Tajiri woke up sitting in a cushioned chair in front of a roaring fire. The chair itself was situated in what looked like the foyer of a nineteenth century British aristocrat’s mansion, and to his left was an old man in an old-fashioned tweed jacket and hand-tailored black wool trousers. The old man had an oiled white mustache and a long goatee that went down to just below his sternum. His bright blue eyes observed Tajiri emotionlessly as he puffed on an elegant whalebone pipe, a glass of brandy on the table to his left.
“Boy, I’m sorry to be the one to have to tell you this, but you are dead,” The old man said, his eyes still flat and apathetic.
Tajiri knew he should have been shocked, but the moment the words reached his apparently non-existent neurons, he just knew that it was the truth. He closed his eyes for a moment, gathering his thoughts. Tajiri was unsurprised he had managed to get himself killed. He had always been somewhat reckless, so the fact that he had died young didn’t come to him as a shock at all… he did find it a bit sad that he couldn’t remember what kind of stunt he had been doing when he died.
“You died because I accidentally dropped my favorite toothpick while flying over your house. The toothpick then punched through the roof and punctured your skull,” The old man informed him, as if he had read his thoughts… which he probably had.
“What?!”
Now he was shocked. He had always thought he would die bungie jumping off of a bridge or jumping his hand-made motorcyle over a canyon. To have died because the being before him had gotten careless with a toothpick was… humiliating.
“Ah, it wasn’t just any toothpick. It used to be the tip of the Lance of Longinus, but after it fulfilled its purpose, my drinking buddy melted it down and made a bunch of toothpicks out of it. It is really good at cleaning between my teeth… it can even dissolve dragon meat,” The old man said, looking inordinately proud of his favorite possession as he pulled it out of the front pocket of his jacket.
With a sigh, Tajiri pushed aside the brief surge of outrage at the sheer… silliness of his death and asked the question he was dying to have an answer to, though that was perhaps a poor choice of words, “So are you God?”
The old man blinked once, twice before breaking out in hysterical laughter, leaving Tajiri to stare at him in bewilderment as he returned the metal toothpick to its place in his pocket and slapped his knee, the hand with the pipe quivering in time with his laughter. It was almost half a minute before he settled down, tears of laughter in his eyes and amusement gleaming from his suddenly lively face.
“No, no, no… I’m not what you would call ‘God’. He’s my drinking buddy, the maker and owner of your world. I’m just one of the many higher beings who make the neighboring universe their home. I don’t have even one millionth of the power your world’s maker has, and I never will. The only reason I can talk to him at all without being reduced to dust is because he makes an effort to insulate me,” He explained, responding to Tajiri’s thoughts as they arose.
“So why am I not sitting at a place of judgment then?” He inquired. Given that God existed, he should have been on his merry way to Heaven or Hell by now.
“Well that’s the problem. You see, you died because of me, a being that isn’t even supposed to be in your world, so the river of fate has been disrupted. You were supposed to die of old age ninety years from now surrounded by your great-great grandchildren, and during your life you would have done a lot to make the world a better place. Unfortunately, now someone else is going to have to do all the wonderful things you were destined to do, and your soul doesn’t have a destination anymore,” He said, looking apologetic as he stroked his abnormally long goatee in what looked to be a nervous tic of some kind.
He gain responded to Tajiri’s thoughts before the young man could speak or even think of speaking, “In this particular world, everything has been predetermined, down to every word spoken and every action taken. This includes going to Heaven, spending a few centuries in Purgatory, or going straight to Hell. Not to mention, your God doesn’t believe in resurrecting people without a really good reason, and a minor disruption of fate – from his perspective – is not sufficient to make him bring you back to life. Instead, another young man has been created to perform the same role, so you no longer have a place in this world.”
“So… I’m going to be cast out into Oblivion then?” While going to Hell sounded horrible, I didn’t exactly like the idea of my soul dissolving into the void.
“No. Since I caused the situation, by the rules I have to provide you a place to go. You are going to be reincarnated in the world I come from, with a few abilities and blessings that will give you advantages when it comes to surviving. Unlike your world, my world isn’t as tightly bound to a particular fate, though the Fates do amuse themselves by altering the natural flow of events on occasion,” The old man replied.
“Advantages?” Tajiri inquired, his interest piqued.
“I’m thinking of letting you choose two gifts, in addition to a blessing I will be giving to you regardless. I’m something of a collector, so I have a number of interesting powers, abilities, and artifacts on hand that you might find useful,” The old man said with a whimsical smile.
The old man snapped his fingers, and they were suddenly standing in what looked like the warehouse from an old movie about a WWII-era adventurer/archaeologist. Wooden crates full of ancient-looking weapons, each labeled with a paper tag tied to a string, sat on stands that went up as far as Tajiri could see.
Tajiri eyed the old man with an expression full of exasperation, “Just how much stuff have you collected, anyway?”
The old man looked embarrassed for a moment, “I get around to various worlds, and I usually… acquire whatever takes my interest along the way. Can I help it if my storeroom gets a bit cluttered?”
“’Acquired’, eh? Well, I won’t ask,” Tajiri said, giving the old man a flat look. It was hard to take this so-called ‘god’ seriously given his obviously quirky nature.
“The stuff that ‘fits’ with my world is pretty far in the back, so it will be a while,” The old man said apologetically as he gestured for Tajiri to get into a nearby golf cart.
Tajiri just shook his head and got into the passenger seat, the old man leaping into the driver’s seat a moment later and flicking the on switch in front of him. For some reason, a faint scream of agony came from where the engine should have been placed, and Tajiri gave him a questioning look, which was answered by the old man giving him the corny ‘innocent whistling’ routine as they accelerated down the aisle.
“Where the hell did you get this thing?” Tajiri asked, gesturing at the floor of the golf cart.
The old man mumbled something under his breath that made Tajiri freeze in place, “What did you just say?”
“… Hell.”
“Why would you buy a golf cart in Hell?!” He asked incredulously.
“… It was cheap, and the seller said it would run for eternity!” The old man replied sulkily.
Tajiri felt a headache coming on and sighed deeply. He had a feeling that if he spent too much time with the old man, his sensibilities would be assaulted until he became numb to strange and insane happenings.
“Just… don’t give me something that uses the souls of the damned for energy, please?” He practically begged.
The old man averted his eyes and once again began whistling.
“Old man!”
Needless to say, they had to pull over for a short time so that Tajiri could explain why he didn’t want to have to hear the souls of the damned screaming constantly around him.
Why me?
___________________________________________________
Thankfully, the old man flipped a switch on the golf cart, switching it over to what he called ‘essence’ power, looking disgruntled the entire time.
Why the heck is he disappointed he can’t torment the souls of the damned while driving a golf cart? Tajiri couldn’t help but wonder. He was starting to have suspicions that the old man had some kind of weird punishment fetish, given how happy he seemed when the souls were screaming in the background.
Along the way, Tajiri saw a suspicious coffin-like object lined with gold, with engravings that looked like ancient Hebrew… but Tajiri chose not to think about it. Considering the design of the warehouse, it was too obvious what it had to be.
Swords, axes, spears, bows, lances, maces, halberds, pistols, rifles, cars, bicycles, rocket launchers, chariots, pendants, suits of armor… the sheer number of artifacts they passed made Tajiri’s head spin, as he could sense a pressure that was building the deeper in they went. For some reason, the bicycles were the scariest of them all, even though he couldn’t find a clear reason why he felt that way.
Suddenly, the passed through something that felt like an invisible veil of air… and Tajiri felt the pressure increase by a hundred times, making him want to scream. A moment later, the pressure vanished, and the old man gave him an apologetic look, “Sorry about that. We just passed into the area where my world’s artifacts and abilities are stored, and your soul isn’t adapted to essence yet.”
“Essence?” Tajiri managed to gasp out the question in a rasping voice.
“In my world, essence is the source of power for abilities, skills, and magic. Everything is infused with essence, from the lowest virus to the highest god. In your world, essence doesn’t exist, and everything is infused with a portion of your maker god’s divinity. It means that artifacts that actually break the rules in your reality are exponentially more powerful than those from worlds like mine, but they are also fewer in number and more limited in their effects. That is because essence is unrefined and uncontrolled, whereas divinity is strictly defined by the will of the maker god of your world,” He explained.
“Anyway, I’m thinking of offering you three Unique Skills. I’ll let you think up one, while I pick the other two. The one you think up will be custom to your desires, whereas the others will be fitting for your needs. The artifacts in this section are mostly pure crap, junk from souls that sold themselves to me, so I’ll burn them to produce your skills,” He said casually, talking about people selling their souls to him like it was nothing.
Tajiri had to ask, “Why go this far? I mean, reincarnating me is one thing, but giving me power at a heavy price to you seems a bit much.”
He gave Tajiri a flat look, “How do you think gods amuse themselves?”
Tajiri thought about it for a moment before answering hesitantly, “Toying with mortals?”
He barked a laugh, shaking his head, “Some of us do that, but the real answer is ‘watching’. We watch mortals, and if I’m going to reincarnate someone, I want them to have the potential to be worth watching.”
“Watching… like on TV?” He asked curiously.
“Very much so. There are even lesser deities who exist solely to find interesting things and record them for us to watch. One of my hobbies is investing in people who look like they’ll do something interesting. Your profile was pretty close to the type of person I usually ‘bless’ with power in my own world, so I decided to go a bit farther than I really have to,” He explained.
“Is that why you trick people into giving you their souls?” He asked dryly.
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The old man chuckled, obviously amused by Tajiri’s attitude, “Indeed. Most people never develop enough to gain a Unique Skill, but the skills they have built up over their lifetime attach to their souls and come to me when they die. While they are mostly common junk skills, they are more than sufficient to form a base for a Unique Skill if I pick the right combination.”
“Skills… you keep mentioning skills, but what are they?” Tajiri asked, drawing a surprised look from the old man.
The old man then frowned and pulled a manila folder out of mid-air and began flipping through the pages inside before nodding with a sigh, “I forget that some people don’t play video games in your world. I’ve gotten used to people that get reincarnated having some familiarity with the concept of skills.”
“I… see?” Tajiri said questioningly, tilting his head to the side quizzically.
“My world is ruled by a system, which quantifies how people refine their craft and abilities, building up their soul and body to prepare them for transcendence. The more skills you have at a higher level, the stronger, faster, and more powerful in general you become. When one reaches a certain plateau, the essence that has been invested into their skills will force their evolution into a higher state. It almost never happens, though. Most people just don’t have the spark and will to pull themselves out of the mud of mortality,” He explained, his expression suddenly full of ennui… the kind of boredom that can only come from an incredibly long existence without any reason to find joy.
“So you want people to transcend mortality?” Tajiri asked incredulously.
The god pretending to be an old man nodded firmly, “Yes. The main reason is that every transcendent who emerges from a world raises that world’s natural essence density, stimulating the evolution of the species that would otherwise be stagnant. Worlds that cease to evolve eventually rot on the vine, much like your world is.”
“Earth is rotting?” Tajiri asked, feeling… saddened by the idea.
“That was part of your world’s maker’s plan from the beginning. He is an oddball who prefers to create conditions where it is nearly impossible to transcend, then hope for one or two greater transcendents to emerge. By filling everything in your world with divinity, he restricted transcendence, in hope that his equal would emerge. Unfortunately, while a few managed to transcend early on, creating the legends and myths you are familiar with, most of them were too low of quality, so he destroyed them. A few, like Enoch, he made into angels, but the rest were killed when they began to stagnate. It’s why most of your world’s polytheistic faiths fell apart,” He explained.
“That’s… depressing,” Tajiri said with a sigh.
“It happens a lot with maker gods who don’t allow others to get involved with their creations… the tendency to see their worlds’ people as a means to an end rather than an end in and of themselves. He loves his people, but the love is that of a true god, not that of a mortal,” The old man replied, melancholy tainting his expression briefly before vanishing behind his amiable mask.
“So, what kind of skills do you think I should try?” Tajiri asked.
“Think of something that symbolizes who you are to the core. I’ll put together a package that fits your request,” The old man replied.
Tajiri sat back in his seat and closed his eyes, immersing himself in thought. What was it that defined him the most? What was his joy? What did he hate? What did he desire? He continued to ask himself question after question, and, ironically, the picture of the kind of skill he would want popped into his mind, causing him to smile crookedly, his eyes still closed.
Thus he missed the old man’s own smile, which was like unto the void. A devil’s smile.
___________________________________________________________
Tajiri came to himself sitting at the breakfast table with his mother, instantly understanding that his reincarnation was a success. His Status wasn’t available yet, but apparently the old man had arranged for him to be awakened the day before he received it.
Acknowledged bastard of a backwoods clan lord… He confirmed his situation. His mother was a beautiful elven maiden whose silver hair glistened in the sunlight coming from the open window behind her. Her gentle eyes observed him joyfully as he slurped his porridge.
His father was a spirit fox, and Tajiri had inherited the bushy tail and ears from there. His hair was silver with streaks of black on his head, his tail a pure silver, most likely from his mother. His father was a black fox, so it made sense.
His eyes were emerald green, identical to those of his mother, and his skin was ivory in color, similar to hers. His father had light brown skin, as was common to the region’s mystic foxes.
As such, despite the fact that he didn’t have his mother’s ears, he stood out amongst the local population, and everyone knew who his father was. Thankfully, his father’s wife didn’t have any negative feelings about his mistress, so their lives were no harder than the rest of the villagers.
Tajiri, his emotions and thought patterns now that of an adult man, wondered why his mother hadn’t gone elsewhere, as the relationship between her and his father had fallen off before he was born. While his father provided some coin and the land they lived on, the fact remained that she was an elf in a land of foxes and oni.
His father didn’t seem to have any interest in his bastard son, and – while he was acknowledged – so far there had been no attempts to familiarize him with his siblings, whom he had only seen from afar. There was no dislike or hatred there, but the apathy struck him as odd. He was unsure if it was something cultural or not that he simply didn’t have the proper references to understand. As a five year old, it wasn’t like anyone bothered to explain things like that to him.
His mother would be continuing his training in magic and the sage arts, her specialties from her time as an adventurer, in the afternoon, but in the morning and early midday, they usually spent their time working in the vegetable patch or harvesting dry wood from the forest. His mother usually had him clean the chicken coop once every three days, the only times when he wasn’t in training in the afternoons.
Tajiri reflected on how this wasn’t how he expected his new life to begin… but, as the memories of his two lives settled, he decided that he shouldn’t have expected anything better from the suspicious deity that was pretending to be an old man. In any case, Tajiri’s personality was highly suited for the sage arts, which required someone to be highly in touch with their inner self in order to effect the world. Even before he regained his memories, he had loved that aspect of his training.
His mother said he also had talent for magic, but the complex symbols and equations necessary to use anything beyond the most basic cantrips were something he simply couldn’t find joy in. If anything, he seemed to be more suited for qigong, which she often mentioned seemed crazy, since elves normally didn’t have much talent for it.
It was just unfortunate that the Lord’s instructors that came to teach the children the basics of the Three Powers for a month every year only taught one the method to access each one.
Tajiri decided that he would wait until his Status was given to him the next day before he decided he’d been cheated by his ‘patron’, though. He couldn’t remember what he’d chosen for his custom skill, despite remembering everything clearly up to the moment when he was shown the pieces he could combine for it.
He was pretty certain the old man didn’t want him remembering it, too. The sheer malice hiding behind the old man’s words at times, especially when he talked about his fellow gods, told him that he wasn’t just a mischief-maker with a taste for the screams of the damned.
He did remember the conversations they had after he put together his skill, and it was mostly him listening as the old man complained about one god or another for a solid week as he showed him bits and pieces of artifacts from throughout the history of a half-dozen worlds. He got the feeling his ‘patron’ didn’t have a lot of close friends, given the fact that he had to go to another world to find a drinking buddy.
Tajiri’s mother hummed as she washed the dishes with a spout of hot water that burst from her fingertips, the grease and grime going straight into the compost pile behind the house while the used water then sprayed over the garden. This was done through a combination of basic sage arts and magic cantrips, and Tajiri could do it too… for a few seconds. His body was that of a child, so he found it difficult to concentrate on magic for extended periods of time, though he didn’t have that problem with sage arts.
The child he’d been before his awakening had simply been bored by the abstract mathematics built into the use of even the simplest of magic, but, now that his memories had returned, his education in his previous life seemed like it might get in the way as much as it helped.
Pure mathematics are the same as on Earth, of course… but something about the laws of this world makes physics inconsistent, requiring a gut-level grasp of shifting factors to be inserted when one casts a spell at any given time. I simply don’t have as much of an instinct for this as Mom does… He thought as he tried to cast a low-rank ice needle spell, muttering a mantra to give him the rhythm of the equations involved.
His mother gave him advice whenever he failed, pointing out where he had failed based on a pure-blooded elf’s instinctive grasp of the art, but Tajiri found he could only manifest the ice needles once out of twenty attempts. They shifted over to sage arts around mid-afternoon, and Tajiri sat on the ground, his legs folded under him.
He closed his eyes and concentrated on his own breathing, gradually matching it to a particular rhythm… the rhythm of the world. This was the basic entry technique to all sage arts.
There was a sudden sense of something clicking into place a few minutes later, and he opened his eyes, breathing out, blue mist rushing from his mouth to form a twisted claw of a hand, which he used to pick up a nearby stone. This was the most basic of all sage arts… using his spiritual energy and fusing it with the natural essence around him. This was in opposition to magic, which utilized the power of the mind to impose a new order on the world through the essence around them.
To his right, his mother had spread out three hundred hands, each of them tumbling a coin along the knuckles. This was an extreme version of the simplest exercise for learning to control spiritual energies. His mother’s eyes glowed green with power as she caused the coins to fall back into the purse on her hip and a deep mist covered the field, eerily flickering green flames appearing at random intervals as she practiced.
Tajiri quietly smiled self-mockingly as he played with his rock, knowing the path ahead was going to be a long one.
That night, as he slept in his mother’s arms on the only bed in the small house, he resolved to take whatever came the next day as best he could.
_______________________________________________________________
Tajiri stood before the elderly village shaman with his head bowed low, as was required of all children during the yearly Blessing Ceremony. The lord’s daughter, his half-sister, stood a few feet to his left with her head bowed just as low, her glossy black hair falling down past her waist and her face as placid as a pond on a day without wind. Seventeen other children stood around them, most of them from the village itself, a few the children of servants.
Tajiri logically knew he probably would never see his sister again after that day. His father showed no signs of taking an interest in him, after all. So he went ahead and impressed her features in his memory, noting that she was definitely going to grow into a beauty, even by the high standards of the spirit foxes.
The village shaman finished his speech, and a violet aura spread over them, causing a screen to appear in front of each child’s eyes, also visible to the onlookers in the crowd of parents behind them. Tajiri eyed his status with a focused expression, his lips tightening slightly at what he saw.
Name: Iryun Liodosia
Age: 5
Race: Spirit Fox (elven bloodline)
Common Skills: Qigong 1, Sage Arts 1, Magic 1, Farming 1
Passive Skills: Mental Contamination 5 (locked, hidden), Mental Resistance 2, Magic Resistance 1
Unique Skills: Divine Contract: Artifact Steed 1, Infinite Growth, World Inventory 1
So my name is Iryun… that’s unexpected. Mother only ever calls me ‘son’ or ‘my beloved boy’, so I have no memory of my own name, Tajiri, now Iryun thought as he looked through his skills. The Three Powers were to be expected, since every properly-educated child had them upon awakening. However, Mental Contamination was a skill he had never heard of, one that gave him a sense of trepidation.
Just what happened to me during that blank period before I was reborn? He wondered.
There were gasps behind him, and he turned around in surprise to find several people, including his mother, staring at his status in shock. Some of the adults began whispering.
“Three Unique Skills?! Even his father only has one… and it is a Noble Skill!”
“He also has two passives already. Just what kind of training has he gone through to awaken those on the first day?!”
“Lady Phara also has a Unique Skill, but at this rate…”
“The Lord will not be pleased…”
At their words, Iryun shot a glance at his sister, taking in her status. The girl herself was oblivious to what was going on behind them, apparently focused entirely on reading what was stated there.
Name: Phara Liodosia
Age: 5
Race: Spirit Fox
Common Skills: Qigong 1, Sage Arts 1, Magic 1, Etiquette 3, Short Blades 1, Unarmed 1
Passive Skills: n/a
Unique Skills: Grace of the Fox Lord
Interesting… my sister seems to be a few levels above everyone else here, He observed. Most of the children only had three or four common skills, no passive skills, and no Unique Skills. Phara’s eyes began to move, so he shifted his attention to the shaman, pretending to listen to the speech that followed even as he commanded his status to close.
From what he understood, level 1 of any given skill was the most basic level of mastery, with 7 being the highest the average person could reach during their lifetime. Sometimes, incredibly talented individuals could attain higher levels in a skill that they had an affinity for, but most individuals put their efforts into evolving their skills into higher-ranked or combination skills, as both gave greater bonuses to the abilities of those who mastered them.
As an example, mastering all three powers to rank 5 grants one the right to fuse the three skills into the Mystics skill. Another would be obtaining at least four weapon skills and getting unarmed to level 3 to obtain the Martial Arts skill.
On the other hand, passive skills were usually gained when one is harmed by whatever they are supposed to resist and are far more difficult to evolve, since one has to have a talent for them. It seemed odd to him that he already had three resistance skills, but he suspected that the mental contamination and mental resistance came from his experiences before reincarnation. Magic resistance… he would ask his mother about that one.
Unique Skills weren’t talked about that much… but from the reaction of the other parents, he knew it was likely his skills were going to get him in trouble. They’d also said something about Noble Skills, but he had no idea what that might be, seeing as there was nothing in the status screen about them.
His mother looked thoughtful but not particularly concerned as she took him home, patting his head gently, careful not to overstimulate his ears. While a parent patting a spirit fox child on the head was normal, the ears were generally reserved for lovers.
He sighed internally, knowing his earlier suspicions about the god wearing the skin of an old man were correct with the glum sureness of someone who had just figured out he’d been swindled.