Chapter 3: The Learning Curve Was Steeper Than Expected
Uriel realized very quickly that he had been completely wrong.
His original assessment was that she wasn't very good at taking care of people. His revised assessment: she was just a little oblivious, a beat behind everyone else.
That "slightly behind" didn't last long either. Two weeks in, Galatina had become a genuinely competent mother. Competent enough to make his thirty-year-old soul deeply, personally uncomfortable.
She'd started keeping her hair silver these days, as a simple precaution. Her real color would have drawn the wrong kind of attention.
One evening he opened the door and found her sitting by the window, the setting sun catching the edges of her silver hair in warm gold.
"What do you need?" She looked up, direct as always. "Mom's not sure."
Uriel stood there for two seconds, making sure she was serious. He thought about it. Thirty years in his last life, five in this one. He had a roof and food. The question of what he needed didn't have a clean answer. So he told her: just being with you is enough.
She smiled. It was a good smile.
The next morning she carried him into town, walked calmly into the bookshop, and pulled six volumes off the shelves with one arm — Common Questions on Early Childhood Diet and Sleep, Elementary Learning: Ages Five to Seven, Starting from Zero: A Parenting Journal, and a few illustrated storybooks. Uriel sat in the crook of her other arm and read the titles one by one.
…She's actually taking this seriously.
She finished all six books in a week. One night he looked through the gap under her door — the candle low, her brow slightly furrowed, lips moving without sound — and watched her draw a thin line of magic beside a passage on the page, finishing it with a small curl at the end, a tidy mark.
He pulled his head back under his blanket.
The old soul inside his chest went quiet for a moment.
The practical results, in short, amounted to the total annihilation of whatever adult dignity he had managed to retain.
Bathroom trips, for instance, required supervision. He had not rehearsed for this. She crouched down, and those hands — the ones that could apparently pulverize things without trying — lifted the front of his waistband with the delicate care of someone handling something that might shatter. She looked up, eyes curving. "There you go."
His face remained perfectly calm.
Somewhere beneath that calm, a thirty-year-old man was screaming into the void.
Please. End me.
Bathtime: she simply picked him up, put him in the tub, rolled up her sleeves, and washed him section by section.
"Mom, I actually know how to do this myself." He argued reasonably, and with evidence.
"Mm. I know. You're so capable." Her hands didn't stop. She lifted the ladle and poured water slowly over his head. He kept repeating I know to himself. It contained absolutely no implication of so go ahead and do it yourself.
At mealtimes, if the food was still too hot, she would blow on a spoonful until it had cooled, then extend it toward his mouth.
"Mom. I have hands."
"I know, but it's hot." The spoon didn't move. He paused one second, opened his mouth, and ate it.
He stared out the window into the darkening evening.
He needed to establish independence. Immediately. Or whatever remained of his dignity as a grown adult was going to make its final exit at this dinner table.
He never did establish independence.
From five to seven, she bought round after round of books, and each finished round unlocked another branch of the skill tree. The cooking stopped being scorched. The salt portions stabilized. The arm that carried him loosened into something easy and natural. By the time he was seven, she could judge — before he even opened his mouth — whether the food had cooled enough. The bedtime stories had become a steady, unhurried current, with a rhythm shaped by however long they had spent together, and she probably hadn't noticed when it happened.
Without him quite realizing it, the baggage from his previous life had been quietly sanded away.
One afternoon he was sitting on the stone block in the yard when the thought arrived without warning: In his last life, as a kid, it had been like this too. Running to find his mom. Reaching up with both arms.
He went inside. Found Galatina wiping down the table. Walked up to her and stopped. Tilted his head back. Raised his arms, reaching upward.
She went still for about one second.
Then she crouched down and picked him up.
She pulled him against her, one hand across his back, and didn't say anything.
Uriel put his hands on her shoulders. He felt something small inside her chest, in the moment the hug settled into place, give the faintest shiver.
Then she showed no sign of letting go.
He waited a while and shifted a little. She held on tighter, just enough to make her meaning clear.
With a silent inward sigh, he put his chin on her shoulder, closed his eyes, and cooperated.
In the moment he closed them, something landed on his cheek.
Light. Soft. Gone quickly.
He opened his eyes a crack.
She didn't explain. She just kept holding him, chin resting lightly on the top of his head, expression entirely matter-of-fact — as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world. Like blowing on a spoonful of soup. Like tucking in a corner of the blanket. Done and done.
Then a burning smell drifted over from the stove.
She set him down gently, walked over, lifted the pot, removed the lid, looked inside, and silently replaced the lid.
Uriel stood exactly where he was. Well, he thought. She really is kind of cute.
"...Give me a moment. Mom will make it again."
"Okay," he said, and went back to his stone block and sat down. "No rush."
Every time she held on tight, and every time he moved first before she let go. But in the space before she re-tucked the blanket or blew on the soup, the old soul inside him went quiet too.
Just sitting there wasn't bad at all.
---
On a morning when he was eight, Uriel filed the most formal request he had made in recent memory.
"I want to go out and play."
She paused longer than usual.
"By yourself?"
"Mm." He nodded, shifting his weight from foot to foot in what he personally considered a very reasonable and not at all wheedling manner. "Just around the village. Not far."
She was quiet for a moment. "Be careful."
"I will."
"Avoid puddles on the road, and if you meet someone you don't know—"
"Mom." He interrupted her in the gentlest interruption he had ever deployed in either of his lives. "I know."
The second half of what she'd been about to say never made it out. After she turned, it ended in a small, quiet smile she probably wasn't aware of.
---
Sunlight filtered through scattered cloud and warmed the forest path to a comfortable gold.
Uriel walked with a thick branch he'd picked up along the way, the length of it just reaching his hip.
It is universally understood that no man has ever successfully walked past a perfect stick.
He had already quietly decided — this was today's Magic Sword. As he walked, he swept it through the weeds at the roadside, dropped his voice to a dramatic murmur, and addressed the open air with full gravity:
"Hmph... under the absolute gaze of my [Observer] Eye, no creature of darkness shall remain hidden."
The voice of an eight-year-old was still high and soft. The proclamation came out rather ridiculous. He cracked up at himself.
His trousers already had mud on them — Galatina had specifically mentioned this exact scenario before he'd left. The instruction had survived approximately three minutes of stick-swinging.
He wandered through the trees for a quarter hour, picked up several more branches along the way, compared them carefully, and kept the original.
Then the wind shifted.
Blood.
Uriel's feet stopped without input from the rest of him. [Observer] caught it a half-second later — a current in the Aether that didn't belong.
As someone whose current life plan was essentially lie low, eat well, and not die, he had no particular reason to go toward that.
But — come on. This is an isekai.
A rapid-fire sequence of images flashed through his mind: a legendary sword in a stone, a glowing golden chest, a dust-covered ancient scroll that unlocks a hidden class. Who on earth is supposed to resist the siren call of free loot?
He tightened his grip on the stick.
Crouched low.
And moved, one careful step at a time, in the direction of the smell.
The eight-year-old boy with his Magic Sword disappeared into the deep of the trees.