Given the situation and my predisposition to popular nerdy culture back in my old life it does not take me all that long to piece together that I have been reincarnated. Isekai was not my favorite genre of anime but it would appears that my knowledge of it has finally come in handy with understanding my current predicament. But if this is real can I get to live a new life..... then how or why? What makes me so special or so deserving of a second chance? I don't think I did anything even remotely close to deserving this.
I feel a third hand place itself on my head and gently pat me. I tried to turn my head towards him but I need assistance; luckily the woman holding me adjusts my entire body from how she holds me. I see another demon looking man and he is looking at me in the same way that she looks at me. The joy and happiness that he seems to have as he looks at me is something that I am not used to.
His skin is red and he has four horns, the larger of the two slowly curved back towards the back of his skull and then upwards at an angle like an almost stretched and rotated S type position. The other two are much smaller oni like in there look. Dark red scales are at the base of all four horns and the horns themselves are bone but they are similar red to the color of his skin if not just a little lighter. His eyes are solid black and only accented by the dark red scales around them that add a bit of contrast to his bright red complexion. He too has long hair that is white and flowing currently braided into a French Braid and accented by golden jewelry. He has the body of a warrior with muscles that would impress some of the bodybuilders back home. If my eyes are correct he looks to be around almost 6ft tall and I can see his tail. It is reptilian in appearance however the scales are thick on the top side of the tail going up his spine which is covered by the elegant white and red robes as he wears. However it would be hard to mistake the two large bat like wings coming out of his back that he has folded neatly behind himself. With one hand he comfortably scratches the underside of his chin covered by his thick full beard that reaches halfway down to his collarbone. And with the other he pats me on the head and smiles.
He says with great pride still speaking in that language from my dreams, "I have waited for this day for quite a while you almost scared us there at the end though, my boy. I was worried there might have been complications....... But think I have the perfect name for you." As he and her locked eyes, she smiled and he laughed.
That was the day that I was reborn into this world and the day I was given the new name I would go by. Tatsuhiro Starcrown...... It has a nice ring to it that I actually like, but it did take some getting used to. After all 50 years of being called by the name Leonidas or Leo is not something that you can get over quickly. I guess it was only providence in that case that the new body I was given in this new world I live in has many races that are very long-lived and I now count myself amongst one of them.
A full ten years from what my mind was able to keep track of it went by before I was even technically physically 1 year old and the years here are bit longer then back on Earth but not by much. There are still 12 months in each year here however each month is an exact 5-week time period with exactly 10 days a week making each month 50 days total. However hours here are a bit longer as there is a total of 50 hours in each day and each our is 100 minutes with each minute being 50 seconds. Each season last exactly for 3 months at any time and begins at the start of each of their respected intervals exactly on the first day of each of the first months of those intervals. It was hard for me to keep track of it but I managed to figure it out in time.
My new parents would not even let me leave the house not that I could even if I wanted to before I was 20 years old essentially a two-year-old toddler barely able to walk right but I can finally speak at least. But when I did I had so many questions. The fact that I already knew what I had learned in this new world was the language of Dragon's Tongue thanks to my dreams in the old life as well as what they call the language of Universal which I know as English; really impressed my parents and they considered me a genius since no other two-year-old could speak so fluently in two separate languages that they hadn't even been taught in school yet. I did not tell them about my past life as I don't want to. However there are so many things about this world that interest me and I want to know more about.
For instance I am myself, what is known as a Half-Blood from what I have been told by my parents. This is just another way of saying hybrid. My father's people are known as the Zahelios and my mother's people are what are known as the Sangsaarra. I thought this originally meant that they were fancy names for what on Earth we know as Angels and Demons, but then they speak about actual Angels and Demons and the differences between them. My father had explained to me the difference. The Zahelios and Sangsaarra are also hybrids but the races that make them up have not been seen in this world for a long time, and in the few that they have they had just been passing through. The Sangsaarra are half angel and half-elemental, and in my mother's case her family descends from Fire Elementals and Angels of the Sun that serve the Sun Gods. It at least went a long way as to explaining why parts of her were always on fire but never burned anything and why her eyes look like staring at two tiny white dwarf stars. The Zahelios were in fact part Demon but also part Dragon and part Elemental. My dad descends from a lineage of Fire Elementals as well but also Red Dragons and Abysswalker Demons.
It was fascinating and these were just two of the races that called this world home, it was not even all of them. But those first two decades of living inside of the house helped me to understand a bit more about the world; especially with the books that my mother kept since she was a former teacher at an arcane university back in her homeland of Warsongshire. She and I would read together often about the world and she would teach me about all of the beautiful things in it. Such as the fact that we currently live in the small backwater country town of Kasaku on the large of the two continents that are under the control of the Divine Empire of Tatsutori. The continent itself is known as Ashikai and once was under the control of a powerful shogunate which fell and eventually got absorbed into the remains of a fallen kingdom that also did not last on the smaller of the two continents known as Torikaga. Those that remained after both the shogunate and the kingdom fell decided to rebuild and make the Divine Empire that took aspects from both and blended them seamlessly together over the last 30,000 years.
The technology here is not as advanced as what I left behind but it's getting close even for a backwater town like this. I would compare to 1990s American technology with things like cell phones only just now getting the more traditional flip phone type of look that was common in the 90s and TVs slowly slimming down instead of being as big and bulky as what's in the living room of my new home here in this world. It's an odd combination of modern and fantasy with hints of sci-fi and magic, but I think that I will like this more especially with all of the advancements I can help to bring from my knowledge of the last world. The only thing standing in my way is the fact that I'm aging at a snail's pace, but this is also a blessing for I can take my time and learn things that I otherwise could not have been able to with a shorter lifespan.
On my 20th birthday and my family finally took me outside the house for once and that's when I finally got to look at the town that I grew up in, and it's small mostly farmland stuck in between two small forest and along a river known as the Yakunaki River. When I first saw the town I was still impressed by it because even though it was small it was covered in snow which I had been missing after 20 years of being stuck inside. My family had the second biggest house in the town with the only other house larger than it being that of the mayor's home. The population of the town was about 15,000 people which was nothing even by my old world standards. Despite how small it was a wonderful place to call home. My father often talked about the fact that he lives here because no one judges him or mother here. Seeing as father has demon blood and mother has angel blood most people expect the two races to not get along well, and there is some slight racism in this country towards those with angel blood only when it comes to them forming lasting relationships of the romantic variety with those like father.
Yet here he says no one judges us for the fact that he and mother are together or that I am the result of their love for each other. As a result of him always saying that I remember that day very well, as we took a walk around town in the middle of the light snowfall that was going on and everyone who saw us as we passed seemed so happy to see me as they had only heard good things. Now they finally got to meet the little boy that mother and father bragged about when they were working. It was on that day that I met someone that would change my life for both good and bad. Akira Yamikaze, the son of the mayor and technically my next door neighbor and my first friend here.
When I first met him let's just say it was a very odd encounter as I was not truly expecting due to my sheltered upbringing in those first two decades for some of the things that I had read about the Empire to be true. The Empire is primarily inhabited by the Zahelios and the demon blood kicks in from what my father tells me around the age of 100. Meaning that by the time someone is 10 years old physically and mentally in this world as a member of his race, they begin having demonic urges for a great multitude of things such as sexual gratification, violent torture, or even murder. So many of those of his race have to try and keep under control a majority of the time and find ways to relieve those urges without them over taking them because if they do overtake you you can temporarily lose yourself to them and do things that go even beyond what you might need to do to initially satisfy them.
But that's where things are different here in the Empire. As stated the majority population are people like my father with that call for the demons blood to be satiated and those running the Empire are also members of the race including the imperial royal family. There are many laws in place here that make many acts that most people would find despicable where I come from not only legal but normal. It's gross and makes me sick especially because I am certain many that have heard me say this I know some of you more dirty minded are thinking that Akira must have been subjected to some of the things that I have only vaguely mentioned this far and you would be wrong. It was his older brother. Here the legal age of an adult for a member of my father's race is 150 and Akira's brother was 155 it still did not change the fact that incest is also legal here. My first meeting with the mayor and his family was in the middle of a celebration of Akira's brother joining the army like all citizens upon reaching adulthood must in the Empire. Seeing as my own family and the mayor's family casually treated the fact that Akira's older brother and his father were being intimate in the kitchen as just a normal thing was quite frankly unnerving, and I probably embarrassed my parents by my attempts to put as much space between everyone as possible only for my father to keep having pick me up and bring me back over to everyone.
It was in that moment that I first finally understood the difference between reality and what I had been made to believe you from my old life between the usual representation of what demons are like and what half demons can do and the reality of people who have demons blood in them and what they deemed as socially and morally acceptable. When I made it back home I didn't want to leave again ever for at least a few months, but that's when the mayor had came over with Akira one day who I had met originally on that day but kept trying to get away from because of what was going on in the background. By then my mother had helped me to get used to it as she herself also did not like many of the things that happened in this nation but has come to an understanding that most of them actually cannot help many of these actions because of the demonic urges that they have. She described it as pure unadulterated sin that the people themselves did not want forcing them to do things that they might not agree with but pushing them towards a darker state of mind and only getting more intense the longer that they try and deny it until they are so overwhelmed by it that they temporarily go insane. She explained that if not for her helping my father whenever he got into those mindsets he would probably be a lot more like some of the others in town. Here I thought that the two of them were just young, dumb, and in love, but now I realize that those late nights that they would keep me up are more so a mixture of that and his own attempts at keeping himself from going batshit crazy.
Nonetheless my parents and the mayor had talked with each other and decided that me and Akira being roughly the same age should be friends since both of us were pretty young and didn't really have anyone else our own ages in town to interact with outside of two or three other children. So after a short but seemingly long conversation I was convinced to at least make an attempt to be friends with Akira even if I wanted to be nowhere near the rest of his weird family. And it all started with a simple, "Hello...... My name is Akira....." Unlike the rest of his family he seemed genuinely innocent and like he wanted to try and be my friend. He held out a toy ball that he had brought and offered it for me to play with. With a deep breath I close my eyes and nodded, when I opened them I took the ball in the two of us played together. That was the start of our friendship and the beginning of where things would go so wrong.
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