Chapter 2 – A Baby's Diary - Part 1: First Attempts

The first days of Christian Raymond were slow on the outside and loud on the inside.

On the outside, he was a quiet baby who nursed, slept, and cried when the diaper got heavy.On the inside, he was an adult squeezed into a tiny body, too many memories, too little patience, and way too much curiosity.

"So that's it… I died and reincarnated as a damn baby," he thought, trying to bring his little hand to his own face. The arm failed halfway, dropped onto his chest, and he was left staring at his chubby fingers as if his own body were laughing at him.

He started with what he could actually do: observe.

The voice of the woman carrying him – the new mother, Lia – was the most constant sound. When she talked to him, her tone softened, her words stretched out like a lullaby. With others, the rhythm changed: firmer, sometimes tired, sometimes laced with a thread of irritation that never fully snapped.

— Good morning, little one — Lia murmured, bending over the makeshift crib and adjusting the blanket under his chin. Her warm breath brushed his skin, and her fingers grazed his sweat-damp forehead, brushing away a strand of hair stuck there.

Magic was his other obsession.

The memory of the midwife, Yana, still burned: glowing hands, clean heat, an invisible pinch in a place he had no intention of forgiving anytime soon.

"If I was reborn in a world with magic just to live the same miserable life as before, someone up there has a rotten sense of humor," he thought, tiny forehead furrowed toward the cracked wooden ceiling. In his head, he repeated like a password the words he had heard:

— Purificatio totalis.— Manus invisibilis.

He waited for the house to quiet, for the night to lie down over the roof. When only the creaks of the wood and a stubborn cricket outside remained, he took his shot.

He opened his mouth; his lips were soft, his tongue felt like a folded rag.

— "Pu… pu…" — came out, more drool than sound, dripping down his chin. The baby version of purificatio died right there. Nothing. Not even a faint crackle of energy, not a single thread of warmth.

Stubborn, he pulled air through his nose.

— "Ma… nu… is…" — he tried again, the "s" turning into a wet puff, his face reddening with effort. In his head, the word was clear: manus invisibilis. On his lips, it sounded like someone choking on porridge.

This time, he tried copying what he remembered of Lilia's movements too: the stroke through the air, the small twist of the wrist.

The problem was that baby arms were not made for precision.

His tiny hand lifted at a crooked angle, fingers opening and closing in chaos. He tried to draw a circle in the air… and ended up just giving himself a clumsy little slap on the chest.

The second movement, which should've been a firm downward cut, turned into a dragging of his hand across the sheet, crumpling the fabric and tugging a bit at Lia's clothes.

She mumbled something incomprehensible, turned to the side, and dropped more than half her weight over him.

"Yeah… zero elegance," he thought, feeling crushed under her arm.

He tried one more time.

He inhaled, tried to speak, tried to move his hand at the right time, to combine sound, gesture, and intent.

The result was a muffled "Ma… bu… is…" and an arm spasm that almost jabbed his own eye.

"Of course not," he thought, letting out a tiny sigh that almost slipped into a cry. His fingers only clawed at the fabric, in an irritated, uncoordinated scrunch. "In games there's always a prerequisite: mana, level, affinity… and here I am without even a status bar. There has to be a mana core dozing off inside me or something like that. There has to be," he concluded in silence, trying to force his attention toward his own chest, even as sleep pulled his awareness by the heels.

He blacked out before the theory was done. Baby bodies don't negotiate with investigation.

Humiliation came in bundles: poop with no warning, pee without consent, heat sticking to his skin. The soaked diaper was a sentence. The crying came automatically, more from anger than from pain.

Lia arrived quickly. She picked him up carefully, a firm hand supporting his head, her body tilting in a practiced movement to lift him from the crib. No disgusted face, no grumbling, no "this again?" written in her expression. Just a low voice he couldn't understand, but that somehow dismantled the irritation that always came with the crying.

— There, there… it'll pass — she whispered, checking if his skin was red, cleaning him with careful movements, changing the cloth and fixing the knot at his waist.

"You look tired…" he thought, feeling his body relax against his will as her breathing set a calm rhythm by his ear. His tiny hand grabbed the hem of her clothes and stayed there, trapped by a reflex he hated to recognize.

"Don't do that. Don't get attached to me… don't make that mistake," he thought, the adult mind talking behind baby eyes. In the other life, every time someone had come too close — Bia, Vani, anyone daring to call that thing a family — the world had found a way to rip them away. Always in the dirtiest way possible.

"You don't know what you're getting into, Lia…" he thought, while his head nuzzled against her shoulder, given over to the sway and to the warm smell of smoke, leather, and cheap soap. He wanted to let go of her clothes, to put distance between them, to keep the safe pattern of not having anyone.

His body, however, betrayed him in the lowest way possible: it loosened, curled closer, sought warmth.

"Maybe just for today…" he gave in, the thought already sinking into sleep.

Later, lying beside him, Lia pressed her lips to his tiny forehead and repeated the sound in the same way as before, with the same rhythm, as if turning an invisible key:

— Christian…

The name seeped in through his skin and spread slowly.

"So that's me now," he thought, tasting each syllable from the inside, like someone comparing a new medicine to an old one whose taste they'd memorized. Lian Rid stayed deep down, like an echo swallowed by damp concrete, heavy, loaded with gunshots, hospitals, and the smell of dried blood. Christian Raymond came clean, empty, with no story stuck to it yet.

"At least the name isn't that bad," he decided, with a tired sense of humor.