chaotic thoughts. His life flashed before his eyes, but only the most painful moments were clear in his memories. The few happy experiences he could call his own were bogged down by the sheer weight of misfortune and malevolence he had to endure in his previous life.

His consciousness faded in and out, and his anger grew exponentially larger with each second he remained conscious. His eyes remained open the entire time; though his physical body stayed awake, his mental body swayed through various degrees of alertness.

Gradually, his mind stabilized, and he viewed his surroundings. The first things he realized was that - even though he had died - he was alive. Slowly but surely, he breathed in air and blew it out a second later. He heard the puffs of air exiting his body - or rather, he felt it through his mouth and nose.

But, after only a few dozen seconds of making conscious observations, Andric lost his grasp on the world and plunged into a dark realm. By the time he woke up, he had forgotten everything he had just seen, and his world looked new.

The excruciating, radiating pain had left Andric’s body, but the deeper and more mental pain of terrible memories never faded. The perpetual anguish caused by having his mind flooded with negative emotions never went away.

Eventually, Andric managed to find his bearings and grew to understand the world around him, even if only a little. Whenever he awoke, he was either with a woman or a man, the most frequent being the former. Their bodies were many times larger than Andric’s, but he quickly realized that it was he who was small, not them who was large.

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His new body, weak and difficult to move in, was only the size of an infant. It didn’t take him long to fully understand his circumstances, but the outlandish nature of his predicament was undeniable. In one world, he lived as a functioning adult. In the next world, he was newborn.

Andric fully understood that he lived in a new world. If not, the magical feats his new parents performed would be impossible. They could raise their hands and summon light or water from nowhere, or they could move objects by gazing at them.

Wolter and Lieve - not that Andric knew their names - were ordinary citizens of Andric’s new world, and they used magic almost constantly. The Avantus house didn’t have the luxuries of Andric’s previous world, but the effects of magic were enough to make those luxuries unnecessary.

Spells made the house a comfortable temperature, cooked food to perfection, healed injuries, washed bodies, and entertained idle minds. With Wolter and Lieve working together to combine their magical output, there wasn’t anything they couldn’t do.

Andric, meanwhile, simply laid wherever he was placed and wondered how to control the magical energies for his own use. He saw his parents using magic almost constantly, and he had a few preconceptions that he brought from his old world, but he could not find out they activated the magic.

He couldn’t understand what Wolter or Lieve were saying, but that didn’t seem to have any effect on the use of their spells. Whether it was summoning a ball of water to wash Andric’s feet with or moving a book from a shelf into their hand, Lieve’s spoken words never had any consistency with what she was doing.

Because of the inconsistency, Andric could rule out chants being a necessary object in a spell’s activation sequence. Hand signs were out of the question because of similar inconsistencies, and wands and charms were absolutely nonexistent.

In the end, Andric resolved himself to learn the language of his new world as quickly as possible.