An Unbound Soul

Time marched on, soon reaching the depths of winter. Or rather, 'xopvis', as they called it here. I was two seasons old. I could crawl! I could... well, maybe claiming I could talk would be pushing it a bit, but I could kinda make intelligible noises. Mum had really taken to her teacher persona and Dad has been adding his own efforts where possible, and as a result I'd gained a far better understanding of the local language and the world I'd found myself in.

The second most important thing from the past season was that I'd found out why my parents weren't completely freaked. Apparently, traits like [Intelligent] and [Genius] existed that gave large intelligence boosts. Even with that, I still thought they were being very over trusting, but I wasn't going to argue, given that I was the beneficiary here. It also raised the question of whether I should tell them the truth. I decided against it for now; I didn't want to say anything to suggest that I wasn't really 'theirs'. I didn't know how they'd take it, given that a similar thought had apparently spooked Mum when I was born, and I'd had more than one nightmare about being found out and abandoned. Maybe I was worrying over nothing, but as a baby, I was utterly incapable of fending for myself. I could always tell them later, whereas telling them now wasn't something I could undo if it went wrong.

It wasn't something I'd thought about before, but their casual blame of traits confirmed that the status screen I could see was a worldwide thing and not some sort of special power I'd gained from my reincarnation. The existence of skills and traits was common knowledge, gifted by something they called the System. Traits apparently formed from their owner's personality, and popped up over the first year of life, after which they'd only change in response to serious life events that impacted the psyche of their owners.

Except that 'year' wasn't a perfect translation. Their word for year was the same as what they used for something that repeats over a long period. A direct translation might be 'cycle'. The same translation quirk extended to all of their units of time. Their smallest unit employed the same word used to describe a single move in a game. 'Turn' would be a good literal translation, if not just 'move' itself. The next one up used the same word as to describe a whole phase of a game. I'd translate that directly as 'round', but it had the same meaning as cricket's 'over' or baseball's 'innings'. Both of those ridiculously game-ish sounding names apparently came from the System itself.

There was no Babylonian influence here, and everything was base ten through and through: there were a hundred turns to a round. After that there were a hundred rounds to a bell, named not because of the System but because towns literally rung a bell once a bell to let everyone know the time. Although I assumed 'bell' based on Earth practices. 'Gong' or something else entirely might be more appropriate. I'd have to wait until I saw one. Out here in the sticks, knowing the exact time was largely irrelevant and just looking at the position of the sun in the sky was sufficient, so we had no bell to ring.

Then there were ten bells to a day. The word for day was the same as that for something which has completed a single rotation. 'Revolution' would be a good translation. My parents didn't know any astronomy, and very little geography, but using a word like that suggested the planet was the traditional shape and spun normally, and that if I went for a long walk, I wasn't going to fall over an edge.

Beyond that, there were ten revolutions to a week, which seemed to be its own unique word not taken from anywhere, and four-hundred-and-twenty-eight revolutions to a cycle, split into four one-hundred-and-seven day seasons. Despite the love of base ten, they couldn't do anything about the rotation rate of their planet, resulting in an extra part-week tacked onto the end of each season to make up the extra seven days.

Despite the overlapping terminology, I kept referring to things as seconds, minutes, hours, days and years. Thinking in terms of turns and rounds was even more uncomfortable than dealing with ten hours to a day or a hundred seconds to a minute.

While a day here was longer than I was used to, with no way of measuring Earth time, there was no way to be sure of the exact difference. If I was forced to guess, I'd say days were approximately twenty-seven Earth hours in length. That resulted in hours that were nearly three times the length and minutes that were more than fifty percent longer. Coincidentally, a local second ended up almost the same length as an Earth one, with the base ten system of time almost cancelling out the longer days.

With the longer days and extra days in each year, a local year was considerably longer than an Earth one, but again, an exact measurement was impossible. I thought I could double check the difference from lifespans, but levels, traits and skills apparently messed with it so much that a 'normal' human lifespan ranged from sixty years to over a hundred. Not to mention there was no reason for a 'human' here to be biologically identical to an Earth human even without the System. If days really were twenty-seven hours, the result would be years that were about thirty percent longer than I was used to.

Money followed the usual fantasy trope of copper, silver, gold and platinum coins. Each step up was worth a hundred times the previous, but there were also large versions of each coin worth ten times the regular version. I'd seen a large copper coin, and it wasn't anything close to ten times the weight of a small one, so value couldn't be based on the actual metal content. In that case, I had no idea what prevented something like melting down a few small copper coins and smelting them into a single large one. I tried to ask, but with the language barrier, I wasn't able to successfully explain the concept of counterfeiting. Maybe there were magical watermarks.

Silver coins weren't in regular use in the village, and it didn't sound like a single gold coin existed anywhere around here, so we were certainly on the poorer side of society, not that anyone seemed to mind.

Weight, volume and distance all used the same word for their measurement, and it translated literally as 'unit', something which I foresaw causing great confusion in the future. Again, they were all System defined. There was no differentiation between weight and mass. I'd not seen any sign of advanced science here, so I guessed no-one had done the experiment of weighing something at the bottom and top of a tall mountain. Or maybe gravity just doesn't work the same way here, and anyone doing the experiment would find them weighing exactly the same.

All this learning granted me a couple of soul points via [Curious], as well as a level up. Aside from granting another soul point, the level up didn't appear to do anything. I hadn't had the levelling process explained to me yet, so I wasn't sure what was going on there. I'd been loath to start asking about the subject in case details of [Abnormal Soul] came out. And alas, despite having soul points, I'd not been able to get any skills. Trying just gave the same message each time.

Unable to access soul point store due to soul being in flux.

I really hoped that related to the first year of life thing, and that once I'd collected my final set of traits, the store would open up. On the other hand, if it was a side effect of [Abnormal Soul], I was going to be angry. And stuck.

The only other System gain I'd made was another point to each of my physical stats, courtesy of all the exercise I'd been doing. Health and stamina caps were based on endurance plus five, while mana was intelligence plus five, so now I had a little more stamina. I was still sleeping a lot, but I was only a half-year-old baby. I was doing well!

And talking about doing well, by far the most important thing from the past season was that I'd been able to eat some solid foods. My breastfeeding phase would soon be consigned to my dark history, never to be spoken of again! Alas, I'd not been permitted to use the toilet yet. Until such a time as I could stand, crawling around the bathroom had been deemed unhygienic, however intelligent I was, so I was still suffering the indignity of nappies. Oh, and there was thankfully no slime wriggling in the toilet. It was another magic stone that breaks down waste. And everything else, apparently, needing to be mounted on some sort of special platform to avoid decomposing its way through the floor. It actually sounded far more dangerous than a slime would be, but had the advantage that I wasn't going to worry about it jumping out of the toilet and up my bum while I was sitting on it. Also, they were apparently quite slow acting, so it wasn't as if my hand would dissolve instantly if I dipped it in.

Today, Mum had been putting extra effort into cooking. Not for us, but for Clana. What goes around comes around, and just like the village helped out Mum when she became a new mother, now it was our turn to help out. Well, I said 'our', but obviously I couldn't do anything other than look adorable. I did at least get to come along for the ride. This was the first time I'd got to leave the house in a while, wrapped up in so many layers of furry blanket that I looked like I'd been eaten by a giant tribble.

Clana's husband was called Camus, and it was him that opened the door. Unlike Clana's neon ginger, his hair was pitch black. Like Clana, he had a pair of feline ears atop his head, and a long, furred tail. Humans weren't alone on this planet, and these people weren't playing dress-up or engaging in magical body-mods. They were a different race entirely, known as beastkin. Or, more specifically, catkin in this family's case.

Camus may have been catkin, but at over two metres tall, heavily muscled and with a long scar running from his hairline to his chin, he lost any qualifications to be called cute, despite the best efforts of his black furred ears and tail. Unlike Clana, he had fuzzy fur running over his hands and up his arms. Maybe his feet were the same, but I'd never seen him without his long trousers and boots. The pair of them looked in their late twenties, by Earth standards, quite a lot older than my own parents, leaving me to wonder why they'd waited so long before having a kid. Given the poor community, perhaps there had been issues with having one earlier? Or maybe they'd only recently got together, or, given that they weren't human, it was possible they aged differently.

"Good afternoon, Camus. Managing to survive over here?"

"Just barely. I wish our Cluma was as well behaved as yours. Afternoon Lucy, Peter."

I did my best to wave, managing to shift the pile of blankets by the smallest fraction. So their little one was Cluma? Did all catkin have two syllable names starting with C, or were this family just particularly unimaginative? Mum stepped indoors with me. I'd never been inside their house before, but it turned out to be pretty much the same as ours. The layout and even most of the furniture were identical. They didn't have all the spools of thread and half finished garments lying around that we did, but they did have a few potted plants growing next to the window and their worktop space was larger.

Clana was sitting in a chair away from the sunlight, carrying the sleeping Cluma in her arms. Cluma was wrapped in a blanket much as I was, with only her head on display. She had a full head of short, dark orange hair that extended up the backs of her cat-like ears. The front side of her ears were brighter, closer to Clana's hair colour. Aside from the ears, the rest of her that was visible looked human, complete with the wrinkly face of a newborn. Not cute yet, but she'd get there before too long.

"She looks well behaved at the moment."

"Hah, just you wait till she wakes up."

Mum started laying out dinner. I still hadn't had a chance to sample Clana's cooking, but it certainly beat out Mum's in terms of smell. Didn't that mean that by 'helping' we were actually providing a downgrade here? To be fair, Clana did look very tired, so I was sure she appreciated the extra helping hand. Clana deposited Cluma into a cot, and everyone sat down at the table. I was released from my blanket prison and sat on Mum's lap.

It was only a couple of minutes before Cluma woke up and immediately started screaming.

Both Clana's and Camus's ears instantly drooped in perfect synchronisation. So this was a more normal baby, then? I used to cry when I needed to attract attention and I was literally incapable of doing anything else, but I was pretty sure I never made a noise like that. Yet another reason for why I was such an idiot for believing I was fooling anyone.

"Already? I swear she'd only just fallen asleep."

"It's your turn this time, dear."

"Let me comfort her. Given how much I lucked out with Peter, it's only fair I get some of the proper experience."

I was handed off to Camus. I'd be fine if they just left me on the floor, but I guess that would have been considered bad manners or something. Mum picked up Cluma, checked there was no obvious reason why she was crying, then started making soothing noises to no visible effect whatsoever. If she behaved like that whenever she was awake, it was no wonder that Clana looked so sleep deprived. It took ten minutes to get her back to sleep, before Mum could resume eating her now cold food.

We wandered back home following our outing. This village was primarily human, with a significant beastkin minority, but I'd heard Mum talk about elves living in the nearby forest. Maybe I'd get to visit them at some point. Apparently, there were lots of other non-human sentient races living in this world too. I looked forward to meeting them all. Humans were boring by comparison. I'd already met more than enough humans in my past life. In fact, it was a fairly common isekai trope that the reincarnated individual would be born as a gender-swapped cat-girl or fox-girl or similar. I wouldn't exactly call myself jealous, but I couldn't deny being curious about what it would have been like. Maybe there's such a thing as transformation magic?

ding

Uh-oh. With some trepidation, I prodded at my previous minute of memory, trying to come up with some explanation for that notification that didn't involve my weird thoughts about cat-girls. There was nothing. Squinting my eyes as if that would offer some sort of protection, I fearfully opened up the message.

New trait acquired: [Xenophilia]

[Xenophilia] - You are attracted to the exotic. Provides 1 bonus point to charisma. (Rank 1)

Drat. Guess I couldn't be lucky all the time. This time, I really did pick up something strange.