Baby Steps

Takeru did not remember much of his previous childhood. Only snippets of images and flashes of hazy memories. And he was thankful for not remembering those shameful memories because getting your diaper changed, getting your ass cleaned, staining bedsheets and getting breastfed by a woman around your mental age is not for a healthy mind. Takeru was experiencing hell everyday. Although he somewhat accepted his fate but still hearing your subconscious shouting 'What the fuck?!' everytime Akane fliped him over to change his diaper and cleaned his ass was mentally scarring.

It had been three months since the protagonist of this story The 'Almighty Bedwetter' Takeru Yamamoto had been living in this brave new world. It had given him some time to think, to think about what had happened and to saving what was left of his broken self-esteem. Takeru knew that his sensing ability was not normal, atleast his parents did not have them. He could sense his father Toru going out in the fields every morning, his mother Akane taking care of the shop in front of the house whilst looking after him.

Takeru could sense his mother's movements, the gestures of her hands, the shifts of her feet, the expressions visible on her face, to every tiny detail. He could sense his father going out to the fields, his return, the dust and dirt on his clothes, the wrinkles of his mothers dress. He could sense everything around him. He estimated that the radius of his sensing sphere was about 10 meters and it was growing with each and every use. And after three months of continuous usage he could passively sense 1 meter around him all the time. Even asleep he could sense who were around him. He also upped the time limit of his maximum time of active sensing to around 20 minutes. He knew that this ability of sensing might be the golden finger he got from reincarnation. He thought maybe it is a mutation that gave him this ability or maybe it is given to him by whatever omnipotent being that took pity on his untimely death and rebirth.

Takeru did not spend 3 months of his life staying idle. He actively moved his arms and legs, turned his head and body around everyday to get them working fast. Although as an infant lifting his head was easier said than done. He persevered and after 3 months could control his little body with great dexterity and he could crawl smoothly. This achievement shocked Toru and Akane as regular babies take atleast twice or more time to start crawling. Nevertheless they were happy that little Takeru could do this and they were sure that their son was a genius.

Takeru could sense people's emotions, be it joy, happiness, love, hope or sorrow, grief, hate, anger he could feel it. It gave him an edge over his parents. He knew when to laugh, when to cry, when to not cry and he timed it with precision. Toru and Akane were surprised by their son's behaviour. They heard from their neighbours and aunt Miyako that newborns were very easily irritated, and would cry, shout, to demand their parents attention at every moment possible. But Takeru was different, he never woke them up from their sleep at night. He only cried when he was hungry or was crapping his diapers off. He always smiled at their presence, making weird baby noises, interacting with them at every possible chance.

Toru and Akane felt like Takeru knew when they entering the room, he knew that they were near him even while asleep. Takeru always smiled while sleeping when Toru or Akane was beside him. This made their hearts full with love. They loved watching him smile. Akane noticed this first and later Toru noticed it too that Takeru was very considerate. He never irritated them or demand their presence at random. He always had a weird twinkle in his eyes that screamed intelligence and awareness. His inquisitiveness and activities made them feel that Takeru will grow up an energetic youth. Even though their lifestyle was very common, the Yamamoto household was filled with happiness.

It took Takeru another three months to further glean information about his mother and father. Takeru's father Toru Yamamoto was a farmer owning a good piece of land where he grew rice and other vegetables along with a small herb garden. He also owned some chickens and pigs which he sold as a whole in their shop along with rice and vegetables. Takeru's mother Akane Ito was a doctor/medic/nurse of some sort. Many people around his neighbourhood would come with ailments of different kind like fever, cough, cuts, bruises to the shop. She would either give them some medicinal paste made by crushed herbs or go to their home to treat them in serious cases. Toru and Akane was well respected and loved by all the people of the neighborhood and some beyond that.

Takeru continued his training and after 3 months of crawl training and leg excercises he could finally walk the first steps of his new life. His parents were amazed at this and it further cemented the image of Takeru's genius in their eyes. Aunt Miyako or granny Miyako for little Takeru, who visited their household every now and then was also shocked to see a 6 months old baby walking around effortlessly. She did a full-body examination of Takeru and saw that Takeru's fitness was around 2-3 year old kids. After his little achievement Takeru further enhanced his training by running around the house, jumping, squatting, climbing, doing various excercises with the pretense of playing.

Takeru's reasoning for doing this was that as a reincarnated person he had a major headstart among the other children in his generation. And he is going to maintain that and even further enhance his growth. His control of his body was exceptional to the point he became unsure if he was given some massive dexterity boost with his sensing ability, because he was sure that no normal child of his age can do the things he can do. He also did not stop practicing hia sensing ability and it was growing continuously everyday. As for communication he listened to conversations of his parents and other people with rapt attention to learn the new language at a faster rate. And like this life continued for Takeru.

At 7 months old Takeru could finally fully comprehend his mother language in this world, and it was pretty identical to the Japanese language of his previous world. His pronunciation though was not good enough. He practiced speaking secretly when his parents were in other room or when he could sense and was sure that they could not listen to what he was saying. He first started practicing using simple words like 'mama' or 'dada' then went for his name, then his parents name, names of random objects he heard from his parents conversations, after that he started doing simple sentences and ended up doing random tounge-twisters. Slowly he worked on his pronunciations, wording and sentence structures.

He did all these in secret. because he became afraid of his progress. He heard from his parents that he was growing twice as fast than other kids his age. And in this era, when superstitions ran rampant, he had to make sure that he was not seen as a demon child or devil spawn. He could not just go to his mother and say 'Bonjour Mother', can he? He might get burned at a stake or worse some weird demon worshipping cultists might kidnap and sacrifice him to their unholy saviour. No, he had to do things slowly and at a steady pace. He would keep practicing sensing ability and various physical excercises but he would do them secretly so that no one could know about it.

At 9 months old, Takeru could lift his bodyweight and was ridiculously fast and swift for a child, and noticed that the more he excercises he did the more his physical capabilities began to rise. He noticed that his thinking capacity is increased. He first noticed it when he started doings simple mental calculations to keep his mind sharp. Now in his past life Takeru could solve simple middle school level mathematical problems in his mind but here Takeru went from middle school to college level calculations. He was not a mathematical genius, he was average at it. But now he was not so sure. Complex problems became easy for him. Rapid calculations including multiple digit numbers became the norm for him. This made him think that maybe his sensing ability was not everything he got from his reincarnation.

It had been nearly one year since Takeru was born in this world and he learned and experienced many things. One of the main things he learned of were his powers or gifts or golden finger or cheat or whatever you call them. Takeru had 4 of them. His first ability was his sensing ability, with it he could sense bypassing any and all physical barriers be it walls, earth, metals and even biological ones. His sensing span was a sphere, and he was the center of this sphere. He could sense underground, be it bugs or insects crawling around or even slight quakes of the very earth that randomly happened for some reason at an extremely accurate detail.

This sensing ability had two modes - the active mode and the passive mode. This ability increased with practice and focus. And his continuous practice with it bore fruit. Takeru could now actively use his sense at the range of 20 meters for the maximum of 1 hour, any more and he would lose his consciousness from sheer exhaustion. His passive sensing ability worked all the time and it did not tire him out and his passive sensing range was now 5 meters around him. Although this ability was amazing, it did come with some drawbacks, mainly sensory overload from all the things he could sense giving him a massive headache and severe disorientation due having multiple sensing perspectives.

The first time he tried to focus and double his sensing range he nearly threw up from all the incoming sensations. Though his active sensing range doubled from 10 meter to 20 meter, Takeru suffered a brain churning headache for a full day. He could not even fall asleep due to sensory overload. From then on he vowed to never do again, and only increased his sensing range slowly through continuous practice. The other time he focused at a certain point in his sensing range to look at himself. It was like an out of body experience for him, as he could see see from two perspectives, first from his own eyes and second from the focus point of sensing range. This feeling really made his head spin until stopped the active sensing. He also found that this focus point vision could not be used in passive sensing. Though he later adjusted to this new facet of his sensing ability and could now consciously use the focus point vision at a relative ease.

His second ability was extreme body or physical control. He found out that if he wanted to, he could consciously control his body to a ridiculous degree. Although he just tried normal bodily movement and some streches yoga and gymnastic stances, he could do them with 100% accuracy. This helped shorten and even negate almost any and all unnecessary movements form his body, making him unnaturally agile, swift. This ability also made him ambidextrous. Takeru also could control his emotions. He could as he experimented in his short life, control how much emotions could control his behaviour. It did not dampen his emotions or lower his emotional quotient, in fact it heightened it. It just that he could feel emotions but they do not affect his behaviour any more than he would want them to.

This ability made his self-regulation heighten to an extreme degree so he could be calm at extreme situations and increased his motivation, which gave him more drive to improve himself, made him more socially-aware reducing his social awkwardness from his past life and making him more sociable person, turned him more self-aware so that he knew where his strengths and weaknesses lay and finally in conjunction with the emotion sensing aspect of his sensing ability it made him highly empathetic that made it easier for Takeru to emotionally connect with others.

Takeru's third ability made his body adaptive but the effect was moderate. This ability made his body grow stronger, become more durable and efficient the more he experiences strains, damages, trauma. This ability gave him mild regeneration, increased pain tolerance and impeccable muscle memory. So theoretically the more he would train the stronger he would become or so Takeru mused.

His final ability was bit weird. This ability made him more intelligent. It increased the speed of his thought processes, increased his computing capability, heightened his learning capacity and enhanced his memories. The memory enhancement had a very nice effect on him as he remembered and retained nearly every single memory he had left from his past life and he could remember, retain and store memories more easily now.

Now these abilities made Takeru's life interesting but also challenging. First was his sensing ability, with which he found out that physical barriers held no meaning to it. So with all his wisdom Takeru decided that he will try to see if he could see through a person's body. And this experiment was done when Toru and Akane were out of the house with only granny Miyako staying there to take care of young Takeru. And boy oh boy Takeru wished he had an ability to remove memories so he could remove the cursed image of granny Miyako sitting without her clothes on. The worse thing was that the damned image became etched in his enhanced memory. He vowed from then on to practice his sensing ability for precision to never be in such a horrendous situation ever again.

Another complication rose when Takeru wanted to minimise his unnecessary bodily movements. He began to move like robot. His movements were cranky and rigid. His steps became ridiculous to the degree that sometimes he literally had to hop around just to save himself from embarrassment. People gave him weird looks whenever they saw him. Only his parents were nonchalant about it as they thought it was game Takeru was playing.

When Takeru found out the adaptive ability of his body he had only one thought on his mind 'ZENKAI FUCKING BOOST!'. But soon he became disappointed because the adaptive ability was mild at best. He wanted to test his limits so with his world shattering wisdom he decided to borrow a knife from the kitchen out in back of his house. Wanting to test his body Takeru sliced his left forearm with the knife, immediately crying out in pain and dropping the knife with a string of blood shooting out of his arm. Now, Takeru was prepared for pain, he thought maybe this would nick his skin a bit letting a little bit of blood out but he did not consider the sharpness of the knife.

Hearing Takeru's cries, Akane burst into the room and seeing the amount of blood on her son she paled in fright. She immediately took a long strip of cloth and a healing paste, cleaned the wound, applied the paste on the wound and wrapped it with bandages. Takeru on that moment just felt less pain than he had felt before and feeling his wound regenerate his smiled in pure joy only to face his mother with stormy look on her face.

This incident was promptly followed by Akane giving him the spanking of his life, Toru rebuking him harshly, getting banned from going to the kitchen for indefinite amount of time and finally stopping his favourite 'riceball nibbling time'. Thus proving that even with having enhanced mental capabilities, some people could not be stopped from committing pure acts of idiocy. Though these misadventures finally gave Takeru some assurance for his capabilities and gave him insurance about the future, filling him with hope that whatever challenges may come in his life. He could surely face them hard and overcome them.

Next major thing Takeru learned was about the place around him. The Yamamoto household was on a good piece of land. On the frontside of the land facing the road was the one storey house Takeru and his family lived in. In their backyard on left side was the partially covered outdoor kitchen, on the far right was the washing-bathing-toilet room. The center of the backyard had a small clearing covered with grass. Further in the distance to the left a small outdoor artificial pond was situated. Beside it, there was a small garden with various medicinal herbs growing within it. From that point on were the farming fields belonging to the Yamamoto family. Takeru used the 'I'm a cute baby and you are going to do as I say' technique to make his father showing him all around the property.

He also learned that his father knows swordsmanship. He saw him swinging a katana around the backyard practicing his sword techniques. This made his eyes burn as after just glancing at the sword he knew it was the real deal and Takeru's inner weeb was awakened. All he wanted to do was to hug the katana fiercely to satisfy his inner weebness. Toru had to snatch the katana away from him fearing he might cut himself again. From then on Takeru rarely saw his father practicing sword techniques. And he could not even find the damned katana anywhere in the house. Takeru, searching for the magnificent katana also found a fully loaded and decorated samurai armor in the store room. He thought maybe his father was a samurai in the not so distant past, or maybe one of his ancestors was.

Takeru respected his father very much. The man was kind, quiet, loving and fiercely protective of his family. Toru was a responsible man who knew the harshness of life and had seen many of life's ups and downs. Toru wanted Takeru to be a just and honorable samurai whose vows were as strong as refined steel. He knew his son was going to be physically superior than any other men when he grew up. So he wanted to teach Takeru the way of the sword as early as possible to create a strong foundation. To motivate and encourage him he told Takeru various stories ranging from mysterious adventures to downright hilarious ones.

Toru did not know if Takeru understood any of it but still told him stories of samurai protecting people from monsters, demons and most importantly villainous shinobis. Takeru knew that shinobis or more commonly known as ninjas existed in this time period but also knew that they were mainly commoners turned trained covert forces working to disassemble the system of feudalism. And ninjas surely were not as powerful as his father described going toe to toe against the samurai. Maybe it was just another exaggerated story a father made up to tell his son.

Takeru did not think much about it. Still Takeru loved his father very much, maybe because of the lack of a father figure in his previous life or maybe because Toru was just a good father. Akane doted her son very much. She took him out to visit her neighbours and friends. She sat him near her when she was making food so little Takeru could watch her and know that his mother was with him. Akane loved how playful and active her son was and how intelligent he was. She could somehow feel that Takeru understood her and Toru, but could not tell how. When Toru told her that he would teach little Takeru swordsmanship. She agreed because in these trying times having physical might was strongly needed if you wanted to make something out of your life. Though she made Toru promise that he would do to make sure that little Takeru would not join any wars, battles or any campaign of the various daimyos and warlords. The swordsmanship would only be for self-defence. Her son would never fight and bleed for another man's agenda.