A new beginning

In a brightly lit room, there was a man strapped to a steel table. His face couldn't be seen under fresh and old wounds. His fingers were all bent the wrong way and his toes were completely missing, turned into bloody stumps. Yet, even in this messy state, he was just breathing steadily.

He had been just a simple man, worked his way up from nothing to propose to the girl of his dreams. They had been happy for a while and had a little girl together. One day, their fortunes had turned when his wife had witnessed a murder.

Their home had been invaded and they had been all heavily beaten and stabbed multiple times, left for dead. Except, fate didn't give a damn about what the petty little humans intended for each other.

He had pulled through despite his caved in skull and made an almost complete recovery, losing only one small thing, restraint.

He had tracked down the ones responsible for the attack one by one, then took cut off their heads. Little by little, a small army of decaying heads in sealed glass containers had been formed inside a storage container. As he went deeper into the organization, he found out about more and more people that were involved. At first, he had thought it to be a simple drug trafficking ring, but it quickly turned into a large-scale import-export business, trading in drugs, weapons, explosives and live humans.

Suddenly, he had been taken by an international taskforce and forced to work for them. The way they got him to cooperate was implanting an explosive device near his brain stem so that if he ever went off mission, he'd be disposed of.

He had once tried to cut the device out, but quickly discovered that it had a metal detection system on it as he had been quickly taken down by the rest of the people forced to work for the taskforce. After that, he'd been always paired up with another member. Still, he had managed to gather a stash of ceramic tools for the job, ready to take care of his little problem the first chance he got.

Yet, he had ended up in this situation before he had the chance to free himself. He was conscious, but just barely, the pain he was in causing him to nearly black out.

Suddenly, he felt a strong pulling force on himself and his vision went first dark and then he saw a light in the distance.

'NO! Not yet! I'm not done here yet! I've still got people that need dying!', he thought to himself. Suddenly, he felt a strange new energy pass into himself. He tried to resist again, harder this time. He tried to throw off whatever had attached itself to him.

For a moment he was free, able to see the lamps on the ceiling glaring at him menacingly. Then the pulling force returned, a lot stronger this time. He could also feel a horrible headache coming on, as if his brain was being poked by white hot rods. He had learned enough about brains while trying to figure a way out of his predicament to know that there were no receptors inside a brain.

Then he was suddenly yanked out of his body. He was able to see the glowing, multi-colored walls of a tunnel as he sped past them.

He was getting angry, scratch that, he was getting fucking furious. He made up his mind then and there that if he ever found the one responsible, he'd make them understand the error of the ways, as painfully as possible, since that fucker had just taken his chance to continue getting his due payback. 'NO, No, No! Motherfucker! Let the fuck go of me! Take me back!', he tried to scream, but no sound came out. He was just a soul in the void between the worlds, after all. He could scream in his mind all he wanted without anyone being the wiser.

Suddenly, with a slam, he found himself come to a stop. A while passed before he was able to think straight again.

'The fuck is it now? Is that my stop or something? Do I go and collect my baggage from somewhere?', he thought sarcastically.

If he had been able to look into his own mindscape during that time of confusion and extreme dizziness, he could've seen strings of text coming into and fading out of existence:

'Initializing Care Package.

No links currently available.

Initializing linker tool. No hooks for links available.

Scanning. Scan complete.

Suitable substitute found.

Compiling data. Rendering. Memory creation complete.

Setting triggers.

Archmage System architecture detected. Data unsalvageable.

Salvaging architecture. Modifying soul to increase adaptability. Insufficient magic available. Absorbing ambient magic. Beginning construction of proto-core.

Proto-core complete. Soul adaptability increased to safety limit.

ERROR !@%^*^%$& ERR&% ...'

Finally, he stopped his mind-shouting and calmed down by a notch. He started assessing his situation. 'Weird feeling? Check. Got pulled by something invisible through a colorful tube-like thing? Check. Ended up somewhere else that doesn't feel like my own body? Check. Know where I am? No check. I guess that's where I'll start, by trying to figure out just where the fuck am I.

Only thing I know that I, in some shape or form, got pulled from my own body to somewhere else and now have some sort of weird energy or some shit like that going through my body. That must mean that this isn't a place that relies purely on science. I got that weird feeling when I was still in my body, so it probably has something to do with my soul or mind or whatever got pulled through. Some must've come to my side by whatever facilitated the process.

What is this world about then? Cultivation or magic? Both?'

He spent what felt like ages trying to move that strange energy within himself, having only minor success.

'If this world is cultivation based, could it be that I have low talent? Or is it that I can't start so early? I'll just try magic too.'

That was the point when the first subtle trigger activated, him thinking of trying magic being the trigger. As he went through different magic systems that he had seen, heard or read about, he got a stronger and stronger urge to try the magic of one particular world, the Wizarding world, known by outsiders as the world of Harry Potter.

He suddenly had a flash of inspiration when a memory surfaced, of him and his daughter watching 'Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone'. In there, the first spell that was taught was the lighting charm, Lumos.

He knew that in any magic system, there were a few universal factors: Willpower, Intent and Visualization.

As such, he made a mental image of causing a light to appear on his hand and paused right there. He couldn't feel his hands. At all. He decided to adjust the mental image to just making his entire body emit light. He then tried to force the energy within him to move and shouted in his mind: 'Lumos!'

He felt the energy within him suddenly mobilize, much easier than it ever had when he tried to move it without trying to cast a spell. The energy then drained quickly, leaving him feel exhausted, but satisfied with the result. He would've been exited as hell, if he hadn't just been pulled out of his own world that he wasn't done with yet.

He wasn't aware of it, but at the stage of development that the fetus he was implanted into, not to mention magic, even thought should've been completely impossible. It was only thanks to the Archmage system framework being repurposed to increase the adaptability of his soul to the extreme that he regained his ability to think.

As for his ability to use magic, it was due to the fact that in the first place, the magic in the Wizarding world had a whole lot to do with the soul, the magic core itself being attached to the soul. That was the reason a soul could exist in a Wraith form or become a ghost after the body had died. The care package had been kind enough to create a proto-core and attached it to his soul. A proto-core was better than just absorbing the ambient magic by leaps and bounds.

Normally, a proto-core would only start forming at a magical fetus' seventh month of gestation and would fully form at the moment of their birth, giving them the first vestiges of magic. Some children would even be able to perform accidental magic mere moments after birth, as would be the case with the future Neville Longbottom, who unfortunately failed to repeat the feat late into his childhood and got abused a whole lot by his desperate family members as a result.

An extremely sadistic grin appeared on his face, promising endless pain and suffering to those that had wronged him. Magic was, after all, extremely versatile. Being faintly aware of the advantage of being able to think and practice magic even while in the womb, he started going through his knowledge about various kinds of magic.

The one that immediately caught his fancy was mind magic – who wouldn't want to have a near-infallible interrogation tool and a means to improve his own memorizing capabilities at their fingertips. There was also the possibility of using the mind arts to force others to take the actions you desired as well as implant memories and thoughts.

Gaude – that was this soul's given name from his previous body – rubbed his phantom hands in glee at that. There was just little problem with mind magic – he had no idea about where to start – or did he?

Some may say that Gaude is a shitty name, and they might even not be wrong. Sure, he could call himself Alexander the Great Wanker from that point onwards, or Bartholomew the Butt-faced, hell, he could even call himself Abraham, The Man That Lost His Favorite Razor and Refused to Shave With Anything Else, but he wasn't down for any of that. It was an honest name his parents had given him, and he was going to stick by it, as a reminder of the world he might have lost forever.

#AN: I mean no offense by the MC downright disrespecting other people's names. Any semblance to historical figures is purely coincidental. #

He had a feeling that he actually had a faint inkling of an idea – he had to make his way into his mindscape, a place where all his memories, thoughts and feelings existed. The way for that was supposedly through meditation.

He kept trying for an unknown amount of time, before he had a flash of inspiration, to try and send a strand of the strange energy into his mind. The mind is just up from where that strange energy was stored, right?

He tried again, and finally succeeded, finding a jumble of a mess of everything on top, underneath, behind or beside everything else, with no rhyme, reason or order to it. He could see the brightest moments of each of his memories as if a video was frozen mid-playback.

Gaude was flabbergasted at what he was seeing. 'What the hell is this mess? There's no way this is my mind!'

Finally, though, he came to grips with reality and through a lot of effort and sheer stubbornness as well as a healthy amount of magic applied to the process, he managed to untangle the pile of old memories and organized them chronologically and by content, creating a linear corridor out of a strand of magic and neatly lined the memories along it, creating a structure with a few connected branches and clusters.

As an immediate side-effect, he found it much easier to remember events that were far in his past with great detail and clarity.

Once he was done organizing his mind, he returned his focus on the outside, or more precisely, to the developing fetus that was his body. He discovered that so much time had passed that he had actual arms and legs on his body once again that he could somewhat move and could feel pressure with.

'Hells to the fucking yeah! I have functional limbs and some feeling in them! Perfect time to try out moving stuff with my mind!'

That was exactly what he did. He had also had another flash of inspiration: trying to accelerate the development of his body with magic. It was all about cell division, right? That's what he tried to command his magic to do, not knowing if it would have any effect. He was just going to leave the differentiation and whatever else was necessary for his body to develop normally, to his body. He trusted his cells to be at least smart enough to know where to go and what shape to take.

After some time passed, he started feeling that he had less and less energy, as if something was eating it up in large chunks and there wasn't enough of it coming in. Unknowingly, he had driven his body to grow so hard that it outpaced the speed at which his mother's blood was delivering nutrients to him.

Thinking over the possible reasons for his predicament, he reached the conclusion that he also needed to boost his mother's metabolism and the exchange of nutrients. That was exactly what he did, even attempting to command his mother to eat more. A lot more, and to make sure she ate things that would give him all the necessary nutrients.

At that point, Gaude had turned into a black hole of nutrients, sucking up almost everything his mother ingested, even drawing from her reserves of body fat for energy.

As to why he was doing that? He had realized the danger he was in. This wasn't any old world where the worst thing that could happen was a few thousand car crashes a day. Instead, this was a world where people were killed off in droves by magic and then the memories of all non-magical witnesses were simply erased.

This was a world where being in a magical bloodline gave you an all-access pass to do anything to the non-magical, as long as you didn't torture them or use them for rituals that endangered the Wizardkind. Muggles were pretty much just consumable items walking on the streets, as long as you had the status and connections to get out of a tricky situation.

That was why Gaude was doing his very damn best to rush his way out, to ensure his own survival first and foremost. Somebody had given him a fresh start, a do-over, with magic added in the mix, and he was going to use it to the very damn best of his abilities, not waste it by getting killed as a fetus that didn't even show up in statistics.

Like that, he kept growing both his body and abilities with telekinesis, and by constantly emptying his fledgling proto-core, he managed to slowly but surely increase its capacity. While in the beginning, it had taken him just a single cast of Lumos to drain it dry, he had come a decently long way from that moment, now able to cast it more than ten times without issues.

He was even more satisfied with the growth of his telekinesis – he was able to create a pretty damn rapid vortex of amniotic fluid around his arms and legs and keep it going for what felt like at least half an hour. He was careful not to disturb the placenta or his own umbilical cord, as those were his lifelines.