Reincarnated Without a Cheat, I Adopted the Former Hero as My Mom

Life settled into a rhythm after that.

Morning lectures. Lunch. Electives in the afternoon. Back to the dorm by evening.

Two weeks into this routine, Uriel had identified one way the Royal Capital First Senior Academy differed from what he'd expected.

The class on Adventurers' Guild ranking and social structure had held his attention — that was information he'd never had direct access to. But when the curriculum pivoted to Magic Theory and Aether Circulation Principles, something shifted.

It wasn't that the material was easy. The instructors here were genuinely a level above anything at Kachin Academy. The circuit diagrams on the blackboard were dense and intricate, and the terminology came fast.

The problem was that Uriel already knew all of it.

Aether cycling and efficient output optimization? That was lesson one. Mom taught it like it was basic arithmetic.

Mana distribution across simultaneous casts? Lumina and the others had that down years ago.

Uriel propped his cheek on one hand and watched the professor at the front deliver what was apparently a passionate lecture on advanced theory. The man's enthusiasm was genuine. From Uriel's perspective, the material was basically beginner-level — and annoyingly familiar. His eyes lost focus somewhere around the third diagram.

Back at the Old Cottage, Galatina had handed all of this to her kids the same way most people hand over a vegetable knife — casually, like of course you need this, why wouldn't you have it. She'd never once mentioned that most people spent years in an academy grinding through the same content.

Since he already knew the answers, Uriel's brain quietly switched to power-saving mode.

He was sitting at a three-person desk. On his right: the suspiciously pretty male student known as Tian. On his left: Leo — a classmate he'd gotten to know over the past few days.

Leo was aggressively average in the best possible way. Mid-tier grades, unremarkable face, and one singular god-given talent: an almost supernatural ability to identify the cheapest dish in any cafeteria on campus. He didn't say much by default, but once he was comfortable, he gave off the unmistakable energy of a normal teenage boy with opinions about everything.

Up at the front, the professor turned to write on the board.

Leo stretched a foot under the desk and nudged Uriel's shoe. His voice dropped to a murmur:

"Hey. Wake up. Old man's about to turn around."

Uriel cracked one eye open. He stayed in his perfect note-taking posture. His mouth barely moved:

"I wasn't asleep. I was doing deep-focus meditation."

"Sure you were. Your head was half an inch from the desk. I was genuinely worried you were gonna face-plant."

Leo rolled his eyes. Then his gaze drifted to the notebook in front of Uriel, and something short-circuited behind his eyes.

"…What the—"

He blinked. Leaned in.

The notebook was packed with the entire lecture. Every core formula from the board. Annotations in red ink flagging common errors and suggesting optimizations.The handwriting was clean and even, every line sitting exactly where it was supposed to, with the margins of someone who had never once been in a hurry.

"You were asleep," Leo said, with the careful tone of a man questioning his own sanity. "Your hands were barely moving. Don't tell me you discovered some kind of lost ancient auto-dictation spell? Did the notes just write themselves?"

Uriel blinked. Looked down at the desk.

…Oh.

He hadn't written a single word.

His eyes shifted right — the smallest possible movement.

Tian was sitting up perfectly straight, gaze fixed on the blackboard, the model of an attentive student. Except that her right hand, hanging below desk level, was in the process of sliding a pen back between Uriel's fingers at a speed the human eye wasn't really designed to track. The whole thing took maybe half a second. Leo, on the left, had registered none of it — as far as he could tell, Uriel had simply been writing the whole time.

So that's why class has felt so effortless lately. The ghostwriting service has apparently been running in the background this whole time.

Uriel exhaled internally. He was used to being looked after like this — had been his whole life — which was exactly why he hadn't noticed until now. The problem was that he absolutely could not let Leo figure out that his roommate was not only an off-the-charts powerhouse, but was currently attending class as his personal note-taking attendant.

"Right," Uriel said, and pulled the notebook smoothly to his side of the desk. His expression remained completely flat. "It's a meditation technique. Regional thing. The pen moves on its own. There's a variant for drawing too."

"That's incredible, man." Leo stared at him with the pure, uncomplicated admiration of someone who had never once managed to stay awake past the second slide. "Okay, listen — since you've clearly got that figured out — can I borrow those notes after class? I spent the whole period watching you not-sleep and got basically nothing down."

"You're a menace." Uriel pushed the notebook over. "Here."

Close call.

But if she keeps doing things like this without reading the room, my cover story is going to have a very short lifespan.

— — —

Evening. The dorm room door clicked shut behind them, and the outside world ceased to exist.

The male student Tian dissolved in the span of a breath. Galatina hummed something tuneless, tied a frilled apron over her loungewear, and walked into the kitchen.

Uriel dropped his bag on the bed, pulled out the desk chair, sat down, and laced his fingers under his chin. He stared at the kitchen with the grave expression of a commander assessing a breached wall.

"We need to talk," he said, in the tone of a man who runs the household.

Galatina stuck her head out from the kitchen, ladle raised.

"Hm? What is it, Little Uri? What do you want for dinner?"

"Anything is fine. But going forward — under absolutely no circumstances — are you to use invisible ghost-hands to take notes for me during class." Uriel fixed her with a look of complete seriousness. "Leo almost convinced himself I'd unlocked some kind of lost ancient magic. Our entire strategy is built on normal. Do you understand what that word means?"

"But you kept closing your eyes during the lecture," she said, with a faint note of grievance. "I didn't want you to miss anything important."

"That doesn't matter."

He held the line, then looked at her expression and gave one inch.

"Here's what we do: you take notes in your own notebook during class. Back in the dorm, I'll copy from yours. Same result, zero risk of someone deciding I'm secretly a genius. Understood?"

Galatina considered this. It did technically reduce her direct involvement in looking after him during class hours, which was a loss. But the outcome was the same. She smiled.

"Okay. I'll do it your way."

The sound of chopping resumed from the kitchen.

Uriel leaned back in his chair and flipped open the ghostwritten notebook. Something from earlier drifted back to him.

"By the way — I met someone else today. Besides Leo."

"Oh? Another new friend?"

"Yeah. Leo's roommate. Goes by Kai."

The mechanics of male friendship, Uriel had discovered, were sometimes built on something almost embarrassingly thin.

That afternoon, Leo had lent his notebook to Kai from the next class over. When Kai returned it, he'd brought along an extra bottle of fizzy orange drink, unprompted. The three of them ended up leaning against the corridor windowsill, splitting the drink, and spending ten solid minutes in deeply committed debate over two pressing topics: whether the Magic History professor was wearing a hairpiece, and whether the fried pork cutlets in Dining Hall Two had gotten measurably thinner.

By the end of the debate, they had reached unanimous consensus on the cutlets. Revolutionary friendship had followed naturally from there.

Kai and Leo were the same breed — the kind of person who blends completely into any given situation. No notable background, no spectacular talent. The biggest problems in their lives were credits and meal budgets.

"Kai's pretty straightforward. Same energy as Leo — enthusiastic about nothing in particular," Uriel said, doing a full slouch into the chair. "Normal. It's good."

This is what being young is supposed to feel like. School life should always be exactly this dumb and exactly this comfortable.

The chopping stopped.

Galatina came out carrying two bowls of braised beef rice, steam still rising. She set them on the desk, wiped her hands on her apron, and the expression that settled across her face was one Uriel had catalogued long ago — a particular softness, the kind that surfaced when something quietly good had happened.

"That's wonderful," she said, hands folded together.

"What is?"

Uriel startled slightly. He had not granted her access to his thoughts.

"Having friends like that. It's really wonderful." She looked at him, still smiling. "I can tell — those two have a real alive quality about them. Cheerful, a little chaotic. No bad intentions. They seem like good kids."

She reached out and moved to pat his hair. He dodged. She didn't push it — just kept talking in the voice she used when she meant something completely.

"Being around people your own age. Complaining about the cafeteria together. Just — existing alongside each other. I'm really glad, Little Uri."

Uriel looked at her expression. It was glowing with a sincerity that was almost aggressive.

He was briefly silent.

Do you understand — if those two regular guys ever found out that the roommate they just casually started hanging around has a mom, and that his mom is the previous generation's greatest hero, and that she is currently standing in a dorm room radiating motherly pride about them — their entire 'alive quality' would probably short-circuit on the spot?

How did my life become this.

He was mid-way through composing a truly devastating internal monologue when the smell of the braised beef reached him.

The dorm room was small. The light was warm. The piece of beef at the center of his bowl had been simmered until it would fall apart at a look.

The tightly wound, perpetually vigilant part of him—the mechanism that kept the 'ordinary student' routine running—finally unwound, exhausted by the sheer domestic warmth of the room.

"…They're just classmates. You don't have to make it sound like I summited something," Uriel muttered, and picked up his chopsticks.

He found the most braised-through piece of beef in the bowl and ate it.

Though it genuinely is a first. Thanks to a certain someone, my entire middle school social life was a blank page.

"Eat up, Tian. I need to borrow your notes after dinner."

"Sure thing."