The rather psychedelic tunnel full of weird symbols that I travelled through after my apparent death led me to believe I was going to show up in a typical castle with a typical figure of royalty asking me for help.

Waking up blearily with heavy limbs and almost no control over my body was most certainly unexpected.

My body gave further signs of rebellion as I felt a sudden desire to cry out. I quickly stamped those desires down and took a look around myself.

The first thing to enter my sight was a rather large person.

The blond easily towered over me and was using the apparent size difference to get a good view of me from an angle.

His green eyes were scanning my whole body.

His focused gaze, the sharp lines of his cheekbones, his defined nose and neat eyebrows added up into the picture of a scientist examining a peculiar specimen. I was very aware of the fact that I was the specimen of his study.

My mind was already running on what kind of scenarios this could be. They did not look good for me. Just before the man reached down to prod and examine me further, a sort of ecstatic cry was heard from behind him.

As the man turned around to address the source, he was pulled away and a new set of eyes were on me. These were less thorough in their scanning of me and began to fill up with tears after their cursory inspection of me.

The owner of said tear-filled eyes quickly picked me up and held me within her bosom. The overall roundness of her face and the contrast it had against the man was the only detail I managed to catch before my view was limited to a rather deep valley.

Head damp with the tears dripping onto me, I tried to recap what the events leading up to this peculiar situation.

I was indirectly killed by some sort of summoning ceremony, hitched a ride on the offending ceremony and am now either in the care of giants or in the body of a child.

The queue of questions to be processed was rather long.

Before I can think further on my predicament, I was lifted up from the embrace, carefully wrapped up in a soft little blanket and moved into a wooden crib of some sort.

From the lower vantage point, I tried to get a bit more context on what was going on.

Some words were then exchanged between the two, none of which I could understand. The tone was the only part I could make out, with calm and informative on one side, and joy and excitement on the other.

My little bit of time to spend observing was cut short when I felt a fairly familiar sensation within myself.

The comfortable bundle that I was in was slowly sapping away at my will to stay awake and inching closer to pulling me down into blissful unconsciousness.

Though the sensation was familiar, the struggle against it was not. My iron wakeful will, one that has conquered a thousand all-nighters for university, was failing in foreign soil and I was definitely slipping.

The last sight I was privy to before sweet slumber was at least entertaining.

The conversation was apparently an ending and the man was given a nice little hug with his head between the mountains that I was buried in a little earlier.

Seeing such an uptight looking man just relax in the woman’s embrace, I dropped my defenses too and accepted my relaxing fate.

Wakefulness came to me some time later with an additional question on how long I was out. But with a new question entering the queue, one was at least resolved to make room.

Unfortunately, the form in which the answer came was not one that made me comfortable.

The debate between me being with giants or me being a baby was solved by the soft little nub that my sleeping body was sucking on.

At the realisation of what I was doing, I promptly stopped and released the milk source, a quickly coined term to avoid any more awkwardness within my own head.

My action did not go unnoticed as the woman turned down to look at me. With a bit more time to inspect my presumed mother, I can tell that my chances of getting a decent looking face in this life was good.

She had a typical gentle look that most mothers tend to pull off with soft features all around. Her contrast with the first face I saw here was very obvious with the soft lines against the sharp and the small button nose against the prominent ridge sported by my, presumed, father.

Observations were cut off when I noticed that sounds were being directed at me.

My searching gaze must have appeared very cute as I was apparently receiving a very healthy dose of baby talk and faces. Deciding that humouring my caretaker was the optimum choice, I faked a smile and made cute little sounds.

The positive response earned one back when she smiled indulgently at me and cooed some sort of compliment that I did not understand. The happy look she had almost made me regret responding positively. Almost. I did regret.

My little act of baby cuteness brought about an interesting mood in the room. Moms, as you all know, are fueled by their child’s cuteness, this one was no exception. I had to brace against weird faces, baby talk and touching me in random places for what amounted to days in my mind.

Eventually though, the session was over after my father walked into the room and decided to take over for mother. A few words were exchanged before, with a small peck on the cheek, my mother handed the bundle that was me over to father.

Once she was out of the room, things turned a bit colder, the window my father opened notwithstanding.

Without constantly paying attention to mother and responding appropriately, I finally have sometime to look around the new room I was in.

It was a study of some sort as from the crib I can see bookshelves lining the wall on the right of the entrance that mother exited from.

Moving my eyes up to the ceiling earned me a nice view of an intricate set of concentric circles with numerous arcane symbols evenly lining the circumferences of said circles. The whole system was glowing a soft white to illuminate the room.

As I was about to try and move my head to get more pieces of the room within my line of sight, my father popped up within my view, the same searching look he had from when I first saw him was on his face again.

This time without interruption, he finally finished the examination of me and quickly closed the distance between himself and the crib. He then started to channel what was clear to my eyes as magic, a swirling of symbols in the classic mana blue.

From the mass of energy, he began to draw forth an item, one that looked dangerously like a dagger from the handle-like part he was grasping on. My fears of him attacking me were alleviated, however, when he finished withdrawing the item.

The dagger-like handle was just a handle and nothing more. I was beginning to question the use of the weird device when he proceeded to stamp the handle guard onto my forehead.

The following sensation was rather hard to describe.

Through using words from plenty of fictions involving magic and convenient learning, and ignoring the intricacies of the process, it was probably like a flood of information has entered my mind. Words, sounds and their meanings were suddenly present within my mind.

After a few seconds of my mind still spinning from the deluge of data, I finally pulled my consciousness back.

My return to lucidity was accompanied by someone calling out something to me.

“C** *u* **der***nd m*?”

Mind still buzzing a bit, I stared uncomprehendingly at my new father.

“C*n *uo u*der*tand me?”

His repeated question was a bit clearer somehow now.

“Can you understand me?”

His third go proved to be the charm as I finally pieced together what was being said to me. My face must have shown some of the understanding I had, because my new father made a satisfied grunt and dropped a bomb on me.

“Good. I thought you were old enough in your last life to handle the strain of language installment. It would have been quite terrible if I was wrong.”

Wait. How did he know? Aren’t they supposed to be oblivious until I get enough courage to do a reveal after some sort of harrowing ordeal that strengthens family bonds.

Internal sarcastic humor aside, this is a rather big pickle, one that does not go well with the survivability sandwich if my new father is taking my replacing his own son rather poorly.

My face again proved to be rather emotive when my father chuckled a bit and continued.

“You are probably wondering how I knew right? That’s what your face is telling me at least,” he smiled knowingly.

I tried to give a nod, but all I managed was probably just a shift in my neck muscles without any clear movement of my head. But the point was still across when he continued.

“Right, for one thing, the ceremony used on your body clearly showed that a new soul was going to be dragged in. I expected a native soul, but your temporary glowing blue eyes were far too similar to the records of “foreigners”. Add all of that to the fact that a hero summoning ceremony was being held in the human nations and I can make an educated guess.”

I frowned a bit at his rather blasé attitude and the man just shrugged at my expression before he continued to explain.

“I know I sound rather apathetic when I talk about this. But we already talked things over. Death was our child’s inevitable fate if we did nothing. I could not have him go that way without at least trying anything.”

I still failed to see why he could be so calm about all of this. To actively make my confusion known, instead of unintentionally like before, I tried to raise an eyebrow and earned a response.

“Oh. I forgot you don’t know much about our situation. Let me fix that then. Though I would need some imagery to work with,” said my body’s father as he pulled out one of the books from the shelves.

Opening the book to a page with a diagram of four humanoid illustrations, he began to explain.

“I’m just going over the basics to paint a clear context of the process that resulted in your presence here. There are a total of four fully-sentient races within our world. They are elves, dwarves, beastmen and humans,” he said as he went over each race’s picture from left to right.

“The races differ in many areas, but the biggest difference would be in the magic system. The difference is also the main reason why you are here today.”

He flipped a page to reveal a more detailed diagram of an elf’s body with clear notes on body parts and organs and pointed towards an organ that sits a bit behind and below the heart.

“This is a mana gland or mana organ, the term is not fixed. It produces mana within the body to use for elves and dwarves. Many also speculate that it is an anchor point for the soul. This has not been definitively proven, but it has been noted that souls and mana are intrinsically linked,” he explained before turning to another page with a picture of a human and a beastman with the same notes on the organs as previous page.

“The major problem my wife and I faced was that she was a human and had a very different mana system compared to an elf like me,” here he pointed to a sort of vein like system on both the human and beastman and continued, “with a system like this, any sort of cross-breeding between elf and human will result in a hybrid with a mana system that was insufficient to sustain a body for very long. So if we wanted a baby, we had to somehow overcome this problem.”

He looked back at me to see if I was following and continued.

“The physical size and structure of the organ do not matter, it is simply the overall mana density within it, so the fix would be to just put in additional mana to jolt it back into properly functioning. This was thought out while your body was still in the womb. We had a lot of arguments regarding this and how to experiment safely with it. It went back and forth for until your body was delivered and the signs of mana fatigue started to set in around two months later that we had to go for broke.”

He then gently picked me up and moved me towards the center of the room that was hidden from view in the crib.

When we first turned around, I was already looking at a magic circle that was worlds beyond the one used for lighting. The symbols were far more intricate and there were a lot of glowing crystals placed within the circle itself with more symbols on the crystals themselves.

My studying of the peculiar set up was cut off when the explanation was resumed.

“You were in this when you first woke up. It’s a magic circle designed to infuse you with mana. The exact source that would be compatible with this process was not known. The child deaths that followed elf-human relationships guaranteed that the whole subject was taboo and any who researched it never shared their findings, effectively making my venture into this field an exercise of trial and error. To compensate, I incorporated a field to extract ambient mana, crystals to transfer mana if that was needed, and an underground system to connect to a possible leyline source.”

He paused to pick up a pile of notes lying down near the circles and went on.

“The interesting result was that, the crystals and leyline source was used to expand the overall capacity of the ambient mana absorption and the system somehow grabbed you and shoved you into the body. The whole sequence of magic circle activation is also very interesting. It started with-”

“Ahem. Could you cut to the chase please. We talked about how a limited amount of time is available for an explanation after he woke up and I have checked him over for overall soul connectivity and side effects.”

Announced to my face was the fact that the whole baby play session was just to check me over again.

“Oh, right. Sorry. Anyways, we knew we would not be very likely to succeed, but you provided us with a lot of answers, and the next time we have a baby, we should be able to keep the original pure soul instead of an insert happening again. So we must thank you and it would be our pleasure to help you out,” they both smiled in appreciation before proceeding, “Though there is a bit of a time constraint since your soul is too mature for the current brain and you will most likely enter a sort of hibernation while the subconscious instincts of a baby within you will take over until the brain is suitable to handle the load.”

With the explanation finished, I was put back into the crib to, as I assumed, rest and think about the revelation.

My body’s parents left soon after placing me down and flirting a bit, a bid for a sibling for me no doubt.

Lying down, I went over the events that has happened. I was killed by the infamous truck. Got into a baby’s body through a couple’s dedication to make a baby that lived. Got free language, biology and magic lessons.

And within all this was the confirmation that I was apparently a very rare elf-human hybrid with a combine mana system of both. That did not sound bad.

The whole hibernation thing sounded rather good as well, no embarrassing breastfeeding, shitting and peeing myself, and generally being a baby.

It was with that sense of assurance that I fell into the predicted hibernation.