Rebirth, or rather, reincarnation. It was not an unfamiliar concept to him. Not only because he often read web novels/light novels, but also because he was a child of two devout Hindu parents. The specifics of his rebirth eluded him. The reasons and the cause were unknown.
To be perfectly honest, even staying awake felt like a gigantic chore at the moment, amidst the shock, relief, bodily discomfort, and many other things. He was not thinking about the possibility anytime soon. As an avid reader, it was only natural to compare his state with the experiences of many web novel protagonists who had similar circumstances.
He believed nothing could have prepared him for the situation he was currently in. It was frustrating, Hard to tell really, but he assumed that it had been approximately a week from his birth.
With no interest in biology in his past life, all he knew about babies was superficial at best. Unless he wanted to count all the novels that he read in which characters were Isekai-ed. Being a baby helped him learn a lot of things about them.
First of all, babies sleep a ton. Around fifteen to eighteen hours on average. Like cats, infrequent sleep cycles.
‘It must be hard to be a parent. Never gonna have kids if I grew up,’ he decided.
All of his senses were on drugs. Different drugs. Everything was heightened and sensitive. Especially skin, but hearing wasn’t any better.
He would subconsciously react to the smallest of noises. It stank when he needed to have his clothes changed. Electricity travelled along the whole body from the tiniest of caresses. A tingle from toe to hair ends, causing him to giggle or cry. He hated that part.
As for his eyes, they were dumb as hell. All foggy and only limited to eight to twelve inches. The less he talked about his motor skills, the better.
…
The protagonists would pop out of the womb and then start narrating finer details of their surroundings, or their hate for the nurse who slapped their butt. All. Bullshit.
The life of a baby was as hard as playing a soul game.
He had a hypothesis. Baby's mind could not process his much older soul properly. It felt as if his body was a dual-core i3 6th generation PC with minimum RAM, while his soul was the next-gen video game on max graphic settings.
Every mental capability felt restricted to the highest degree. Retaining proper mental capabilities for even twelve straight minutes was hard before his body switched on the safe mode of its operating system. In that state, he could only perform uncontrollable bodily functions and suckle the occasional nipple shoved into his mouth.
Yes, it was terrible. That was being a normal baby.
…
In those small rational moments, he extracted sufficient information to safely wager with a seventy-per-cent guarantee that he was still a human.
The information came from his barely functional eyes that glimpsed his body parts while trying to move his body unsuccessfully. The body had only reacted to external stimuli so far.
Nothing was in his control, but after several subconscious attempts to grab his mother’s large finger, he could safely bet that his palm looked human enough. With a similar shape and equal number of digits.
Either a human or something humanly equivalent. Thus, only a neat seventy per cent guarantee on the bet. No signs of scaly skin, tail, or flippers were reassuring.
The people he assumed to be his parents should be human, too, unless he was adopted. He hoped not.
Unlike the severely foggy vision, his hearing was perfectly normal, and gladly, he had not yet heard them make any non-human sounds.
Sure, the language was unknown. One of the reasons he assumed was not born on Earth. While unable to identify any fantasy-like elements so far, there were a lot of things that looked out of place.
A lack of sound born out of electrical instruments and not being subjected to any modern medical procedures that a human child usually goes through on earth were strong indicators.
The technology that he was oh-so-familiar with was non-existent. Plenty of questions swirled in his mind, but they had to wait until he could at least support the weight of his bald head.
…
Days came and went. Activities were dull and similar. Largely due to his dependency on others. His time was spent either sleeping on his wooden crib or getting nipple fed by his mother.
A giant in his perspective, he couldn’t make out the finer details of her face, but her beautiful figure looked slim in his cloudy vision. Golden hair, soft white skin. The irises were a shade of light blue. Plenty in the breast department.This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
Though it mattered not how she looked. Whether she was fat or a supermodel. A mother was a mother.
She would rock him in her arms, with a gentle smile on her lips whenever she took him out of the crib and in her arms. It would awaken a warm, bubbly feeling in his heart. She loved him a lot. He could tell.
It warmed his heart.
‘I think I love her too,’ He decided, falling asleep to her lullaby.
Hard to deny that fact. Something in her eyes, her smile, her embrace that compelled him to love her. True, He had a different mother in a past life. A different family.
His old mother would always have a place in his heart, but the fact couldn’t be denied. This woman loved him with as much passion as his old mother did. How could one deny such motherly love?
…
Taking solace in the fact that the rationality only lasted for a dozen minutes on the best of days, which helped him combat boredom and shame after soiling his clothes. Things were getting better, but they were as slow as a snail.
There might have been some benefits of being a baby, but he refused to acknowledge any based on all the discomfort he experienced daily. All of them combined could not make up for the boredom he was subjected to.
Life as a baby was a black-and-white world compared to the colourful memories of his past life. No music in the background, no television, no internet.
He was only provided with a few stuffed toys to play with inside his crib. Something that he couldn’t do with an unresponsive body. He tried to move an arm, and one of his legs kicked in the air.
The stuffed toys. Yes, let’s think about those. They appeared to be dolls. It opened a can of worms. He believed himself to be quite liberal minded. Boys could play with dolls, too, but that was not the point here.
The point was, and he couldn’t stress this enough, what if he was a girl now? The toys raised a lot of terrible questions. Why did his parents decide to give him dolls at a stage when a child would not be able to decide whether he likes to play with dolls or robots?
What were the implications of this?
The lack of stimulation left him alone with uncanny thoughts he didn’t want to have, so he did the mature thing and ignored them.
…
It was a normal yet boring day when he made a discovery. It all started with meaningless thoughts floating in his head. He was finding it hard to convince himself that he could return to his old life on earth. Not sure on how he ended up here, but it didn’t seem like a usual event that could be reversed if he wanted to.
How many people died and were reborn with their memories intact?
It was beyond anything he deemed possible after being educated in a scientific structure of education. It was magical, which bordered on a miracle.
Magic.
That one word hit him like a truck full of cargo. That inconsequential, little thought ignited something inside him. He used to be an avid fiction reader. And thus, He wondered…
In those books, magic was presented in quite a few ways. Most of those ways were impossible for him to test right now. But… there was one that he could try right away. It used to be a popular trope in anime. It was something that most protagonists tried to confirm as soon as they opened their eyes.
Calming his heart and with almost a zealot concentration, he only thought of one word. Status
As if answering his prayers, a faintly transparent blue screen flashed into existence in front of him.



Status


Time Until First Awakening:
1799: 16: 34: 18



Skills:


IDE




 
‘It worked. It f-…ing worked!’ A few moments of cheering followed as he sighed in relief.
A breath that he was holding without his knowledge left him. Magic. The implications were far and wide. So many possibilities to contend against.
He couldn’t think straight for the next thirty seconds. He noted the exact seconds by comparing them with the ticking clock inside the status screen.



Status



Time Until First Awakening:

1799: 16: 33: 48


Skills:
IDE



 
He wondered what might happen once the clock reached zero.
.
.
.
Not something to think about at this moment, He judged fairly quickly.
He rather focused on the other thing that stood out to him. His only skill.
Was it common for babies to be born with skills? Why did he possess only one skill? Was it a good or bad thing? Oh my God! So much. So many things to ponder and panic about.
IDE. It sounded familiar. Short for Integrated Development Environment. He hoped it was something different.
What use could he have for it in a world with most likely no electrical machines?
He looked at the screen in front of him and focused on the skill name. Maybe it would tell more about the skill.
He wished that the status screen also described what a particular skill could be used for or was capable of; a hint, so to speak.
Sadly, nothing happened. The only change was the ticking down of seconds in the timer. The skill window did not expand to provide a description or any other information.
He tried to mentally click it. That worked, but something else happened instead of what he envisioned.
An entirely separate transparent screen flickered into existence in the air before the status screen. His hopes were crushed. The skill was indeed what he guessed it to be.
Integrated Development Environment.
This new screen was like the screen of his laptop. Just in a floating projector form. Augmented reality of sorts. He remembered Banana launching a similar product called Banana Vision Pro that would have worked similarly to this in principle.
The GUI (Graphical User Interface) of the IDE was similar to Visual Studio Code. A popular application for programming and creating software.
‘Maybe the skill was using that tech-equivalent because he was most familiar with that IDE.’ He ventured a guess.
By looking at the Explorer slide window, he was able to confirm that he was inside a folder called Help. It only contained one file. An .md file called Documentation.
Before he could try to figure out how to access and control the application manifested via the skill, a wave of sleepiness overtook him, and he immediately fell asleep.
…
On the night of that same day, all astrologers were left dumbfounded.
All five moons in the sky aligned into a straight line, which was not supposed to happen for at least fifteen years according to their calculations. A lot more had happened that were kept secret among closed groups of people who stood over the masses. This was new for many.