《The Secluded Magus》Chapter 1
Advertisement
As time passes, changes occur. This is a fact of life.
There are some changes, while significant, are unnoticed. In a corner stall of a busy marketplace, a woman, a peasant woman, to be more specific, lies, giving birth to a child. Like the four other children she had given birth to over the years, this one was also immobile. Believing that her fourth child was also a miscarriage, she cuts the umbilical cord with the knife meant to cut meat and pushes the body to the garbage pile, after which she flees the scene.
The day passes as various people move to and from stalls around the marketplace, blissfully unaware that in a corner laid a living child. After some time had passed, the child grew hungry, and started to cry, which alerted the people around him that there was indeed something there. However, it was ignored by all. As time passed, the child, being too tired and hungry to continue crying, stopped and fell asleep, still hungry. At the end of the day, the stall owners, while throwing out their trash, noticed that there was a small bundle of flesh in the corner of their shop and inspected it, only to find that it was the forementioned infant. Not wanting to be held responsible for having a dead infant in their stall, they hurriedly felt the child, hoping to hear a heartbeat.
They sighed in relief as they realized that a weak heartbeat could be felt from the infant. The stall owners’ wife, having given birth to six children, knew the process with which to handle a newborn infant and swaddled it in some cloth found around the stall. After her husband had finished cleaning the stall, they took the child and started walking towards the center of the city.
After some time spent walking, they finally arrive in front of a big building, made of gray bricks, with a big, vaulted roof. In this nondescript building, the only sign of personality was the words written on top of the big wooden doors, but the couple, having seen said sign multitudes of times, ignored it. The husband, in a hurry knocked at the door in what could only be described as a rush. They waited for a few minutes after knocking, only to be greeted with no response.
Advertisement
The husband knocked on the door again, this time with more power, and waited. After a minute or so of waiting, a small woman, with a petite body frame wearing all blue, opened the door.
“What is all this knocking for” she said.
The couple bowed their heads in reverence and the husband, taking the initiative replied “Sister, we are in urgent need of your help”
“We found this infant in our market stall, and he looks to be only a few days old.” He adds as he looks down towards the ground, unable to look at the woman. “please take him”.
The woman, who was a priestess at the Church, looks at the couple with a serious face, and in a flash, her eyes turn a golden color. The stall owner and his wife shiver and cower in fear of this woman.
After a few seconds, she says “Leave the child with me”. The couple, happy, but too afraid to smile, pass the child into the arms of the priestess and shuffle away from her. After taking a few steps away, they turn around and walk away hurriedly, happy that they had been relieved of their burden.
The priestess, taking the child, closes the enormous doors with minimal effort and starts to walk along the great hallway with the child in her arms. After reaching the end of the hallway, she takes the stairs up to the second floor where she enters the last room on the end of another big hallway. In the room, another woman, a bit older by looks, could be seen hunched over a table, looked towards the open door as the priestess walks in. “What have you brought” she asks as she sees a bundle in the younger woman’s arms.
“Some peasants have left an infant in our doors Mother” she says as she sets the infant down on the table.
“They claim that they have found the infant in their market stall, and I have seen that they believe it to be true.”
The Mother, leader of this branch of the Church, sighs and looks at the infant. “Another one already?” She says, with a sad expression on her face.
Advertisement
“Get some milk and tell the others to feed him” She says to the other priestess. The other priestess, after hearing this order hurries to do as ordered. After bringing some milk, the child is woken and fed, after which he goes back to sleep.
In the office, the mother after some thinking, states to the priestess “His name will be Elephon, take care of him”.
Unbeknownst to all, the baby in question was not a baby at all. Rather, he was a baby in body only, but had an intelligence of someone else. His name had been john back when he was in earth. He was a student, with not much else to his name. He had no family, as he was an orphan who had circulated through the failed American foster care system, and he had successfully managed to claw his way to a manufacturing job while studying in college. He had had lofty goals. He was studying to be an engineer, learning computer and electrical engineering as well as biology. His lofty goals in life had derailed as a result of a derailed train cart during a hike. As he died, he had no one near him, and no one to worry for and about him. He died thinking that it was a fitting end for a man born with nothing to die with nothing.
However, the growing pain and discomfort felt all over his body told him that he was most certainly not dead. As he tried to open his eyes, he realized that he could not see much but for specks of light. After a few minutes of waiting, he realized that his body seemed to be much smaller than he was used to, and that he had no control over his extremities.
After some thinking, it was decided that he was either dead or in the hospital. The growing feeling of hunger in his stomach caused him to open his mouth, but the only thing that came out was the shrill cry of a child. This caused him great confusion, as he realized after multiple attempts to open his mouth that the noise was coming from him. This led to the sudden realization that he was now in the body of a baby.
After thinking it through, it started to make some sense. After all, only a baby would have no control over their arms and only a baby would be unable to speak. His body was also much smaller, and he realized it was because of his new body. As soon as he realized this, the crying stopped, and he began to ponder over the meaning behind the changes. His sudden enlightenment of being in a child’s body convinced him that he had reincarnated, like in the web novels he had read before.
It felt like he had waited for years, he cried his lungs out and yet no one came to comfort him. After a few more attempts at crying, he soon realized that no one would come, and the hunger, combined with the overstimulation and overthinking resulted in unconsciousness.
The next thing he felt, as he awoken with a start was the movement of hands under him, and he realized that he was being transferred from one pair of hand to another. After another undetermined amount of time, he finally had some hard stick like object placed in his mouth, and from it he was able to feel some kind of liquid flowing from it. Being hungry, his only response was to start suckling the object as he tried to drink as much of the liquid as possible. After drinking some liquid, but not being full, the object was removed from his mouth and as he opened his eyes, he realized that the object in his mouth was a wooden stick. In the distance, he saw a blurry object covered in blue, but he was not able to fully make out what it was. He deduced that it was probably a person wearing blue. He was struggling to stay awake after the feeding and fell asleep after a few minutes.
Advertisement
- In Serial20 Chapters
Sword System Academia
2/17 NOTICE: I'm putting this on hiatus, possibly permanently. I didn't want to spam with an "update chapter", so hopefully here and in the story blurb will get enough eyeballs. There are a couple reasons for ending SSA for now. 1) I wrote the next chapter but wasn't happy with it. I've been less and less satisfied with SSA's quality the more I thought about it. Part of the reason is... 2) I am seriously thinking about trying to publish some novels to help pay the bills, since I don't have my other source of income anymore. I have never asked for anything from SSA readers, no money, not even a review or rating. SSA is written for fun to amuse myself, primarily, and I would kind of feel bad actually charging someone money for something as unserious as that. I don't think it is good enough to ask anything in return. To use an analogy from music, SSA is more like a jam session with a bunch of friends. You're just chiling and having fun playing some music. I mean, if you are Mozart or even Eminem, your jam session is good enough to sell, but for an amateur beginner like myself, haha, no. If I want to publish something, I feel like I need to go the proper route of practice and rehearsals, which might be more similar to a classical concert performance. With SSA, I work from worldbuilding notes and a loose outline, but what you are essentially getting is the first draft with lots of so-called pantsing. Pushing out a web novel like this also means it is very difficult to go back and improve things without breaking everything else downstream. I wanted to try this "jamming" approach, as it was a good way to teach me about another aspect of writing, but to move forward, I think I need to hone my "classical" techniques, which emphasize rewriting, or at least, revising outlines. 3) While I intend to try to make $$$, my actual current goal is to "get gud". I've spent a lot of time recently trying to understand the self-publishing industry, and I'm pretty sure I can make some money by using short-term strategies with my current amateur skill level. But I've seen too many authors come and go/burnout, and really, the only way that I think I can enjoy writing and still make money on a long-term basis is to become a better writer. And the next step for me, which I haven't done much before, is to spend more time on rewriting and outlines. That is pretty much antithetical to the way SSA is developing. I've always been kind of 20/80 plotting/pantsing, but I want to spend a lot more time outlining before I even start writing. SSA jam sessions don't really fit my goal anymore. If you're curious about what's next, read on... Among other regrets, I regret not finishing SSA. It's the first story I've dropped, but then again, it's the first web novel I've attempted, so I suppose that's not a surprise. I don't think traditional web novel formats suit me that well. The whole SSA story I had loosely planned (beyond a first book or major arc) is way too large as well. Big story = good for neverending webnovel with Patreons, bad for penniless and fickle writer like me. I am currently outlining a complete trilogy to another story in great detail. I want the story to end concisely, and I also want the chance to really spend a lot of time on the full outline to spot pacing problems, character issues, lost themes, and so on. I'll still share this story on RR. What I intend to do is finish book 1, flash-publish the whole thing here for a few weeks, then publish on the big Zon. Repeat for books 2 and 3. The upcoming story will be about crafting heroes. The backdrop is an isekai-like setting, where elves will summon humans to their world as heroes, but the whole hero crafting business is still in its infancy. The elven mage researchers are figuring out how to imbue heroes with power, while the heroes are trying to figure out how to use the powers that they gain. Humans are the best hero templates because they are blank and have no intrinsic magic. Or at least that what the elves thought. The human MC has his own secrets... There will be some similarities with litrpgs, but I would call it more a progression fantasy or gamelit story. For example, the stats are very low, at least initially. Say we have a stat called Str. Going from Str = 1 to Str = 2 is a huge deal. Also, going from Dex = 0 to Dex = 1 is an even bigger deal. I guess you could call it a "low-stat litrpg", haha. Also, the heroes won't be gaining stats simply by killing things or leveling up. You can't increase stats arbitrarily, either. There will be rules to how stats can increase, and how they work with each other. The elven mages will be figuring out these rules in order to craft stronger and stronger heroes. Some inspiration will be from cultivation magic systems, but there won't be overt cultivation, at least for now. A theme I really want to explore is the idea of interactions. That includes things like hero crafter vs hero, tactics vs strategy, skill synergies, racial interactions (dwarves, elves, etc), and son. Yeah, so hero crafting. I'm super excited about this project and venturing into publishing. If you want to check out the upcoming story, you can follow my RR author profile to see when it drops here. Finally... THANK YOU TO EVERYONE! I'm very sorry that SSA is stopping, but I hope at least some of you will find the next story at least as enjoyable, if not more. Thanks to all the readers who gave SSA a shot. Big hug or solid fistbump to all of you, whichever you prefer! I hope this message is not a downer but an upper, because I am psyched!! -purlcray -------------- BLURB: Talen, youngest Master of the Koroi, makes his way to the Empire's capital to salvage his clan's fate. But the bustling city has few opportunities for the traditionalist. For the old sword clans are fading. With the rise of alchemy, gold can purchase strength that ordinarily took years of training to cultivate. Sword artists, once rare and accomplished, are quickly growing in number, especially among the wealthy noble class. Even with such alchemy, though, no one has advanced to the rank of Grandmaster in countless years. Talen's true dream is to walk the path of a sword artist to the very end while fulfilling his clan duties. And then the Swordgeists return, fabled founders of all sword arts, gods who had touched the world long ago and vanished. These myths turned into reality warn of a coming threat. Alongside this warning, they issue an invitation to the Sword System Academy, a path to power beyond the mortal realm. But first, they will hold an entrance exam... Story notes:Sword System Academia blends elements of western and asian fantasy such as xianxia and litrpg. I took parts from different genres I enjoyed and twisted them into my own creation. There will be an explicit system, both of the litrpg kind and the hard(ish) magic kind, but it is embedded within an academic structure that will develop over the course of the story. This is my attempt to design a unique type of system, the System Academia.
8 153 - In Serial6 Chapters
Arrogant Master In The City
***Hiatus / On Hold***Do immortals exist? What if i told you they do exist and you can become one. Join Kiryu as he treads on the treacherous path of becoming an immortal and uncovers the hidden side of the world you thought never existed. Creating a harem is a bonus :)WARNINGContains blood gore sex torture etc etc :)[ Working on rewriting chapters one to twenty six currently ] [ 4/26 done ]Link To Old Version All 26 Chaptershttps://docs.google.com/document/d/1xkHVCanGOLpoQW2qdjfNl6hTqUqpez2sy5BNsF3Uh2A/edit?usp=sharing
8 173 - In Serial8 Chapters
The First Shadow Assassin
In a world where citizens' gain a blessing from one of 5 gods, they gain the ability to learn magic and use powerful skills with all sorts of weapons. This story follows the perilous journey of a young street rat named Ethan Shadowmark to rescue his family, however along the way he discovers the truth of his real family and the horrible destiny that has befallen him. Filled with rage and hatred towards the adventurers of the nation known as Valen, a god long since forgotten grants Ethan his own blessing leading Ethan to decide if he wants to use his power to destroy the corruption at the heart of Valen and make everyone free and safe or to seek vengeance and lead the nation into chaos. Only time will tell if Ethan is powerful enough to lead a nation to prosperity for all or be the herald of chaos and bring doom to all.
8 96 - In Serial17 Chapters
Angel and Wolf
A man given power after being zapped by a power crystal, making him an Enhanced Individual of Power. A housekeeper with a secret. A world on the brink of chaos.
8 146 - In Serial26 Chapters
As They Rise (The Eva Series #1)
A Wattpad Featured story. As seen on The Huffington Post. Book One of The Eva Series, which has over 3M combined reads!A kick-ass young girl, a nation swarming with zombies, and a sweet romance that grows amongst the ruins. You'll find all that and more in this exciting and action-packed apocalyptic YA story. Readers have said it's had them on the edge of their seats, reading all through the night and still craving more.Eva was just an everyday girl, working as a waitress, hanging out with her friends, and falling in love. But her whole world changed overnight when a powerful virus spread throughout the country, transforming it into a wasteland of deadly disease and crazed zombies. With Australia cut off from the rest of the world and rampant with terror and chaos, Eva and her friends must do whatever they can to survive.Set in Australia, blood, gore, friendship and true love collide to make this tale of survival stand out from the rest. The Eva Series is guaranteed to make you smile, scream, cry and fist-pump the air as you go on a wild and dangerous ride with Eva and her friends. And it all starts here, as they rise. Are you ready? Hit the Start Reading button and get ready for a heart-thumping adventure.Previously titled 'Eva Wilde Vs The Zombie Apocalypse.'AS THEY RISE is the first in a series of books following her dangerous journey as Australia becomes an apocalyptic island.THE EVA SERIES:Book One: AS THEY RISEBook Two: WHILE WE FALLBook Three: BEFORE IT FADES**Please note: This is the first draft. Please excuse any typos or grammatical errors. I've just done a big re-write, edit and expansion of this, and it's now available on Amazon Kindle, iBooks, Kobo, Nook + Google Play here: jenmariewilde.com/books**Tweet me: @JenMarieWilde / #TheEvaSeries(Completed 01/01/2013)
8 104 - In Serial12 Chapters
Arrange to the one and only Jeon Jungkook | BTS JUNGKOOK√
"I'll give you two choice. Be my girlfriend or I'll just kidnap you so you can be with me." He said and my eyes widen.Jeon Jungkook × Ju Y/nARRANGE TO THE ONE AND ONLY JEON JUNGKOOK
8 116

