Death is a lie, a trick, an illusion, a fantasy; and I’ve been playing this game for far too long. I can barely even remember my original existence; my first form, and my true reality is a mystery. The beginning of a new life is always, annoying.

Sometimes it isn’t so bad, but I’ve learned firsthand what true evil and kindness are; I can guarantee that karma exists. Hell, I actually met her a few times, but each reality has its own rules and laws. Thankfully, most reincarnations come with a memory wipe, but in that space between life and new life… it’s always rough.

The problem comes later, much later; when the memories begin to resurface and your life which was just beginning, is completely destroyed. Everything that you are and could become is erased by the overwhelming history you wish wasn’t smothering your mind.

A soul is meant to just be a guideline, deep rooted morality, beliefs that can’t possibly be explained logically, a general sense of who you are. Unfortunately, some souls are older than others, so old that it’s impossible to completely prevent those past lives from interrupting the new ones.

I couldn’t remember much on that first day in my new body, but I was far more aware of my surroundings than a normal newborn should have been. My mother was beautiful, like an angel… she literally had dove-like wings protruding from her back, along with the others that were gathered around us.

They all seemed to be female, or at least pretty damn close, since they were all completely nude but with my limited view, it was difficult to verify their genders. I was really, truly praying that this would finally be heaven, or at least some version of it.

My mother was crying, but they weren’t tears of joy, all of them were weeping while gazing down upon me. I recognized this scene, I experienced it many times when I was born disabled in one way or another.

Aside from pity, I could sense a strong emotion emanating from each of them, it was fear. One of the angels said “I’m so sorry…” in a voice that sounded like an entire chorus singing, a very depressing song.

It wasn’t just her, when each of them spoke, it was truly beautiful. Even if the content of their song was about how I had to be purified, which sounded much more like they were condemning me to death, or worse. My mother was crying a melody of pain as they sang at her, until she finally whispered “I love you, Hanael.” in my ear.

Without thinking, I said “My name is Michael, but you are my mother so you can call me whatever you wish. We just met, so I won’t go so far as to confess my love for you just yet, but you do seem like a nice kid. If it isn’t too much trouble, can you at least explain the situation before you decide to kill me?” in a very high pitched voice, that reminded me of a prepubescent girl inhaling a helium balloon.

The entire group seemed to be too shocked to sing another note, but then my mother stopped crying and sang “My child can’t be one of the fallen, their minds are so warped that they can never learn or understand our song!” in a very hopeful voice while looking at the others.

They were each wearing a different shade of anxiety and fear on their faces as they gazed upon me. The one to my mother’s right sang “Even if it can sing, it doesn’t even have wings! It may posses a voice, but it is obviously not one of the chosen! It is only just born, yet its aura is so oppressive, so dangerous, it cannot remain here! We must let it fall!” in an angry and terrified voice.

The others seemed to agree with her, but my mother was pretty upset. She sang “If my child is meant to fall, then I shall clip my wings and fall as well!” in a stern and powerful tone.

I finally decided to end that annoying musical and yelled “Oh for fuck’s sake! Please just send me down to hell or whatever terrible place you brats seem to throw unwanted infants, and just get this shit over with already! Also, beautiful young woman who appears to be my mother, don’t worry so much about me. I will be fine on my own, stay here in this peaceful world where you belong. One day, we’ll meet again, but until then, I love you and goodbye.” in a strangely beautiful harmonized voice.

I really wanted a bit more information about my destination, but if I let that innocent girl get too attached to me she would have done something very stupid. I looked into her bright-green eyes one last time and then pushed myself out of her loving arms.

It felt strange as I was enveloped in some form of teleportation, which immediately told me that it was probably going to be one of those annoying realities with magic. I was laying on my back when I opened my eyes and looked around, it wasn’t very hellish. The blue sky and white clouds gave me a familiar impression of an Earth-like planet, which was one of my favorites.

My back was so damn itchy, but my stubby little infant arms couldn’t do much to alleviate the suffering. Since I couldn’t exactly move, I decided to feel around my body and get an idea of what the hell I was.

I was humanoid, male, and aside from my tailbone actually having a long, thin, fluffy tail attached to it, I could probably pass as an actual human. Which was bad, because humans are weak, especially right after they’re born. After the sun went down I had finally realized how completely screwed I was, but then I noticed a woman crying in the distance to my left.

My view was obscured by tall grass, but I finally had a chance at survival. Unfortunately, I couldn’t just yell “Hey bitch, get your fat ass over here and help me!” because talking babies are creepy, so I started crying. Crying for a baby is pretty easy, no matter how degrading it was, it got the job done pretty efficiently.

Within seconds there was a beautiful-ish woman staring down at me. The left half of her face and head was seriously burned, the other side was very pale, unnaturally so. She wore a white dress that was filthy, like she had literally dug herself out of a grave.

Blood was dripping from her one good eye onto my face as she smiled at me and exposed her very impressive fangs by accident. I smiled back and she quickly picked me up into her cold arms. When she rocked my body gently and I couldn’t help but fall asleep.

When I awoke, my tiny body was covered in a warm blanket and I was looking up her desiccated face. I guess I didn’t notice before, but she looked like a corpse that had been drained of all its blood. Her left ear was completely missing, seared from her head, but the right one was obnoxiously elven, it was at least an inch taller than the highest point of her head.

You visit enough of those magical shitholes, or live as an otaku for 5 minutes and you can pretty easily recognize an elf. That one was an elven vampire, a blood elf, but since I didn’t know their language or terminology, I remained silent.

Luckily she spoke in a language that I actually understood, it was an elven dialect that I learned a couple lifetimes ago. As she was cradling me in her arms and crying from her right eye, she said “It’s Ok little one, Mama will protect you…” in a weak voice. The look in her one existing eye, that was a beautiful shade of crimson and partially obscured by long white hair, conveyed a very familiar experience to me.

I smiled at her and said “It does eventually go away… the pain from losing a child.” in as deep of a high pitched baby voice that I could muster. She was obviously confused, so I told her “You aren’t having strange delusions, I’m actually speaking to you.” in a semi-reassuring tone.

Her facial expression quickly changed to a loving mother as she said “Is Mama’s precious little angel hungry? Don’t worry, Mama will feed you!” in an excited voice. She unbuttoned the front of her blouse, she had changed her clothes when I was unconscious, and pulled out her left breast which was right next to my face. It was saggy and wrinkled like a dried date with raisin on the tip, which actually sounds much more appetizing than a dehydrated teat.

I sighed and said “I am not putting that crusty nipple in my mouth… for fuck’s sake, did you even take a shower before changing your clothes? Anyway, it’s obvious that you’re the one who needs to eat, so hurry the fuck up! After you come back to your senses, if I’m not completely exsanguinated, go catch me some food. Since I seem to already have sharp teeth, whatever I am is probably able to eat meat from birth.” in an irritated voice as I vehemently pushed her breast away from my face with my tiny arms. She didn’t seem to understand anything I was saying so I bit my own finger hard enough to draw blood and managed to shove it into her stupidly grinning mouth.

After a few minutes of her sucking on my finger like a baby, the irony of which wasn’t lost on me, her face and body finally began to resemble a much fresher corpse of a beautiful woman. I felt pretty light headed, but that was just because she drained so much of my extremely delicious baby blood.

Then she finally came to her senses and immediately pulled my finger out of her mouth. With a look that screamed ‘What have I done?!’ she started to cry, but this time instead of red, her tears were as clear as purified water.

Eventually she said “I’m so sorry… I… I don’t know what to do… why did I do that?” in a confused voice, to herself, since she didn’t seem to understand the situation. Actually, it wasn’t until then that I even looked around and noticed that we were inside some kind of small cabin. It had cobwebs everywhere and appeared to be abandoned for years, she was sitting in a filthy rocking chair that sounded like it would fall apart any second.

I sighed again and said “Before I pass out from blood loss, my name is Michael. You’re obviously some kind of vampire, so it should be an easy task for you to catch some sort of edible animal for me. If I die, oh well, but just in-case I don’t, hurry the fuck up.” in a calm and stern voice before falling asleep, I was still a baby after all.

The saying “You are what you eat.” is usually true, even in realities where magic is simply fantasy or illusion. It’s a general rule that to grow, we must constantly kill and devour other beings, both literally and metaphorically. Add in some mana to the equation and everything becomes much more exaggerated. However, in pretty much every reality, to live means to kill and eat other lifeforms in order to survive.

Normally, a baby would be incapable of eating solid foods, but I was most likely some sort of monster. I had assumed as much from the angel’s conversation, and I was correct, which was convenient because I hate breast feeding. From both perspectives, yes, I have been a mother before, it would be stranger if throughout my many lifetimes I was always male. On average I was probably male 60%, female 30% and other 10% of my lives. At least that’s all I can remember, who the hell could even keep track of something so trivial?

The most important things to remember while reincarnating are various technologies, sciences, war tactics, survival techniques, efficient ways to kill various types of creatures that might appear, magical spells in-case you end up in one of those realities, a few hundred of the most common languages, along with miscellaneous other common sense type bullshit.

It might seem like far too much for an infant’s mind to handle, because it usually is, but if you get lucky, like I just had, you would be born with a body that held an abnormally high potential.

After a pleasant dream of a family I once had, the smell and sound of bacon cooking in a frying pan woke me up. Mainly because of how incredibly hungry I was, but that was just wishful thinking. I was facing the cobweb filled ceiling of the cabin which was dimly lit by natural light when I realized that it smelled much more like burnt toast.

Somehow I rolled my tiny body off of the rocking chair and managed to crawl over to possibly the worst vampire I had ever met. She was laying face down on the floor, which was brightly illuminated by the sunlight coming from the open door.

Her left shoulder and right thigh had crudely made arrows embedded into them. Her ear, forearms, calves and feet were completely burned black while still smoldering, but she was still breathing. Yes, from my experience, very few creatures that have a circulatory and respiratory system can survive for very long without using them.

Vampirism is usually just a virus, parasite, or even a nanite that transforms a human or other animal into a different type of animal that prefers to consume blood. Even when it comes to magical worlds, it’s usually the same concept, she may have looked like an extra crispy slab of elf bacon, but she was most certainly still alive.

With all of my, extremely low strength and leverage, I somehow managed to slide her across the floor a few feet, out of the very mild early morning sunlight. Then I noticed what she was clutching tightly in her left hand, a rabbit carcass which had an arrow through it’s abdomen.

It wasn’t difficult to imagine what happened, she stole from a hunter and got shot a few times. After removing the arrow, I used it like a scalpel to carefully remove the pelt as well as I could in an infant’s body.

Sanitation has always been very important to me, but when when you’re starving and a baby, it’s best to just eat. The raw rabbit meat was very similar to undercooked chicken, drenched in a thick tomato sauce, which was actually blood.

Trusting my immune and digestive system, I actually enjoyed the meal greatly, but immediately afterward I had an extreme case of diarrhea. Luckily I was able to at least crawl outside of the cabinet a few meters before relieving myself.

I refused to shit or piss all over myself and I definitely refused to vomit. Thankfully, I wasn’t human, so I could avoid such disgusting and common experiences for an infant. After defecating on the grass like a small dog, I used the rabbit pelt as toilet paper and crawled back into the cabin feeling surprisingly refreshed.

Humanoids tend to be fairly weak after birth, but if I thought of myself more like one of the animals who become mutated or transformed by extreme quantities of mana in the environment, it wasn’t that strange for me to have higher physical capabilities than a normal infant.

My arms were pretty tired from all the crawling, but I still managed to eventually close the door behind me. Then I got to work removing the two arrows, since they were lodged into bone, it took nearly an hour of wiggling to free them.

Being a baby was very exhausting, but on top of that I now had to become a father to a blood elf who most likely had severe brain damage. Either that or she was just an idiot, but it was still irritating.

Like before, I fed her blood from my right index finger, but this time I didn’t feel weak even after 30 minutes. Of course at that point, I didn’t actually know their concept of time, but it turned out to be an Earth class planet.

I used to know why all of those Earth types seemed to have a moon that looked nearly identical, but it probably wasn’t important. Hell, they even called the planet Earth, or something like that but in a different language, which I translated for simplicity’s sake.

She remained unconscious for several hours after I fed her, but I could tell that her body was healing properly. The crusty blackened skin was sloughed off and a new layer of pink and fresh skin became visible. Even her burn scars on the left side of her head were healing, her left ear was slowly regenerating as well. She needed much more blood than I could generate in a few hours to completely heal, but vampires have an unnaturally high life force so she wouldn’t die anytime soon.

By the next morning I had realized that there was no possible way that woman would be able to fetch me more food. Even with my severely limited motor skills, I was able to scavenge some rather meaty beetles and worms from the ground in front of the cabin.

Luckily there weren’t any monsters or predatory animals nearby, which was surprising since we were only a few meters away from a thick forest. Time seems to pass more quickly the older your mind becomes, and mine was far beyond ancient.

A month passed by before she finally regained consciousness, unfortunately taking care of an incontinent comatose blood elf is just as disgusting as it sounds. Thank God for water magic, if not for that I would have seriously killed myself or died trying to find a river of some sort.

Unfortunately magic is a lot like singing, or martial arts, even if you know what to do and how to do it, your body has to be trained over a long period of time to actually not suck.

Basic Elemental Magic is essentially just telekinesis, you don’t create fire, earth, water or air, you just manipulate or move them using your mind. Spells are typically mantras that let you do a complex manipulation of an element unconsciously.

However, I’ve always preferred to improvise and be creative as much as possible, because it’s more entertaining that way. When you live forever, you realize that it’s usually better to just enjoy life, rather than dwell on every life or death situation that comes up.

Sure, once upon a time I may have wished for an end to this eternal torture called having a soul, but that was so long ago that I can barely even remember it. It was the one and only time I ever felt completely helpless and pathetic.

I was a woman and a slave in a shitty world that I killed myself to escape from. That wasn’t the end of it though, after being born again and living a life full of revenge and hate on everyone who slightly resembled the man who continuously raped and tortured me, I realized that it was me. I enslaved myself and did all those terrible things to myself, that was when I first met the being known as Karma.

Time is relative and souls have absolutely no concept of it since they exist outside of any reality they influence. Basically, one soul could be living 100 or more lives within the same reality, universe and time, but the individual people would usually never know.

If it wasn’t for my ability to remember past lives, I would have never even realized that the piece of shit that I hated enough to kill myself while wishing eternal damnation upon them, was actually me. After that life was prematurely ended by my own hand, I had a pleasant stay in a place that can only be described as hell.

Karma kindly explained to me about reincarnation and answered various other questions I had while letting me experience torture, pain and suffering that was beyond my wildest fantasies before then.

The point is, I have only two unbreakable rules in every life I’ve lived since then “No Rape.” and “No Slavery” for obvious reasons. Whenever I met someone who broke either of those rules, I would quickly send them for an extended vacation with the lovely Karma.

Breaking away from that unnecessarily long explanation of some of my shittier memories, I was actually giving her a magical shower when the blood elf finally woke up in the middle of the night.

The concept is pretty simple, I raised a small amount of water from underground, then purified it by removing just the water from whatever else was inside. After that, you pretty much just have to slowly but steadily use the clump of water to rinse off any dirt or grime, or fecal matter, that’s attached to the person’s skin. Purify the water again outside, fertilizing the grass, and continue the process which is extremely difficult with such little mana.

When her eyes opened and she saw me, who looked like a one month old baby with black hair and a black cat like tail, actually standing upright and performing water magic on her naked body, she seemed extremely confused.

First of all, she actually had two eyes and ears, which for some reason surprised her, but then there was me, the infant, who was taking care of her as if she were the baby. I smiled at her and said “Final-fucking-lee! You should be as good as new or better from all the blood I’ve been feeding you each day, but seriously, the next time you shit yourself I’m not going to clean up the mess!” in an angry, obnoxiously high pitched baby voice.

She sat up, stared at me for a few seconds, tilted her head to the left and finally said “A talking baby?” in a confused voice, she didn’t even slightly remember me.