Chapter 7: Reinhart Castle [2]
Alex POV -- Age: 1 Year, 3 Months
There is a certain cruelty in being trapped in an infant's body as an adult.
Not because I am helpless, incapable of walking, coherently speaking, or pouring my own cup of water. I acquiesced to all of this in the first month. The real cruelty was much more subtle and maddening. It was boring.
When you have the eyes, brains, and power of mind of a twenty-six-year-old web novelist, the memories of a world you have spent five years building, and you are trapped in a crib with sixteen hours of the day surrounded by people who talk to you in cooing, high-pitched voices reserved for puppies and tax deductions, you start to lose certain things. Patience. Dignity.
"Day four hundred and twelve of my imprisonment," I mumbled, staring at the ceiling mural of a silver dragon curled around the peak of a mountain. The agenda of the day is to pretend to struggle with the spoon. Let Marcus feel useful. Observe the spy. Don't really quote a maid to Confucius by accident and cause her to pass out from shock."
I had a system. This is a beautiful system. For the last 15 months, I have played it like a chess grandmaster, playing against pigeons.
The spoon was also important. I had calculated, using the Writer's Mind passive skill, and after about three weeks of observation, that any evidence of supernatural motor control would result in an immediate report to my father.
Garrick Reinhart loved his son with a ferocity rivaling that of his love of cleaving things in half. If he thought I was developing at an impossible pace, he would either A) beam with pride and proclaim it to the whole kingdom or B) demand to personally supervise my physical training at age one.
Neither option is acceptable. Option A exposes me. Option B is that my father will attempt to train a toddler to wield a greatsword, and I will die in a bizarre manner, the safest household in the kingdom.
[Ding!]
[Skill: Acting -- Passive Observation Mode Active]
[Alert: Target Entity 'Martha' -- Abnormal Behavior Detected]
My eyes tracked left. Just barely. Just enough to appear to be a baby distracted by dust motes.
Martha- Quiet, spy Martha -
"I'll just fold the linen here and certainly not memorize the Duke's schedule."
She was in the corner of the nursery. She folded my blankets.
This was normal. What was not normal was the small, flat crystalline disc she had squashed to the inside of her apron pocket, and angled slightly toward my crib.
"A recording runestone, Tier 2 Intelligence Crystal, if I had to guess, he said. The Royal Family's intelligence division uses them to keep records of the nobility. In Volume 4, Chapter 88, it is written in a footnote that I doubt seventeen people have ever read. And yet here it is."
There was absolute calmness on Martha's face. Professionally blank. She was good. If it were not for her background as a royal spy, I would not have seen anything suspicious.
The question was, What was she documenting?
I suspected that the answer was everything. The Reinhart family's daily routine: Garrick's training schedule, Lillian's current magical capacity and - increasingly - the disturbing reports of a baby who held his head up at one week old, followed moving objects with a "warrior's focus" at three months and at least twice caught apparently reading the spines of books in the West Library before anyone noticed he could see that far.
"I need to be more careful. This is not only about Martha. The Royal Family currently has two camps: the Crown Prince and the Second Prince.They both want Reinhart's military might on their side. Both are watching the house. If they figure out I'm special before I'm old enough to protect myself or make my own political position, I'm a card for them to play."
I let out a long, theatrical baby yawn, with my small fists up and eyes scrunched. Very convincing. I had practiced.
Across the room, Martha relaxed almost imperceptibly. The angle of the crystal was varied.
"Good. That's right. Nothing to see here. Just a normal baby who stares at ancient mana theory scrolls for two hours without blinking once in a while?"
Reinhart Castle had a morning routine that was a clockwork miracle.
Marcus arrived at exactly six o'clock, thirty seconds before the magic dawn lamp by my crib changed from night amber to morning white.
He bowed, and announced the weather with the gravity of a man reporting the conditions on the battlefield, and started to coordinate the morning staff with a succession of silent hand gestures, which I had gradually deciphered over the previous year.
The index finger is raised, and the warmed milk is brought to the mouth. Two fingers horizontal: start preparing the bath.
A slow wave going downwards: the Duchess is resting, keeping the noise below a certain level.
His right hand was flat, tapped once against his left wrist: the Duke had already gone to the training grounds and was already training.
"Marcus has created a whole battlefield sign language of how to control a baby's morning schedule."
I find this very impressive and slightly terrifying as well. He is absolutely wasted on diaper duty.
Liya, the Head Maid, went in at six - twelve. She moved through the room as all highly trained assassins do with their bodies, taking up the room, marking every exit, cataloguing every potential threat, and causing the younger maids to become extremely nervous just by being near them.
Sarah, the clumsy one with the glasses, broke a decorative vase the minute Liya walked in.
The vase was caught by Liya's left hand without her looking at it. Sarah made a noise like a mouse who found a cat in its hole.
Nina the gossip said something to Sarah that I was fairly sure was "she does that on purpose to remind us she can kill us."
"She does that on purpose, absolutely does that."
An unexpected event occurred during feeding.
My mother was late.
This was not alarming. Lillian Reinhart has had both good and bad days since her birth. The curse had been removed from her body, the womb curse that had stolen three children before me, but the price of the Soul Link Ritual had been paid in full.
Her mana veins were scored like rivers re-carved by floods. On bad days, even channeling enough mana to light a candle made her hands tremble.
On good days, she sat with me in the library and read aloud from magical theory texts; her voice was steady and warm, she smelled like jasmine and silver ink, and I let myself forget, just for a little while, that I was supposed to be maintaining emotional detachment from fictional characters.
'She is not a fictional character anymore,' said the part of me that had been awake at three in the morning, small fists pressed to the wooden bars of my crib, listening to her cough down the hall.
'She hasn't been for a long time.'
However, she was late that morning.
When she arrived, twenty-three minutes after the scheduled time, I noticed three things immediately.
First, her silver hair was immaculate and pinned carefully, which meant she had help.
She had not done it herself. Her hands remained unsteady.
Second, her emerald eyes were slightly brighter than usual. Not with health. With the specific, artificial brightness of a person who has applied a small mana-enhancement charm to appear well in front of people who are worried about her.
'Mother. You are literally using your already depleted mana reserves to trick your own son into thinking you are fine. That is both the most loving and the most infuriating thing I have ever witnessed.'
Third, and most importantly, she was carrying a book I had not seen before. Old and leather-bound, the spine cracked and re-glued at least twice.
The title was worn away to almost nothing, but my enhanced vision courtesy of fourteen months of 10x nutritional absorption and whatever the 'High Human Variant' racial trait was doing to my developing optics caught three words of the original lettering:
Vein Reconstruction Theory.
[Ding!]
[Writer's Mind — Cross-Reference Active]
[Novel Memory: 'Vein Reconstruction Theory' — Referenced in Original Novel, Volume 6, Chapter 201]
[Context: Rare alchemical text] Lost in the original timeline during the Mage Tower's burning. One known copy survived in the Elf Queen's personal archive.]
'That book should not exist here. Not in this timeline. Not at this point in the story. The Mage Tower does not burn for another 12 years. This means that this copy came from somewhere else. This means that the mother has been conducting her own research. Which means she's been quietly fighting to fix herself this entire time, and she hasn't told Father, and she is sitting across from me right now pretending everything is fine while holding what might be the key to her own recovery—'
I knocked my milk cup off the table.
The sound of it hitting the floor was a perfect, resonant crash that filled the entire breakfast room with its echo.
Every head turned. Liya's hand went instinctively to the small knife she kept in her sleeve.
Marcus's monocle nearly popped out of his eye. Sarah knocked over her own tray. Nina gasped. Martha catalogued everything with perfect Royal spy calm.
My mother's eyes were on me.
I stared back. My tiny face was arranged in what I had calculated to be my most effective 'curious and harmless' expression — wide eyes, slightly open mouth, head tilted. The expression of a child who has just discovered gravity and is delighted by this new information.
But my gaze remained fixed on her. And for just a moment, one single, unguarded moment,I let myself drop the performance.
I looked at the book she was holding.
I looked back at her.
I looked at the book again.
Lillian Reinhart remained still.
She was a genius. A High Elf descendant with a mana IQ that ranked her among the top twenty mages born in the last two centuries, despite her current limitations.
She had spent a year watching me with her focused attention of a scholar who suspected that the data she was collecting were profoundly important.
She looked at her fifteen-month-old son.
Her fifteen-month-old son looked pointedly and repeatedly looked at the ancient forbidden alchemical text she was carrying.
Very slowly, Lillian closed the book, pressed it flat against her lap, and covered it with the folds of her dress.
Then she smiled at me, the same warm, practiced, 'everything is fine' smile that she had been wearing all morning.
I smiled back.
'We are going to have a very interesting conversation, Mother, when I can actually speak in full sentences. I give it three months.'
[Ding!]
[Quest Updated: 'The Restoration of the Reinhart Dukedom Glory']
[New Sub-Quest Unlocked: 'The Hidden Researcher']
[Objective: Discover the extent of Duchess Lillian's private research. Assess whether the path she is pursuing is safe or carries hidden risks.]
[Hint: In the original novel, one character pursued the Vein Reconstruction Theory and succeeded. Another pursued it and died in the process. The difference was a single ingredient.]
'...Of course it was. I wrote that.'
I reached for the second milk cup with both hands, gripped it with the slightly too steady control of a child who was trying very hard to be appropriately clumsy, and drank deeply.
'Okay. Therefore, the following situation arises. My mother is secretly researching a procedure that could either completely restore her or kill her, and she is doing it alone because she does not want to worry my father, who is already running himself into the ground trying to rebuild the aura capacity he spent on me. And they are both, separately, quietly destroying themselves out of love for a baby who is quietly scheming to save them both.'
'I really did make this family's backstory too tragic.' My past self should be ashamed.'
I finished my milk with great dignity.
'Right then. Three months to achieve coherent speech. Let's accelerate.'
[Ding!]
[Host Determination Detected — New Training Parameter Set]
[Speech Acquisition Protocol: ACTIVE — Estimated completion at current 10x rate: 2.7 months]
To Be Continue....