I was currently eating baby food. If there happened to be poison in it, I’d be dead before the day was out. Nevertheless, I suppressed my fear and swallowed the mush being delivered to my mouth.
In my past life, I’d read a few light novels about reincarnation, here and there. I wondered if the protagonists had spent their infancy feeling this same terror. And wasn’t I supposed to get an overpowered ability? Or a conversation with a god?
I didn’t even remember how I had died. I had the feeling that I hadn’t been the sort of guy who could risk his life to save someone in the spur of the moment. If I was right, then this reincarnation probably wasn’t a reward of any sort.
It likely wasn’t an apology gift for some divine mistake either. I would’ve gotten the chance to talk with a deity if it was, right? I supposed there was always the chance they’d just wiped my memories. But then why would they have reincarnated me in a prime position to die in my infancy, with no overpowered abilities?
That left the option I suspected was most likely: I was being punished. What had I done? I was pretty sure I’d just been an ordinary, timid guy, without the nerve for any real wrongdoing...
Parts of my past life’s memories were still hazy. I could remember my parents’ and older sister’s faces, but not their names, nor my own. The events surrounding my death were a complete blank. If I’d done something to deserve all this, nobody’d left me with any clues as to what.
That aside, whatever this paste was, it tasted awful. Are you sure this isn’t poison?
＊＊＊
I could see only one path to survival in this world, and it was that something in the air that I’d never felt in my last life.
Finally, my confirmation came. One day, I witnessed a maid produce a spark from her fingers to burn litter in the courtyard. It was magic. I couldn’t help it; excitement bubbled forth from within me. Just a little, though.
That said, with someone always keeping an eye on me, I couldn’t exactly go about reading books or working out. All that little baby me could do was play around with the stuff of wonders.
Toys? Sure, I played with them too. Like building blocks and such. They were good for practicing fine motor control.
Now then, this magical energy thing...oh, to heck with it, I could just concede to convention and call it mana. If I could manipulate it at will and learn how to use magic, I’d be able to hold my own despite my frailty. From the Middle Ages to the early modern period, one’s personal strength was directly linked to one’s survival. I had to acquire magic, no matter what it took.
First, I tried touching it... Yep, couldn’t feel a thing. More accurately, I could still sense that it was there, but nothing had changed. Since I wasn’t actually looking at it with my eyes, I couldn’t tell if it was particulate matter or something else, or even if it was affected by airflow.
Next, I tried thinking really hard. Gather around my index finger! Gather, I say!
Nope. Couldn’t sense any gathering happening at all. I supposed it needed an incantation or something.
“Ah auh! Goo!” (Translation: O wind, blow!)
Nothing happened. I figured as much. The maid smiled at me like I was just the most precious thing. Damn you.
Oh, whatever. I had no idea what I was doing. And I’d been so optimistic about my chances too.
＊＊＊
“Come on, Your Majesty. Time to go beddy-bye.”
The nurse picked me up—I still couldn’t get anywhere under my own power—and laid me onto a bed garishly decorated with gemstones and precious metals. Coupled with the canopy and railings to prevent me falling off the sides, it made for a resting place that was anything but restful. Also, it was stupidly large; two adults could’ve fit comfortably without touching.
Ostentatious furnishings aside, my thoughts were occupied by another mainstay of reincarnated-in-another-world light novels: magic items. If your world had magic, surely it had devices that capitalized on it. In fact, I was fairly sure that I was using one right now.
Given that I was presently an infant, I didn’t have a lot of voluntary control over my bodily functions, especially when it came to, er, waste management. Since I couldn’t fight it, I simply let myself become desensitized to the experience. Shame? Dignity? Those things didn’t have anything to do with this, thank you very much.
As one might expect, this world’s diaper technology had not come very far: Mine basically consisted of a wrapped cloth. However, I never stained the sheets.
Even stranger still, however, was that upon closer inspection, there was some kind of...device attached to me “down there.” It resembled a short pipe with a sealed tip, and after making this discovery, I spent the rest of that day observing it.
Each time one of my wet nurses changed my diapers, they also swapped out the device. More specifically, they swapped out the tip part by spinning it off and screwing another one back on. The only time they removed the device entirely was during my daily baths. I credited my failure to notice it until now to the fact that I always did my best to look away. Desensitized or not, some things were just uncomfortable to watch.
But returning to the device: It was clearly magical in some way. The tip was simply too short to retain much, which meant it had to be disposing of its contents in some other way. Given all the free time I had, I whiled away my boredom by trying to figure out how it worked.
Of course, lacking any knowledge about the laws, effects, limits, and costs of magic in this world, all I could do was form broad hypotheses. You could’ve told me it worked by invoking the aid of my dead ancestors and all I’d be able to do was smile and nod. Eventually I could remedy this issue by studying this world’s myths and legends, but for now I had to make do with what I had: my own past lifetime’s worth of practice with empirical inductive reasoning.
It seemed fair to assume that the device had some kind of liquid intake function. The fact that the wet nurses removed it during my baths was probably to prevent it from malfunctioning. The question was, though: was it absorbing the urine or compressing it? That it was transporting it was also a possibility, but that seemed unlikely with how often the tip needed to be changed.
My next hint lay in the device’s ability to remove odor. Since my diet consisted of various pastes, my excrement was, let’s say, not the most pleasant aroma I had ever experienced. However, with the magical device attached, my urine never produced any smell, including when the device’s tip was changed. Therefore, whatever absorbed the liquid also absorbed the smell.
I didn’t know whether odor could be compressed like liquid—I didn’t even know if the laws of magic had any commonalities with the laws of physics. I could only make the simplest assumption that the device absorbed both the liquid and odor simultaneously, rather than in separate processes.
Finally, there was the issue of cost-effectiveness. The device was, in fact, not the same one every time. While the parts that attached the main device shaft to the tip were uniform by necessity, there were often visible differences in shape, as well as various engraved emblems.
The existence of the latter had briefly terrified me with the unfounded worry that they were curses of some sort, but that seemed unlikely since the maids and wet nurses could clearly see them. The logical conclusion was that they were the maker’s mark or logo.
In other words, chances were high that the devices were handmade by skilled individuals with an obligation to advertise. That reintroduced the previously unlikely possibility that it was some sort of matter transfer device, but absorption and subsequent evaporation also seemed logical.
The scary thing was the thought that each device was custom made and disposable. If they were, it pretty much confirmed the absorption hypothesis, but the sheer cost was staggering to think about. All those craftsmen putting all those hours into something to be used once and tossed away? Talk about extravagance.
Wait. I was the emperor. That kind of luxury was par for the course. My bed alone was proof of that.
Was this empire going to be okay? There weren’t any revolutions brewing, right? There had better not have been a Lumières movement currently spreading through the populace. An intimate encounter with a guillotine was not my idea of fun.
Oh, I was getting sleepy. Beddy-bye time.