Chapter One

Lucas Tyr-Andoral became aware of his surrounding quite suddenly. He always found it odd that there was no gradual return to consciousness or whatever his state of being was. Instead, there was nothing and then there was him. He pondered for a brief time on this oddity and moved on. The realm around him was a void. There was no color as there was no sense of sight. Also lacking were sound, touch, and taste. This was a realm for his soul to come to in between reincarnations. The amount of time that he was “awake” in this realm varied. There wasn’t a real sense of time here, but Lucas was generally able to meditate on between three and five concepts or problems while here before he was inserted into a vessel.

The realm itself was a complex construction of the soul that was attached to, but not part of, The Great Circle of Reincarnation. At some point a body that met his criteria would become available, and Lucas would be inserted during a brief window between a host body being created and a soul being assigned to the body by the system.

System access itself was limited here in this place. Lucas was able to access it with some effort, but it cost him significantly on his next birth. Generally, he just waited until he unlocked his system interface and most of his memories in his new body.

Lucas thought briefly about his plans now that his primary motivation for everything he had done over the past seven millennia was gone. He hoped that he would get a decent body relatively quickly. Spending three of four centuries cycling through various sub-par hosts, unable to unlock his potential, was somewhat frustrating. Not that he felt it here. Here in this soul space, it was hard to feel anything. Even boredom was somewhat difficult to grasp, though he had managed it once. He would never make that mistake again. Lucas’ soul experienced a shudder at that recollection.

Suddenly, Lucas felt a tug on his essence and a sensation of movement. After a brief period of reorientation, Lucas could finally see around him. He was far above a tropical forest and descending at a rapid rate. Faster and faster Lucas fell towards the forest canopy. Then he was moving through the canopy and slowing. He came to a stop above a nest containing four speckled eggs. Each egg was about the size of a man’s fist.

‘Oh well,’ he thought. ‘At least I’m not a sentient plant again. I wonder what type of bird I’ll be?’. Not every animal had a soul so the bird would have to be something out of the ordinary. There was a brief wobble and one of the eggs suddenly sprouted a fine web of cracks as a small beak punctured through the shell. The beak was a bright orange. The moment that the shell was punctured, Lucas felt his soul being dragged towards the now “living” bird.

He had a few brief moments to inspect his surroundings before the great spell that bound him began to compress his soul. At this point he would normally pick which memories and skills he wanted to “decompress” as he grew, but the tiny bird that was slowly emerging from the shell through an instinctual need to survive would likely never reach a point where it could handle even the tiniest amount of sentience. The spell wouldn’t target the animal if the potential wasn’t there, but Lucas knew through harsh experience over the many rebirths that it was unlikely. Lucas allowed the spell to start the process of compression in the default setting and waited patiently for his next life.

Lucas recalled his first time being reincarnated as an animal. The spell was still relatively new, and he had never been reborn. He hadn’t taken into consideration what putting a three-hundred-year-old arch mage’s soul into a lizard would do. The answer, Lucas found out moments after birth, was to cause critical instability leading to a chain reaction as the body attempted to draw in the mana from its environment to stabilize the now overwhelming soul that had taken up residence.

Lucas’ time as a lizard on his first rebirth lasted approximately 3 seconds before the lizard, and an area of approximately 50 meters in diameter, exploded in a massive unstable mana explosion. It took five different rebirths and subsequent explosions before Lucas was able to activate one of the emergency protocols built into the spell and correct the instability. It wasn’t the last time the spell had run into hiccups, but that was one of the most severe.

Lucas’ moment of reflection ended suddenly as his soul began to compress down even smaller and consciousness could no longer be supported. His final thought as he descended down into the tiny down covered bird that had finally emerged from its shell was At least I’m not a buzzard.

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The first fledgling chick of the grey speckled tulloc bird was enthusiastic in its exploration of the nest. It wandered near the edge and back to gently nudge the other eggs in the nest. The tiny bird was covered with a light blue down and had what was quite possibly the largest beak to body ratio in any bird on the planet. With a sharply hooked beak that was bright orange in color, the beak of the grey speckled tulloc was one of its defining characteristics. Nobody had ever determined exactly why such a large beak was required as the grey speckled tulloc survived almost entirely on carrion and didn’t use the beak as a specialized tool or for mating rituals.

The second fledgling chick of the grey speckled tulloc displayed another of the breed’s defining characteristics. As it emerged into the world, it let out a piercing cry. As the bird grew and slowly absorbed mana, this cry could be used as a weapon to defend its any carcass found in the forest below from other adventitious scavengers.

The third fledgling chick of the grey speckled tulloc displayed the third, and possibly most important, of the breed’s key aspects. As a smaller, sharper beak emerged from the shell, quickly followed by a bird that was almost twice the size of the grey speckled tulloc. This chick was covered in a soft white down and made no noise as it slowly oriented itself. The first thing this chick did was nudge the fourth and final egg towards the edge of the nest and over, to fall to the forest floor below where it would soon become food for the many other carrion eaters in the forest. It quickly began the process of nudging the second chick to follow its unfortunate sibling to the ground. This behavior was standard for the red cuckoo, one of the best-known nest parasites in this portion of the world. The first fledgling chick, host to the soul of our hero, suffered the same ignominious fate of its two siblings, falling to the forest floor without ever uttering a peep.

The adult grey speckled tullocs returned to the nest where they found one smaller white chick, the remains of two grey speckled eggs, and one bright red egg that was almost twice the size of the others. The two adult tullocs proceeded to feed the cuckoo and never noticed anything wrong thanks to the extraordinary combination of stupidity and lack of survival instincts singular to this breed of bird.