Chapter 1: I Couldn’t Care Less About an Otome Game World
A baby cries.
It took me a moment to realize it was me crying. I was in a bed, lying on white sheets enclosed by a railing. And the crying baby was me. Meaning I was reincarnated.
I had been working in research, having stayed at my college as a researcher after finishing my graduate science degree. I was researching AI—and not those chatbots or whatever that was all the rage at the time—real AI with personalities and emotions.
No corporation would hire me to research something like that since it didn’t translate into money, but the college did.
I was always the sort of person who would become obsessed with one thing until I completed it to perfection. If I started a game, I would become entirely absorbed and stay up late to keep playing. It was the same with the AI research I started—I kept at it so much that I barely had time to sleep.
Which was fine. Or it was when I was a student and had nothing to focus on besides my work. However, once I was hired as a researcher, I also had to help with tasks such as class dissertations and other obligations on top of my work. My only choice then was to cut back on sleep. After a week of pulling all-nighters, my vision just went dark suddenly.
Dying from overworking in your twenties isn’t funny though, is it? In my case, it was because I was doing what I wanted to, so…no regrets.
“Oh, Arius, what’s wrong?” A woman with platinum-blonde hair and ice-blue eyes lifted me off the bed. She looked around twenty years old and incredibly beautiful, a charming and alluring person. The woman calmed me down with a puzzled expression on her face.
What was more interesting was I recognized her and that name she’d said, “Arius.” It—
“Rhea, is something wrong with Arius?” came a voice, and a handsome, scholarly-type man with silver hair and blue eyes came into view. I recognized him, too.
“Oh, Darius. I heard Arius crying and came immediately. He’d stopped crying by the time I got here, though.”
The father was Darius, the mother was Rhea, and the child was…me, Arius. Which meant I was reincarnated into the world of Love Academy as Arius Gilberto.
“Love Academy” was the nickname for the otome game Love & Magic Academy. I have no interest in otome games, but my childhood friend forced me to play it, and I played it to completion.
Arius Gilberto was one of the love interests, and his parents, Rhea and Darius, appeared if you played through his route. My friend went on and on about the game’s characters and setting, and everything came flooding back to me.
But did being reincarnated as a love interest mean I had to go to school at the Royal Magic Academy and end up embroiled in otome game scenes? I did not want to be surrounded by the main character and her love-brained love interests. Like, seriously. I had zero interest in romance.
I never once experienced romance in the twenty-five years of my last life. If I had enough free time to spend with girls, I would have instead used it for something I enjoyed doing.
Well, Arius doesn’t enter the Royal Magic Academy until he turns fifteen; that gave me time. I had just been born and had nothing else to do, so I figured I should spend some time contemplating my future.
As the “Magic” in the title Love & Magic Academy implied, the world it was set in was a fantasy one. Magic and monsters were usual. Even more interesting, the game had dungeon diving events. Despite being an otome game, the characters had stats like HP and STR. You could raise the characters’ levels like any other RPG game by defeating monsters in the dungeon events. Not that leveling up had any impact on the rest of the game.
According to my friend, Love Academy inherited the setting and system of an RPG that was canceled for being too conventional. If my new world also had levels and stats, I would be way more interested in that than the otome game stuff.
Curious, I shouted, “View stats!” It actually worked; a stats screen popped up and displayed my low numbers—I was just a baby, after all. But…as Arius was one of the love interests, he had stupidly high base specs. Wouldn’t he get ridiculously powerful if he started training as a baby?
No skills or spells showed on the status screen, but there was MP, meaning I should be able to use magic. I tried to imagine the act of moving mana and managed to manipulate it through feel.
Ah, Arius. High spec even as a baby.
I learned through manipulating mana for a while that, unlike the game, your stats didn’t just jump up when you leveled up. Instead, you gained levels by increasing your stats.
For example, increased INT and MP come from manipulating mana. Applying stress to the body enhanced the STR, DEF, and HP categories. Once your stat total reached a certain point, you leveled up.
I decided to use mana to apply weight to train my body. There was the question of what happens when a baby does weight training. I theorized it would make me grow faster—and it did. I was able to walk in just a few hours.
“Excuse me, I’d like you to teach me how to swordfight and use magic.”
By three months old, I was able to walk and talk. My parents were speechless, but they didn’t treat me like some monster.
“Rhea… Our dear Arius, he’s a genius!”
“He is! I should have expected as much from our child. Arius, we will teach you how to use swords and magic!”
They were delighted and taught me exactly what I wanted. Complete child-obsessed parents.
Darius was the chief minister in the Kingdom of Ronaudia, and Rhea was his wife. As you might have expected from Arius’s parents, they both had high specs. They taught me everything in an easy-to-understand way, and I quickly learned the basics of using a sword and magic.
Magic seemed similar to programming: the incantations were like the programming language, and reciting it built up the components that formed a spell. Running the components with mana like a circuit casts the spell.
Once you get used to it, you can skip the recitation by imagining the form, known as a contracted incantation. A more evolved spell-casting is the silent incantation, or silent casting, where you form the spell’s entire construction in your mind.
Skills were learned by repeating them repeatedly, like forming an automatic activation circuit. For example, you could learn sword skills by repeatedly swinging a sword. You can also imbue skills with mana, allowing you to coat your blade in flames or send attacks flying away.
It was standard to use mana in some way during combat in this world, even outside magic and skills. You could strengthen your body by subconsciously covering it in mana. Humans could defeat massive monsters using their own bodies to withstand attacks, thanks to the mana surrounding them.
Technology in this world also seemed more advanced. Magic devices in the form of lamps and cooking equipment were widespread, books were made with a printing press, and the windows weren’t made with just slatted shutters but with glass.
Another thing that made it feel a lot like it was a fantasy world was the airships. Carriages and ships were the primary transportation methods, but Ronaudia provided regularly scheduled airship flights between countries in addition to airships reserved for the royal family.
The more time I spent exploring, the more it sunk in that I was in the world of Love & Magic Academy. There were some differences between reality and the game, such as the fact that you didn’t gain stats by leveling up—it was the opposite, actually—but it did feel like the game’s system and world were remade into reality.
Even if this world was made by someone in the same way as a game, I didn’t think of the citizens as just game characters. The people who stood before me definitely existed—they had emotions.