“It’s a boy!”
These were the first words the young boy perceived after being born. Of course, he couldn’t understand them yet.
“He’s so beautiful! Just like you, dear.”
After having his tiny body handed over to another person, the boy finally opened his eyes and looked at his surroundings upon hearing this second male voice. He was currently being held by a man of about 25 years of age. His face was a little rugged but an observer would still be able to see a little bit of resemblance with the young boy. The position of their cheekbones was practically the same.
When the boy turned around to check where the sudden sound of delicate weeping came from, he saw a young and beautiful woman in a hospital bed whose side the man he instinctively recognized as his father sat on. She looked quite exhausted and tears were streaming down her eyes. Those weren’t tears of sadness, however. They were tears of joy upon finally being able to look at her own son. This woman was his mother.
Contrary to what the young couple expected, their son didn’t start to cry to announce his presence or show a smile in response to their teasing. The boy just expressionlessly observed them and his entire environment. Upon not finding anything of note that could ignite his interest, the boy’s shockingly intelligent eyes closed as he decided to just passively listen to his parents to be able to converse with them sooner. Looking around would just exhaust him quickly, after all.
Seeing their son behave so disinterestedly, a look of worry flashed across the father’s face for a moment before he shook his head and got rid of the random thoughts plaguing him.
“He is probably just exhausted… Let’s let him sleep for a bit.”
Just like this, the boy soon fell asleep in his mother’s arms, feeling completely safe.
This young boy was, of course, Isaac. Everything about him was normal, besides one certain feature.
It was his monstrous intelligence. There was no real reason as to why he had been born with it. Some people might call it a blessing or winning the lottery. Little did they know it would turn out to be nothing but a curse for the boy. A curse and a blessing, they were two sides of the same coin, after all.
With his intelligence came a disinterest in everything he already understood. It was too easy for Isaac to get bored of something. No matter what, if it wasn’t somehow related to other worlds, which he couldn’t observe yet, Isaac would turn out to be unable to find interest in any part of his own world.
While a normal human being would have a dream, a wish or an interest, Isaac would have nothing of the sort.
Of course, at this point in time, the young boy didn’t know about any of this. In his heart, he still held hope. He wanted to find something interesting, nothing more than that.
Just like every human when they were younger, Isaac couldn’t yet appreciate what he took for granted. He was born to loving and caring parents in a first world country, giving him a very good start in this world. Still, how would he, as a newborn, be able to comprehend such concepts when even most adults still took everything they had for granted?
Observing all of this was the immaterial form of a girl with golden hair. There was no way for her to interact with what she was seeing. Neither could any part of this world react to her presence. All of this was just a memory, after all.
Right after she had opened her eyes again, Ais had noticed that her body had turned almost see-through. She couldn’t touch anything at all. At the same time, she was standing in a hospital room, witnessing the birth of a young boy. Although her environment and the outfits of the people around her felt very foreign, it wasn’t hard to understand what was going on. Nevertheless, the quite bloody scene surprised her a little. She had never seen a woman give birth before, after all.
Shortly after the young boy was born, Ais noticed how inside of her, she seemed to have a second set of feelings and thoughts. When cautiously interacting with them, it didn’t take her long to realize they were the young boy’s. If she hadn’t been able to figure out that this young boy was Isaac in the situation she was in, she would have been an idiot, considering how she had just minutes ago decided to experience his past.
Over the next few days, Ais got more and more used to focussing on the young Isaac’s thoughts and feelings, while observing patiently. As this was a new world for her as well, she felt quite a lot of surprises whenever different and seemingly inconceivable things happened.
A while after having been born, Isaac’s parents finally left the hospital with him. When he experienced his first car ride, that was the first time he showed any sign of interest in something. As a toddler, he obviously had no idea what was going on and could only note this baffling experience down mentally as a target for future research.
After all the time in the hospital, Isaac was already able to more or less understand the words his parents spoke. Of course, not all of them. Whenever a new word was used, he had to first figure it out by cross-referencing many different contexts before finally adding it to his dictionary.
While his mother had been sleeping, Isaac had tried to pronounce a few words stealthily. For some reason, he didn’t want his parents to hear him speak before he was able to do so properly.
This behaviour of ‘not wanting to show off one's slight skills in front of an expert’ made Ais chuckle quite a bit.
The house Isaac’s family lived in was quite large and had enough room for four to five people to live in comfortably. It wasn’t anything special, however, as pretty much every other house in the small countryside town was about the same size.
It only took about a week for Isaac to grow unhappy with his own inability to walk. So he decided to take this as an opportunity to talk to his parents as well.
“Mama. Papa. I want to walk.”
When the toddler in her arms suddenly started speaking this fluently, Isaac’s mother thought that she had heard wrong. But when she met the eyes of her husband, who was equally as shocked, she couldn’t hold back her tears of happiness.
Her son was already able to speak. They didn’t even try to teach him anything and yet he was able to. She wasn’t even aware of how much of a seemingly heaven-defying act this was. Instead, she was just incredibly happy that his first word had been ‘Mama’.
While his mother was a very emotional person that cried easily, Isaac’s father almost seemed like the opposite. Although he did show some emotions on his face every now and then, he never let them control him. So in response to his wife’s outburst of happiness, he just smiled warmly and held both her and his son gently.
Isaac, however, wasn’t having any of this. He couldn’t really understand why his mother showed such extreme happiness, although he could make a few guesses. What baffled him the most, however, was that he hadn’t been set down on the floor. He thought he had made himself perfectly clear. To make sure he didn’t misunderstand the words he spoke, he repeated himself exasperatedly.
“I want to walk.”
This time, Isaac’s father finally decided to act. He took the boy from his mother’s arms and set him down on the floor gently, observing him curiously.
Admittedly, the first try went pretty badly. Although Isaac had been able to stand up, he soon fell back down as he hadn’t gotten used to the change to his center of gravity.
Seeing the young boy fall flat on his face and having a really unhappy look after the fact, his parents were still able to hold back their laughter. The observing Ais, however, didn’t need to worry about the young boy’s mentality and giggled amusedly.
On his second try, after having calmed down and analyzed what went wrong, young Isaac was able to walk for a few meters before his untrained legs gave out underneath his weight.
Over the next few weeks, with a ravenous pace, Isaac learned new words by talking to his parents. He also got up to walk many times per day, so he quickly was able to do so for prolonged periods of time. Reading was also something young Isaac was drawn to quickly after he had seen his father do so and asked him about it.
It took Isaac only a single day to memorize the few dozen letters and one whole week to finally be able to read. Compared to learning how to talk, it was extremely easy. And so, he started to devour book after book whenever he had the time.
Time passed by very quickly. Shortly after Isaac had turned one year old, children’s books stopped having any appeal for him. So after a discussion with his parents, they decided to let him read some textbooks and educational material. Funnily enough, it was Isaac who had requested these. He craved knowledge in his search for understanding and something that would retain his interest.
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By the time Isaac turned four years old, he had already finished a lot more than what elementary and middle school education would cover. At a time when he was already this mentally developed, it was mandatory by law for him to go to kindergarten. His parents didn’t think of that as a huge problem and thought he could get to know other kids of his age and make friends.
Sure, they knew that their child was a prodigy. But how to deal with human interactions and strangers was something he still had to learn.
Needless to say, when Isaac finally arrived at his kindergarten, he didn’t expect the kids he was supposed to get along with to be so… stupid. He didn’t have any fun playing with them and just decided to sit far away and read. For him, the kind of simple and mindless fun the other kids were having was purely a waste of time. Still, as he had been properly raised, he knew it would be wrong of him to deny them their fun, therefore he just distanced himself from everyone else. To each their own, a peaceful coexistence.
Of course, after a while, one of the other kids, Elias, didn’t appreciate Isaac’s kind intentions anymore. Instead, he repeatedly threw things at him or tried to separate Isaac from his books. At the beginning, it might have just been an attempt to make him play with the rest of the kids.
Understandably, this kind of behaviour annoyed Isaac. Still, he didn’t retaliate and just got as far away from the aggressor as possible. When one of the child care workers saw this, she tried to convince him of playing with Elias. In response, Isaac just showed her that he was currently studying a high school textbook. She left him to his own devices after that, utterly dumbfounded.
It didn’t take long for Elias to get annoyed by Isaac’s lack of a positive response to his behaviour, so a few days later, he decided to give that arrogant nerd a beating.
Isaac had never been physically hurt before, so when that tiny fist suddenly hit his face, he could only fall over and stare at Elias, temporarily unable to decide on how to act. Before he was able to run away, his small body took a few more hits.
If Ais had been able to, she would have protected the young Isaac. Still, she was aware that this was just a memory. And she wasn’t able to do anything at all.
When one of the child care workers saw Isaac run away bleeding, she asked him about who had beaten him. As his mother had taught him to always tell the truth, he did exactly that.
On the next day, however, Elias came back with a vengeance. Apparently, he had been scolded heavily for his actions. And the only thing on his young and irrational mind was now to make Isaac feel just as terrible. Of course, he happily ignored the fact that the initial aggressor had been him. Who told Isaac to not participate in playing with the other kids? It was obviously his fault that he was beaten up. At least according to Elias’ logic.
Not many people were able to admit their own shortcomings. It was always a lot easier to blame someone else than to learn from one’s own mistakes. Therefore, such behaviour wasn’t anything out of the ordinary.
This time, Isaac didn’t just take the beating. He had already decided that he would respond in kind should he ever encounter such a situation again. And as he was able to control his body a lot better than Elias, he effortlessly pummeled him to the ground without receiving a single hit himself.
Just five minutes after the beaten and bruised Elias had run away with his tail between his legs, he came back with one of the child care workers while crying her a river. His words, which painted Isaac as the villain, were taken for fact.
When Isaac stated that it was Elias who started it, he just got dismissed. According to the child care worker’s words, it only mattered who got hurt, not who initiated it. Such a thing seemed incredibly irrational and stupid to Isaac, so he just wordlessly sat there, while the young woman decided that he had to go to anti-aggression therapy sessions. Passively, Isaac just took all of that information in and wondered about what he had done wrong. He couldn’t understand it.
The only other thing he noticed at that time was the gleeful look on Elias’ face. He openly took pleasure in Isaac’s unjust fate. This caused a sharp and dangerous glint to flash across Isaac’s eyes for a moment.
Even when his mother came to pick him up, the child care worker spoke badly about him and made her promise to make him take part in the aforementioned therapy. She made him out to be a very aggressive bully who regularly beat up the poor and innocent kids. Of course, she had just been misled by Elias, so she wasn’t lying about this intentionally. Still, such disingenuous and one-sidedly naive behaviour disgusted Isaac. This was the first time he noticed how easy it was to mislead others by feeding them one-sided information.
This whole time, Ais was just clenching her fists tightly, feeling enraged at such despicable behaviour. Although it wasn’t anything massive, to a young boy growing up in a safe and protected environment like this, its impact could be enormous.
At home, it took Isaac a few minutes to finally convince his parents that he wasn’t at fault. As he had never lied to them in his entire life, they readily believed him and told him they would talk to the child care worker about this, so he didn’t have to worry. Still, there was one problem left. A snake called Elias.
Later that day, Isaac found some time to talk to his father alone, as he knew his mother wouldn’t like the topic he planned to discuss.
“Can I kill Elias?”
This question utterly shocked Isaac’s father. He didn’t expect his son to be so bloodthirsty. Still, as Isaac had always been a smart child, they hadn’t really taught him about death yet, as there had been no need to. Both he and Isaac’s mother had just assumed he would eventually pick up on it himself. Quite apparently, this was the case. Admittedly, they had slacked in his education on common knowledge.
So, with no other option, Isaac’s father began his explanation.
“No, you can’t. It’s wrong to kill someone.”
These words just earned him a simple question in response.
“Why?”
When Isaac’s father started talking about the inherent value of life and similar things, Isaac dismissed most of it after thinking about it deeply. It was simply irrational. Just like with any animal, it was natural for humans to kill their enemies. So Isaac brought up that point in defense.
“Unlike animals, for us humans, there are laws we have to follow, as we live in a society. If we don’t follow these laws, we’ll have to face very bad consequences.”
Isaac’s father took multiple hours to teach Isaac about society and the law. Gradually, the young boy understood why wanton killing was not a good idea. If it was allowed, society itself would crumble. At the same time, he thought about his past actions again. He had really stuck out like a sore thumb. When living in a society, however, it was best to conform and compromise. Humans instinctively treated anything they perceived to be dissimilar to themselves differently. Elias’ behaviour had been the result of such a phenomenon. Even the child care worker’s actions made sense to him now. He had never behaved like a normal kid, it was obvious people would develop prejudice.
Although he had only experienced a very minor incident, it was plainly obvious that these kinds of prejudices wouldn’t be a good thing for him in the future. Unjust treatment was certain to ensue, most likely even in more serious situations. Would he be held responsible for a crime next? Thoughts like these drifted across young Isaac’s mind as he was deep in thought.
“Thank you, papa. I know what to do now, you don’t need to worry.”
With these words, Isaac bid his father farewell for the day.
The next morning, to everyone outside of his home, the distant and scarily mature Isaac had disappeared. What replaced him was a pure and innocent kid, running around the playground with the other kids, seamlessly fitting in and laughing happily. As all of his previous complaints with Isaac had disappeared just like that, Elias soon forgot all about the previous conflict.
Like this, the days of young Isaac observing humans, their behaviour and their society began. Faceless within the crowd, not sticking out in the least, he locked his true self away. Around this time, he first noticed the root of loneliness hidden deep within his heart.
For the sin of having been born simply too smart, he could either be ostracized or permanently wear a mask.
-----
When Ais returned from the memory, she was quite disoriented for an hour or two. After all, she had just spent multiple years in there. It took her a while to finally come to terms with her current situation. But as soon as she did, she panicked. Only once she checked the time and date via the system did she calm down.
Contrary to her expectations, in the world she came from, only a few hours had passed. Most of that time was spent staring at her ceiling after she had returned from the memory, as well. It was no wonder that the system had recommended this kind of safe environment to her previously. Her mental state had been very unstable upon her return, after all.
Once she had taken a few deep breaths, Ais reflected on what she had just witnessed.
Never had she expected to experience even Isaac’s early childhood. She had thought she would just witness a few key moments of his life to be able to understand him a little better. Obviously, this wasn’t the case. During her stay in the memory, she also realized why.
If she had only experienced key moments of Isaac’s development, she would miss the majority of his life. Every experience of a sentient being would shape them in some way or form, even the most mundane ones. Apparently, Isaac intended to make her truly understand him, not just superficially. Another one of his purposes was probably to let her experience the same world as he did. This way, even more barriers between them would be shattered.
Over the course of her stay in the memory, Ais had slowly but surely learned about Isaac’s past world while accompanying his past self. It was an interesting experience, to say the least. Quite a few things caught her interest. The only thing that truly baffled her was the lack of any kind of magic or strong fighters in general. Up to this point, all the people the young Isaac met or even heard of were just simple commoners in Ais’ eyes.
Still, she was aware that all of this was just the tip of the iceberg. So far, only the masks Isaac was wearing in normal social situations were explained. There were so many things she wasn’t yet made privy to and didn’t understand. Her desire to earn Achievement Points to unlock ‘Episode 2’ was burning strong and bright. After all, the most boring part of a human’s life, their early childhood, was now out of the way. It could only go uphill from here on out.
While thinking about her future plans, the mental exhaustion finally caught up with Ais and she drifted off into a peaceful and deep slumber.
The older you get, the more experience you will accumulate.
The more experience you accumulate, the higher you can climb.
The higher you climb, the more of the world you will be able to see.