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Chapter 2 - Chapter 2 – Born to Chaos

Neil's second life began with noise.

Muffled voices. A woman crying. Wind pushing through wood.

His eyelids fluttered—he could barely see, barely breathe, barely feel. The light around him was dim and gold-tinged, flickering like firelight. A figure loomed above him—blurry and warm. A face, flushed and crying. Then hands—rough, gentle, trembling.

Another voice entered the space, deeper and relieved, speaking words Neil didn't recognize. The woman clutched him against her chest, her heartbeat pounding in his ear.

He was… tiny.

He couldn't move properly. Couldn't speak. Couldn't focus.

Everything hurt, and everything felt too new.

But deep inside, he knew:

This isn't a hospital.

This isn't Earth.

I'm alive again.

Time passed.

Days blurred together into sensations: warmth, hunger, darkness, arms.

He learned to recognize voices—the woman's, who cooed and laughed and wept; the man's, deeper, slower, steadier. Another voice, a child's, small and curious.

Their language made no sense. But the patterns in the sound stirred something in Neil's brain. It wasn't English. It wasn't Mandarin or any other Earth tongue.

It was… something else entirely.

He listened.

He catalogued.

And quietly, inside the helpless body of a baby, Neil Yuan began studying his new world.

By the time he was a few weeks old, he could recognize them clearly:

The woman who held him every morning and every night was his new mother, a young woman in her late twenties with long, dark hair always tied in a braid. Her name was Seri.

The man who worked all day with calloused hands and smelled faintly of smoke and leather was his new father, a kind-faced man named Tomir, who often hummed while feeding goats or mending tools.

And the small boy with round cheeks and energetic limbs was his older brother, Lio, no older than four. Lio liked to bring him smooth stones and whisper stories into his tiny ears.

The family lived in a small house on the edge of a farming village—wooden beams, packed earth floors, woven mats, and curtains that let in golden morning light.

It was quiet.

Peaceful.

And completely foreign.

Neil's infant body betrayed him constantly—crying without meaning to, falling asleep in the middle of thoughts, unable to control his own limbs. But his mind remained sharp. Not in the superhuman way transmigration stories often promised, but in a distinctly human way: curious, focused, observant.

He watched his parents' mouths when they spoke.

Tracked repeated words.

Counted sounds.

Connected gestures to objects.

It was frustratingly slow.

But also strangely satisfying.

I'll learn your language eventually, he thought, somewhere between a yawn and a hiccup.

One word at a time.

By the time he was crawling, Neil had begun forming basic associations.

"Ba" meant bread or food.

"Ashi" meant hot.

"Luka" was Lio's nickname, sometimes shouted, sometimes sung.

"Noa" was his—he had been given a new name: Noa, a common name for second sons.

The first time he realized it, he felt something flutter in his chest.

Neil Yuan is gone.

Noa has begun.

He didn't remember crying at that moment, but Seri scooped him up with teary eyes anyway and whispered soft, loving words in the unfamiliar tongue.

The first sign of magic came one cold evening in winter.

Tomir was fixing a broken wall brace near the hearth, muttering to himself, when Lio—ever impatient—threw a fit and demanded warmth faster.

Seri scolded him gently and held out a hand.

Noa watched, wide-eyed, as a shimmer of pale green light flickered above her palm, floating like mist. It hovered in the air for a moment, then sank into the wood in the fireplace.

A second later, flames burst to life.

No flint. No smoke. Just… heat.

Neil—Noa—was stunned. Not because it was flashy, but because it wasn't. It was casual. Natural.

Every instinct he had as a scientist screamed for explanation.

But all his baby body could do was blink in awe and drool on his sleeve.

Magic exists here.

Real, observable, measurable magic.

He would later learn that what Seri had used was called Nature Magic, and that many villagers knew at least a little of it—mostly simple spells to help with farming, light, and healing.

But at that moment, Neil didn't care about its classification.

All he knew was that the impossible had happened—and someone had done it with a gesture and a thought.

And it worked.

This world… obeys different laws.

But they're still laws.

Which means… I can understand them.

As the seasons passed, Noa grew.

He learned to walk—falling often, crying more often, but always getting up again.

He learned to speak—slowly at first, piecing together syllables from years of formal linguistic memory, correcting his own grammar even before anyone else noticed.

By the time he turned five, he could speak the village tongue as fluently as any child his age.

Tomir was proud. Seri cried again. Lio, ever dramatic, declared that Noa had stolen his "smart brain" while in the womb.

Noa smiled, not correcting him.

He liked being their son.

But even as he helped harvest crops, learned to herd animals, and ran barefoot through meadows with the village children, Noa never forgot who he was.

He was a physicist.

He had seen stars from a dying bed.

He had known equations deeper than instinct.

He had died with unfinished questions.

And now, he had a second chance—not just to live, but to learn again. From nothing.

One step at a time.

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