My new mother was many things. A terrifying Knight, no doubt. A damned good cook, for sure. An adept hunter and an exemplary teacher of the practical side of many things, of course. She wasn't, however, very good at imparting theoretical knowledge.

  "There are big worlds, and then there are the little ones."

  She kept jumping from one important topic to another.

  "There are Grand Kingdoms controlling dozens of planes and then there are the local, small forces kept in the dark for too long."

  Not once did she pause to elaborate further on what had seemed like an interesting, complicated set of circumstances.

  "Oh, and there are sea worlds. I'll teach you how to swim so you don't have any trouble dealing with them."

  To some wild things, she acted as if they were nothing out of the ordinary.

  "Planet-sized beasts love luring ignorant prey into their 'lands' by keeping very still. Never fall for those. Their local gravity will keep you nailed until you'd turn into a tree or a rock. Depends on the particular plane beast, of course. If you ever get caught by them, you will probably die. There's no helping that."

  I tried to keep a blank expression throughout what she'd called our very first lesson, but an occasional lip-bite or a squirming eyebrow was beyond my control. The things she considered as normal couldn't be any further from the reality in which I'd lived most of my life.

  I might need a real history teacher if I wanted to get a better understanding of this place.

  "Now, my little Leo, you should know that we don't use the word 'chaos' lightly, ever. To name an entire age 'The Age of Chaos,' certain things had to become common practices in long stretches of time. In this case, the name of the current age had been long decided before you were born. It has been, to this date, about ten thousand years."

  I leaned back into my chair, my little arms completely powerless, the back of my head stinging from the sheer effort of trying to follow each thread my mother kept throwing at me.

  Alright.

  Take a deep breath.

  You could do this.

  You could—

  Did she just say thousands of years?

  "Scholars call this age the Age of Expansion, and they do it for a good purpose. It all started with the discovery of Voidwalkers. It is through their innate talent of space that the Mages had discovered the dark side of magic."

  "Voidwalkers?" I mumbled blankly, my mind too occupied with the former knowledge.

  Far as I could tell, the name "Voidwalker" could mean anything. It could belong to a race of people who could space-travel. Why not? I'd been reincarnated, so people blinking through space didn't seem that far off reality. Or it could be about monsters. There were magical creatures in these lands. That one happened to cross planes at some point seemed only normal.

  "They are creatures of the deep space," Mother explained, and this time, she didn't look so relaxed. It meant we were getting into good things. Important things. "It happened when one of them crashed into one of the major worlds of the Gehrant Planar System. That is how the local mages of that world—we call it the Pioneer now—discovered space magic. You will find that true in most cases. We learn from nature a lot. We learn from it, steal from it, and make it our own. Then… we use it to destroy many things."

  Mother kindly spoke in child speech, steering away from using complicated words or grueling details, most likely wanting to keep my little brain safe as long as she could, but as a man hailing from a world on the brink of destruction by human hands, I could relate to that.

  Not that I cared much for it, but I was aware how cruel humans could get against each other and even to the place they called home. In our case, it was Earth. In this case, it was a whole galaxy.

  "The Pioneer, governed by a long-hailing Empire of extraordinary might, with ranks upon ranks of Mages and Knights at their disposal, began a cruel spree of visiting other worlds quickly after their scholars managed to unearth the hidden insights of space magic from that poor Voidwalker. They established a dynasty spanning nearly half of the Planar System. Their greed was endless and their assaults were sharp and precise. With time, they became masters at invading worlds and took millions of souls under their command to feed their ever-growing machine of war. Their purpose was to become sole masters of the Planar System. They nearly succeeded until one day, they came across a tiny little world."

  I got chills in my body.

  My second life took many things from me. My hard-earned flat in which I was alone. My spectacular computer that could run any games in full graphics, and my singular TV with which I binge-watched ungodly amounts of shows.

  I felt the lack of those dopamine-inducing habits in the back of my teeth in this medieval world. The stories my mother read to me didn't really do it for me. They were at best clichés. Most of the time I could tell the ending right after she read about some party of heroes out for a hunt.

  This, however, was like crack.

  On top of that, it was real.

  A galactic empire on the rise? Their cruelty knowing no bounds? Taking slaves from dozens of worlds they'd invaded to pump their industry just so they could keep at it?

  Of course, as in most stories, they would face a problem.

  An underdog.

  Who was that underdog?!

  Instinctively, I'd already inched as close as I could to Mother, and could feel her breath on my face.

  That brought a smile to her lips.

  A surprised smile, I might add.

  She was finding it surprising that I was spellbound by history?

  Go on.

  Tell me more.

  Please!

  "It turned out this particular world also had Mages and Knights in it. That in itself wasn't unexpected. We now know mana and internal energy are quite common in the Planar System, with the latter being nearly present in all lifeforms. This particular world, however, had one thing the Pioneers lacked. They had a group of Runemasters."

  I sucked in a shivering breath. It was getting a little hot in our little house. My cheeks were flushed, and in no small part by my child-brain, I was sure. Still, even as an adult I found this oddly mesmerizing.

  "Knowledge about souls was scarce back in those days. It was a field of untapped mystery, unknown to most worlds in the Planar System, even though they later discovered living in their own lands were such people gifted with this arcane power. That is, in part, thanks to the swift defeat the Pioneers suffered in that little world. That fated meeting would bring a qualitative change to the ways with which nations would be governed in the future," Mother continued, her gaze locked deep into my eyes, one hand clenched softly around the tip of the table.

  "You see, my little Leo, nowadays we see Runemasters as forces of nature. They are the grand masters of legendary feats, born of depthless power and a terrifying potential, of a legacy long since etched into memory after thousands of years. To the Pioneers, however, at first they seemed only human. This great Empire that had claimed to have tamed nature itself didn't fear a bunch of humans. They thought they were little prey, and nothing more. They were wrong."

  I nodded my head. Of course they were wrong! This was the classic self-absorbed, riding-on-a-high-horse way of thinking of a galactic empire on the rise. They were bound to be prey of their own arrogance!

  "Alone, a Runemaster is still just a mortal. Powerful, yes, but not enough to stand against an empire of millions. Her true strength lay not in what she could do by herself, but in what she could awaken in others. She could carve runes into the desperate and raise them as Runemages and Runeknights, spreading her gift until an entire host bore her mark. That was what the Runemasters of that small world had done. Their Knights and Mages were already inscribed long before the Pioneers arrived."

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  Mother had a look about her as she took a sip from her cup, a sense of weight as though she was talking out of experience. She most definitely wasn't thousands of years old. She looked quite sharp and beautiful, after all, but I could tell there was some part of her hidden in the words she uttered.

  I then imagined that little world in my head. Or rather, that group of Runemasters. It was made very clear to me from the start that a Runemaster wasn't just a stronger Knight or a Mage. They had the potential to bring about armies of soldiers to new heights. They could, quite literally, make new monsters out of people who were already monsters themselves.

  It wasn't just about the people, either. A Runemaster could inscribe weapons, armor, or anything that could house a set of runes, meaning that their influence wasn't limited to the potential of flesh.

  "It was a one-sided bloodbath. A complete massacre of the Pioneers, which had never happened before. Not only did this single defeat shake their confidence, it also triggered a chain reaction across the various worlds under siege. People now knew the overlords could be defeated. A new force had appeared, and it promised freedom for all."

  "It didn't end there, did it?" I asked the obvious.

  This wasn't a fantasy novel. It couldn't have an open ending here. If anything, with the rising awareness of rune magic, things were bound to get more hectic in the long run.

  "You're right. It didn't." Mother sighed a long breath. "The Pioneers destroyed that world in the end. They poured their armies into that small realm until the Runemasters were brought to heel. They then thought they could keep rune-knowledge hidden, but as the saying goes, a secret shared by two is no secret at all. Soon enough, war itself had changed. The grand Empire shattered into countless splintered powers, and Runeknights and Runemages became the measure of every realm's strength."

  I found myself at a loss for words in the end, and with much to think about.

  As a soon-to-be seven-year-old, I could inscribe a handful of Grade 1 Runes in a single day. A 20% increase in strength or mana didn't sound like much, but I was still a kid living in a little house. If I could keep at it, there was a good chance I could move on to Grade 7 or even Grade 8 runes in the future. That meant I could triple or quadruple the strength, the endurance, and the agility of a Knight with my soul energy.

  It seemed that I could get an army of my own anytime. That seemed so common with Runemasters.

  What made me curious, however, wasn't my future. Not entirely, at least. I was curious because Mother had brought me to a small world. I was curious because Mother trained me in such a way that it felt as if she'd expected me to face… certain difficulties in the future.

  There was no other explanation as to why she'd taught a little child how to hunt or keep a constant training regimen over long periods of time.

  I wondered when I would get to hear the real reason behind this arrangement. Did it have something to do with my long-absent Father? Or did my mother, my terribly strong new mother, get tangled up with something that forced her to flee?

  Shaking my head, I glanced up at her. It seemed the first lesson had come to an end. She was too lost in her thoughts, tapping one finger to the table in rhythmic thuds.

  I let her be. There was no rush to learn more. Not like we were going anywhere soon.

  ……..

  I was, once again, as I did many times in the past, proven completely wrong.

  We were going somewhere.

  Somewhere far away.

  After a month of constant training, rune inscribing, history listening, working, much and much working, I was woken by an earthquake so strong that it took me a painfully slow moment to understand I wasn't in my bed.

  It wasn't actually an earthquake.

  Mother was carrying me in her arms.

  We were somewhere in the woods.

  Sunlight dappled on the leaves of the trees beyond the circular lake ahead, gleaming like liquid gold over the pines towering in the distance. Morning light was everywhere, except the surface of the lake looked decisively dark.

  Up above, the sun was a mean sphere glaring down at us. By logic, it should've painted the lake's surface golden, as well.

  Why then, did a shadow cover the better part of it?

  "You're awake," Mother said, smiling down at me. Her blond hair was tied neatly on her back, and in her free hand sparkled a golden ring I'd never seen before. By instinct, I looked back from where we came, but saw only the colorful stretch of the forest we'd left behind.

  "Where are we going?" I asked.

  She kept her silence.

  Birds chirped loudly from all around as she carried me to the lake, then set me down when we were a few strides away from it. My feet found the ground wearily as I blinked around myself in an effort to understand what the hell was happening here.

  "Your birthday is in a week," Mother said, then glanced around her as though she wanted to etch this pastoral landscape into her mind. That was odd. "We can't stay here any longer."

  "Why?" I asked again. "Is something wrong?"

  "No." She shook her head, then placed a gentle palm on my head. "There's nothing wrong, my Leo, but this world has served its purpose. It gave us a safe home. It gave you time to grow up. It's now time for us to move on."

  "Can't we just… stay here?" I muttered hopefully. It was good here. Warm and silent. There were times the monotony of the life could get boring, yes, but all in all I was perfectly fine with how things were here.

  A new place meant change. And not a little change by how Mother kept hinting at a possible hop to another world. The thought alone made me nervous. I wasn't ready to move on. Hell, I wasn't—

  "You need friends," Mother said, though her face took on a strange expression that told me she wasn't really meaning it. Or rather, the word "friends" here didn't carry the same meaning I thought it had. "An appropriate environment to flourish. This world doesn't have it."

  "But I—"

  "We are going."

  And that was the end of it.

  I was a grown man reincarnated into a child's body. I didn't get to choose. I had no other choice but to follow this woman, and I was generally fine with it. It was just that something in me fought to keep things as they were. My fingers grew cold as Mother took a step toward the lake. A sudden fear gripped my heart, and I found myself shaking, my feet refusing to move on.

  "Meet Nell."

  It was her voice that pulled me out of my own imaginary fears. I raised my head slowly up to the lake, only to freeze at the sight.

  So there was a good reason why the lake was shrouded in shadows while everything else was bathing under the sun.

  "She's an old soul, and my lifebound companion. You don't know her, but she was the one who carried us all the way down to this world."

  It was a monster.

  A lake-sized one, at that.

  "Don't be afraid."

  Mother stretched a hand to the towering beast in front of her. Its scales were wreathed in darkish lights that streaked across the length of her mountainous back like scattered lightning. Half of her body was invisible, still shrouding the lake, but the other half had slowly appeared in a confusing play of lights.

  Before long I found myself staring at two enormous pupils looking down at me. They looked almost… gentle. Then slowly, she turned to face us and opened her jaw.

  Mother took a step into that hungry maw of an opening. She waved a hand at me.

  "Come on. It is time."

  ……