01 - Empty...

Empty...

Coming from a poor family made me think that with money I could solve all my problems.

Sure, I no longer had a problem with food, since I could eat whatever I wanted whenever I wanted.

I no longer had a problem with clothes, since I had so many sets of clothes that I could go a whole year without repeating a single item in my wardrobe.

I didn't even have a problem with women anymore, since having good looks, lots of money and good influence had brought me women I could only dream of in the past.

But even though I had all this, being alone in such a big house made me realize that the only thing I felt was..:

Emptiness.

The last time I didn't feel this way was when I was playing the best games on the market, analyzing everything I could learn and replicating everything I learned in an improved way in my own game.

The thrill of finding a different way of applying something that I thought I already knew all the ways to apply was priceless.

And that also included things within my game.

Watching players choose skill combinations from the huge number of skills available was fascinating.

Combinations that even I, the game's developer, hadn't thought of while making those skills, were used in such interesting ways that it made me want to try them out too.

The problem was that when the excitement wore off, all I was left with was..:

Emptiness.

Unfortunately, it wasn't healthy to spend all my time inside my game.

While I wasn't working on the game, I was still trying to find something as interesting as this to analyze in the real world, but nothing came close to being as much fun...

So in the end I just let go of my wealth, stopped enjoying the luxuries that money and fame could give me, since none of it interested me, and spent the next few years focusing on improving my game.

The game that was already a success, earning a few hundred thousand dollars a month with my updates, grew into a game that earned me several million.

Money that I simply reinvested in the game, donated to orphanages and charities or left to accumulate in my bank account.

Without any relatives or close friends to spend it on, the value of the money just got lost for me.

My life outside my game was just a constant void, completely discouraging me from trying to interact with other people outside the virtual world.

And then, what I called a 'crossing over' happened...

After staying awake for more than 30 hours programming the most fun Boss I'd ever done, my body couldn't take the fatigue and just collapsed on my computer desk.

This was normal for me, something I did at least once a week, but this time it was different.

When I woke up, everything was different...

Unlike the headache I used to get when I went so many hours without sleeping, the headache I was feeling now was much more intense.

Several new sensations were coming over me.

Opening my eyes to get up and find out what was going on, what I saw startled me.

I wasn't in my room...

Or rather, I felt like I was in my room, but this wasn't “my room” where I'd spent the last few years of my life while developing my game.

This was my room where I spent the last few years of my life studying magic!

As soon as I understood this, memories that I had no idea existed began to pop into my mind, adding to the headache I felt.

A father called Alden, a mother called Lise, an older brother called Hal and a pair of younger twin siblings called Finn and Milla.

Memories of how I interacted with these people for more than 10 years of my life surprised me greatly.

But what was more surprising was the world I observed around these memories.

'If I'm understanding what's going on correctly, I've just transmigrated into a 14-year-old boy also called Kael, in a medieval world of swords and magic...' I thought shocked as I looked at my hand.

The hand I was looking at was much smaller than the hand I was used to.

Unlike my previous hand, which was white, soft and healthy, this hand I was looking at was also white, soft, but much thinner than it should have been to be considered healthy...

And the most surprising thing was that around my hand, colored particles were glowing and floating in the air.

Confused, I tried to grab one of these particles but it just passed through my hand as if it had no physical matter.

As soon as I touched it, memories of what it was came to mind.

These were particles of Mana that remained in the environment, and I could only see them because of my eyes!

Realizing from my memories that I had special eyes, the first thing I thought of were the famous red eyes that a certain ninja family had, eyes so powerful that when stimulated in the right way they could rival almost godlike powers!

Thinking that I could have such strong powers in this new world began to make my blood boil with excitement.

Unfortunately, apart from these eyes being special with some similar abilities and being exclusive to this body's family, that's where the similarities ended, as this was considered more of a curse than a blessing for us...

In Kael's family in this world, these eyes had a high chance of being passed on to male children, extremely beautiful bright purple eyes, but they required so much Mana to keep them active that they practically cut off the possibility of the holders of these eyes becoming magicians, despite our tendency to have an affinity with magic...

The difference between the family of ninjas with red eyes and ours was that our eyes couldn't be turned off.

If the supply of mana to the eyes was insufficient, an intense burning would take over and our eyesight would slowly deteriorate until in a few days we would go blind.

To ensure the safety of our eyes, our body unconsciously blocked all the Mana needed to keep the eye active during the day, leaving only the rest available for our use.

In my case, 80% of my total Mana was blocked and only 20% was available for me to use...

From Kael's memories of this world, I saw his father telling him that his grandfather's brother didn't have enough Mana to sustain his eyes when he awoke, causing him to become blind from the age of four.

It was fortunate that the Kael of this world and his father had enough Mana to sustain those active eyes, otherwise both of them might also have become blind from childhood.

And to be blind in a medieval world was to sign a certificate of suffering for the rest of your life...

Between being blind or blocking one's own Mana for safety, the second option was definitely better.

Now remembering how Kael kept trying to learn and practice magic, even with such great limitations, I was surprised.

Having only 20% of his Mana available to practice meant that Kael could only do one spell at a time before having to wait for several hours to recover his Mana and try again.

Fighting for one's dreams even if all the odds were against it was a respectable thing to do, reminding me a lot of myself in my previous world, studying programming only with old and outdated books was all I had in the orphanage I lived in, even though the children laughed at me, I still insisted and knew that this would be my future.

Despite being told that he had no chance of becoming a wizard, Kael didn't give up and took advantage of his eyes being able to see the Mana in the air to try to copy and learn the spells he had seen wizards use in the past.

His memory wasn't that good, so he had to concentrate as much as possible while watching the magician perform the magic, and to be able to replicate it perfectly, Kael needed days of trial and error until he finally managed to replicate it perfectly and the magic worked.

Thinking of the intense training Kael had gone through trying to copy a simple water conjuring spell, I tried to use the memory of this body with the muscle memory of his body to repeat it.

After a few minutes my headache had subsided and trying to remember Kael's other memories was becoming less and less painful.

And considering that I was in a world of magic, with a body that really knew how to do magic, using magic with my own hands, with my own Mana was something I was extremely eager to try.

Following exactly what my mind told me to do, I began to move my hands slowly exactly as I remembered Kael doing when practicing this, and I said in a low voice.

“Aqua Evocare...”

As soon as I said this, the Mana in the room began to be shaped exactly as the wizard had done, and then a fist-sized ball of water materialized in front of me!

Summoning this ball of water was extremely exhausting for me, reducing the little Mana I had available to a critical point, causing me to stop controlling the ball of water and letting it fall to the floor of my room.

Draining so much Mana from my body while my eyes sucked up even more Mana made me feel as weak as if I'd been awake for more than 20 hours, but the excitement of being able to do real magic with my hand made my heart race wildly!

'I've really come to a world of magic...' I thought excitedly as I looked between my hand, the water scattered on the ground and the beautiful particles of Mana that were floating off the water.

It was hard to believe that I had actually transmigrated to a world of magic, just like the premise of so many books I had read in my previous world.

For a few moments I even stopped and tried to wake up from this dream, but all the signs I felt, all the unique things I saw, were great reasons for me to really believe that it had happened to me.

Despite having a creative mind, I doubt my subconscious could have imagined something as realistic as the Mana I was seeing floating out of the water, or the sensation of Mana passing through my body, obeying my commands and condensing the moisture in the air to turn it into a ball of water...

Even though this magic had no offensive power, knowing that I could do magic, something that was only possible in the games I played or the game I developed, was a fantastic feeling!

Every particle of Mana I saw floating around me was like looking at a possibility of magic I could do.

From my memories I knew that there were very powerful spells, just like the maximum level spells in my game that made fire dragons, rains of ice blades, or cures to treat any injury, all of which were also possible in this world!

After so many years, something other than my game managed to take away the feeling of emptiness I felt inside.

Instead of the emptiness in my chest, what I felt now was excitement and a thirst for knowledge.

Despite the problem my eyes were causing me by having such a high Mana consumption, the only thing I would have to do would be what I had always done best in my previous world, find a solution in a creative way that would help me deal with it.

With such incredible opportunities coming my way, just thinking about the spells I created in my game like [Umbra Inferni], [Mortis Cantus], [Collapsus Gravitas] and the possibility of being able to recreate those skills in this world...

But to begin with, the first thing I had to do was analyze all the memories of this body, fully understand my environment, the life that Kael of this world had before I transmigrated into his body, and fit in with that.