The first thing I felt was the air.
It didn't smell like ozone. It didn't taste like the metallic, biting tang of the world on fire. It was sweet, too sweet—nauseatingly so—scented with the cloying aroma of lavender and warm milk.
I tried to draw a breath, expecting the familiar, jagged pain of a smoke filling my lungs. Instead, my chest expanded with a terrifying, hollow ease.
I'm alive.
The thought wasn't a relief; it was a cold, sharp realization. The 'blinding white' hadn't been the end of the world. It had been a doorway.
But was I the only one that had come through?
I tried to open my eyes, but my eyelids felt like leaden shutters. I forced them upward, my vision swimming in a blur of muted colours and soft edges. There were no scorched skies here. No Demon Kings. Just a ceiling made of polished wood and a hanging mobile of... were those sheep?
I tried to roar. I tried to demand to know where the bastard's corpse had fallen.
Instead, a high-pitched, pathetic wail erupted from my throat.
What...
I tried to lift my arm—the one I had replaced with a crude prosthetic of light. It felt heavy. I looked down, squinting through the haze, and saw a small, pink, fleshy lump of a hand waving aimlessly in the air.
It was soft. It was weak. It was tiny.
You have got to be kidding me.
***
The voice of a woman rang out—too bright, too brittle, and offensively kind.
Where was I? A distorted future? An illusion cast by the King in his final moments?
"What year is it?" I demanded.
Or, I tried to. In my mind, the words were sharp, a commander's authority carved from a century of war. But the air didn't vibrate with power. It didn't carry the weight of my intent.
"Gah... goo... guh."
The sound was sickening. A wet, mindless gurgle that lacked even the dignity of a death rattle. I tried again, pushing mana toward my throat to force the muscles into compliance, but all I produced was a rhythmic "Goo-goo gah."
I stopped. Every second spent playing the part of a literal infant felt like a stain on my soul. If my vocal cords were a lost cause, I would use the only weapon I had left: my ears.
I closed my eyes, sinking into the darkness of my own mind, and waited for the world to reveal its hand.
"Awww, Elias, look. He's trying to speak already." She cooed lovingly.
The voice was closer now. I forced my heavy eyelids open and clawed at the air, a desperate, clumsy reach for a reality I could understand.
A woman leaned into my field of vision. She was striking—tall, with a lithe grace and skin so flawlessly pale it looked like it had never been touched by a stray ember or a speck of battlefield grit. She looked like a painting of a woman, not a survivor.
In that moment, the finality of it all hit me.
This wasn't a fever dream of the dying. It wasn't the Demon King's final illusion.
This was the ultimate insult. The war was over, the world had moved on to this soft, lavender-scented peace, and somehow—by some cruel joke of the stars—I had been dragged back to the start.
I hadn't even been permitted death. I had been recycled.
I had been robbed of even the rest I deserved.
There must be a reason of some sort, and if there isn't, I'm going to beat some sense into whoever brought me back, god or otherwise.
A man cropped up beside her—Elias. He didn't carry a sword. He didn't even have the callouses of a man who practiced basic forms. He looked down at me with an expression of pure, unearned adoration.
"He has your eyes, Elena," Elias whispered, his voice smooth and untroubled.
I stared at him, my tiny heart hammering. Elena. My mother was named after a saint, and my father was a man of silk. They were the children of the peace I had bought with my own blood, and they had no idea who was currently staring back at them from the cradle.
I wasn't an expert on the physical limitations of an infant, but I knew they possessed one functional weapon.
Aural warfare.
I let out a wail that would have signalled a retreat in my previous life. It was a jagged, high-pitched sound that tore through the lavender-scented air. My stomach felt like a void. If I was being forced to relive life, I wasn't going to do it on an empty stomach.
The faces of my parents dropped. It wasn't the frantic panic of a first-time parent; it was a look of mild, weary exasperation.
"What does he want now?" Elena asked. She tried to maintain her regal composure, but a hint of "I just sat down" filtered through her voice.
"Food, probably," Elias replied, his tone pragmatic.
I felt the world tilt as he scooped me up. From this height, the floor looked like a distant canyon. I felt a brief flash of vertigo—me, a man who had leaped from the backs of wyverns, now terrified of a one-meter drop.
It was humiliating.
And so began the brief but petrifying walk towards the kitchen.
After what felt like an hour, I was placed on a table in what I assumed was the living area.
Elias then disappeared around the corner, probably to make something for me to eat.
The table looked awkward, too bent in the wrong places, it felt frail as if it was crafted by somebody entirely inept.
But more than that, I could sense something within the corners and vertices of the chair.
I assumed it was magic, although I couldn't be entirely sure.
At the end of the day I was in the body of a baby, there was no reason for me to be able to sense magic in a vessel like this, regardless of how great I might've been in my previous life.
But through blurred senses, I could definitely grasp something along those lines.
Is that what they use magic for now?
To make up for shoddy craftsmanship?
Is this really what I died for?
I would've started wailing, but my throat was dry and my stomach was grumbling, so the best I could manage was a low continuous moan.
Elena stepped into view.
"What is it now?" She groaned, already itching to leave.
She glanced around, probing to find what I was scrutinizing so deeply. After a moment, her eyes landed on the chair I was staring at with a lethal intent.
"Oh the chair? It's brilliant isn't it? We had it imbued with magic too!" The look of despair on her eyes moments before had disappeared, replaced with what you would call a 'characteristic cheerful grin.'
I closed my eyes. I had died in a world where mages burned through their lifespans like to create a single ward of protection. And here they were, wasting mana so a chair wouldn't wobble.
My stomach growled again. It was a good thing I couldn't speak, because the words I had for this 'new era' would have probably burned the house down.
"Brilliant? What about that is brilliant?" I would've roared.
But alas, I could do nothing but sit as my mother continued to gloat about what was the worst chair I had seen in my lives.
Please don't tell me everything has deteriorated this badly.
I don't think I'd be able to handle it.
***
I looked at the silver plate on the wall. It bore the crest of a kingdom I didn't recognize, and beneath it, a date that made my heart—this tiny, fluttering thing—stutter.
Year 2032 of The Restoration.
Over 2000 years
I had been dead for two millennia. The world had rebuilt itself, buried the ruins of the past, and paved over the graves.
The realization felt like a physical weight. Every person I had ever known—every friend, every rival, every soldier who had died screaming out to the heavens—had been dust for twenty centuries. Their very bones had likely turned to oil or stone by now.
"Here we go," Elias said, returning with a steaming bowl. He looked at me, misinterpreting my wide-eyed shock for excitement. "Someone's hungry, isn't he? It's the finest cream-grain from the southern plains. They say even the High Knights of the Citadel eat this for breakfast."
He blew on the spoon with a gentle, focused breath.
Two thousand years.
In that time, empires had risen and crumbled. Languages had merged. And apparently, the "High Knights"—the successors to the title I had once held—were now being compared to a baby eating mush.
I looked at the spoon. It was polished to a mirror finish. I could see my new reflection: a round, puffy face with eyes that were far too old for its skull.
Fine, I thought. If I have to start over after two thousand years, I'm not doing it on an empty stomach.
I opened my mouth.
The first taste hit my tongue, and for the first time since waking up, my cynical internal monologue went silent. It didn't taste like the raw, violent energy of the Fallen Era. It was "tamed." It felt like drinking a river that had been filtered until it lost its soul.
You've made it soft, I thought, my eyes narrowing as I swallowed. You've taken the fire of the world and turned it into a lukewarm bath.
The rhythmic thumping of marching started to seep through the walls from somewhere outside.
I spared a quick glance in the direction of the window. Beyond the manor's fences lay a vast expanse, maybe a few thousand acres. Directly outside of the fences of the manor, there was a group of men, no more than 2 dozen, continually marching. There were scabbards at their waists, and they practiced a sterilized form of swordplay.
A knight's order?
The realization followed a second later: these were nobles.
This is going to be a nightmare, I thought. They're going to try to teach me etiquette. They're going to dress me in ribbons. If my old party could see me now, they'd never stop laughing.
Elias scooped me up, without any inclination of listening to my wishes, and still oblivious to my silent judgment, and carried me to the glass. He gestured with a proud, sweeping motion toward the rolling green hills.
"One day, Aren, all of this will be yours. From the whispering woods to the silver stream. Nearly four thousand acres of the finest soil in the province."
Four thousand acres, I thought, squinting at the horizon.
In my time, four thousand acres was the width of a single defensive line. It was a stretch of mud we'd lose and retake three times in a week. Thousands had died for less space than this man used for 'summer strolls.'
To him, it was an inheritance. To me, it was a tactical nightmare. The western ridge was completely exposed, and the 'silver stream' was a natural bottleneck that any run-of-the-mill water mage could turn into a mass grave.
"Is it not beautiful?" Elias beamed.
I let out a soft, dismissive huff.
It's a death trap, Elias. Beautiful is hardly the word I would use for it.