《Burnout Reincarnation》 The First 100 Days Archmund Granavale staggered to top of a hill on the Granavale Estate, overlooking fields of golden wheat maintained by their tenant farmers. He was barely nine-years-old, but his body had been weakened by the Crylaxan Plague, a nationwide pandemic that had consumed the nation for half a decade and killed his mother and siblings. He was the last hope of House Granavale, but the plague had weakened his body. So despite the gentle sun upon his face, filtered through the leaves of apple trees, he eased himself down a tree trunk and closed his eyes. And he dreamed. He sat in front of a bright, flat rectangle. There was a half-sphere in his right hand, cool to the touch, and his left hand danced over a strange abacus. Like a machine, he dragged the sphere, and highlighted a sentence on the screen. He stretched his hands ¡ª holding the mouse and keyboard for hours on end had strained them, and he would be here for many hours more. The world outside the window was dark, but hours of work remained on the computer. At least his office was brightly lit, so he wouldn¡¯t fall asleep. Another few months, and this bout of work would be over, only to return again in a year¡¯s time. This was his life ¡ª sitting at a computer at 10 pm, moving numbers around and building spreadsheets, doing nothing meaningful. Was this all life had to offer? Archmund Granavale jolted awake. The sun was still high in the sky. Yet now the clouds cast wide shadows upon the rolling fields. His heart hammered in his chest. He felt tense and restless ¡ª anxiety. And his stomach felt heavy as if he was going to throw up ¡ª despair. He¡¯d felt tragedy before, when his mother had died, so long ago he could barely remember her, but this was different. This was a lack of hope. Archmund Granavale had never wanted for anything in his life before. As the last heir of House Granavale, he had been spoiled by his father and their servants alike. He had never known lasting pain, for they immediately brought forth the Gems to heal him. He had never known boredom, for his days were filled with tutelage about the lands and titles he was to inherit. And he had never known a lack of purpose, because he was to rule as Lord Granavale once he came of age. And suddenly all of that was terrifying. ¡°Fuck,¡± he said under his breath. ¡°Fuck.¡± Then he paused. That word had been in English. The word ¡°fuck¡± had been in English, which was the language he used to know in that memory. It was a generic profanity for being frustrated or angry, but it also meant fornication ¡ª something that he was sure he hadn¡¯t been taught, yet made perfect sense as something that could happen. He didn¡¯t even know if any swears existed in his native tongue, though now that he thought about it they obviously did. He never used to think like this. Before, he¡¯d had proud yet simple thoughts about how great nobles were, or how good the harvest was, or how much he hated tutoring. But now his mind was expanding far beyond what it had been. If that had been a dream, it had been extraordinarily vivid and detailed. Now that he¡¯d pulled the thread, he began remembering more and more about English. It had a subject-object-verb grammar, which differed from his native language, and was very very liberal about borrowing loanwords from other languages, to the point where it¡¯d borrowed words from every language on Earth. And that was another thread. That he¡¯d lived in another world, called Earth. That Earth had so many languages, so many countries, its own systems of religion, power, and culture that were like nothing he¡¯d known. That he knew about so many of them. That if he tried to remember, he did. This wasn¡¯t a normal way of thinking. His was a mind given to strange circuits and loops, that held onto strange trivia like a sponge and went places other minds would not. They had called him ¡°gifted¡± in his previous life. He was sure of it. He¡¯d studied Physics in college (which was like going to the Imperial Academy, but for commoners), and later more advanced math, and even some soft sciences like finance ¡ª and he¡¯d been a voracious reader, absorbing books and their trivia like a sponge in water ¡ª though strangely enough, in none of his memories did he actually use most of that knowledge for anything at all. And yet something didn¡¯t make sense. He had been ¡°gifted¡±. Earth had been a paradise world. Disease had been conquered. Famine was a thing of the past. War was a distant rumor. So why had he been so miserable?
Whenever the Lord Reginald Granavale was at his estate, as opposed to schmoozing in the Imperial Capital, he would share dinners with Archmund. Normally, Archmund would eat alone, watched by the servants, after a day of tutelage in all the topics a young lord needed to know. Until now, Archmund had always looked forward to these dinners. Now, he wondered if he could hide his true self. ¡°Archie, my son,¡± said the Lord Granavale. ¡°Father,¡± Archmund said. The dinner was elaborate yet oddly quaint, almost simple. Steamed greens with butter sauce, white bread, and steak, rare. Archmund had taken this at face value before; now, he had so many questions. This was a meal fit for a noble house that was comfortable but not extraordinarily rich. Butter took hours to churn by hand but much less by machine, which suggested the kitchen staff could spare the time to do this or that there was a centralized industrial butter factory. White bread, similarly, meant someone could separate germ from wheat or that there was a machine to do so. And steak? That was a dead cow. One that a peasant family could use to turn grass into milk reliably for years on end. The food was a bit lacking in salt, however ¡ª far less than the ultraprocessed snacks of his previous life. Salt had been valuable enough that the Roman Empire, which men thought about daily, had paid wages in it; he wondered if that was true of this world¡¯s Empire as well. And it was unspiced. ¡°Are you enjoying the meal?¡± said his father. ¡°I spare no expense for you, my son.¡± ¡°Truly?¡± Archmund said. ¡°Archie?¡± Lord Granavale said, blinking, before breaking out into a beam. ¡°Whatever do you mean?¡± ¡°This amount of salt ¡ª I have no complaints with the flavor, but is this healthful or is this all we can afford?¡± ¡°Entirely health reasons,¡± said the Lord Granavale. ¡°In the Capital, the meals are loaded with salt and lard. Far too rich for my simple country tastes.¡± Archmund realized this was the first time he¡¯d asked an actual question of his father in years. And, if he stopped to think about it, he had been on the path to being a spoiled, pampered brat. The last son of Lord Granavale, the last hope of House Granavale, given every privilege from birth, endowed with the burden of his clan. No one in this estate or the neighboring towns would ever have told him ¡°no.¡±Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation. ¡°Do you want more salt?¡± said Lord Granavale. ¡°Would that make you happy? I can get you more salt.¡± ¡°How much would it cost us?¡± Archmund said. ¡°Pennies. A trifle. It¡¯s no large matter.¡± ¡°And if I wanted it for the rest of the year? Until I go to the Academy?¡± ¡°It would be fine!¡± ¡°What if I started asking for extravagance? Cakes for dinner, meat for breakfast, exotic spices at every meal.¡± ¡°There comes a time in every dutiful lord¡¯s life,¡± said the Lord Granavale, ¡°where he must learn temperance. Temperance, the virtue of moderation¡ª¡± ¡°So it would bankrupt us if I did,¡± Archmund interjected. ¡°Was it the spices?¡± ¡°Why would you think that?¡± said the Lord Granavale. His voice wasn¡¯t reproaching or scornful. It was curious. ¡°Meat, sugar, and eggs we can levy as a tax. Perhaps unfairly, but life is good enough in our lands that it wouldn¡¯t cause mass unrest. Spices we would have to import.¡± ¡°Did I teach you this?¡± said the Lord Granavale, in wonder. Archmund shut his mouth. Regardless of whether those memories had been delusions, they¡¯d given him instincts and intuitions that were correct. He wondered if he¡¯d said too much. He wondered if he¡¯d started talking like an unearthly child, someone far too wise for his years. It was certainly possible ¡ª perhaps those memories had been more than memories, but also behaviors, mannerisms, and tics. ¡°I¡¯ve always known you were a smart boy, Archie, but I¡¯m proud of you,¡± said the Lord Granavale. ¡°You¡¯ve got a keen eye and a keener mind. You¡¯ll find the Academy a breeze. Gods above, I might be able to abdicate early and leave the hopes of Granavale to you. I¡¯ve known it all along, but you have a gift.¡± And a cold, creeping chill wrapped around Archmund¡¯s heart. Yes, this was the world that awaited him. This was the role he was born for. This was his original fate. ¡°Tomorrow,¡± said the Lord Granavale, unaware of Archmund¡¯s increasing agitation, ¡°we should begin your training in earnest. What it means to be a lord, the full account of our holdings, and matters of policy and politics.¡± Yes, this was his duty and his burden. To live a life being tutored in the ways of the lordship. To go to the academy to find a wife suitable to rule besides him. To bounce between the city and the country begging for money and military support in the bad times. To have sons or daughters capable of carrying on the family name. And to die, content, with nothing having changed. In this world, that was the duty of ¡°gifted children¡±.
He remembered what it meant to be gifted in that previous life. Only children were ever labeled as ¡°gifted¡±. Children who, for some reason or another, exceeded their peers. Who from some accident of birth seemed smarter or stronger than those around them, and for that brief period of strength got to live blessed lives. They didn¡¯t have to practice. They didn¡¯t have to study. They could just succeed. But that never lasted. The gifted grew up faster than their peers, but rarely further. One day, inevitably, their peers grew to meet them. And the gifted children, who never had to practice or study because of an accident of birth, suddenly were just average. And not long after that, they would be surpassed, because everyone else had learned how to study and practice and compensate for their own weaknesses. And then they would fail. The prophesied greatness of their early years would come to nothing. At best, they could hope to be normal. He had failed. By the time he¡¯d been an adult, he had been so deeply tired. Completely and utterly burned out, and disillusioned with the world. Archmund was under no delusions this time around. He might¡¯ve been ¡°gifted¡± in his last life and ended up burned out because of it. He was still as sharp as ever, but it was flagrantly obvious that he was in the same boat. His major advantage was decades of memories from a previous life. But by definition the advantages granted by aged memories wouldn¡¯t last. Sure, he had the life experiences of a thirty-something-year-old ¡ª but in three decades, so would all of his peers, and an extra thirty wouldn¡¯t mean much. To make something of this life, he needed to seize this early advantage of precocious knowledge, and use it to build a life that he truly wanted.
Archmund''s Journal:
Year 0, Day 0. I remember my past life. I hated it. The normal future for me means being the Lord Granavale. Having a loveless political marriage for status and a mistress if my wife permits it. Spending all my time begging for Imperial funding. I would hate that too. Before, duty would compel me to accept that life. Now, I can imagine another way might be possible. But to find that way, I need to know more. And to remember.
Yet deep within the Guts of Hell and the Arched Vaults of Heaven, along the Axis Mundi that speared this and all other worlds, an entry in a great cosmic ledger shifted. Think of it as a library if you wish, and the System guiding it. A ¡°people management system¡±. A vaguely classist cosmic mechanism for separating the haves from the have-nots. Here is how Archmund¡¯s entry changed He would be seeing it sooner than he realized.
Archmund Granavale Lifespan: 9/90
Stat Value Titles Achievements Bound Items Relationships Skills
Strength 5 Granavale Heir (*new*) Reincarnated Memories N/A Lord Reginald Granvale, Father N/A
Dexterity 5 Lady Sophia Granavale, Mother (deceased)
Constitution 5 Amelia Granavale, elder sister (deceased)
Intelligence 5 Linus Granavale, elder brother (deceased)
Wisdom 5 Calla Granavale, elder sister (deceased)
Charisma 5
Luck 5
The Slow Road to Escape How do you keep your second chance at life from going the way of your first? For Archmund Granavale, that involved a temper tantrum and locking himself in his room. He was nine. He knew he could get away with it. Right now, he had one goal: Figure out what the fuck was going on. He remembered some snippets from his past life, though more and more were coming back. He wrote as much as he could down ¡ª in English, so no one else could read it. He had to reconcile what he knew from his past life with the circumstances of this life. And somehow he had to turn that into avoiding ¡°bad ends¡±: loveless political marriage, dying in a pointless war, or worst of all, rotting away in mediocrity in Granavale County until the end of time.
What were his chances of an untimely early death? House Granavale was in a comfortable position, for a two-member house. Their holding, Granavale County, was an insignificant county outside of the imperial core. It was not a breadbasket, a trade hub, or a crucial border. Its existence may as well have been a formality. He had a few options here: play the game of status and wealth to elevate the Granavale name through diplomacy, marriage, or other avenues of prestige, or abandon the title entirely and let it be absorbed by some other noble family. He could go to the untamed lands and become a monster hunter, which was a lucrative but dangerous job. But he had no skill with a sword, bow, or Magic Gem, nor any understanding of what that job would entail ¡ª because the Granavale lands were so safe. The House Granavale had lasted hundreds of years, but they had nothing on the pedigree of the Imperial Family, House Omnio, and were far poorer than the upstart Veneto, a merchant clan with several de facto trade monopolies and rumored underworld ties. House Omnio descended from Alexander Omnio I, more commonly known as Alexander the Conqueror. He¡¯d established the Omnio Empire, which was so successful that even now the country, continent, and known world were all called ¡®Omnio¡¯. Magic was real. In his old life it hadn¡¯t been. There was a University of Imperial Mages, which was insular, mysterious, and heavily regulated. He didn¡¯t know a lot about magic in this world. It could have been a party trick, a weapon of war, a closely guarded secret, or something utterly useless. It was annoying that he didn¡¯t know. That was something he had to change. One thing was for certain. He was not in a video game ¡ª at least not obviously. Magic spells didn¡¯t have clear ¡°mana costs¡±. He couldn¡¯t meditate to view a ¡°stat sheet¡± on the back of his eyelids. He couldn¡¯t clench his brain to open up an inventory screen. If he gazed up at the night sky, there was no ¡°perk tree¡± awaiting him in the constellations. If a System governed the world, it was hidden ¡ª for now. This was both comforting and frustrating. In his old world, he had no reason to believe that there was anything but random chaos governing everything. But this world had magic, which fundamentally changed the game. Even if he had to figure out how himself. In his past life he had studied financial markets. In those systems, you could make a lot of money by teasing out hidden patterns and making bets on them. Tease out the patterns well enough, and make the right bets, and you would end up rich. Suppose that physical strength, manual dexterity, innate intelligence, and wisdom, charisma, and luck were fundamental driving stats for every living creature in this universe ¡ª a common system in video games. It wouldn¡¯t make sense for a living, breathing world to function on a point-allocation system upon a discrete ¡°level up¡±. But it did make sense for one¡¯s skills and stats to increase naturally when used. Though perhaps he was just assuming this was how it should work given his knowledge of his old world. There was an extremely simple way to test if the world functioned on a game-like system where doing strength activities built strength, and intelligence-like activities built intelligence. Do a hundred push-ups a day to build strength, and if the world functioned on exponentially scaling game logic, over the course of a year he would become superheroically strong. If this didn¡¯t work, he would still be physically stronger from having done a hundred push-ups a day for a year. This was a strategy straight from the writings of an author in his old world, Cal Newport ¡ª a ¡°little bet¡±. Little bets were small, low-risk actions one could take with the possibility of huge payoffs if they were successful. He had heard that nobles were stronger and smarter than the peasantry. He¡¯d assumed this was natural before he¡¯d awoken, classist propaganda since he had, but now he wondered if it was simply an extension of resources and self-care. In his old world, the idle rich were able to take care of themselves, buying expensive cosmetics and health procedures and spending significantly more time in education. If this world functioned on the growth logic of games, then one would hear stories of impossible feats of strength by the nobility ¡ª unless they were deliberately repressed. He would have to track his personal progress. An untracked change could be illusory, wishful thinking of the mind. But he¡¯d remembered a framework from his last life called ¡°SMART goals¡± meant to make sure goals were achievable and not vague: specific, measurable, actionable, relevant, time-bound. Task #1: do 100 push-ups a day for a year. Track how long it takes to do them and how many are possible consecutively. Specific: 100 push-ups daily. Measurable: how long it takes to do them total and how many were possible consecutively. Actionable: it was, by definition, a physical action. Relevant: push-ups to train strength. Time-bound: he¡¯d do it for a year.This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version. That was a start for the physical side of things.
The second major point of order was magic. Magic pervaded society, yet hadn¡¯t transformed it into a post-scarcity utopia. Magic was rare if powerful yet common when weak. Magic was easy to use, hard to master. Magic was accessed through Gems. Archmund had one on his desk. It was about the size of his thumbnail, and it cost roughly a year¡¯s of a peasant¡¯s wage. It looked like a ruby, but was cut like a platonic tetrahedron, though not perfectly. He ran a finger over it. A faint electric hum, familiar yet brand new, flowed from a deep place in his soul through his finger to the Gem, which lit up with an orange candlelight. The Gem had a complex official name, but this one he¡¯d always called the Red Gem of Light. He felt a little more tired than he had a moment before. Doing magic always made him feel this way. His knowledge of magic was basic. As far as he knew, it was accessed solely through Gems. Gems came from the earth and the corpses of slain monsters. He didn¡¯t know what monsters were, just that they appeared in Dungeons and the frontier wilds, but it was probably worth learning more. Gems were rated on multiple dimensions. Density, size, and refinement of cut were the most basic, but Gemologists studied for decades to develop full understanding of Theoretical Gemology. He didn¡¯t understand why when simple metrics were stunningly effective: A denser, larger Gem would be more powerful than a smaller Gem. Refinement and cut were nuanced, though. The more faces a Gem had, the more refined the cut. The more refined the cut, the more powerful the magic. A few chips or mis-cuts would weaken the magic, but not shatter it. In fact, sometimes intentional flaws would be introduced to create weaker spells. There was a basic geometric innovation here. A square, a pentagon, a hexagon, a heptagon, and an octagon were all regular polygons. There was an argument from calculus. If you had a polygon, and you added more sides to it, it became more and more like a circle. In that sense, the regular polygon with infinite sides was a circle ¡ª though, since infinities were ugly to work with, strictly speaking the circle was the polygon as the limit of the number of sides approached infinity. If you made the analogy, then a perfectly spherical and polished smoothed Gem might be immensely powerful. If it wasn¡¯t already being done, why not? The spell or enchantment associated with a Gem depended on three basic things. Its ¡°element¡±, its density, and how it was cut. Any human could touch a magic Gem and charge it to release the spell it was enchanted with. That was the limit of his theoretical knowledge. Unfortunately, he didn¡¯t understand the practical side nearly as well either. Why did he feel more tired when he used Gems to cast spells? Was magic the normal kind of life energy that could be replenish food and was used for everyday tasks? Was magic drawn from a limited spiritual pool, and if he ran through it all would be never be able to use magic again? Or was magic something deeper, potentially tied to his soul, and doing too much magic could cause permanent damage? He didn¡¯t know, and didn¡¯t know if anyone knew. Magic was rare, even among nobles ¡ª the comfortable House Granavale held maybe ten Gems in their estate, across all their holdings. There were maybe fifteen known Gems in their entire County. He only got to have one at all because of how spoiled he was. Rough and less dense Gems were probably obtainable from the mines, but dense and refined Gems dropped from monster corpses, which allowed adventurers and monster slayers to get richer and more powerful, which allowed them to hunt more monsters, and so on. Was monster hunting the path to true power and freedom in this world? Perhaps. But then again, there was an equal argument for pious ascetic study: There were legends that when sages and wise men died, they would leave behind no bodies, only perfect and dense Gems. Task #2: Charge the Red Gem of Light to personal exhaustion over the course of the 100 days. Track how long it stays bright. Track how many days it takes to recover. Do this after the daily push-ups. Archmund''s Journal:
Year 0, Day 1. Push-ups: 100 in 1.5 hours Magic: Light lasts for 10 minutes It¡¯s so odd how I never questioned magic before, yet now I see all sorts of holes in it. What is magic? Does everyone have magic, or are nobles actually a separate species that can use magic? Why hasn¡¯t magic revolutionized society beyond the pseudo-18th-19th century environment I find myself in? I¡¯ve set two goals: one physical, one magical. If this is a game, governed by a hidden system, I should find myself becoming immensely powerful through level-grinding. But who can say if this is a game? Perhaps this is true reincarnation, like in Buddhism, and this is the realm of the hungry ghosts or the gods. Perhaps this is a physics-based simulation instead of a game, so grinding won¡¯t work. Perhaps this is all a vivid delusion brought upon by surviving the Crylaxan plague ¡ª but that doesn¡¯t explain how my knowledge of ¡°English¡± is so internally self-consistent. Perhaps this is all a dream. The worst kind of literary cop-out imaginable. The Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi once dreamt of being a butterfly. When he woke up, he asked himself ¡°was I a philosopher dreaming of being a butterfly, or am I a butterfly dreaming of being a philosopher?¡± I will never know, until the illusion breaks. Until then, I must live as if this is my last and final chance.
The day after Archmund began his exercises, his stats, in that distant and hidden sacred library, updated.
Archmund Granavale Lifespan: 9/91
Stat Value Titles Achievements Bound Items Relationships Skills
Strength 5->6 Granavale Heir Reincarnated Memories (*new*) Ruby of Light Lord Reginald Granvale, Father N/A
Dexterity 5 Lady Sophia Granavale, Mother (deceased)
Constitution 5->6 Amelia Granavale, elder sister (deceased)
Intelligence 5 Linus Granavale, elder brother (deceased)
Wisdom 5->6 Calla Granavale, elder sister (deceased)
Charisma 5
Luck 5