If William still felt like crying when he was born, maybe he would have seemed like a normal baby. Instead, he got over it long before then. Interestingly enough, his consciousness became more spotty as he developed more. He supposed he wasn’t really supposed to be conscious at all in the womb anyway. When he fell unconscious, he truly was, even though he had been perfectly fine being conscious without a body. Now that he had a body, he had to follow how it worked… or something. Every time before, he had just woken up as he was born.

Once William could spread his senses out to cover himself, and more than himself even, he saw some things that bothered him. However, there was nothing he could do about it… and he could have been wrong about what he thought he saw. Then, his consciousness faded out one more time…

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William soon found himself being born. Everything went find with the process, but he found himself panicking upon realizing he was right. He supposed this might have been his most normal reaction to being born.

There was a lot of drifting in and out of consciousness for the next while, and William came to terms with what he had seen. Sure, his father might have red skin, and his mother’s skin might be blue… they also both had horns. Still, that didn’t mean they weren’t still his parents. Sure, they might be demons, but they probably didn’t mean him any harm. No, if they did… it would be more than trivial to accomplish, with William being a helpless baby.

After he calmed down at the initial panic of being born a demon, William became more confused. Based on what he knew, it shouldn’t have been possible for him to have been born a demon. At least, he thought so. His mind told him that, but he couldn’t remember exactly why. William thought he should have been born a human again. No, wait… that wasn’t quite right. He shouldn’t have been born again at all, but he was anyway. If he hadn’t just been incorrect in his understanding, something must have changed. Maybe his exceptional circumstances caused an error… he supposed that the reincarnation process wasn’t really conscious. Even if it had a consciousness, it could mess up.

There was another possibility though. For example, if humanity had still been destroyed after the Demon King’s death… maybe being reincarnated as a demon was the best that could be done with his soul. However, that would imply several things. First, that humanity had been destroyed despite how William felt the war was going. It may not have been strongly in their favor, but they should have survived. Perhaps there was another war though… after a civil war among the humans, maybe. Still, there was one other thing. It also implied William couldn’t reincarnate as a dwarf or elf. William didn’t think it was a problem of distance, so either they had never managed to find a new place to settle and died out, William’s soul was even less compatible with them, or something else entirely. Regardless of how it happened, though, William was now a Demon.

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William had thought teething was painful, but it was bearable. He’d had some practice, and gotten better at handling pain through various means. However, he wasn’t looking forward to growing horns. He wasn’t born with horns- that would have made the birthing process much less simple. Presumably, growing horns would be much worse.

However, before he knew it… William had horns. They just started growing in, without any real pain, just a strange sensation. He was only a few weeks old, and his teeth wouldn’t come in until almost a year… if demons were the same as humans in that regard. His horns were just tiny nubs but they were certainly horns. As they continued to grow in, he could soon actually see them with his eyes and not just his ki senses. He tried to feel them with his hands… but his arms didn’t work that well yet.

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William didn’t have much to do with his time, so he spent it cultivating… or more accurately, cleaning up the mess that was his spiritual sea. His progress was faster now that he had a body… but he also had less time to spend on it. Even so, there was just so much to do with that he almost felt he would never finish.

However, William only did this when his parents weren’t around. When they were, his time was better spent trying to learn the language. His mother actually helped him accelerate this learning by carrying him around with her and talking to him. He found that he lived on a farm… and though the animals weren’t exactly what he had expected, their purposes were soon realized. There was an animal that gave milk, and a type of fowl that gave eggs. Calling them cows and chickens was a stretch. However, unlike what William expected from animals in the demon lands, they weren’t excessively violent and dangerous… though they were bigger.

The bulky, milk-providing animals had six legs, and were rather short and squat. The middle legs, instead of being used for walking, seemed more like they were for stability. They actually faced out to the sides, and were usually only planted when they were standing still. It seemed like a waste, but William later learned that they could actually use those to kick predators to the sides, and not just those behind them. The important thing about them was they had horns, and thus William learned that the word for “demons” shared the same root as “horns”.

It shouldn’t have surprised William, but he justified himself by the fact that he had just spent two lifetimes as the enemy of demons. Of course they didn’t call themselves anything with such negative connotations as “demons”. What they used was much more natural and sensible, and it was basically just “horned people”. The word they used was gevai (geh-vai), which differentiated them from directly saying “horned people”. They weren’t demons… and they didn’t seem to be inherently evil. At least, not any more than humans. William knew that, which was a reason he hadn’t previously been interested in wiping them out in retaliation, but now he finally was starting to understand that they were normal people. Well, normalish, anyway. They weren’t necessarily good people, nor were their intentions misunderstood… but they weren’t all bad like the Demon King, at least. Thankfully, he was gone forever. Except… what if he wasn’t? After all, William was still around, and he was expecting to go with him.