It might not have been such a bad thing that she never got to see the Nightsky Caves, considering she found all that enveloped her was an endless starry abyss once the dark text box faded. The stars shifted, softly and wrong, as if someone had set a .gif’s frames to crossfade on a set of frames clearly unfit to be edited that way.
She couldn’t for the life of her remember the source of that traumatic memory, but it was an accurate comparison. Remember… A swift burst of panic came and went through her very being. The sensation of being incomplete, with the knowledge of just what she was missing forever unreachable. The fissured memory of her last day was almost clear in comparison.
Though there was nothing to be felt, a manner of sensation was present, just not in a way she could describe. Thought-like, almost. She could watch these stars for eternity and perhaps be content, but the foreboding wouldn’t yield, remnants of memory and star alike shifting into more words before her.
Integration complete. Traveler, two paths stand before you.
Even lacking a body or eyes to move in the first place, she looked up—two boxes manifested side by side. She had to reread them more than once, but at no point did the experience feel surreal, as if her very being had just accepted this new reality immediately. Her very rationality seemed to be placed on hold.
Half your past life was spent dealing with the aftermath of choices others made for you.
You may receive 2 bonus Skill slots, complete with Trait and Aspect functionality and usable at any stage, as the system’s restitution for your years of systemless existence. This is per Class category, totaling 8 bonus Skill slots.
You may use those slots to obtain Skills from the world you are reborn in and develop them within it.
You will not immediately gain any levels from this, but your overall level capacity will be increased by 10 per Class category, for a total of 40 bonus levels attainable by raising Skills.
A partially randomized
Through this path, a start as fresh as can be awaits you.
Will this life be one in which all choices are yours to make?
Half your past life was spent seeking among the dead the connections you wished you could have had for yourself.
You may receive 2 bonus Skills, with an unlocked Trait slot and predeveloped Aspect each, effective immediately, as the system’s restitution for your years of systemless existence. This is per Class category, totaling 8 bonus Skills.
These Skills will be determined by the system, either based on what has been salvaged from the remnants of your past life’s memories, or chosen for synergy should your past life not have contained the knowledge required to complete the promised amount of Skills.
You will gain 10 levels per category, for a total of 40 levels. These levels will be banked alongside the Skills, and may be redeemed at your convenience, unless you choose to forge a Class for their category. Forging a Class will forcibly apply the levels banked from Skills of that category. Due to the transcendent nature of their acquisition, the existence of levels redeemed or applied by forging a Class cannot be hidden from others even if you obtain a level privacy Trait.
You will obtain a Mana Source attuned to your past life. Given the lack of functional Mana Sources in your past life’s world, this generated Affinity cannot be of higher rarity than
A path neither new nor old.
Will this life continue your quest for unfathomable remembrances?
An unequal choice, was it not? Yet still an unfair one. Half your past life was spent dealing with the aftermath of choices others made for you. Half your past life was spent seeking among the dead the connections you wished you could have had for yourself.
Both, things she knew to be true within her very being, yet could not unravel the depths of. The unequivocal, and the lost.
She looked back on the day of her death then, now a foggier thing. She’d viewed waking up with this system as a mere continuation of her life, a few blinks after the brightness that had claimed her.
That fell apart now that she examined it—she remembered reading, words of the two-point-five languages known to her, names of people and places. She did not remember learning to read, she did not remember learning any tongue, and she did not remember where or why each name became known to her. Perhaps she had never committed those details to memory, the knowledge simply absorbed throughout the years, but she would be lying to herself if she pretended it went no deeper than that.
She knew she had been to school, been adopted—knew not where she had gone to school, recalled nothing of those years, the faces those who raised her as blank as a freshly bought canvas. Even Yoyo’s face was lost to her. Her grandson. Whose son was he?
No.
No benefits needed to be weighed or compared beyond the core concepts of the paths.
She could not allow herself to lose anything else.
She would be alive again, but would she, really? Her life had evaporated before her, this current existence almost forged from bits and pieces.
She would cling to anything.
The path of remembrance was an obvious best, yet her thoughts lingered on choice, the mention of having choices made for her triggering a seething hate in the core of her being, even if the context was lost to her.
Knowledge of the nitty gritty for this hypothetical new world wasn’t needed for her to understand, almost instinctively, that this was ridiculously powerful. A blank slate, with additional options… It would be the perfect way to start playing a new game, an advantage over everyone else at her level.
Yet even if whatever powers that be were clearly laughing at her for having looked up isekais before dying, this wasn’t really a game.
It would be her life.
A life she would control either way, and heaven help anyone who tried to get in her way this time.
So why start with nothing?
You have chosen the path closest to continuation.
(❗) Error: Preexisting Affinity detected.
You have inherited Foresight II
Foresight II
For every hundred things you predict, two are guaranteed to be correct.
This Affinity may be increased to Foresight III by reaching Acclimation and Control milestones—or automatically for the next generation—to evolve its core effect.
If you turn this Affinity into a Root, you may use Foresight-aligned mana as Mana Source regardless of origin.
(❗) A promise made is a promise kept.
Stolen novel; please report.
You have inherited Legacy ∞
Legacy ∞
Something preceded that which now is, and something will succeed that which will once have been.
This Affinity is already timeless. No further growth awaits it—all there is left is to learn anew.
If you turn this Affinity into a Root, you may use Legacy-aligned mana as Mana Source regardless of origin.
If she’d had a physical form, she would have flinched, and not merely at the realization she’d have to figure out how macrons worked on a new world. Who was Beryl Rīsanin? Something told her this wasn’t someone she had ever met.
Wait. This new world I’m being reborn in. It’s already decided who I’ll be?
That sounded right, some intrinsic knowledge clicking into place, that this Beryl Rīsanin would be her mother. She should find this ironic, yet she couldn’t place why—only a faint, almost echo-like thought of ‘curse you, Rupert’ gave hints as to the reason, and she still had no idea what it meant.
Further considerations came to an abrupt halt as she reread the rarities of her two Affinities. {Foresight} sucked, if that description was all there was to it. Were it not for the implication that it could be leveled up in some way—through what she assumed would be tiers of a sort—she would have been even more irked.
But seriously… She wished she had teeth to grit. How is {Legacy} Tier-Infinity lower rarity than {Foresight} Tier-2?
Rationally, she understood rarity was probably measured separately from tier, but it would be unnatural if she didn’t complain at least a few times anyway. Her priorities had been perfectly straight on her earlier life, and they would remain that way if she had any say on it.
Traveler, any offspring brought into this world by Beryl Rīsanin will have a chance of survival to adulthood calculated as less than 10%. For your misfortune, you are offered three options as to how your rebirth will commence.
Oh, that was ridiculous. Not even the few historical infant mortality rates she knew of got that low! Why make everything sound so dramatic and give her hope of a new life with however systems worked, when she had such a low chance to live in the first place?
It just said it’s going to give you options…, the contrarian voice in her head. Strange. She thought she’d grown past self-doubt when… when something, some milestone happened. Stupid memory loss. How unfair of post-spaceship-explosion rebirth to be inconvenient to her.
Be born as a fully sapient baby.
Enhance your chances of survival by being in control from the start.
Oh, the powers that be were definitely laughing at her for what she’d seen and thought on that isekai-lookup.
Gradually unlock remaining memories of your last life through your physical development via triggers.
All abilities and identifying details will be hidden until all your remaining memories are unlocked.
Enhance your chances of survival by going unnoticed.
Be reborn as a normal child until your inevitable end.
Obtain a one-time guaranteed revival upon the end of your new life, granting you access to your memories and abilities.
This option is available to you due to your knowledge of how unconventional rebirths can work.
Her nonexistent eyebrow twitched at that last one, though she found herself at a loss for words—not that she could utter any. And it wasn’t as if there was some tried and tested strategy for how to best increase her chances for survival.
Well, for all I know, there might be. Didn’t actually get to read much more on the isekai thing.
She tried not to dwell upon the implication that people suddenly waking up as somebody who just died actually was something that could apparently happen, after all. She wanted to discard that third option almost out of spite.
It would save me the effort of actually having to grow up, though… Or would it? With a mortality risk that high, she could be born in ancient prehistory for all she knew. Some of the images she’d seen while looking isekais up seemed to contain stock fantasy worlds, in that ambiguously anachronistic style of medieval stasis.
Dying as a baby only to become a resurrected baby with memories just seemed like the option to be born as a baby, with unnecessary extra steps and without the bonuses. It would be great to regain her memories once she was old enough to do things, like a skip button for the annoyances of growing up, but she had no guarantee it would work that way.
The second one went soon after. It was somewhere in the spectrum between sapient baby and flawed skip button, but she actually had no idea where exactly it fell, and all options sounded bad from the moment she considered them.
Just a regular medieval child celebrating the holidays… oh, wait, what are these intrusive Scrooge thoughts?
The more she thought on it, the more she just expected it to be disruptive. Of course, she was thinking of ways each option could go wrong. That was the first thing one had to consider with anything, after all.
She put some effort into imagining herself letting out a very drawn-out sigh.
A baby… She could hardly believe this seemed like the only option. What about being a baby wouldn’t be a disadvantage? She’d be defenseless! Can I shoot lasers with {Foresight} or something?
An imaginary snort followed. Oh, with her luck, she might even get to use that {Foresight} and its two shots per hundred to see a threat coming and be able to do nothing about it. For all the Affinities said she could use them for mana, she had no idea what that’d mean in practice.
All three options were dumb.
'
Without the appropriate sigh, she chose the first option, expecting to immediately fade out and into babyhood. Something clicked, but there was no immediate change. For someone who hadn't picked the choice option, she was certainly getting to make a lot of choices after all.
Your cumulative age may affect your new existence. Choose whether you would wish to keep it this way.
Keep your current age in full. Starting [Integrity] will be decreased and maximum [Toll] will be increased accordingly.
Keep your current age as a memento. Age will be displayed in addition to your new current one in your new world’s format and accounted for in age-based achievements, but will have no impact in your attributes.
There wasn’t much thought required, even if the question had caught her off-guard. I’d rather not have centenarian stats, thanks. Especially since whatever [Integrity] was would be decreased. She wasn’t sure it was related to health, but she was also fairly certain it probably had nothing to do with structural integrity either, so she’d play it safe.
Unless it does mean structural integrity? Are characters buildings in this world?
She’d only thought that as a joke, but a wall manifested before her. She tried to scream, then understood what she was seeing were just rapid-fire notifications blocking out her view of the true stars.
You have been granted [Home Sweet Home]
You have been granted [Unpacifiable]
You have been granted [Cool Head on Your Shoulders]
You have been granted [Learning by Reading]
You have been granted [Once and Forever]
You have been granted [Nosy Old Lady]
You have been granted [Situational Autopilot]
You have been granted [Close to my Chest]
She almost reached out with her nonexistent hands to do something other than gawk at the Skills. So much to consider.
But she didn’t get the chance.
The stars faded, and the big sleep she’d kind of hoped to eternally avoid sunk in.