It was midway through the spring of 5E 1756, and the flower had just begun blooming once again. The sky was a partly cloudy azure blue, and the wind was quiescent. The village of Hildenfreide looked fresher and nicer, a product of Azriel’s strict and rigorous maintenance. The dirt path that led down the mountain into the basin was dug up and layered in neatly cut stone laced with mortar, and the patchy houses were refurbished and whitewashed. Azriel even built stone and mortar bridges conjoining the most commonly crossed areas of the creek.

A ten-year-old Azriel awoke from a nightmare wherein his life had been but an illusion, and he was still in that realm. He sighed in relief before lifting his bedsheets to reveal a toned figure underneath. The sight of a kid his age with that kind of body would be uncanny to anyone. He was lithe and lean, but his body wasn’t soft like an ordinary ten-year-old body was. The muscles on his body were dense and compact, a product of hard work and his skills. Enhanced Constitution was beneficial as not only did it help prevent sickness and ailments, but it also allowed him to put on more muscle and put it on easier.

Azriel almost absent-mindedly flipped out of his bed but caught himself before he did. He had to follow his father’s advice. He was earnest in making him uphold that rule. According to him, a person who acted different to everyone else stood out far too much. That applied many times more to someone who stood out in ways that were deemed extraordinary. His father explained that it was okay if he was the former, but the latter would be very bad. The only real problem was that Azriel couldn’t clearly find where the line between different and extraordinarily different was drawn.

Lazarus explained to him that many people had been reincarnated in the world of Aarterra, but when they spoke up, they were taken away from their families and forced into becoming storytellers, oracles, prize-fighters, or even slaves. Reincarnations usually had at least one skill entirely unique to them, which commodified them like treasure or a rare collector’s item.

This knowledge was more than enough to keep Azriel on the straight and narrow, but he still couldn’t help but feel like his father left something out, like a puzzle missing a single piece. Azriel still clearly recalled his father saying the words, “for the safety of the world.”

“What did that mean?” he wondered.

Slowly sitting up and sliding out of his bed, he prepared for the long day of work he had planned for himself. Putting on light clothing with torn sleeves, he left his room and descended the steps as normally as was possible down into the kitchen, where he saw his mother and father eating boiled grain topped with butter. It was a simple meal, but Azriel wasn’t picky, far from it. He had to restrain his urge to scoff it down, as his reward for doing so was being given seconds and thirds… and fourths.

Ester pulled her hands from beneath the wooden table to reveal a small ornate wooden box. Azriel was especially curious as he had not ever seen something that elaborate before. The box was painted beige with many angular and curved edges, and it had copper decorations shaped like vines on all parts but the edges.

With a warm smile, she slid the box across the table to Azriel while saying, “Everyone in the village chipped in. They say it’s payment for all that you have done.”

“All that I have done,” he thought. The words echoed through his mind. “All that I have done. All that I have done. All that I have done. All that I have done. All that I have done.”

Memories he had long forgotten assaulted his mind like a cavalcade of shame and despair. He remembered a time when he cannibalized hundreds of blue-banners and red-banners alike to satisfy his insatiable hunger.

The memory turned his stomach and caused him to spit out his food involuntarily. His parents immediately called out to him, but he could not hear them over the onslaught of memories overflowing in his mind.

“All that I have done. All that I have done. All that I have done. All that I have done. All that I have done. All that I have done. All that I have done. All that I have done.”

Azriel remembered the time when he tortured and flayed blue-banners in vain to get them to say even a single word. He did it for what felt like decades or centuries but could have also been millennia or maybe days, or it could’ve been hours. It was at least thirty minutes. Or could it have been twenty?

“All that I have done. All that I have done. All that I have done. All that I have done.”

He remembered when he raped his combatants after killing them. He loved it because he could climax infinitely without a refractory period. He would sometimes even leave them alive, cutting their limbs off and placing them in line, raping one, killing them, and then moving to the next in the queue.

Azriel’s eyes were wide open, but he could not see. His ear worked fine, but he could not hear. His stomach churned, but he did not puke. How could he vomit at his own doings? He willingly chose to do all those things his memory had repressed.

“Asher!” his mother yelled, snapping him back to reality. She looked very distraught.

“Asher, are you okay? Say something!”

Azriel looked down in shame, whimpering, “something.”

“That’s not gonna work this time. Tell me what the matter is.”

“This is not payment for all I’ve done.”

Ester looked shocked and appalled with Azriel’s words, “Really! How can you be so ungrateful! It is not the box that is the gift, it’s what’s-”

“It’s not about the box or the gift inside. For that, I’m more grateful than you would ever know. I just don’t feel I deserve it.”

Ester’s expression softened and became more solemnly empathetic. She hadn’t been told by Lazarus that her son was a reincarnate. He said it was better if fewer people knew, even his own mother, especially his mother.

She grabbed his hand and flipped them over, pointing to the thick callouses coating his fingers and the palm-side of his knuckles.

“There’s the proof you deserve it,” she soft-spokenly asserted.

In a wobbly voice, Azriel concurred, “Yeah… You’re right.”

Azriel choked backed tears as he opened the box, exposing a glowing gold ring from within. He recognized that the faint burning gold light emanating from it signified that it was magic, therefore quite costly.

“W-What i-is it?”

Ester smiled while Lazarus clarified, “A spatial-magic ring. It is a product of the deity of measures: Metro, the patron deity of many builders and merchants.”

Azriel pulled it out of the cushion and slipped it on his finger, unsure of what exactly it did.

“It creates a thing called a pocket-dimension, a place where can store things away and pull them back out whenever you need them.”

The concept completely flew over Azriel’s head, but he was too timid to mention it. His father, picking up on that, grabbed his hand with the ring and slipped it on, explaining, “Try to focus on the ring as if it were a doorknob opening a door.”

Azriel nodded in compliance as his father directed his hand to move in a swishing motion. As the ring moved along with it, it was as though it was tearing a hole in reality. In its place, a swirling vortex of molten gold appeared before him. It was identical to the portal he saw when he was leaving that place.

The flowing liquid gold vortex looked three-dimensional, but as he bobbed his head around to change the angle at which he was perceiving it from, he found it looked the same from every direction. It was as though it were moving to match him, preventing him from seeing it at a side-angle.

Ester’s smile grew wider until she let out a chuckle she could no longer contain.

“Ready for your real gift?”

Azriel furrowed his brows in utter disorientation.

“Your real gift is inside there,” she declared.

Azriel took a moment to process this information that had wholly caught him off guard before slowly lifting his hand to the edge of the portal. He was a little nervous, but his mother assured him that it was perfectly safe.

Reaching his hand in, he felt a space with no sensations of touch in any form. His hand felt as though it was touching nothing, not even air. His limb felt no warmth, nor did it feel any cold. It was complete sensory deprivation except for two things: the flat angular confines with slight elasticity that gave him the feeling as though he stuck his hand into a rubbery cube and the thing at its base that felt ever so slightly inclined.

Pulling out that thing which he couldn’t place, Azriel saw that it was a thin slip of parchment paper that read, “For his proven bravery in defeating a fierce wendigo at the young age of six years old and for having the full support of everyone who knows him including a valued veteran who served me many years and retired with seven honors I, Duke Tobias Leone of Hilton, doth proclaim my support for Azriel of Hildenfreide in the election trial for the prestigious Azurellione Knight’s Academy.”

Azriel was a tad confused about what his gift was.

“Is the gift the paper or the compliment written on it?” he wondered. “The parchment paper they used is very expensive and high-quality.”

He looked back to his mother’s contagiously affectionate smile and asked, “What is this?”

Ester chuckled, “It’s a letter of recommendation to join the knight’s academy signed in the name of the duke himself. You could use this to take a test and be enrolled as a knight in training. one day you may become a really prestigious and successful person.”

Azriel remained as unemotive as usual, but on the inside, his heart sank. He didn’t want to destroy castles; he wanted to build them. He didn’t want to burn crop fields; he wanted to sow them. He didn’t want to go to a place where people valued killing for their side; he felt finished and done with that episode in his life.

Ever since he came to this world, he had slowly come to understand the joy of destruction was oriented to the young of mind, but his mind was already old; it was the joy of creation that captivated him more now that he got his first taste of it. When you’ve finished building an empire off the bodies of others that came before, you only want to preserve what you have and build upon it. People are the same way. Azriel was the same way.

Azriel looked over to his father and simply asked, “Did you agree to this.”

Just as he was about to speak, Ester cut him off, “Not initially, but he came around to the idea.”

It was clear that somehow the information that it was he who killed the wendigo was not a well-kept secret.

“How many people know that I killed the wendigo?”

Lazarus spoke up, “Me, your mother, and Hans. Henric did as well, but….”

“When is it?”

Ester explained, “The entrance exams will be held in the capital in one month, and the trip there by carriage will take two weeks from Hilton to the capital, which will take about another three on foot. So, you have a little less than four days to prepare.”

Azriel thought of the projects he had built around the village and pondered whether or not he would be giving up on them by leaving. Hildenfreide had become his town, his people, his infrastructure, his spirit.

“Can I just up and leave?” he thought. “Who’s going take care of it, maintain it? Will I come back and find it in ruin? Will it exist without me here to observe it?”

Azriel wasn’t interested in the outside world. He felt as though he was making some sort of progress there in Hildenfreide and that the act of leaving would be forsaking the progress he had accumulated.

“Give me the rest of today to think it over,” he requested.

His mother nodded while his father explained, “Don’t feel as though we’re forcing you... or at least I’m not.”

With a passive-aggressive smile, Ester elbowed Lazarus in the stomach knocking the wind out of him.

Azriel hopped off his chair without a backflip and headed out the front door with the slightest of frowns.