Darkness, then a ceiling made of packed earth.
Suddenly he remembered the pain in his body, so he felt and checked his whole body. But he looked fine, so he let out a heavy sigh, thinking he had died.
Then a floating screen appeared in front of him.
[System Initializing...]
He was startled.
[Host has been reincarnated into: Pearl World]
[World Information: Pearl World is a world shaped by Aether, a force that flows through land, sky, and living things, not quite mana, something older and rawer than that. Through attunement, mortals may temper their bodies, awaken their aether veins, and ascend through tiers of power, moving from mortal flesh toward something closer to immortal.]
He closed his eyes a few times, then read it again. He pinched himself, then noticed his hands were small.
This isn't my body. Am I in a child's body now???
[System's Function.]
[Aether Field: Host may choose a designated location. Within this field (10m), ambient Aether will be more pure. The higher the purity and density of Aether within the field, the greater the boost to attunement speed and quality for anyone training inside it. Additional functions may unlock as the Host advances through higher tiers, though not every tier will grant a new function.]
After he finished reading it, he didn't know what reaction he should feel. But there was nothing left to do but accept it.
---
Four years had passed since he woke up in this small body. He was ten now. But some memories never faded, no matter how much time went by.
It was two in the afternoon when his mother called him in from the yard.
"Yao'er, come here for a moment."
He wiped the dirt off his pants and stepped inside. His father stood by the door already, a travel sack slung over one shoulder, the kind used for longer trips, not the short walks to the trading post.
"We're heading to Mount Apo," his father said. "Should be back by tomorrow."
Arthur Flour blinked. "Why?"
His parents exchanged a glance, the kind adults shared when they were deciding how much to say. It was his mother who answered.
"We're going to bring your grandmother here. Your father's mother."
"Why now?" he asked. "It's already afternoon. Can't it wait until tomorrow?"
"She's old, Yao'er," his mother said gently. "The woman who's been looking after her just left to live with her own family. There's no one to watch her anymore. We can't leave her alone, not even for one more night."
"So she'll live with us?"
"Yes," his father said. "You'll have company from now on. Someone to talk to when we're out at the mines."
Chen Yao still felt uneasy, a small nagging worry he couldn't quite name, but he pushed it down. These were his parents. They had never given him a reason not to trust them, not once in four years.
"Be careful," he said instead.
His mother smiled and touched the top of his head. "Always."
His father gave him one last look, the kind of look that lingered a second longer than it needed to, before the two of them stepped out into the afternoon light and disappeared down the path toward the mountain trail.
He didn't know, not then, that it would be the last time he saw either of them.
---
Present day. Ten years old, four years into this life, and the mud walls of his room felt smaller now than they used to. He sat up slowly, the memory fading the way it always did, back into some quiet corner of his mind he rarely let himself visit.
His father was a miner. His mother worked as a kind of gardener, someone who grew and tended herbs. Both of them owed a debt to the organization but they still received wages, just docked to cover what they owed. Even with the deductions, their combined income was enough to support a family of three.
For the first two weeks after they disappeared, the organization did nothing. After that, they carried out a search, though it wasn't an intense or large scale one. Four years had passed since then, and still nothing turned up.
Because he had the system, he wasn't as deeply affected as he might have been, especially since he and his parents hadn't had that long together in this life to begin with. A few neighbors looked after him in their place, ordinary people just like his parents had been.
Over those four years, he made his own effort to search too. He asked around about Mount Apo, but everyone said the same thing: too far, too dangerous. He never went. Not because he gave up, but because he had another reason to be careful, he still needed to find a proper location for himself, a place to train, now that he actually had a system that let him do so. So while he searched for clues about his parents, he searched for a training spot at the same time. Two birds, one stone, as he put it.
He found the place two years ago, though he wasn't fully certain about it at first, so he kept scouting the surrounding mountains. Nothing large or dangerous enough to kill him lived there, but there were animals he could hunt and eat. By now, he had already worked out a rough plan for building a house there, far enough from the organization that even if they searched, their first assumption would likely be that he ran off toward a village or city looking for someone to take him in.
He was close to actually leaving when he heard it, a voice loud enough to reach the whole area, like it came from some kind of speaker, though he knew better. Some Aether Mage was amplifying their voice from a distance. It was far, but loud enough that his neighbors heard it too. Most of his neighbors were in more or less the same situation as him, ordinary laborers, only a few of them close to the kind of standing his parents had.
The voice called for everyone to hurry to the house of the person in charge of operations, not the president of the organization himself, just the one who ran things day to day, since the organization was large enough to have layers like that. Suspiciously, only children were being summoned, though anyone was welcome to come watch, the reasoning given was that some of them might have Aether potential.
Then, right as the voice faded, a new message appeared in front of him.
[Life Changing Decision:
1. Host goes to the stated location.
Reward: Extra Life Talisman and Random Place Teleportation Talisman
2. Host does nothing and ignores them.
Reward: Extra Life Talisman and Random Place Teleportation Talisman
3. Host flees toward the location he had already planned.
Reward: Intermediate Aether Gathering Technique, and Aether Book.]
While he read it, he could hear shouting outside the house. "It's a Mage!" "So cool!" "I wish I could be like them, but I don't have any potential..."
"A bunch of ass lickers," he said. Whatever they did, shout, kneel, admire from afar, none of it would earn them anything, and none of it would change their situation. He didn't shout with them. Not that it mattered, he was the only one who could hear the system anyway.
That was the moment it clicked for him. Two of the three choices offered an Extra Life Talisman as a reward, which meant, most likely, he would need it. Put together with everything else, the summons, the vague talk of "potential," the timing right after the search had gone quiet for years, he arrived at an uncomfortable conclusion: they might be planning to turn him into a pill, something consumed to heal or strengthen whoever ate it. And if that was the plan, it would explain why children were being called specifically. It would also explain why the system, which only reacted to things that actually mattered, was suddenly offering him extra lives.
And there was one more thing he was sure of. Since he had a system, he definitely had potential. That alone made him a target worth watching.
So, it was decided.
He let a few seconds pass, forcing his breathing steady, and then ran, straight for the location he had already chosen.