An unknown amount of time passed, completely lost to Alec. He was embraced by the relaxing reverie of non-existence.

Suddenly, as if he were a fish pulled right out of the water, everything started coming back. One moment, he was nothing, the next, he was everything. Everything he knew to be, at least. A piercing headache and unrelenting nausea assaulted his consciousness.

‘Maybe,’ he thought. ‘Sleeping more would have been a good idea.’

Then, everything came back.

The familiar scent of the incense came back, ever stronger. This time, instead of synchronizing with his breaths, it entered his body through his pores. He could feel it penetrate deep into his skin. There also seemed to be something else, however, he couldn’t tell what it was from all the grogginess.

As his eyes cleared, he noticed two people standing next to his bed. One of them was the red-headed Evan. The other was a short, blue-haired girl with brown, dazzling eyes. Alec guessed her to be slightly older than Evan, probably around 19 to 20 years old.

‘The people of this world seem to have really weird hair colors. I wonder what color my hair is...’ Alec thought. Unfortunately, his hair was too short for him to be able to see and there were no mirrors in his sight.

Disrupting his thoughts, the blue-haired girl got up and walked up to Alec. She put her hands on his forearm, which caused Alec to shift his attention down. Attached to his arm was a catheter, slowly infusing a dark blue liquid into his bloodstream, making him a little bit more energetic.

As the blue-haired girl's hands gently touched his arm, Alec turned to look at her. Inside her eyes was a determined gaze, she seemed ready to do whatever to achieve her goal, which remained unknown to Alec for the moment.

The girl’s touch shifted from his hand to his head. Then she gently gestured for Alec to close his eyes. Going along with her wish, Alec started waiting expectantly. Whatever she was doing to him, he hoped that it was something good.

The next moment, the darkness he had been plunged into after closing his eyes shifted in hue, turning a light purple. Some magic was being cast right next to his face, and Alec could undoubtedly sense it. Whatever the magic was, it was something related to his cognition. He felt his mind shift in a way he had never felt before, as if someone was doing a very invasive brain surgery on him while he was still awake.

As the purple behind his eyelids faded, Alec opened his eyes to look back at the people next to him. They seemed more... memorable now.

Evan got up from his seat, exchanging a few words with the blue-haired girl. Alec managed to latch onto the girl’s name from this conversation, which was Ariel.

‘Suitable for her angelic, beautiful, and mesmerizing self,’ Alec thought to himself. Then, the next moment, he questioned why he had thought that. There was no reason for him to be attracted to this person he had just met, especially when he didn’t even speak her language yet. ‘Did that magic she cast on me do something? Mind-altering magic?’

After Evan left the room, the girl named Ariel sat down and turned toward Alec. Taking a book that had gone unnoticed by him from the bedside table, she flipped open the first page. A short while later, she turned the book towards him and pointed at a sketch.

It was a rough sketch of a person lifting a dumbbell. There was a strangely familiar squiggly shape next to it. As Alec was about to tilt his head to indicate his ignorance, Ariel started making a hard-to-describe noise. Although their language sounded weird by Earth standards, Alec could at least tell where words ended and started sometimes.

And this was one of the times when he could tell.

‘She is repeating it, the same word?’ Alec thought. Then, an idea started sprouting deep inside his mind, connecting a few dots together with its branches.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

Immediately, Alec brought up his unreadable stat sheet and started carefully looking at the squiggly shapes on it. Right there, at the top of five lines of writing grouped as one, Alec spotted the word or letter that Ariel had pointed at in the book.

‘Strength... It means strength!’ Alec thought. He quickly snapped his attention back to Ariel and traced her mouth movements. She seemed to be dragging the word out, opening her lips slightly more than normal to let him see how she pronounced things. This made Alec feel a warm tingling in his chest before he pushed it back and opened his mouth.

“Sh- Shp... Shp” He forced his tongue to move. Unfortunately, he couldn’t replicate the sound just yet, he didn’t know how to utilize the muscles necessary to produce it. However, his attempt at pronouncing the word seemed to draw out a reaction from Ariel. She was crying. Tears rolled out of her eyes, tracing her cheeks before splattering onto the floor.

Seeing her beautiful face sour up in sadness, Alec felt the urge to rip out the catheter in his arm and pull her into his embrace.

‘STOP!’ He shouted in his head, a strong sense of willpower pushing back against the feelings. ‘This is too distracting! What are these feelings? I have not felt this way for any woman in my life! There’s no reason for me to feel this way now. Am I being manipulated by magic?’

Unfortunately, he didn’t have an answer to that question. His knowledge of the magic of this world was non-existent. If he at least knew the basics, he could have extrapolated from there using the flexible mind he had crafted through years of power fantasy authorship. Unfortunately, he had to focus on trying to conjure his first words like a little baby for now.

As Ariel’s tears subsided, she went back to teaching. Her finger gently slid across the book to point at different things.

Funnily enough, the first five words Alec had learned were:

‘Strength, Agility, Health, Mind, and Mana. Funny choices for first words,’ Alec commented mentally. He didn’t think too deeply about it, as he had to focus more on the topic of studying. With the constant infusion of the dark blue liquid and the incense, his body and mana reserves were starting to recover.

With his ability to move coming back, Alec sat upright and spent a few hours studying different words. He noticed that his ability to remember things was much better than before. Unfortunately, he didn’t know if this was related to the magic that had been cast on him by Ariel or Alec’s brain simply being better than his own.

‘I’d much rather the first one,’ Alec thought. ‘The second idea makes me feel bad...’

After a few tiring hours of word study, the lights coming from the windows started dimming. Alec’s brain was getting groggy, as learning new stuff prompted the brain to go to sleep mode. Seeing his tired, barely awake state, Ariel got up from her chair and kissed Alec on the forehead before leaving the infirmary.

Alec’s heart started beating furiously in his chest at the sudden violation of his personal space.

‘W- Wh- What was that?! Why did she kiss me? Is this normal in this world!?’ Alec started firing question after question in his head. He didn’t have much romantic experience back in his first life as he was heavily focused on making money. This fresh emotion made him feel ecstatic, almost making him drop his guard against any mind magic completely.

‘Stop!’ He shouted mentally, once again driving away the emotions sieging his mental defenses. ‘Something is seriously wrong about me. I need to figure out what it is!’

Quickly, Alec swallowed and took out the fountain pen from his abdomen with a sharp mental command. Inspecting it from tip to bottom, Alec thought of different ways to solve his conundrum.

‘I don’t know if I have enough mana but I have to risk it! If I’m under a spell and am caught unprepared, I might even lose the will to fight against it. Now that would become a problem,’ he weighed the risks before coming to a decision.

Slowly but surely, the pen moved to slide on the inside of a cup next to him.

[Very Low Mental Cleansing Potion]

As the words left his pen, Alec started waiting anxiously. He didn’t want to go into another coma by exhausting too much mana, so he added some adjectives that could make the potion less expensive.

‘Please work...’ He wished as the motes of mana started leaving his body. Fortunately, their rate of expenditure wasn’t nearly as much as before. About one-third of the way to fainting, the liquid was formed completely.

It was purple, albeit a lot darker colored than the magic Ariel had cast on him before. It was a thick, heavy mixture. It felt like Alec was holding a bottle of mercury in his hand.

Taking a deep breath, he downed the potion in one go, as his face soured with his taste buds firing off crazily. The potion took effect immediately. A feeling of cleanliness washed over his brain, as if someone was hosing off mud from his body. His grogginess got slightly better.

For a brief moment, Alec felt something very very wrong, however, the feeling disappeared immediately before he could make sense of it, alongside the memory of something like this even happening.

Then, the potion ran out.

‘Either my mind has been cleansed, or the potion was not strong enough,’ he thought before forcing his mind to wander toward Ariel. Feeling his face redden in response to the impulses sent from his central nervous system, Alec sighed in frustration.

‘It mustn’t have been strong enough...’