AN: Sorry it took a few days for this, I was going back and forth on how I wanted to present the chapter. The flow may be a bit off or seem fast, since I was trying to condense it, to get the early childhood part out of the way. Aside from that, someone please leave a bloody comment! It helps the motivation. Now on to the chapter.
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Chapter 4: New Beginnings
You know how all those MC's in the reincarnation stories forget to cry right away after they're born?
Yeah, that's a load of bullshit, no way you get squeezed through a hole much to small for you to fit, and not come out screaming from the pain.
On the plus side, my fear of being born a pig was quelled some time ago after my fetus developed.
It was terrifying while it lasted, not that I'm sure how long that was, since it's difficult to keep track of time inside the womb.
When I woke up the next day, I got my first good look at my new mother.
She came barreling in after a few minute of screaming my head off from hunger, gotta get her attention somehow after all.
Honestly, she looks a bit plain with her straight strawberry blonde hair, green eyes, and freckled face.
She's currently got the pregnancy weight still on her of course, but from my best guess, she shouldn't be more than a little plump once she looses the excess.
After getting my fill of milk, she stumbled back out, probably going back to bed since it's still the middle of the night.
My father, at least I hope, came in to poke at me later, I assume he's trying to play with me, or just thinks I'm cute...if I had teeth, I'd bite the stupid finger that he keeps poking into my cheek.
He's a bit rough-looking due to his weathered skin and stubble, probably a bit taller than my mother, with dark brown hair and grey-blue eyes.
On the plus side, now that I've gotten a look at both parents, I can say with a fair bit of certainty that I'm human.
It's been awhile since I was born now, not sure how long really, it's easy to lose track of days when you sleep through most of it.
I'm starting to stay awake longer, so my parents have started playing and talking with me, not that I can understand many of the words.
They seem to be speaking some form of Gaelic, which I knew a few words of from Earth; but decided to keep my mouth shut since I'm still a baby here.
Few means few by the way, I only know a hand full of words from when I was looking into Druidism, seemed like a really hard language to learn so I gave up on it back on Earth...figures that would come back to bite me in the ass now.
It looks like mom is either a housewife or staying home with me, as I don't see my father much, he's probably still working at whatever his job is.
I've decided to wait till I can better understand the language before I let anything but unintelligible babble escape my mouth, it would probably freak my mother out if I tried saying any of the few words I know.
When she's not spending time with me or feeding me, I've been working on crawling in my crib, I want to be let loose as soon as possible to learn what I can from just looking around.
When the time finally came, they brought in some simple toys for me to play with, mostly made from wood.
They consisted of blocks, simple wooden puzzles, and to my surprise what looked a lot like a humongous set of Linkoln Logs, man talk about nostalgia.
Despite my curiosity of my surroundings, I spent the next few days playing...come on, who doesn't think of reliving their childhood every now and then.
Really, I only stopped because they started babbling excitedly, non-stop, when they walked in and saw I had used nearly every one of the near 300 pieces of connecting logs to make a huge castle like structure.
Their reaction told me that probably wasn't normal, so I had set my play time aside to start searching around the room.
After a few days of inspection, I didn't really manage to find out too much.
To the best of my knowledge, it's hard to do precise measurement as a baby, the room is around 15 square feet and everything is made of hardwood.
The one window in the room seems to face north due to the displacement of the light over time, but because of it I only know the sky is blue, I haven't seen hide nor hair of the sun or moon to know if there's any real difference from Earth.
With my utter lack of any real results, I went back to playing while trying to appear somewhat like a normal baby.
Enough time has passed now that I have finally been able to understand some portion of the language, a while ago I finally graduated to semi-solid food as well.
Not nearly enough for my peace of mind, but enough that I know my birthday is today, I'm turning 1, and decided I need to start saying some simple words.
By the way, my name in this world appears to be Mallic, while fathers' is Connor, and mothers' is Keelin, with our family name being Caervylen.
I started walking a while ago as well, so I was able to look out the window from some new angles, and it appears that all the structures I could see are made of the same wood as my room.
I'm starting to wonder if they have something against stone, or if my family just lives in some kind of outlying village.
Weirdly, at least to me, this would be the first time I've been brought out of my room, I wonder if that's normal in this world?
When my mother came to get me, I called her momma for the first time...maybe I waited a bit too long, she dropped to her knees and started bawling after I spoke.
I guess I may have worried them a bit since I haven't tried to say any baby like words till now.
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Father came running shortly after to try to figure out what was wrong, he sighed in relief and was really happy when mom told him what happened.
We celebrated my birthday with a small cake like thing that wasn't near as sweet as a cake should have been, maybe sugar is rare here?
I got a few new toys as presents and they finally started to leave the door open for me to move around the house.
After a year of moving around the house as I please, I got a much better understanding of my surrounding.
We live in what looks like a small rural village of some sort, mostly surrounded by forests.
Everything is really made of wood, just like you'd expect from a low tech outlying village.
The sun looks a bit bigger than it did back on Earth, and there are 3 moons of different colors.
The biggest is about 3 times the size of Earths' moon and of a blue-silver color, the second largest is reddish and about twice the size of the moon on Earth, and the last moon is about the same size as Earths' and yellow-orange in color.
They must have an odd rotation around the planet as the only one you can see every night is the smallest one.
When I asked my new mom about them, she told me they are, in order of size, the Beast Moon, then the Blood Moon, and then the Hearth Moon.
The Beast Moon enhances the power of the natives of this world, making them more aggressive and putting the beastkin into heat.
The Blood Moon makes the beasts and beastkin of the world even more aggressive, and it's used to signal the start of succession and advancement battles in the beast clans.
She said that it also has an effect on blood related or dependent creatures as well, making them more aggressive.
The Hearth Moon, named because it looks a little like a hearth fire in color, simply acts as a normal moon.
The following year I finally figured out that my father acts as a hunter and trapper for the village.
My mother is apparently some kind of healer, and has started seeing patients in the home, though whenever someone comes over, I'm told to stay in my room.
I asked her about it after, and it turns out she heals with magic, she has me stay away so that she doesn't have to waste mana on curing me on the off-chance I caught something from a patient.
Even though I asked, she won't teach me about magic right now.
She told me it's unsafe to learn until the mana current in the body stabilizes around 5 years old.
Once that happens, children are sent to the village sage to start basic schooling, and the exceptional ones are sent to special schools in bigger towns to be further trained after they turn 10.
Life was pretty normal for me after that, consisting of simply being a kid again, just stuck inside, since it was dangerous to roam around outside due to wild beasts.
I finally turned 5, after a breakfast of potato and mushroom porridge we'll be heading to meet the sage.
The sage is an old human with a bald head and a long grey beard, he kinda reminds me of Gandalf if he took off his hat.
The old man is seems nice enough, probably the type that's good with kids.
He took us to a small building next to his house, where class is held.
It's a really simple place, one large classroom, an office, and a type of indoor outhouse....how I miss flushing toilets, at least the bathrooms are kept clean with water magic.
I was told my class would have 8 students once I joined, between the ages of 5 and 7, and I would be learning the basics of magic, world study(which is basically nature science back on Earth), arithmetic, reading and writing.
It seems humans are able to learn all the basic magics in this world, which are called basic invokements...which makes them sound a lot more impressive than they really are.
Basic invokements are basically cantrip spells from good old D&D, doing nothing more than acting like a lighter, shedding light similar to a candle, and other little effects from each of the four basic elements.
Today is my first day of school, I'm not going to lie, I'm nervous...I didn't exactly have the best experience in school on Earth.
As I was procrastinating getting out of bed, my door slammed open and my mother stormed in.
"Time to get up, it's your first day of school! How can you still be sleeping? When I was your age, I was so excited that I couldn't even sleep!" - Keelin
I just looked flatly at the "happy-go-lucky" mother, buzzing with excitement, and apparently that was enough to get her to realize I wasn't as happy as her about the situation.
Saying, "No time for butterflies, up you get!" she unceremoniously drug me out of bed, undressed, then redressed me in clean clothes appropriate for the first day of school.
Pulling me to the kitchen table, she proceeded to shove food in me till it looked like I was full, before taking my hand and dragging me out the door...I may or may not have left treads in the ground.
Once we arrived in front of the "school," she grabbed me by the shoulders, kissed my forehead, and told me to, "Go learn and have fun, that's an order little man!", before shoving me toward the building.
I stand in front of the door for a minute, look back to my mother who's just standing there with her arms crossed, tapping her foot briefly, huff a long sigh, then open the door.
When the door opened, everyone stopped what they were doing to turn and look at me, my only thought with all those eyes on me was, *Great, I'm back in hell.*