The crackle of bones snapping, the wet sounds of flesh shrinking and stretching all on its own, the sheer horror of a process meant to unfold over 3 whole years happening instead in the space of mere minutes, seconds even, was enough to make Magna’s whole system shut down and drag him under.
He drifted into a long, suffocating dream, woven entirely out of the fragments of his past.
Phantom memories rose up one by one, memories he’d buried so deep he thought he’d forgotten them.
He saw the flashing lights of the car crash, back when he’d been only 8 years old.
It was the moment that took his mother, his father, and his sister from him, all together.
The years that followed came next.
The orphanage had been cold, and so had the silence he carried with him everywhere he went. People kept their distance, never quite sure what to make of a boy who never spoke.
Worse still, that silence had made him an easy target, and the bullies turned an already lonely life into something closer to hell.
But the orphanage was only the beginning. Soon enough came the endless stream of foster homes.
The families that adopted him tried more than once, each one taking him in and doing their best to make him fit into their daily lives.
Yet in every house he ever stayed in, he was compared to their own children, always making him feel like he lacked the things a normal child should have, always the outsider at the table, before eventually being let go, worn down by a boy they never quite managed to reach.
The dream didn’t linger there, though.
It moved on, until it landed on the one thing that had actually saved him, video games, and the very first time he’d ever touched a controller and found somewhere he truly belonged.
Slipping into other lives, other worlds, had always come to him so naturally it felt less like a hobby and more like the one thing he’d been built for.
Worlds without end, where he could be anyone at all, wear any face but his own, and do exactly as he wished without ever having to carry the weight of simply being himself.
Those had been the best years of his life. At least, he thought so far... right up until the day he died and met the mother goblin.
Before her, Magna had been quite convinced he’d already tasted every experience a human soul could hold, every joy, every sting of grief, every last shade of agony.
He had never been more wrong.
As the dream shifted, his days with the goblin played out like some surreal reel of memory.
From a creature he’d once have dismissed outright as a monster, he learned what true, unconditional love actually felt like. He found, once more, the quiet warmth of having a family.
And through her, he learned an entirely new kind of pain besides.
The scenes twisted into something far closer to a nightmare, dragging him violently back to the moment of the mother goblin’s death.
Overwhelming grief and utter helplessness crushed his chest, an agony far deeper than anything his past life had ever managed to inflict on him.
Magna’s eyes snapped open to the familiar cave, gasping for air as he tore free of the nightmare’s grip.
He lay there a long moment, tracks of dried tears stinging his skin, his chest heaving in ragged breaths.
"Did I... pass out?" he mumbled, his voice hardly more than a raspy whisper.
The last clear thing he remembered was the pain, the exact instant Gaia’s countdown hit zero and his whole body seemed to catch fire all together.
He hadn’t even lasted a fraction of a second before his mind simply pulled the plug on him, dropping him headlong into darkness, a pathetic reminder of just how fragile his tolerance for pain truly was, physical or psychological.
Slowly, he pushed himself upright, and his body answered with a chorus of strange, unfamiliar sounds, every joint popping and creaking like a set of rusted hinges that hadn’t moved in years.
He froze halfway up, startled by the racket, half convinced something inside him had genuinely broken.
But no pain came, and relief washed over him instead.
He tried again, slower this time, planting one hand against the cave floor and pushing himself up.
His arm held firm, without the faintest tremble, without the slightest give beneath his own weight.
He noticed his hands next, broader now, the fingers longer and leaner, nothing at all like the chubby little paws of a baby anymore.
"Am I... nearly four years old now?" he muttered, freezing as he realized his voice sounded entirely different too.
His pronunciation had gone far clearer, every word forming far more naturally than before, though the tone of it struck him as rather odd.
"Aahh... Ooh... Ehh..."
He paused, letting out a low hum that vibrated gently through his chest, then shifted it higher, testing the limits of his new vocal cords.
It wasn’t merely the clarity of an older child.
His range was absurdly broad, stretching easily into piercing high notes while still able to drop into the deep, heavy resonance of a grown man.
The sort of raw gift usually reserved for master opera singers, or for musicians who’d trained rigorously since childhood.
Probably the effect of his earlier vocal cord mutation, he figured.
Too bad he had no desire whatsoever to become a musician.
Not dwelling on his miraculous new voice, he got to his feet.
His body still felt stiff, every joint seeming to wait on some invisible unboxing, brand new and entirely untouched.
To shake off the stiffness and get used to this new body of his, he ran through a few stretches, the very same routine he used to rely on after long, motionless gaming sessions.
Then he began checking himself over.
He was surprisingly tall for a child barely three and a half, his height just over a meter by his own reckoning, only inches shy of a fully grown goblin.
His frame was lean, nowhere close to malnourished.
Unable to see his own reflection, he reached up to feel his face and head instead.
His hair had grown medium length and thick. Pulling a lock forward over his eyes for a better look, he found it pitch black, same as it had always been in his last life.
"Well, I can live with that."
In a fantasy world, he wouldn’t have minded a more dramatic change, but staying black wasn’t exactly a bad outcome either.
All things considered, it was a deeply satisfying power up, though one glaring problem soon made itself known.
Looking down at his body, he realized he was completely in his birthday suit.
Given that even the goblins had enough decency to wear small scraps of cloth over their privates, walking around like this was simply out of the question.
Searching the cave for anything useful, his eyes landed on the red cape his goblin mother had used to wrap him in.
It wasn’t large enough to cover his entire body, so he tied it around his waist, letting it hang down to his knees. Barely enough, but at least it spared him from being completely bare.
At last, his gaze settled on the goblin he’d been feeding on earlier.
With a bigger mouth and stomach now, he could pull in far more nutrients than before, feeding even more energy into Gaia.
Right on cue, his stomach let out a low growl, as though it fully approved of the plan.