"Push, my lady, I can see the head!"
The room echoed with the agonizing screams of the woman on the bed. Pale as a corpse, drenched in cold sweat, she dug her fingers so hard into the bedsheets that the fabric threatened to tear.
Then, one final, desperate push. And the child slipped right into the midwife’s waiting hands.
An unfamiliar silence fell over the room, quite unlike the cry one might have expected right after a birth.
The midwife carefully lifted the blood-covered infant into her arms, and let out a small breath of relief, at least glad the baby was breathing fine.
"Congratulations, my lady..." she began softly.
Then her eyes drifted lower, and the smile died on her face at once. Her voice dropped to something barely above a whisper.
"...It’s a healthy baby boy."
Her words changed the expression on every face in the room, the mother’s included.
Meanwhile, the newborn slowly opened his eyes and looked upon this unfamiliar world for the very first time.
His tiny brows furrowed. ’Wait... what?’
’Did I... did I just get reincarnated?’ Magna thought, quietly taking in his surroundings. He didn’t even pause to wonder how a newborn could possibly see so clearly.
The idea of reincarnation didn’t strike him as all that absurd, really. After all, only moments ago he’d been murdered by a group of gods he’d always believed were nothing more than characters in his own game.
Besides, after a lifetime spent as a nerd, buried in web novels, fantasy worlds, and the games he’d built himself, adapting to the impossible came rather easily to him.
As he studied the room, trying to make sense of the world he’d just been born into, the first thing to catch his eye was the row of candles lining the walls, the only light to be found anywhere in the room.
’So... a medieval world, then?’
The complete absence of electric light, or indeed of anything a proper delivery room sshould have, was enough to convince him of that much.
Judging by the room itself, from its elegant curtains to its finely crafted furniture, not to mention the number of maids standing nearby, it was plain that the family he’d been born into was extraordinarily wealthy.
Being born the son of a wealthy noble family in a medieval world was, by his reckoning, about as fine a beginning as any story he’d ever read or made could offer, provided he played his cards right.
But there was something he couldn’t quite make sense of.
When he looked up at the midwife holding him, her expression unsettled him. It was almost as though she were looking at him with disappointment.
And it wasn’t only the midwife. The woman lying weakly on the bed, and every servant in the room, wore that very same look.
’Hey, hey... put the flags down...’ A bad feeling crept into the back of Magna’s mind.
Unfortunately, it turned out to be entirely justified.
The weak yet furious voice of the woman on the bed, the one who was supposed to be his mother, rang out through the room.
"Get that thing out of my sight."
Apparently, the people of this world spoke Magna’s language, albeit with a somewhat different accent.
Under any other circumstances, that alone might have startled him, but before he could dwell on it, panic swept through him as he realized exactly who she meant.
’What kind of mother says something like that about her own child?’
Magna, quite furious now, immediately set about scolding his mother, nearly forgetting his social anxiety altogether as the words flowed through his mind without so much as a stumble.
What actually happened, in reality, was a red-faced newborn with furrowed brows, producing nothing more than a string of meaningless baby noises.
It didn’t help matters in the slightest.
"Why is it still here? I said get rid of it."
"Yes, my lady." The midwife hurried from the room without another word.
The sky above hung dark and vast, an azure moon casting its pale, bluish glow over the world below.
The night was eerily still, broken only by the cold wind drifting through the air and the gentle murmur of a slow-moving river.
Carried along by the current, a lone basket drifted downstream. Inside, lit softly by the moon, lay a silent baby.
’Is this really happening?’ Magna, his fury long since faded into quiet resignation, had begun to question his entire existence.
After his mother’s rejection, the midwife had wasted no time whisking him from the mansion. She’d tucked him into a fruit basket and set him adrift upon the river.
It wasn’t, perhaps, the cruelest way a child had ever been cast off, but that hardly made the whole business any less unsettling.
As he drifted along beneath the stars, he turned his mind to the two most likely outcomes ahead of him.
The first was that the basket would sink, tipping him into the water to drown.
Strange as his new body already seemed to him, what with his oddly sharp eyesight and the fact that sleep hadn’t come to him even once, he knew perfectly well he had no hope of swimming to safety with his little arms.
The second possibility was that some kind soul might spot him and pull him from the water, though that, too, seemed unlikely given the hour and the utter absence of anyone nearby.
’Is this my punishment? For everything I did in that game?’
Magna’s thoughts drifted back to God Simulator.
Since creating it, he’d spent most of his waking hours inside that world, shaping countless lives for better or for worse.
Hell, he’d even rewritten the history and civilization of an entire world before running over a schoolboy with a truck.
Though, compared to everything else he’d done in that game, that one barely counted as disturbing at all.
But as far as he’d ever known, it was only a game. How was he meant to have known any of it counted as a crime?
Could he really be blamed?
It seemed, unfortunately, rather too late to be asking such things now.
As the cold crept through the thin blanket wrapped around him, numbing his tiny body by degrees and threatening to become the third and final outcome of his predicament, a strange sound reached his ears from somewhere nearby.
"Hruuugh... Graugh..."
It sounded rather like an grandpa clearing his throat.
Magna strained to place the sound, but the basket blocked his view entirely.
’Has he noticed me? Should I make a noise, try to get his attention?’
He’d already begun spiraling into overthinking when a far louder sound tore through the night, cutting his thoughts short.
"GRRRAAAUGH!"
Whatever it was, it no longer sounded like any harmless old man. It sounded like a monster, roaring in fury.