The last thing I remember from that life was a half-empty instant noodles cup and the fluorescent hum of a convenience store at three in the morning, which is both poetically tragic and very on-brand. I was thirty-one: one degree, a thousand half-started projects, and a lifetime subscription to regret. I had been promising once; then life happened—the slow, bureaucratic kind of erosion that turns potential into a closet full of unpaid shirts and a willingness to accept microwave dinners as personality.
It was raining when I left the building. Not cinematic rain—just the sort that makes taxis scarce and thoughts louder. In a different script, this would have been my heroic last scene: lightning, a sappy line about redemption, a single tear on a perfectly lit cheek. Reality, as usual, chose the cheap route: a concrete patch, a glancing collision, and the world folding like an old paper map.
People tell neat stories about dying—white lights, tunnel-of-some-kind, a chorus of relatives you didn't like but appreciated for the cameo. My death felt more like a corrupted save file: a sharp little thought—This is not my day—then a jitter in the back of my skull like a program trying to load and failing. Snapshots of my former life slammed into me: a university lecture, my mother's scolding about umbrellas, a username I'd rage-quit in a decade-old MMO. They crowded my mind like commuters at rush hour, all trying to get through the same turnstile.
Then another sound: straw rubbing, a hollow thump, and a warmth like a badly wired lamp. I opened my eyes to torchlight and faces bent in, not cinematic angels but real, interested people. Someone hissed at the door in a language my head translated as if subtitles had been turned on: "By the saints, the child—awake. Fetch the midwife, quickly."
The words felt foreign and immediately usable, like a puzzle piece clicking into place. I could understand everything in that room—every whisper and every rustle. That part was unfairly convenient for a thirty-one-year-old brain sleeping in an infant's hardware. The rest of the problem was this: my limbs were squishy, my neck would not hold my head properly, and the throat in this body was still a confused machine. Think what you like about destiny, but evolution does not expedite its production line because you have existential remorse.
The midwife arrived like a trained storm. She had a braid whipped up and hands steady from long practice. She smelled of rosemary and something medicinal; her fingers moved with the ease of someone who had seen a hundred births and considered them routine miracles. She set eyes on me and half-laughed, half-sighed. "Blessed be," she said to the room, under her breath.
Then she asked—gentle, properly theatrical, as if coaxing a shy colt—"Can you hear me, child? What sound did you make?"
There was an absurd pause. My mind ran through several levels of meta-commentary—think, don't say anything embarrassing, think of good interview answers for your future biography—because adult brains default to narrative even while stuck in infant meat. The truth was, I had made no grand pronouncement. I had not spoken any full sentence or explicated metaphysical mysteries. What had come out of me was a single bright noise, and the noise had been more instinct than speech: a clean syllable that held no grammar but somehow insisted on meaning.
It had been "Kai."
I did not form it with conscious verbal chords; the sound slipped out like a hiccup in the world's machine. I felt the notion of the syllable more than I heard it—like a small bug in the HUD of life saying, "Name: \[placeholder]." The midwife's face changed in an instant from concentration to an amused, almost reverent curiosity. The steward, who had been hovering like someone auditioning for a respectable role in a house, exhaled with the smug air of a man who has just been given a new line to hear.
"Kai," the midwife repeated slowly, tasting it. She smiled, the sort that rearranges wrinkles into kinder configurations. "Kai," she said again to me, this time with a weight of tradition behind it. "A clean sound. Good lungs."
Let me be boringly clear: I could not speak as a baby. I could not form complicated sentences or deliver monologues. I could think like a thirty-one-year-old and I could form plans like a spreadsheet in motion, but the physical act of speech—tongue, lips, lung control—was infantile and clumsy. The single sound uttered at birth, however, answered a different set of rules in this world.
When the steward and the ink-stained scholar began to mutter about lineage and omens, I booked that internal footnote—this world had rules; find the manual later. The scholar poked at my hand, sniffed the air, and made small notes in a leather-bound book as if cataloguing the event for posterity. "The name-root," he murmured to the steward with the satisfied air of a man pleased to have evidence for his theories, "appears quite clear. This one will have a straightforward root—useful for registers. Record it as Kai."
Name-root. The term landed in my internal lexicon like an unexpectedly logical explanation. As my adult mind sat in the tiny shell of a newborn, I had two simultaneous reactions: the first was an irritated, snarky impulse to complain about the universe's UI updates; the second was a sharp, delighted relief that the world had a consistent rule I could, in time, learn and exploit. If every infant emitted a single sound at birth that became their identity's seed, then babies speaking that sound was not a plot hole; it was a cultural quirk, perhaps even a law.
What the midwife said out loud to the steward and the scholar confirmed it for everyone else in the room, and incidentally reduced my urge to stage a soapbox lecture on the ethics of respawning. "It is the old way," she told them. "A newborn's first sound is the root. We take it, we shape it. It is said the soul offers its first syllable before the tongue learns the world."
Said the soul. The phrase lodged where superstition and plausibility meet—a place as fertile as any university seminar I'd ever skipped. My adult mind buzzed. Reincarnation, soul echoes, and name-roots tangled into potential plot threads. Was the first sound a random neural twitch? A soul's echo selecting a phoneme? A trick of fate? I could not know. But I could mark the suspicion and revisit it later when I had grown larger and less inconvenient.
People in the room nodded and debated this like neighbors over a fence, their voices low and practical. The steward proposed a name that added gravitas—Kai Redwood rolled off his tongue like creditable property. The scholar, fond of cataloging patterns, suggested a variant that hinted at place; the midwife shrugged and said the simpler the name, the better for a child who might have to shout it across windy markets. Names, they agreed, were talismans and practicalities both.
Being a newborn with an old brain is like having admin privileges to a device that refuses to accept your commands yet. I could understand all the conversation, and every exchange seeded an inner map—who was kind, who was ambitious, who smelled faintly of vinegar and might therefore bargain ill. Leverage planted itself immediately in my adult cognition. In my previous life I had been lazy with the margins I'd been given; now, even in a swaddling cloth, I understood the mechanics of advantage well enough to plan.
Leverage meant tutors, books, and people who would teach me things other children learned at a crawl. It meant getting the midwife's goodwill, the steward's favor, and the scholar's curiosity. If there were guilds or orders, I wanted to be friends with them before I needed them. If there were mysteries in the magic system, I wanted to be the kind of persistent pest who stuck to scrolls and argued with professors until they cracked. If there were swords that sang when swung, I would learn their language. If life had a ladder, I wasn't going to wait for it to fall into my lap again.
The evenings and days that followed were a strange apprenticeship in listening. I babbled—incoherent consonants, the odd vowel that pleased the cat—and adults around me interpreted the small noises as whimsical signs of character. The steward winked at my attempts as if I had winked back; the scholar's pen never rested. The midwife came by often, an earthy oracle with a pocket for herbs, and she explained more about the name-root in a way that reminded me of footnotes: "Some say the first sound at birth is the soul's first footprint on the tongue," she told me once, smoothing the blanket across my knees. "Others call it the Echo of Rebirth. Families take it and make meaning of it. It does not mean everything, but it does mean names are not entirely accidental here."
I filed that away with the kind of neatness I'd never managed in my old life. The world had rules. They were not necessarily fair, but they were learnable. If a tradition said a child's first sound conferred meaning, then the fact that I'd uttered "Kai" might be coincidence—or it might be something the plot would later gnaw on like a persistent rat. Either way, it gave me a handle.
Under all the practical cataloging, something softer and rawer grew: a desire to be different in a way that matters. In my previous life I had watched others live and been a spectator. I had been good at planning but poor at execution. This time, the vow that rose with surprising force was simple: do not be someone who leaves dreams in a closet to gather dust. Protect people if I could. Learn things that made a difference. Be deliberate.
The midwife kissed my forehead the first night I really slept long enough to dream—not the lucid cinematic dreams you see in movies, just a small spilling of images, a map half-remembered from an old game, a face that might yet belong to a friend. She whispered, almost to herself, "He has lungs. That is the beginning." Her breath smelled of rosemary and well-used soap. The candle guttered. Rain rinsed the roof in patient little waves. The room smelled of wet earth and straw and the small iron tang I'd noticed the moment I came awake.
"Beginner mode," I thought, because if you cannot laugh at the universe you might as well mutter about it. The word felt equal parts jest and prayer. I could not speak in paragraphs, but I could think strategies. I could listen. I could plot.
Kai Redwood, I told myself in the private auditorium of my mind. Remember the name. There would be time to ask the midwife more about name-roots and the Echo of Rebirth later, when I had teeth and could grumble with a credible voice. For now, the sound I had burst out in birth would be interpreted for me by those who lived here. A name had been planted. The rest—reading, training, growing—was for me to make.
If the world was bugged in my favor and had rules I could exploit, fine. If the world was a bureaucratic mess of superstition and power structures, also fine. I would learn the rules and bend them until they bent me something better.
And if the universe had, in some cosmic typo, given a thirty-one-year-old mind to a newborn body that happened to blurt a single syllable upon arrival—well, then I planned to exploit the glitch until the world learned to respect the name Kai Redwood. (or maybe just try not living like a NEET)