Here is the second chapter. I will be updating quickly, till we get 15K words in.
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What is life?
The question hung in the void between us.
Charles stared at me. And kept staring. If I had to guess, probably a solid ten minutes.
"This is your wish?" he finally asked. "You do know you can ask for anything, right?"
Yes. I want you to answer this question.
Charles rubbed his paw against his temple. He stayed quiet for a long time, thinking.
"Life," he finally said, "is a very broad concept."
I knew that.
"If we're talking about your science textbook, " He glanced at the ledger, "life is a complex phenomenon defined by shared characteristics. Organization. Metabolism. Growth. Response to stimuli. Reproduction. Homeostasis. Adaptation. It distinguishes living matter from non-living matter through processes that sustain and evolve over time."
He looked at me, eyebrows raised.
"But I know that's not what you mean. You know what a mitochondria is."
Powerhouse of the cell. Yeah, I know. That's not what I'm asking.
Charles leaned back in his chair with a sigh.
"The term 'life' can be interpreted in millions of ways depending on who you ask. It's widely subjective."
He looked up at the cosmos above us.
"Ask a father? Life is his family's welfare. The struggle to put food on the table. The exhaustion of a double shift. That simple, quiet joy when his kid smiles after a long day. That's life to him."
"Ask a kid? Not you, Ren, but a normal kid? Life is their friends. Their toys. The scraped knee that feels like the end of the world. The ice cream tomorrow that feels like the ultimate prize. Small things that don't matter in the long run, but mean everything in the moment."
"Ask someone in love? Life is the person they love. Their entire world shrinks to a single human being."
"Ask someone starving? Life is food. The next meal. Survival. The pain in their gut is the only reality that exists."
Charles stood up and walked around the desk, his claws clicking softly on the invisible floor. He stopped right in front of me. I didn't have eyes anymore, but I felt his gaze piercing through me anyway.
"So, Ren," he whispered. "Tell me. What was your life? What drove you to wake up every day? What made you feel alive?"
I just stared at him.
Or tried to. Hard to stare when you're a blob of consciousness. Okay, okay, the joke is getting too repetitive.
.
.
.
I searched my memories. Fourteen years on Earth. What did I live for?
School? That was just a holding cell.
My parents? I loved them. They were good people. But I didn't live for them. I felt like a guest in their house.
The anime? The books? The games? Those were distractions. Windows into other worlds because I didn't like my own. They weren't purposes. They were something like painkillers.
The answer was simple.
I lived for nothing.
No motivation. No drive. No passion. Nothing.
I didn't have that spark Charles was talking about. I was just existing. A biological machine that consumed oxygen and converted food into energy until the machine broke down.
So... was I ever truly alive? Or was I just a thing the whole time?
The silence stretched. The gray void now felt heavy.
"Stop overthinking, kid."
Charles's voice snapped me back. I looked up, slowly finding his eyes.
He wasn't looking at me with pity. Pity is cheap.
He was looking at me with something like respect.
"There are people who need the right stimulus to trigger their emotions," Charles said. "You aren't broken, Ren. You were dormant. A seed that fell on concrete instead of soil."
He walked back to his chair and sat down, giving me a small smile.
"So here's the offer. Since your wish was nothing major, I can do something better than just explaining it to you. Words are cheap. Anyone can give you a definition. But experience?" He paused. "Experience is how you actually learn."
He opened the ledger, flipping to a fresh page.
"Would you like to be reborn in a random world? Or go to Heaven?"
I hesitated. Reborn?
"Yes. A do-over. A restart, if you want to call it that." Charles leaned forward. "But before you decide, I'll tell you this: life won't be all sunshine and roses. If you want to know what life is, you have to experience all of it. Not just the fun parts."
He made sure I was paying attention.
"You'll learn what pain is. Real pain. Not just the headache from a tumor, but the pain of failure. You'll learn about loss. Betrayal. The struggle to keep standing when the world wants you to kneel."
He paused.
"You can't know what life is unless you have something to lose. Heaven is safe. Comfortable. It's a warm bath that never gets cold. But nothing happens there. It's static." He tapped the page. "Rebirth is messy. It's loud. It hurts. But that's what living actually is."
"So," he said. "What do you want, Ren?"
I didn't need to think about it.
The decision was already made.
You already know the answer, don't you?
Charles smiled. A toothy grin that showed off his perfectly white canines.
"Heh. So it's decided?"
As sure as I can be.
"Then good luck, son." The pen floated up and scribbled something in the ledger. "I might check in on you sometimes. May you find your purpose. And Ren?" He looked up. "Try not to die so young this time. It messes up my paperwork."
He slammed the book shut. The sound echoed through the void.
Bye, Charles.
The floor disappeared.
I was falling again, sucked into darkness, swirling down into nothing.
***
I opened my eyes.
Bright. Too bright. Like someone was shining a flashlight directly into my face.
And loud. God, it was loud.
Someone was screaming.
Wait. I was screaming?
I tried to stop, but I couldn't. My body was on autopilot. My lungs were burning with the first breath of air.
Cold air hit my wet skin. Giant hands grabbed me, handling me like luggage.
"It's a boy!"
The voice hit me like a megaphone pressed against my ear.
A boy?
I got reborn as a boy.
Thank Charles. I mean, it's fifty-fifty, right? Could've easily been a girl. That would've been weird.
But that's where the good news ends.
See, during my hospital time, I read a lot of reincarnation novels. Hundreds of them.
Most of them skip the baby arc. They do a "Time Skip: Four Years Later" right after birth.
I used to think that was lazy writing. Or maybe the authors thought readers didn't want to read about babies.
Now, lying here wrapped in rough cloth, unable to lift my own head, staring at a blurry ceiling, I get it.
They skip it because being a baby is absolute torture.
It's not cute. It's not magical.
It's painful. Humiliating. And hella boring.
Imagine having the mind of a teenager trapped in a body that doesn't work.
My muscles were useless. My neck couldn't support my head. My eyes couldn't focus, everything was just blobs of color.
I tried to move my hand to scratch my nose. Simple, right?
My brain sent the signal: move left hand to nose.
My body responded by flailing both arms like a cloth in a hurricane.
Then I punched myself in the eye.
Great. Now I was crying. And I couldn't stop.
I tried to speak. I wanted to say, "Hey, can someone turn down the lights?"
What came out: "Waaaah! Grahh! Bububu!"
Maddening.
And then there's the stuff your body does without permission.
Let's talk about the most embarrassing one.
You have no control. None. Zero. You're a prisoner to your own bladder. You just... go. No warning. No "excuse me." It just happens.
Then you lie there. In your own mess. Hoping one of the giants notices you smell terrible, and clean you up.
You have to cry to get attention.
I tried to develop a code. One short cry for "I'm hungry." Two long wails for "diaper change." A series of hiccups for "I'm bored out of my mind."
Unfortunately, my new parents didn't catch on.
Nobody caught on.
I'd give the diaper change signal.
A gentle, blurry figure draped in layers of silk would peek at me from behind a bamboo screen.
"Oh, is the young master hungry? Look, he is hungry!"
Nope. Wrong guess. I'm not hungry, I'm sitting in filth. Check the clothes.
She'd signal a wet nurse to shove a breast in my face.
So now, I was full and dirty.
I spent days staring at wooden ceiling beams, counting grain lines in the timber. I recalled entire anime episodes in my head just to keep my brain from turning to mush. Strange contrast to the ancient world around me.
I stared at the edges of my bamboo basket for hours. A prison. It felt like a silk-lined, incense-scented prison.
I plotted escapes. Calculated the trajectory needed to vault over the rim.
Then I'd try to roll over and get tangled in my own small kimonos.
And the talk. God, the talk.
Adults with their high-pitched cooing.
"Who's a strong heir? Is it you? Is it you? Yes, it is! Look at those noble cheeks! Hehehehe"
They'd pinch my face. Make weird clicking noises. Dangle a colorful fan or a temari ball in front of me like I was a kitten.
I'm not a pet. It's a fan. I know what it does. Can you please just talk normally?
After a year of waiting, I finally hit a milestone.
I learned to walk.
It wasn't graceful. It involved a lot of falling on the mats. But I didn't cry. I just got back up and tried again.
The first time I managed to pull myself up on a low writing desk, stand on my own two legs, and take a step without holding on?
It wasn't for applause. It was for freedom.
I looked at the servants who gasped in surprise.
Finally, I thought. Now I can actually get somewhere.
Since then, three more years passed.
I survived the baby arc. Endured the potty training. I waited out the teething pains. I tolerated the formal introductions to other toddlers without biting them, which took a lot of patience.
And now, life — my new life in this ancient era — was actually starting.
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Powerstones and comments are greatly appreciated.
And if you enjoyed it, add it to your library.