The city roared with life.
Iron carriages thundered down black streets.
Glowing signs flashed symbols he did not yet understand.
Humans scurried by, speaking into strange devices, voices lost to invisible ears.
Jack walked among them, hood low, gaze sharp beneath the shadow.
Every movement.
Every invention.
Every fragment of sound.
He absorbed it all.
But he felt… exposed.
A man with no history, no record, no name…
didn't simply exist in this age.
Strangers were noticed.
Tracked.
Catalogued.
Jack's lips curved into a faint smirk.
"If I want to live among them… I must start where they start."
He raised his hand.
The flow of time bent around him.
His body shimmered.
His height shrank.
His features softened.
Golden eyes dimmed to ordinary black.
Even his voice faded into the babble of the crowd.
And in place of the hooded wanderer…
lay a crying infant, abandoned on the steps of a busy street.
Gasps echoed.
A woman rushed forward.
"Whose baby is this?!"
The cry tore through the city air.
It was pure. Fragile. Human.
Jack's mind remained aware.
Every heartbeat, every breath, every panic around him he observed, calm.
But no one could sense the god within.
Within hours, he was swept into the city's system.
Taken to a foster home.
Rewritten by bureaucracy as just another abandoned child in a sprawling, uncaring city.
Jack allowed it.
He was no orphan.
He was a god who chose to be forgotten.
That night, lying in a cradle for the first time in a million years,
he stared at the ceiling with innocent black eyes.
The hum of the city drifted through the window.
Soft. Distant. Alive.
And in the quiet of his mind, he whispered
"Let me see… how it feels to grow."