Chapter 1 : I dreamed a dream....

I yawned for the fifth time this hour as I gazed at the displaced tiles on the false ceiling. Yes, I counted it. That's just how bored I was.

I gave a pitiful look to the invigilator, begging him to let me leave but all he did was shake his head.

It's five minutes, man!

I sighed.

But he pointed to the clock and wagged his finger.

Rules are rules, his eyes said.

I groaned and leaned back in my chair.

Stupid education board and their stupid rules.

Can't leave before 90 minutes have passed. Blah blah blah.

A load of bullshit.

I had already finished my paper half an hour ago.

I wasn't going to ace it, sure, but who cares about some stupid engineering degree when you live a world of gods and monsters!?

I had checked out of this whole deal the day I found out about the existence of magic.

Goddamn magic!

I mean, here I was, given a second chance after my death, reincarnated into a new life. An orphaned baby from an unnamed single mother who died in childbirth.

Something I would have remembered in a bittersweet fashion in a memoir in my golden years if not for the fact that she cursed me with her dying breath.

She named me Calender. Fucking Calender.

It was her dying wish too. One that my adoptive parents, bless their soul, kept.

Something about how she was an illiterate village girl and wanted to name her kid something in english so he would be respected.

Because that's how rural India is. If you could speak two words of english or have a fancy english name, you got a certain amount of respect.

A holdover inferiority complex from the British Raj. And because she saw it in a movie one time. Damn you Javed Akhtar!

I guess being a lower caste unmarried girl, pregnant and barefoot in the big city, she wanted all she could get for me.

A kind sentiment, terrible execution.

Because that only works in the villages, not in the cities, which where I was adopted.

In the cities, you get bullied and mocked for that sort of shit.

Take a wild guess what happened me.

Yeah.

Fucking Calender.

Still pisses me off, I swear.

But, the whole silver lining on this crap sandwich were my adoptive parents.

A kindly childless couple.

Dr. Patel and his wife.

Or as I call them.

Dad and Mom. Because amidst all the bullying, they stood by me, supported me, someone that wasn't their own blood, the best they could. And while they didn't let me change my name, having promised my birth mother, they helped in every other way. And by that, I mean money and freedom. Neither of which was in plenty mind you, given that dad worked in a government hospital, even though he could have joined a private practice, because apparently even the poor need help.

Mom even worked in a charity. For free.

But the gesture mattered.

The two of them were practically human cinnamon rolls. Even though at first I missed my parents from my last life, the love they had shown me helped me get over it. Over the years I had come to love my new parents just as much.

If I wanted to learn something, they got me the tools, books and tutors.

If I wanted to do something, they spared no expense.

They even took me scuba diving once, even though it strained the finances that month.

And I was just joking when I asked for that!

I was baffled sometimes by their genuinely kind nature. Truly, the two of them were truly too good for this sinful world.

And their kindness, well it rubbed off on me too.

Still, I hold some pride in the fact that after living with the two human golden retrievers for 20 years, I have managed to retain my introversion and skepticism. I swear, they literally gave the clothes off their backs to a beggar once, despite seeing the clear alcohol bottles littered all around their tent.

It doesn't matter if they sell the clothes for alcohol money, my mother said, because if even a small portion of that went to help them live a little longer, she would be glad for it. And that just melted my heart.

I wasn't the most trusting guy but they had really infected me with that goody two shoes bug, as much as I hate to say it.

I was always the pessimist last time around. Paranoid and distrustful. I saw the worst in the world and wasted my life living in fear and suspicion.

But this time, this life, I didn't plan to waste it.

Here's a question. What do you do when you get reincarnated in what you think is a normal, average world?

Do you start planning your great powerplays and build a harem of genetically engineered catgirls? Invest in Google at age 5 to make the big bucks?

Of fucking course not!

Setting aside the fact that no one would believe a literal child, much less let them invest in the stock market on their own, let's say they believed me and made that fortune, how was I supposed to explain where I got the information from anyways? Dreams? Divine Revelation?

Was I supposed to tell them that I know the future?

Yeah. Realistically, it's just not a viable option. I'm no megalomaniac or mastermind. I can barely act like a child. I still don't know how I made it through my childhood without them figuring out that something was wrong with me.

And let's not even talk about showing great intelligence and bring labelled a genius. The only thing that'll label me as is the demon that possessed their baby. Or they realize I'm a reincarnated person- the concept of reincarnation is built into the Hindu religion after all- and then what? Too much uncertainty. No way I was risking that.

And even if none of my fears came to life, setting high expectations in childhood is a one way ticket to a miserable adulthood. They'll always expect the same level of success from their 'genius' son even after you're grown up. That's a one way ticket to an unhappy life. That's just not the life I want for myself.

Power? Harems?

Who gives a shit about that?

I don't want to deal with the psychopaths at the top and women are more trouble than they're worth.

I just want to live out my life in peace. Make lots of money early and retire at age 25 with a nice nest egg. Travel the world. Eat all the cake and garlic bread I can stuff into my face. Finally play Skyrim for the first time. Maybe volunteer at a wolf sanctuary. I'd love to take care of the big fluffies. Oh and bears. Are there bear sanctuaries? I'd have to find out.

And so I made my plan. It was simple. I was no stock market whiz but I knew a handful of stocks would go up by a lot. Uber, for one, given how much Gary Vee whined about it.

Invest early into crypto.

Get out before the Indian government bans it and use the earnings to milk Uber stocks and finally deposit a neat couple million portfolio into BlackRock and chill out for the rest of my life.

Have some fun this time around dammit!

But of course, my new parents wouldn't allow that if I told them, so I didn't. You need to help the poor with the gift you've been given. Blah blah be a good person and sacrifice a happy life for others.

Blech!

No way Jose!

Well actually they would let me keep a good sum if I insisted but I didn't want to disappoint them. I had come to care for them. So naturally I planned to hide it all from them. Make a while fake cover for my future actions.

I decided to go into a respectable profession for a middle class kid.

Engineering.

And to that end, I got into one of the national institutes of technology and made steady and stealthy progress on that goal. Made a secret bank account, scammed money off my parents, earned extra money by doing the homework for the other kids, got ahead on that drop shipping trend before it collapsed and finally bought up over 400 Bitcoins in the three years since it was released.

All was going according to plan.

Until last month. To the dot.

April 2015, my second year of university.

I was scrolling through the net for something to binge. Anything would do. But being an obsessive reader in my last life, I had already consumed most of the good shit.

So there I was, panning the shallows of obscure forums for a nugget of gold. And I struck diamond.

The Fillory And Further series.

By Christopher Plover.

At first I snorted in amusement at the effort some stupid fuck had gone through to recreate the aesthetic of a book series that was a fiction within a fiction, a Narnia-esque children's fantasy series in the world of the Magicians, a book and TV series by Lev Grossman.

Except this was 2015. The show itself hadn't come out yet. Not even the promos.

The books themselves should have just finished publishing this year.

So was this some early promotional material?

No, said Google.

Fan work then? Interesting!

I always did like fandom and their fanart.

Out of curiosity, I clicked on the link to the PDFs, half expecting a virus or malware. Or a bit of concept art for a fanmade series.

But what came up was more than I had bargained for.

It was ... A book. Like a real book. Complete with the story.

What?!

This has to be a joke, right?

Then I read it.

It was good. Actually good. Good writing, great characters and even better worldbuilding.

I devoured the books, word for word, picture for picture, all in a single day till the gravity of it all bore down on me.

Yup. It was real. Or a really well made spoof.

Some skeptical part of me refused to jump to conclusions right away.

Even when I found the official website and the Plover estate tour guide and a host of other forum entries praising the series or tearing into it, I didn't quite believe it.

But what really sealed the deal for me was the knighting of the author. And the accompanying Wikipedia page.

I checked the sources.

Sir Christopher Plover was a real person. You couldn't fake that. Not just yet.

Apparently he died in the 60s. The books were real too.

I shook my head.

No. This can't be right.

I immediately googled the original author.

Lev Grossman.

No results.

The Magicians.

No results.

I could feel my world collapsing around me and I swallowed thickly.

This.... This is impossible.

But then again, so was reincarnation, and here I am.

I calmed myself and opened up a new tab and typed in one more search term.

A name.

Quentin Coldwater.

12000 results.

I opened up the first result, a blog. About Fillory.

And accompanying it, a picture of a boy. The spitting image of a teenage Jason Ralph. The actor who played Quentin Coldwater in the 2015 tv show.

Fuck.

Fuck!

This is real.

I could feel my breath catch and I hunched over my laptop, my world spinning in a vertigo and I heaved a deep sigh.

My heart beat in my chest like a war drum as excitement coursed through me like a tidal wave!

Fuck yeah!

Magic. Is. Real. Like actual magic. Real magic. Right out of fiction.

I looked back at the big board of my plans for the future and scoffed.

What an idiot I was.

To think I didn't even realise I was isekai'd to urban fantasy land.

Imagine if I wasted my second life too, without ever learning of this fact?

The mere fact sent shivers down my spine.

A quiet life?

Safe investments?

When the whole multiverse was at my fingertips?!

Just out of reach?

Stupid. Stupid. Stupid me.

No.

Fuck that noise. Now that I knew magic was real, that multiverse travel was an actual attainable dream, in a world of time travel and world hopping and gods and monsters and all sorts of awesomeness?!

No way I'm becoming a stuffy little investment broker.

No. I'm going for the only route anyone in their right mind would ever choose.

I'm going to become a multiverse traveler!

And so, within the month, I had derailed everything.

The slush fund of Bitcoins for my media venture? Liquidated.

My grades? Who cares?

My parents? I presented them with a fake cover letter from a shell company I established in the Cayman Islands with nearly 100k dollars at my disposal. An internship in the UK.

In my bag today was a plane ticket to London, a tourist visa I had finagled over the last month and my passport.

This was my grand gamble.

I was going in, all or nothing.

If I win, I stand to gain everything.

And if I lose, I end up in British prison, deported and likely disowned or worse.

But in the face of a chance at becoming a honest-to-god wizard, eternal life, the sights of the multiverse and the dream of every hot blooded young man, it was all worth it.

There was time that I dreamed, in my previous life.

A dream of the stars. A dream of godhood and immortality. Of great power and greater adventure. A childish fantasy.

Now that I can actually achieve it all?

I will do anything for it. I get what I want. In this second chance at life, I will achieve my dream.

By hook or by crook.

No matter the cost.

Even if it meant lying to the angels that were my parents. The ones I had come to care for dearly.

All for this chance.

After all, as Quentin Coldwater said in the series.

No one would rather know magic and want to forget it all. No one would rather see colour and want to go back to black and white.

That rang truer for me more than anyone else.

The bell rang, signalling the halfway period for the exam passing, and I got up from my seat, slung the bag over my shoulder and deposited the half assed answer sheet onto the invigilator's desk and before he could say anything, I walked out.

No time to waste.

Magic awaits!