Chapter 1
Tim's POV
I died at forty doing something embarrassingly ordinary. Just a crossing signal, a delivery truck running late, and then nothing.
Then screaming.
The screaming of a newborn, which I apparently was now.
The first weeks were the worst. Not because of the hunger or the cold or the helplessness of an infant body, though all of that was wretched enough, but because of my mind, fully intact, trapped behind eyes that couldn't focus and limbs that couldn't obey. I lay in a wooden crib in a room that smelled of straw and woodsmoke and too many children, and I thought:
"medieval. I've been reborn into a medieval world, just my luck"
No running water. No electricity. No sanitation.
That last one terrified me more than anything else.
I had read enough history to know what killed people in pre-modern societies. Not war, mostly. Not bandits. It was the invisible things. Contaminated water. Unwashed hands. Shared cups. Children died from things that a basic bar of soap could have prevented, and soap here, real soap, aren't made yet.
So before I could walk, I had already made my first decision.
"i would stay clean."
It started small. Refusing to put my hands in my mouth. Turning my face away from other children who were coughing. When I was old enough to sit up on my own, I would drag my hands along the cleanest surface I could find, the inside of my own shirt, mostly, before touching anything near my face. The caretaker thought I had a nervous habit.
By the time I could walk, I had developed a full routine. Each morning I would find a basin of water, whatever was available, the fresher the better, and wash my hands and face before eating. I wiped down my eating bowl with the hem of my shirt. I drank from the communal ladle last, after everyone else, because I'd watched enough of the other children wipe their noses with their hands directly before touching it.
I knew I probably looked insane. A toddler refusing to play in the dirt, scrubbing his hands obsessively, examining his food before eating it like a suspicious old man. The other children thought I was strange. The caretaker clearly didn't know what to make of me.
But I didn't get sick, soooo great victory.
In four years, while half the orphanage cycled through fevers and stomach ailments and the occasional bout of something worse, I remained mostly healthy. I grew steadily. My mind, already that of a forty-year-old, catalogued everything, the layout of the building, the rhythms of the staff, the names and personalities of every child around me.
I kept my head down. I didn't draw unnecessary attention. I kept to myself.
And on a grey autumn morning a few weeks after my fifth birthday, I finally heard the name of the city.
One of the older boys had gotten into a fight near the gate and come back bleeding, muttering about the guards in E-Rantel's lower ward being worse than dogs.
"E-Rantel."
I stopped breathing for a moment.
I knew that name.
Not from this life. From a screen, from a manga volume, from a story about an undead overlord who would one day descend on this world and reshape it entirely. I was not in a nameless medieval setting. I was in *Overlord*. A world where the most powerful beings were not kings or dragons but players from another world entirely, wearing the bodies of monsters, commanding armies that could level nations.
And Ainz Ooal Gown was coming, i need to know the time i was in, so i asked my caretaker how old was the first prince.
"he was born a few years ago"
I sat very still for a long time after that.
Then I finished washing my hands and thought about what to do next.
Mara's POV age 12, resident of the orphanage for three years.
Tim was weird. Everyone knew it.
Not mean-weird, not scary-weird. Just *odd* in a way that was hard to explain to anyone who hadn't seen it themselves. He didn't play in the yard the way normal children did. While the rest of them dug in the mud near the fence or chased each other through the dormitory, Tim would sit somewhere dry and quiet and "Watched".
The hand-washing was the strangest part. Every single morning, without fail, before he touched his breakfast bowl. Mara had asked him about it once, maybe a year ago.
He'd looked at her with those calm eyes and said, "Dirty hands make you sick."
"Everyone's hands aren't dirty, the feet are dirty" she'd told him.
"hands are more dirty than feet" he'd said, and gone back to washing his hands.
She'd thought about that more than she expected to.
The funny thing was, he wasn't wrong. Tim never got the stomach sickness that swept through every winter. He didn't catch the coughing fever that had kept half the dormitory bedridden for two weeks last spring. While children around him sniffled and burned with heat and sometimes got carried off to the healer's corner, Tim remained steady and quiet and *fine*.
Mara had started watching which surfaces he avoided touching. She'd started washing her hands before meals too, though she didn't tell anyone why.
She wasn't sure Tim had noticed. But once, at breakfast, he had pushed the cleanest portion of bread toward her without saying a word.
Sister Edna's POV, head caretaker.
In seventeen years of running St. Linel's orphanage, Edna had seen every variety of child the streets of E-Rantel could produce. Angry ones, broken ones, feral ones who bit. She had seen children who refused to eat and children who hoarded food under their mattresses for months. She knew the language of many damaged young minds.
Tim did not fit any category she knew.
He had arrived as a newborn, left at the gate in the usual way, no note, no name. She had named him herself, something plain and forgettable, the way she named all of them. A practical mercy. Names that were too fine only made the children want things they couldn't have.
But Tim, from almost the very beginning, had been *watchful* in a way that unsettled her without quite frightening her. Infants stared. That was normal. But Tim stared as though he was *thinking, and by the time he was two, she had mostly stopped talking when she was in the same room as him, because she had the persistent and irrational feeling that he understood everything she said.
The cleanliness rituals had begun early. She'd tried, at first, to discourage him, pulling him away from basins, scolding him for obsessing over his hands. But the boy never listened, and i never saw him fall ill. Not once. In a building where sickness moved like weather, seasonal and inevitable, Tim was an island of unnerving health, i was starting to think that boy wasn't human.
She told herself it was practical. A healthy child was less trouble.
She didn't examine the thought any further than that.
The morning he went still in the yard, the day she later marked as the one where something shifted behind his eyes, she had been watching from the doorway. She saw the older boy come in bleeding, heard the name of the city pass through the yard, and saw Tim stop completely. Not freeze in fear. Just *stop, the way he stopped for a whole hour.
Then he'd sat down calmly and continued with his morning like nothing was wrong.
Creepy little freak.
Tim stats ( Tim can't see his stats).
lvl 1