Al's eyes slowly opened up, but everything was a bit blurry.
‘Where the hell am I?’ Al looked around, something that he found weirdly taxing, and found himself in a large wooden room, made of old and half-rotten planks. He looked down at his body. ‘Wait, the damn room isn’t that big, it’s me who’s small!’
The realisation hit him like a truck. He was a baby! Had he been reincarnated? It,couldn't be. ‘First the 'System takes over world' trope and now this!? Am I the plaything of the god of drama or something!?’
After a while, Al calmed down again. He thought ‘Status’, and the oh so familiar ethereal blue screen spread in front of him.
Alberto Peñas
Age: 3 months
Level 1
Strength
G
Dexterity
G-
Toughness
G
Will
E-
Intelligence
F+
Assignable
0
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Skills:
Except, as expected, he was weak as hell. His Perception stat was locked like at the beginning, and the only things that hadn’t changed were his name and his Intelligence and Will attributes. He had never put a single point in them, since they were mostly for mages, but F Grade was about average for an adult.
Intelligence didn’t really make you smarter, although apparently it improved decision-making, memory, and foresight. 'Some foresight would’ve been pretty handy back then.' It also improved mana regeneration. Will increased mana capacity, but it also helped your drive and not buckling against adversity.
Some of those clashes against adversity had brought Al’s Will from F- to E- over the years, since different types of training increase different attributes naturally without having to use points. It gets harder the higher they are though.
His age also seemed to be tied to the body, not his soul or whatever it is that carried his Will and Intelligence over. He also wondered why he gained consciousness when the body was 3 months old, and not at birth or in the womb.
Al looked at the empty skill section, memories from his first days as a hunter resurfacing in his mind. He needed to find out what the heck was going on.
As if summoned by him, a woman in her mid 30s with pale skin and black hair entered the room and started giving Al milk from a wooden bowl.
Al greedily drank it as it filled the pit in his stomach he hadn’t even realised was there. ‘I’ve always had a problem listening to my body. I guess that’s especially bad when you’re a baby though, I gotta be more careful from now on.’
The woman seemed pleased by Al’s compliance and picked him up, cradling him in her arms. She seemed to say something, but he didn’t understand the language and it sure didn’t seem like one from Earth. ‘Wait, could I really have...’
He pushed the thought aside for now, and pulled at the woman’s robe. He needed to make sure they didn’t give him some sort of weird name. He started mouthing “Al” while pointing at himself over and over again, though it came out more like “Aru” ‘Stupid baby mouth’
The woman seemed to get it and giggled, before pointing at him and asking what he deemed to be a question, based on intonation. The last word was “Al”, or at least it was similar. Al nodded furiously, so much so his neck started hurting. ‘Stupid baby body’
----------------------------------------
A few days had passed, and Al had managed to gather some information on his situation.
'Firstly, being a baby sucks ass. I have to sleep at least 12 hours a day and can’t even control my bladder. There aren’t even diapers, goddamit. Just...cloth.'
'That brings us to the second point: technology here is extremely rudimentary. The water seems to come from a nearby stream where they also do the washing, and there is no electricity either.'
Even after earth was incorporated, villages had generators that ran on ambient mana and allowed a semblance of modern life. Not here though, the closest thing to technology is some kind of stone that heats up when you push mana in, and it is used to warm rooms or draw baths. Yeah there’s no electric heaters. Either it’s an extremely secluded place or... it’s an isekai.