James stood on the stage of his graduation ceremony, schooling his face in order to appear as stoic as possible. He had caught sight of his younger brother and parents in the audience, barely containing their own excitement. Their infectious aura threatened to ruin the image he had spent his entire college career cultivating: the intellectual, the professional, mature beyond his years.

  It was hard to hold back his own grin. The future seemed...promising. James had spent more of his teenage years than he wanted to admit doomscrolling through the internet, reading headline after headline about injustices and inequalities and how everything was on the brink of collapse. It had corrupted his headspace for a while, but he had come out the other side determined. He wanted to make a difference.

  A double major in History and Philosophy from Stanford opened doors. Even those who considered liberal arts useless admitted they made a viable pathway for a future do-gooder intent on grad school. He had flipflopped between choosing the path of a public defender or a physician, and—-

  The moment before his name was announced, a metal streak blasted overhead. James blinked a moment before the thunderclap of the sonic boom reverberated outward. His bones rattled.

  A fighter jet? Was this some sort of military performance for graduation?

  In the distance, a blinding flash. Heat. Scouring heat. Unbelievable force flung him off his feet, and

  ***

  James opened his eyes and screamed.

  The world was blurry, indistinct, yet suffused with swirls of vibrant color. Every shade he had ever seen, ever imagined, and more, blending and mixing and separating like the living palette of some divine artist.

  Colossal humanoid figures leaned over him, emanating their own colorful auras. Unlike the surrounding environment, there was a pattern to their hues. One figure radiated honey and pink and peach. Calming, healing light. Another, a bit farther back, reminded him of a book: paper and leather and ink joined in harmony, with a hint of tobacco.

  The worst migraine he had ever experienced pounded between his eyes.

  This couldn’t be the afterlife. Too much pain, too much feeling, too much emotion. Had he survived a nuclear blast? Was he in the hospital? Maybe his messed-up vision was some weird aftereffect of being blinded.

  He could be on the verge of death, riddled with random mutations that played tricks on his mind. People on the outskirts often survived the initial shock of a nuke before succumbing to the radiation. At least, for the earlier generations of those bombs, before they reached apocalypse-level yields.

  But that didn’t seem right.

  Though his senses had expanded in some magical way, he still had a vague sense of his body. It felt…wrong. Not broken or battered or burnt.

  No, this was something else. He was too small, too helpless. He had a head but no strength to move it. Now that he focused on it, it felt like he was cradled in someone’s arms. Swaddled in soft blankets.

  Weird.

  And his own screaming was distorted, warped. The cry of a baby.

  Oh, he thought after several seconds. I am a baby, aren’t I?

  With the revelation came one answer, and many more questions.

  Black text settled across his vision, overlying the swirls of mystical colors in his surroundings.

  [ Foreign reincarnator identified. Limited System access granted. ]

  [ Status]

  [ General Skills]

  [ Achievements]

  [ Titles ]

  [ Class ]

  [ Profession ]

  Limited indeed. Every option except for Status was grayed out.

  Immediate parallels to the phenomenon leapt to mind. James had played his fair share of video games in what he was beginning to accept had been his previous life. No one could resist some mindless entertainment in their spare time, even if they harbored delusions of personally righting all the world’s wrongs.

  A System with Classes and Statuses whispered all sorts of promises about this new reality: knights and necromancers, priests and cultists. A world where the right Lawful Good hero could make a real difference.

  Before he could investigate his Status, several more colossal figures entered the colorful world. Colossal from a baby’s perspective, at least. Each of them radiated a unique signature. One reminded him of a forest, another of the sea. That looming one was like a thunderstorm.

  His budding senses were soon overwhelmed, and the world devolved into a painful, kaleidoscopic blur. He squeezed his eyes shut.

  Gaze of the Dominator: Level 1 > 4.

  A string of sounds thundered overhead. Far too loud, but they had a pleasing, almost musical quality that helped identify them as words in a foreign language. James couldn’t discern any sort of grammatical structure or even where one lilting word ended and another began. At least the syllables sounded easy enough to mimic for anyone without a useless floppy baby mouth.

  The world around James suddenly vibrated with a hum that almost reminded him of the intonation of a Buddhist monk. It resonated beyond the physical, settling into his conscious awareness in a way that dominated his thoughts.

  Nothing else mattered besides that mystical sensation. It held all the secrets of this strange realm.

  The aching behind James’ eyes pulsed in time with the vibrations. Slowly, the pain receded, and his awareness of the hum faded along with it. After a moment of hesitation, he opened his eyes once more.

  No more prismatic riot of colors and clashing auras. He was, indeed, swaddled in a woman’s arms. Her peach and pink aura no longer painted the world around her, but her flushed cheeks and gleaming eyes held all the same warmth.

  She lowered her nose until it brushed against his. As invasive and demeaning as the gesture was, he couldn’t help but quiet down and try to latch onto her face with his little sausage arms. They refused to obey him, but the desire remained. Endorphins flooded his mind with an irresistible joy.

  After a moment, she rotated him to face the man who had the bookish aura. He was handsome, in a sinister way. A sharp, almost villainous face observed James from behind a pair of spectacles. The lenses were fascinating, a mosaic of facets reminiscent of insect eyes. Pitch-black irises gleamed with vague hints of a captured rainbow, like oil spills after rain.

  “Tear,” the man said, pointing at him.

  This must be my father, he thought to himself.

  The realization made him start crying again. New parents. That meant that his old family was gone, and he doubted there was any going back. The text had labeled him a ‘foreign reincarnator.’ Reincarnation meant a new life; no take backs.

  The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  His family would have been vaporized in that same atomic blast that killed him. Part of him denied it, tried to piece together a reasonable, alternative explanation for the final moments of his old life, but the truth was obvious.

  At best, a conventional munition from an enemy bomber had laid waste to Palo Alto. But an attack on Silicon Valley like that couldn’t go unanswered. With how high tensions had been throughout Earth around his time of death, he couldn’t imagine anything less than a nuclear winter being the end result. Perhaps it was best his family had been flash-transmuted into ash, after all.

  Baby James’ choked, desperate cries had an immediate effect on his father. The smug, self-assured expression twisted into panic. He muttered something and glanced at the kind-looking woman.

  What was that word? Elomaz? James assumed he had learned his first curse word in the local language. He wanted to repeat it over and over again. Instead, before he could bother focusing on the other people in the room, he found himself drifting to sleep.

  ***

  Time passed in his new world.

  The helplessness and constant drowsiness eventually faded away. Once he was able to control his body and, thank goodness, actually walk around, he found that his horizons had broadened significantly.

  On top of that, learning the basics of the local language had been simple enough, even if he couldn’t produce half of the sounds yet without blowing spit bubbles.

  If anyone thought it strange that a ten-month-old baby could sprint around and form garbled sentences, they hadn’t bothered to reveal their surprise to him. No one took him seriously, instead choosing to gush over his babbling attempts at coherency and applaud him for his various acrobatics.

  Part of that was, no doubt, due to the existence of the System. It turned out that this world, too, held its inequalities. Not all children were born equal.

  [ Status ]

  Name: Tyrus Hollan

  Age: 10 months

  Race: Human (D)

  Bloodline: Vision of the Omniscient (D)

  Attributes:

  Strength: 2

  Dexterity: 3

  Constitution: 1

  Will: 7

  Perception: 4 (8)

  Charisma: 4 (8)

  Skills:

  [ Gaze of the Dominator ] - 4 (Sealed)

  At some point, James had accepted his new reality and began to think of himself as Tyr Hollan in truth. The memories of his past life remained, but they felt more like the highlight reel of a movie he had watched too many times.

  An inevitability. Memories are flimsy constructs. People never recall the exact details of the original imprint on their mind. They recall the last time they recalled those details. Time blurs and smudges until only an impression of an impression is left. And so the vengeful ghost of James began to fade, and the inquisitive soul of Tyr Hollan blossomed in its place.

  Unfortunately, no one had seen fit to divulge too many details to the pink little cherub running all over the grounds of his family’s countryside estate. Even his attempts to pry information from his father, Leon, had met with complete failure.

  Leon was happy to read to him or let him sit on his lap while he flipped through one of his many dense grimoires, but he always pretended not to understand babyspeak whenever the System was mentioned.

  Frustrating. Being a cute little shit had its benefits, but somehow no one felt the urge to monologue about the metaphysical nature of this world while they prepared his milk bottle.

  With nothing but time to spare, Tyr explored the world around him on his own. The similarities to Earth, the differences. His investigation into the System and what it meant had stalled, but he had been able to deduce some key details related to his own Status.

  The meaning of his individual attributes was mostly self-evident. Strength indicated his physical power. Dexterity related to flexibility, fine motor control, acrobatics. Constitution was some sort of measure of his durability.

  Without much of a means of comparison, he couldn’t pinpoint exactly how these physical attributes worked. All three of them had started at a base of 1 on his day of birth. His repeated efforts at controlling his body and freeing himself from the indignity of being immobile had led to notifications that they had advanced, one point at a time. It had taken around four months of fiddling with anything within hand’s reach to advance each point of Dexterity.

  Unfortunately, Constitution seemed impossible to train. At least in his current circumstances. He was about as tough as a baseline child his age, which meant that he bruised like a peach whenever he ran into anything or fell from his latest climbing target.

  Based on vague memories of James Mclean’s baby nephew, Tyr estimated he was around twice as strong and three times as dexterous as one would expect from a little boy his age.

  He doubted the attribute number indicated a pure multiplier of a base human, since it would become truly ridiculous at higher levels if that was the case. Though it was always possible that attributes had diminishing returns.

  Without knowing anything about other people’s Statuses, he wasn’t sure if most people were even able to raise their attributes through external means in the first place. Perhaps it was just a display that indicated their power relative to others. His mental stats had remained the same since birth, even as he expanded his knowledge about the world.

  Not being able to advance them would be a disappointment and, fortunately, seemed rather unlikely.

  Classes, Professions, Achievements, Titles, and more had yet to be unlocked for him. No doubt they granted skills and attribute points, possibly even Bloodlines like his own that could be inherited. He had his theories about the rather ominously-named Vision of the Omniscient. The rainbow glimmers trapped within Leon’s eyes hinted which of his parents had passed the power on to him.

  That also explained part of the anomaly regarding his mental attributes: why were his Perception and Charisma only half of their true potential?

  Leon had sealed Tyr’s only skill, [Gaze of the Dominator], after he had been born and first opened his eyes. While that had been somewhat of a blessing, freeing him from the tyranny of blinding colors, locking his Bloodline had stopped it from leveling up ever since. That may have been unrelated, but it was hard to convince himself that having his mystical rainbow eyes sealed had nothing to do with those attributes being at 4 instead of 8.

  Another source of frustration, even if he understood his father’s reasoning. If it was a Bloodline ability, there had probably been multiple past generations that had experimented and honed it over time. Perhaps the overwhelming sight of magical energy and auras fried most babies' brains if uncontrolled, but how many of them were reincarnators?

  Tyr could probably handle it.

  More than once, he had a moment of self-awareness that let him reflect on why, exactly, so many of the ‘elite’ were characterized as spoiled brats. If you were convinced you were special from birth, it only seemed natural. That self-awareness was often forgotten whenever he began exploring the boundaries of his own greatness once again.

  Get it together, kid, an older voice grumbled in the back of his mind.

  Part of his arrogance came from the high Will stat. Probably.

  Will seemed related to his ability to focus and think. Even compared to his prime in his past life, revelations and theories flowed through his thoughts with an ease that made him smirk like a smug, chubby-cheeked villain.

  Infant minds had greater neuroplasticity than those of adults, at least back on Earth, meaning they could form mental connections and learn more efficiently. Countless hours memorizing historical dates and trying to make sense of Heidegger would have been far more tolerable with this admittedly remarkable little baby brain.

  Of course, the real world had a tendency to humble him. His Will may be high, but he couldn’t keep up with his father flicking through the pages of a tome faster than he could even see.

  Triple a normal baby’s Dexterity wasn’t much, and his childish attempts at carving furrows into the dinner table with his silverware left no mark on either wood or utensil.

  Clearly they were not mundane materials. Enhanced with magic, maybe? Or a naturally higher ‘grade’ than normal? That System term had to have something to do with the quality of an object.

  His Status associated it with his Race and Bloodline—concepts with rather awkward associations back on Earth, but with some measurable distinction in this new life. If those had Grades, it stood to reason that other things did as well.

  His entire home was essentially babyproof. At least in the sense that, despite his determination, there was almost nothing he could destroy. Even the glass windows must have had a high Grade.

  Over time, Tyr had pieced together that his parents were no commoners. Living on a countryside estate with an orchard and horses and servants made that fairly obvious, but it seemed to go beyond a matter of luxury.

  Leon and Alana, his mother, carried themselves with a quiet dignity that spoke of nobility. It was never more evident than when gaudily-dressed strangers came to visit, begging his mother for healing or an apprenticeship. Less often, petitioners sought his father for guidance on some esoteric matter of academia.

  Despite these visitors’ massive bejeweled weapons and opulent carriages, they bowed and scraped and listened to his parent’s wisdom with the reverence of pilgrims before a holy shrine.

  As they should.

  On top of that, almost all of these supplicants would glance at the imperious baby standing off to the side and offer him tribute. Some swirling elixir, piece of glowing jewelry, or heavy pouch of coins would be presented for Tyr’s consideration. Of course, his parents always hid them away somewhere, but they would find their way to their proper owner in due time.

  Damn, I’ve burned all the good karma I built up in past lives and ended up some tyrannical nobleman. A glimpse of innate privilege and I’m already scoffing at my lessers.

  His parents scolded him whenever he threw a tantrum or sauntered around with a bit too much arrogance, but they seemed to find their patrician-in-waiting rather amusing.

  They shouldn’t be humoring this!