My ears must have developed because I started to hear things! There was still a massive disconnect between my undeveloped body and my intellectual, well-aged mind. The two simply refused to acknowledge each other, plus millions of neurons were still being built inside my organic brain that would let me take full control of my body.

I had passed all of the sound that my body was receiving through my Mindspace so that I could filter out the random white noise coming from my mom’s organs. I kept the sound of her heartbeat there, because it kept me relaxed, acting like a soothing background metronome.

I recalled that the Soviet ministry of culture sold vinyl recordings with the sound of a beating heart. According to the note on the cover it was an easy way to relax cranky newborns and to destress adults - a carryover from hearing the mother’s heartbeat in the womb. I wasn’t particularly stressed living inside the womb, but I had to admit to myself that I was definitely starting to feel a little bit lonely. Having nobody to talk to for months was wearing on my psyche, no matter how much I convinced myself that I was fine.

When I had fully tuned out the white noise for the first time ever I heard my parents' voices! Universal Comprehension had translated the words for me instantly, but I had recorded their words regardless using the power of the Mindspace so that I could manually learn their language later on.

“...to Millizens farm to deal with some pests,” this was definitely my mother, judging by the volume and proximity of the voice.

“Well, take it easy,” the male voice responded, sounding a bit muffled. It was likely my father. "Stay inside the wards and be extra careful... the blood Elks are hunting this month. They nearly drained Joahim Mavison last week!"

"Oh, is he okay?" Mom inquired with a twinge of annoyance and worry in her voice.

"He went too far out alone to hunt and got cornered by the herd. He completely ran out of mana, so he had to swear a Vow to Ishira sacrificing his water-summoning skill!" Dad replied. "He nearly lost an arm chasing them off - the bastards are tough. Thankfully, Tamara was able to sew his wounds shut."

"Right," mom sighed. "Don't worry, I know to stay on the paths. I'm not a careless fool like Joahim."

“Our little girl certainly got a good role model!” Dad laughed. “Love you, bundle.”

“I love you too, my bundle.” Mom responded.

I found their pet names rather cute.

I also winced a little at the mention of a girl. Did they use some kind of magic to identify me earlier or was this future-prediction magic? I knew that future-prediction magic existed because I’ve seen my mom use a very basic [future - seeing - weather] spell to tell the weather. It was her job to take care of the fields so basic Meteomancy was one of her skills.

My parents will certainly be surprised when their child will be born a boy. What if they are able to see a person’s level? That could be a big problem for me.

I should prepare some sort of a contingency plan for that. Maybe I could add something to the Infoscope? I could tether Modify to it, so that I could create a fake letter sent from some high-authority, future-seeing wizard that would warn them that their kid was unusual, but this was perfectly normal. My parents occasionally got letters in the mailbox outside the house from grandparents, so all I had to do was [Modify] an existing letter, replacing the stuff written within. There, a perfect plan.

I put a [Write my parents a letter explaining questionable stats of the newborn] on my ever-expanding to-do list.

Another interesting point of note was that a hunter from Skyisle had sacrificed one of his skills to survive an attack of dangerous Elks. That's the second time I learned of the power of a Vow being used and this time it was for gaining mana in a time of need. Unslotting a skill didn't provide me any extra mana, why was a Vow different? Was it because a god was involved? Was it because the sacrifice was unbreakable, permanent? Could I communicate with a god using Vows? I had a lot of questions and no way to test things for answers. I wasn't desperate enough to sacrifice one of my skills. I was fine with my six mana - it was more than enough for my current needs.

. . .

I was carelessly identifying various things within the forest next to a field of grains in which my mom was working when I noticed something odd moving in the trees nearby.

I spied a long-limbed ghostly monstrosity swimming in the air between white birches. It was a semi-transparent, four meter-long creature made up of flowing white tentacle-like threads. It had a hollow, pale-silver shell on its back full of smaller copies of itself. It had emerged out of literally nothing, as if it slipped right out of empty air between the trees.

[Phantasm-Squid LV 324] the Infoscope defined the creature. What?! This dangerous creature wasn’t from Skyisle where everything was Level 20 or below! It had come from… elsewhere. It didn’t belong to our little, peaceful valley.

Unlike the villagers, it had noticed that I was observing it! It turned, staring at my Infoscope with a hundred glowing, glassy eyes. Then, it opened its maw and released a horrid scream. The alarming screech of the monstrosity was the worst thing I heard and it shook me to my core. It sounded akin to a thousand nails being scraped on a thousand chalkboards.

I knew that its scream was a threat for me - mom didn’t notice the creature, nor heard its abhorrent screech. This monstrous phantom was hidden from human eyes but not from my high-level identification tool! I realized that its screech must have been ultrasound, because ultrasound at around 19–20 kHz range could only be heard by people below 20 years of age.

All at once, the thing had released thousands of its children. An entire army of ghostly, miniature squids that started to glide around the birch trees heading towards my Infoscope. They all stopped at the barrier shield formed by the protection of the runestones surrounding the field and I thought that we were safe.

Unfortunately, I was wrong.

The ghastly squid-mother arrived at the barrier. It opened its mouth once more and a thin, semi-transparent, white ray shot out of its maw. It passed right through the runestone barrier shield, striking at my mom. She yelped in surprise, unable to see the attacker. The ray tore through, shredded my Infoscope, passed through my mom’s stomach and snagged my side and that’s when I knew that I was not safe inside her - there were creatures out in the forest that could easily target me!

[Affliction: Soul damage: -3 in Soul]

The System flashed.

Crap!

I felt pain unlike anything else, akin to being electrocuted from within. The damage radiated from within my very soul. I called up my stats, praying that the ghostly squid wouldn't be able to target me as long as the Infoscope was inactive. I heard my mom’s rushing footsteps and whimpers as she retreated away from the forest, panting. The stats wobbled in my eyes, letters shimmering, fading in and out with freakish static.

Name:

_______ Alan Skyisle

Age:

37 weeks [8.5 months]

Species & Subtype:

male - human - foetus

Level:

6

Experience:

2163/2450

Health:

6/6

Stamina:

6/6

Mana:

2.6478/6

Mana regen:

6 m/hr

Strength:

0

Agility:

0

Dexterity:

0

Vitality:

2

Charisma:

0

Magic:

1

Luck:

0

Intelligence:

75 [+89]

Wisdom:

0

Soul:

2 [-3]

Skills:

[Transient Soul LV 6]

[Universal Comprehension LV 1]

[Infoscope LV 75]

[Modify-Chromosomes LV 50]

[Info-tether LV 22]

[Mindspace LV 39]

Investiture points:

29

Affliction:

Soul damage [-3 in Soul]

Damn it all!

Terrified of being shot again, drowning in an ocean of soul-pain, I quickly pushed all 29 points into Soul, mentally gritting my teeth at the unfairness of it all. What the hell? Souls were supposed to be immortal! I’ve been misled by Russian Orthodox dogma from the world that I had departed from. Not that I believed any of it, but still!

The System menu stopped flickering and shimmering and the deep, gut-wrenching, unbearable pain subsided.

The Soul stat flickered and changed to:

Soul: 31 [+46] [-3]

What? Where did that +46 come from? I guessed that this was the original stat within my transient soul, just like the hidden Intelligence.

[New skill gained and slotted: Soul Devourer!]

What the hell?! What kind of a skill slots itself in when there's not even the empty slot available for it? I tried to unslot it, to pull it out of my skills menu but it refused to budge. Pulling on it brought back the pain. Argh!

I pointed the Infoscope at it.

[Soul Devourer] - [Allows the holder to carve up, devour and dominate weaker souls from within.]

Holy crap.

The phantom didn’t fire its ray at me again. It didn’t stop me from being terrified of inexplicable monsters that attacked people's souls and gave them freakish skills.

Mom was panting heavily, now likely behind the second layer of runestones, which would hopefully keep us safe.

“What in the flying-whales-arse was that?” I heard her angry mutter. “Did I get nipped by an invisible beastie? Lazy Glenn Millizen must have forgotten to send the boys to charge the outer runestone wall.”

“Heal!” She cast a healing spell on herself. It did nothing whatsoever to cure my soul damage.

I haven't looked out of her stomach with the Infoscope as I was quite worried about getting shot again. I activated the [Mindspace] spell on myself. I needed to learn what the soul damage did exactly and how to fix it!

I found myself sitting in my computer lab. I looked down at myself. The soul damage within me showed up as a deep, shimmering crack across my shoulder and left arm. I lifted up my arm looking at the crack in my body that sliced right through my lab coat. Green-silver shimmers glittered within the crack. I looked up from my injured hand at Bessie. The Soviet supercomputer twinkled with red lights as usual.

The chair facing Bessie turned towards me. My secretary sat on the chair. She looked at me and her face suddenly glitched into a wide smile full of sharp fangs. I jumped up, feeling a deep growing pit in my stomach made from dread. I had no way to explain this phenomenon - she was wrong. She looked, smiled and moved very WRONG. She didn’t look like an avatar or a memory.

Everything about her screamed of wrongness.

With bone-deep terror I realized that she didn’t even look like how I imagined her priorly - the girl in front of me had silver hair and blue eyes.

There was something extremely uncanny valley about how she sat - she looked like an alien THING that was wearing the shell of a person, someone who had no idea how people sat and smiled and breathed.

A deep, shimmering, silver-blue crack ran across half of her body, going down from her head towards her arms.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” she spoke. She didn’t sound like a person.