The time when I was not Fearless

I was born a mortal and died a mortal for too many times to count on two hands. That was the perk of being the husband of Tiadra the goddess of life and death. I got to retain my memory of my previous reincarnations. My wife forbade me forgetting her or all the memories I shared with her. As the result, I remembered being in love with Tiadra and her alone through a millennium.

I solved the problem of forgetting by writing my memories on my own soul, branding my soul with all of my memories. I learned that trick after my second reincarnation. That's why I have forgotten many things about the first reincarnation.

However, I remembered being born the seventeenth son of a baron who owed a border fiefdom in the kingdom of Nevermore. That I would never forget.

I and many of my siblings had never expected to inherit my father's title and had thought about our future when we were very young. Many of my brothers pursued knighthood or farming or trading at a very early age. My sisters, they attended lessons to become ladies in waiting for more powerful noble houses or swore an oath of chastity and served the powerful deities at a temple.

I was the only odd ball among my siblings. I wanted to become a magus when I was very young.

When I was ten, a drought terrorized my father's fiefdom. It was when the wheat on our fiefdom started to bloom and entered a very crucial phase of development. My father tried everything he could to prevent a bad harvest but that drought was very terrible. The river ran dry and the earth cracked from the heat and dehydration. In the end, he gathered a lump sum of coins and requested the Mage Council of our kingdom to dispatch an Arch Mage.

An Arch Mage came to our land. An old man whose hair was grey, with long grey beard and a face full of wrinkles. He came to our land and tried to solve the problem. It took him five days to finish casting his spell and when the spell activated, rain started to fall from the sky. My father cheered for the miracle, his people, too, did. So did I as a boy.

We cheered for that Arch Mage until he lost control of his spell and the giant dark cloud he conjured on the sky somehow transformed into a thunderstorm. That thunderstorm swept my father's fiefdom and destroyed everything on its path, houses, stables, fields, everything.

That autumn, there was no harvest on our fiefdom. The farmers on our land had nothing to do during that fall, because all the wheat was destroyed by that rouge thunderstorm.

I remembered the fury of my father and his subjects. They marched into the capital and formed a blockage in front of the Diven Clock Tower, the head quarter of our kingdom's Mage Council, demanding a full and complete reparation for that incident.

I remembered they were stopped at the entrance of the capital city by the guards of the king. The guards feared that my father has rebelled against the king and denied his entrance for many days. It was until my father managed to sort out the problem that he was allowed to enter the capital with his army of thousands farmer and peasants.

The Mage Council was extremely apologetic. They paid the reparation in full and even sent mages into our land, helping my father to restore his fiefdom for free, hoping to douse the blazed fury of my father and his subjects.

That was when I decided to become a mage. My father thought I was insane, so did my mothers and siblings. They could not understand me.

When I was fourteen, I applied for a seven years course in the Academy. There was only one academy at that time in our kingdom, the Diven Academy of Magic. My father arranged a place for me at the Academy.

The Academy provided me a full scholarship and free accommodation for three years, knowing whose son I was. They only made me promised to not say a word of that rouge thunderstorm incident to anyone else attending the Academy.

I was the special kid. All of my teachers knew who I was and gave me special treatment. I learnt almost nothing from the time I spent at the Academy. The teachers never found faults in me and always gave me praises and full marks. I was the special kid.

When I was seventeen, I finished the basic course at the Academy and applied for a four year tutelage under a qualified Arch Mage of Diven Academy. The Academy gave me the special right and allowed me to pick my teacher. They always made the assignment themselves and never allowed a student to pick. In a way, I was glad that Arch Mage screwed our fiefdom with his magic.

I remembered picking my own teacher out of hundreds of Arch Mages belonged to the Diven Academy. From the drawing on their resumes, I could only see old men in their fifty and above, until my eyes were drawn to the drawing of a beautiful woman.

Aira Gospel, she was the youngest person in our kingdom history to attain the title of Arch Mage. What's more impressive, she was a woman. She had contributed many researches to our kingdom and more. The Diven Magic Council gave her the aliases the Witch of the South and the Prodigy.

As soon as I finished reading her resume, I immediately knew who would be my teacher and thus made the application. At that time, I did not know Aira Gospel's third alias, the Drunken Rose of Calamity.

The thought that I should have changed my decision has truly never crossed my mind. Not even when the director of the Diven Academy sweated profusely with a cramped smile on his lips when he saw the choice I had made. He asked if I wanted to rescind my decision. I honestly thought that was a strange question at that moment.

I had only two reasons at that time to pick Aira as my teacher over anyone else. First, her perfect and complete resume. Second, if the drawing in her resume was true and not doctored, she had the most beautiful chest I had ever seen in my entire life. She was hot like a red burning torch. She was like a flame that even if I knew I would get burned by touching her, I would probably still try to do it anyway. She was everything that a seventeen years old boy like me at the time could have fantasized.

Of course, I would pick her over those old men. Of course I would not rescind my decision.

That's how I became the student of the most problematic Arch Mage in the history of our kingdom. I was her one and only student.

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I fixed my broken nose with a simple healing spell. I should have not punched myself with such strength. However, when in doubt of being trapped inside an illusion, the best way to check if that was reality or illusion is by causing self- inflicting pain.

As soon as I opened my eyes and realized that I was still alive, I pinched my cheeks. It was not painful enough so I punched myself in the nose just to make sure.

After that, I conjured my soul screen and double-checked my reality.

"Shit, I went back in time by a millennium." Only when that thought completely sunk in that I managed to engineer a plan to deal with Abominaton.

I have to grind and level up, reaching max level and ascend to a supreme mortal being as quickly as I can. I have to warn the gods and goddesses on Asagir before Abominaton caught them and devoured them to strengthen himself. I have to convince Tiadra to marry me again, as soon as possible, and sired thousands of beautiful demi-god children with her as well.

As soon as I made my priorities clear, I entered the mobile witch tower and climbed the rotating stairs with hastened footsteps.

The mobile witch tower was created by Aira by assembling and stacking fifteen giant golems on top of each other. Each of the fifteen giant golems was a magic masterpiece of our world back then. Each of them formed a floor of the mobile tower when they were in hibernating mode. When Aira decided that she had enough of a landscape, she would disassemble her mobile tower and marched it to somewhere else. Thus, it was extremely hard for the Mage Council to locate Aira.

I remembered got stuck inside her mobile tower for a straight thirty years instead of four and ended up learning all of her spells and tricks, becoming an Arch Mage myself before even taking the Arch Mage qualified exam.

That was a mistake of a life time. This time, it won't happen again.