Rebirth of the Strongest

I opened my eyes with a struggle. Everything was blurry, but there was light. And there was color. I was no longer atop a crumbling skyscraper, drenched by black rain under an eternally dark sky.

Instead, I appeared to be in a spacious room warmly lit with floating orange lights that looked like fireflies, though on closer inspection, they were actually crystal shards. The shards illuminated a floor of polished white marble and walls decorated with elegant red and white fire patterns.

The contrast was so jarring with the scenery of my death that I was completely dumbfounded, unable to react.

"Look! The child opens his eyes!" I heard a woman's voice laced with excitement echo out. The words the voice uttered were entirely foreign to me, but somehow, I still understood them.

Wait, besides that, how was I even able to hear anything?

Or see anything?

Wasn't I dead?

What…exactly was this?

Had I been dreaming before? Had I made up that last fight that killed me?

Had I meditated without eating or drinking for too long? Had I eaten one too many suspicious mushrooms during one of my many long survival trips and gotten into a really, really bad trip?

I felt myself get picked up with big, strong hands at my sides, whisked high into the air, and I immediately reacted with sheer instinct.

I knew how to deal with bigger, tougher enemies that relied on brute force and muscle mass. It did not matter whether they were Mutant or Fighter.

All I had to do was make sure to gouge the eyes, put a spear finger through the ear, or crush the windpipe or…

Wait a second.

I'm…a child?

No, not just a child, a literal baby.

My body did not move at all according to my whims.

Gone was my iron temple of honed muscle, bone, and tendons.

In were soft, squishy limbs that did not respond to me at all.

"The child even flails its arms! Mere seconds after leaving the womb! And look at the eyes, twinkling with recognition. Such development, straight from the womb, is quite rare among humans.

This is a wonderful sight, my lady and lord!" A young woman looked up at me with striking red eyes, eyes that did not exist back on earth unless through some odd mutation.

She was the one holding me up, staring at me with a mirthful smile.

What was first most striking about her was first her outfit. It looked much like a maid's uniform, black and white and neat and ordered.

And the next feature that stood out were her ears. They were long and pointed.

An…elf?

Even in the post-apocalyptic world of 2100, plenty of cultural relics had survived, and I quite liked scavenging old games or manga or comics.

Reading them was a good escape from the broken and desperate world around me. Even I, the strongest fighter, needed an escape every now and then. No, especially because I had been the strongest, alone at the top, I needed somewhere else to go as I had nobody else's shoulder to lean on.

The elf maid's eyes settled between my legs. "Oh, and it is a boy, too. Wondrously healthy, full of vigor, and a man to boot: your bloodline is assured to continue!"

I noticed then that gone was the vast majority of my manhood. Suffering this horrible loss, a loss that I was sure all men feared, I wondered if this was a hyper-realistic nightmare.

"The boy does not cry," came a panicked voice. "Why does he not cry? Are not children all supposed to cry? Is something wrong with him? Is he defective?"

The elf whisked me away to the source of that voice, and I felt myself held in the arms of another woman.

I looked up see a human staring down at me in concern with deep blue eyes that looked like glinting crystals, faceted and sparkling.

She drew back sweat-matted locks of long auburn hair behind her ears to inspect me closer.

I was always good at reading faces.

And her face showed nothing but concern.

Not concern in a motherly way.

Concern in a strangely cold fashion, like she was worried she was looking at damaged goods, not a healthy baby.

At the very least, it wasn't a look I found comforting as a newly minted child.

"Not all infants cry, my lady," said the elf. "It is not abnormal. See how he wriggles his fingers, how he moves his arms and legs? How he breathes so rhythmically? These are signs of health to look for. Trust me, my lady, my many years as a royal midwife speak truly."

Yeah, this must have been a nightmare, I thought, not just because of my severely nerfed manhood, but because of the sheer absurdity of this situation.

I heard that some people thought right before your brain shut down, in those tiny microseconds before the neurons stopped firing, that you could live entire days, entire lifetimes.

Maybe I had ended up in a similar situation, my brain defying death to the end.

If that was the case, then perhaps this wasn't so bad. This whole setup seemed like one of those reincarnated into another world type novels I read through.

Perhaps my mind was rewarding me with a simulation of a good life after one of fighting and having nothing.

But the moment I started to question reality was the moment something in my head, some deep, instinctual feeling, convinced me otherwise.

This was very real.

This was a new life.

I didn't have to wander through a ton of logical thinking hoops to reach that conclusion, and I was never the type to think too hard anyway.

I just knew the conclusion was right.

The why didn't matter, it felt as self-evident a truth as saying water was wet.

"Bring the boy to me." This time, it was a man's voice.

The elven maid gently held me in her arms as she brought me over to a pair of ruby red, glowing eyes that stared at me with sternness. These eyes, like my mother's, looked like glowing gemstones.

Maybe this was a special trait of the people in this new life and land? But the elf didn't have eyes like this at all. Her eyes were specially colored, yes, but they looked normal in structure, not cut and polished from rare rock as was the case with my parents.

Regardless, I didn't appreciate getting stared at with such stiffness.

Come on now, I thought, I am literally a newly born baby. I should be receiving wide smiles and laughing eyes, not getting looked up and down like a sack of meat.

The maid held me towards the man, but he shook his head and raised a white gloved hand.

"You will not hold your child?" the elf said.

"No. He is covered in filth. I will not touch him until he is thoroughly cleaned," said the man, who I now knew as my father, though, with what he had just said, I could tell instantly that I wasn't going to get along with him.

But what the hell did I know about parenting. In my old life, I never had parents.

Biologically, I guess I did; I wasn't just spawned out of nowhere.

But before I could even remember their faces, they sold me off for food to a martial artist obsessed with raising the savior of the post-apocalyptic world.

Said martial artist became my master, but he was never really my father.

I was one of a hundred orphans he had taken in, and his training was brutal enough that every year, several of us died until at the end, there were just four of us.

By design, too.

My master passed down four unique styles and he never intended on having more than one successor for each. That meant he trained us with the intention of culling ninety six of us.

We were not so much adoptive children as we were one long term experiment, the confounding variables and defective specimen carefully excised until only the cream of the crop remained.

Needless to say, I never knew what it was like to lose myself in a parent's warm embrace. I never knew that kind of love, so called 'unconditional love'.

Honestly, I thought it was a load of crap.

Unconditional love never existed.

Only with dogs, maybe, but not with people.

In my journey across the post-apocalyptic world, I had seen parents sell their children into slavery. I had seen them abandon babies to die in the wilderness, torn apart by mutated beasts and men.

At the very least, I knew I wasn't going to find that kind of love with my father here.

"As you wish, my lord," said the elven maid. She had no judgment in her voice, though I could tell by a twitch of her lip that she did not approve of my father's coldness.

"He is a healthy child, as expected. Though unnecessarily large. My wife would have suffered greatly had it not been for the healing runes engraved upon her before this dirty process," said my father.

Magic, huh. Now that piqued my interest. Back on earth, there was no such thing.

Well, you could argue qi was like magic, but it didn't let you shoot beams from your hands or instant teleport like some manga would indicate.

All it did was amplify your physical traits, which had incredible effects to be sure, but nothing on the scale of the magic I'd read and seen in fiction.

At best, it simply let you exceed normal human limitations, but actual martial arts experience was what gave that strength any sort of direction.

I felt excited to see what this world, a world of magic, of far greater potential, had in store for me.

If I was lucky and like countless other main characters in these types of reincarnation novels, I'd probably even have a huge cheat to give me an easier life as well.

By now, I was tired of using my fists. I had done that all my entire past life. Day in, day out, training and training and, later on, killing and killing.

I would be content in this life to sit back and wave my hands to cast magic to defend myself.

My initial shock and trepidation melted away into anticipation. I had suffered and struggled my entire past life.

Maybe I was dosing myself on cope, but I thought I would finally get to live an easy, comfortable life.

Did I deserve it?

No, but I would take what was thrown my way.

"Yet, I cannot sense a hint of magic from him," said my father. He put his hand on his angular chin made even sharper with a striking black goatee. Most of his features were like that. Sharp. Especially his gaze, hawk-like in its ferocity.

"Human children do take longer to show their potential," said the elven maid. "I heard that it may take up to seven years before they show signs of magic sensitivity, though within the people of this mystic kingdom, it manifests even earlier."

"I know that. I am not a Magic Lord for no reason," said my father impatiently. "But if this boy is a true child of mine, he should have Awakened sight from birth.

No, he should show more than that.

Sparks from his fingers, perhaps, considering he is of my fiery blood. A ripple in the air, or, if he was truly talented, Crystallian Eyes.

Straight from the womb, I showed such signs, as did my father before me, and his father before him.

This lack of anything is already quite disgraceful. That prodigious size of his is nothing more than an unsightly mutation, useful perhaps for Undercity laborers, but not for refined mages.

Are you truly certain this boy has talent?"

Gee, thanks for the encouraging words, dad. At this point, I really hoped I wouldn't see much of him.

"This boy is destined for greatness," said the maid. "As you said, he is your child. He will no doubt inherit house Huo's renowned mastery over fire.

And perhaps if he is lucky, the lady's divinely blessed mystic trait to bend all manner of beast to her will."

"If he has even a shred of my blood, that ought to be the bare minimum," said my father. "But until he exhibits magical potential, I will have his existence be a secret. I cannot risk the shame to my house to have sired a child incapable of magic."

He turned around, placing his hands behind his back.

The loose sleeves of his clothing hid his arms entirely in a sheen of red fabric patterned with white flame patterns, the same color and pattern scheme that decorated the walls of my room.

I noticed that his getup that looked remarkably similar to a Chinese hanfu.

It was a garb that I was quite familiar with as the martial arts I practiced in my old life came from a longstanding Chinese lineage, though it did incorporate techniques and principles from styles all across the world.

There was a white tongue of fire within a circle imprinted on my father's right shoulder, indicating some form of familial crest.

"I must attend to more urgent matters. See to it that the child is taken care of, Eyva."

"Yes, my lord," said the maid with a bow, whom I now recognized as Eyva, keeping her head lowered until my father left through an ornately decorated wooden door that slid open not through technology, but magical force.

As Eyva bowed her head, she looked down at me in her arms, giving me a warm, gentle smile.

Her face was pretty, perhaps all elves were pretty like they were type casted in fiction, but it helped give her a 'halo' effect that made her smile that much more comforting.

I had heard that even babies could tell when something was ugly or pretty to look at. Maybe this was proof of that. Or maybe it was because my brain still somehow worked normally adult-wise despite being an infant.

Who knew.

What I did know for sure was that I preferred Eyva's company over my father or my mother's any time of the day.

"Can I hold him again?" said my mother.

"Certainly, my lady." Eyva carried me over to my mother, and I wondered if she was going to use this chance to redeem herself in my eyes.

My mother was bedridden, no doubt from birthing me, but she seemed quite fine, sitting up straight against several large, velvety pillows.

She had a slim, slight figure, small and petite - I could understand why my father said she would have had trouble pushing out a large baby - but her condition didn't seem too bad.

Her plain white dress clung to her skin with sweat, but her skin was hearty and hale. She did not show the kind of paleness or strain of a woman that had gone through one of the most painful experiences possible.

The white sheets she laid atop were faintly stained in blood, though said blood grew fainter by the second due to some form of what I presumed was cleaning magic.

"Oh, my dear child," said my mother as she held me, staring at me with worry. "I do so hope that you will show your potential soon. If not-," She gazed at the door my father left through. "I would have married that man and given him a child for nothing.

My house will remain unknown.

If, by some horrid chance, you are a Fell child...oh, I do not even want to entertain such horror."

My mother hugged me, but more so to comfort herself than me, as if I was like a doll.

I made a judgment call then that though my mother wasn't as overly harsh as my father, she was no true mother. Her eyes still had no real warmth in them.

To her, like I was to my father, I was simply a tool, a vessel to carry on their blood with my entire worth predicated on nothing but my magical potential.

A part of me wondered what would happen if I never showed magical potential. Nothing good, that was for sure.

When my thoughts meandered over there, I started to involuntarily cry, and there was nothing I could do to control it.

The downsides of being a baby, it seemed. I was not in full control of my body anymore.

My mother tried to soothe me, but her touch was awkward. Rough. Too heavy handed for a baby, as if she was never meant to be a mother in the first place. She seemed scared, even, not of me, but of motherhood.

As if being a mother had been something thrust upon her, not something she had prepared to accept.

It did make sense. My mother looked very young. At best, she was twenty, and that was stretching it. She was likely in her mid teens. Far too early to be bearing the responsibility of a child, though perhaps conventions were different in this world.

In contrast, my father had slight wrinkles around his eyes and creases around his lip that made him seem to be in his mid to late thirties.

I knew age gaps weren't that rare, especially in 'medieval' type settings, but this reeked of an arranged marriage, one that was loveless, and that lovelessness leaked down to me, the product of this utilitarian union.

In the end, my mother handed me over to Eyva who put me to sleep with a far more tender touch, her warm embrace and gentle rocking acting like tranquilizer.

As I drifted away, I wondered how my new life would be.

I hoped it wouldn't be one of struggle - I had gone through too much of that already - but with my luck, I really didn't hope for the best.