Modern

"What are you, stupid?"

I looked at the person in front of me as they asked me this. Once again, I was completely unaware of a common fact in this new world. I suppose to understand this though, I will have to explain some events that happened earlier in the day.

I was traveling with my classmates something after school when one of them said they needed to call their mother to tell them they would be home late. I simply asked how he expected her to hear him yelling from across the town and I got called stupid.

It was common knowledge on my world that in order to call someone you used a middle stone. On this world though, they had something called a cell phone.

Though I suppose this leads a whole new question to be answered. I am from another world. No, not some technology filled world flung into the middle ages with magic and dungeons. I was from a world with magic and dungeons and got flung into a world with technology. The only similar thing was that I kept my memories.

I remember how I died. I saw fighting the SSS class lava serpent. My party mage who was SS rank had one job, continuously cast the immunity to heat spell. Apparently this was too much for her and I was killed by the lava as I swam through it. Myself and 3 other fighters were in that damn lava for over 30 minutes swinging at the serpent, and we ended up dying because our mage got tired. I'll never believe it when someone says they have a mana capacity of 40,000 again.

Not that it matters though, because this world does not have mana. I realized that fact when I tried to cast a simple light spell. Only a few months later did I find out that I was inside my new mother's womb, though the fact persist. No mana. More specifically, no mana in the atmosphere. Mana still exist in the body, so I have going for me, which is nice.

Exactly how nice it was, I did not find out until something very un-nice happened. My mother, father, and I were taking a peaceful walk downtown one evening when it happened. Alright, I was still about 4 months old so my mother was carrying me, but we really were downtown.

From my limited vision, it looked like one of the self-propelled horseless carriages was hit with an explosive fireball spell. The resulting impact from the spell caused a chain event with the self-propelled horseless carriage and caused a huge area around it to become bathed in fire and parts from the self-propelled horseless carriage.

I instinctively augmented my body with my internal mana, which did not change much from previous life, in fact I think I even had more, and the shrapnel and fire did not effect me too much. I know what you are thinking, if a car bomb, as I have learned what it was called, did not hurt me how did the lava? Well, my body augmenting only protects me from flames up to 500 degrees. The car bomb was for sure hotter than that, but because of my mother diligently protecting me, the temperature was kept low.

On my world, we would have someone run by and start casing Cure on everyone. Maybe if we were lucky someone might know Cura and everyone would live, but on this world nothing is so simple. People came by and put everyone into more of those self-propelled horseless carriages like the one that just exploded but looking a little different, and then took us to another building.

I would really like to thank Mrs. Otter, because she and her husband took me to live with them after that. Nobody expressly said it to me, but I knew my new parents had died. Mr and Mrs Otter had an orphanage in the northern part of the state where they took in children from the mega city I was living in. I say mega city because compared to my world where the largest city had about 50,000 people, this one with over 1 million was unbelievable.

Being 4 months old at the time, I had no choice but to lay around all day in the orphanage. I learned a few things there, that farming was no longer a majority occupation, and people could take time from one day and add it to another. Image my shock when I heard Mr Otter was a genuine time mage, or a Day Trader as he called it.

My knowledge of time magic was minimal, and I was never able to use many of it on my world because of the universal mana requirement. I unfortunately only had minor worldly mana and large amounts of soul mana. I could easily list the spells I could cast, Fire, Freeze, Light, and a special one I made myself, Augment. The first three spells were essential to any adventurer. Cook food, freeze food, light caves. The fourth spell, Augment, transferred my soul mana into an object. Theoretically it would work on another person, but in practice it would interfere with their own mana and defuse.

I learned a few years later that Mr Otter was in fact not a time mage, just a bookkeeper of sorts. Sort of a letdown, but Mr Otter was the last person I suspected of being a mage in this world.

During my time with the Otter's and the other orphans, I would say it was uneventful. There was not very much to do and nobody fit into any cliche's. There was no bully or overly popular girl. The 8 of us got alone very well, unlike some orphanages where the mother would yelling at the children and the children would choose one of their own to blame everything on.

When did I go to an orphanage before? Back on my old world I had to subjugate a demon that had possessed a child in an orphanage. The head mother was yelling at the top of her lungs as I came in through the wall I smashed down. The demon possessed kid was having invisible hands pinch the old woman's skin and pull it off in chunks. After killing subjugating the demon, I asked the other kids why he was possessed. They didn't tell me anything, so I can only assume they were the cause. One Cura from a local mage and everything was fixed.

Though it might have been because I was not even a year old that we got along so great. However, once I turned 1 year old, that was no longer the case. In my previous world, there was a difficulty system that scaled to a persons ability, and based on luck. I must have the worst possible luck though, because my difficulty started at normal at birth. That might seem really normal like the name says, but most babies had peaceful as their difficulty. One year after birth the difficulty is redetermined. Most move to easy or normal at that stage. I moved to hard.

The next change was at 5 years old, it became very hard. Then at 12 years old it became expert. At 21 my difficulty was at master. This was as high as most people got, but not me. The next difficulty change was at 42 years old and it became insane. The next rumored difficulty change was at 72, but I never got to that. 40,000 my ass.

Effects from difficulty increasing was usually more monster spawns, higher level monsters, and slower regeneration. Fortunately for me, body mana regeneration is almost instant, it just has a cap to how strong it can get unlike world mana which is limited to the mana of the user. At insane difficulty, monsters spawned constantly and at their max levels, my regeneration was almost nothing, and if not for having trained my entire life and for having a body mana pool the size of an ocean, I would have never survived.

I just wondered how this body was fine. I was not being attacked by monsters, and I knew my difficulty was reevaluated at my second birth, so what gives? I had a bit of a theory, but when I turned 1 year old it was proven.

It was the winter after I turned one year old and I was trying to huddle with the other 8 orphans. It was very cold in the northern part of the country, and without fire spells I had no idea how to heat the room we were in. I however was able to augment my body to stay warm, but I didn't want anyone to get jellous of me so I didn't. At least at first.

Later in the night we were all moved by Mr and Mrs Otter to the center room of the house we were staying in. We moved everything out of the room and took in as much firewood as we could carry, then we blocked off the doorways as much as we could. All the sheets we had were taken into the room and many of them were nailed to the top of the door to create a seal. A fire was lit in the fireplace using some otherworldly method and we all huddled around it.

A few hours later and we had ran out of wood. None of us could sleep with the fear of not waking back up, but a few of us gave up. There was really nothing we could do, save for using our own clothes and the few blankets we had with us as fuel. We were down to a blanket per person and no more sheets or otherwise burnable cloth that we were not wearing.

Sure enough, a few hours later I was the only one in the house left. I could survive until minus 150 degrees, so I was fine with the minus 60 that was sweeping through the house. A few days of having nothing to eat and the cold being extremely bad, the temperature became normal. Due to it being so cold, I just put the bodies of my former family members in the corner.

During my time as an adventurer, many people close to me died. They might have been strong or had friends in high places, but at the bottom of a fire eating gorilla dungeon, even a prince dies the same as a slave. My friends were no different, but that was why I developed the Augment spell. Without world mana though, it was worthless.

The next day after the warmth returned someone came by the house and discovered what happened. Being only a year old, I was not allowed to live in the house by myself. The property was given to some relative of Mr. Otter and I was taken in by a friend of Otter's nearby.

Nobody knew anything about the temperature drop, and everyone else was fine. I couldn't very well ask people what happened, but from what I was able to listen to, it was like a 300 foot circle around the house became extremely cold. The only catalyst for this I could think of was... my difficulty. This world did not have monsters, so maybe it was being supplemented by environmental effects? That was my thought at least.