Silas woke later that evening.
His mind remained hazy, but it took only a few seconds to realize this was no hallucination.
He really had been reborn as a baby.
The thought was absurd, yet the tiny arms in front of his face were unmistakably real.
He lay wrapped in a thick towel inside a wooden cradle.
The room was small, with windows on opposite sides.
One looked outside.
The other opened toward a corridor where nurses and doctors occasionally passed by.
Silas watched them through the slats of the cradle.
He turned his head slowly.
He was not alone.
Several other babies lay in their own cradles around the room.
“An incubation room.”
He let out a soft breath.
He still had no idea where he was, but his surroundings offered immediate clues.
The spoken language was foreign.
The clothing was unfamiliar.
Even the construction of the building bore no resemblance to anything he had known.
He was far from the Heavenly Wizard World.
That was not the strangest part, however.
Silas’s eyes shifted toward the bizarre devices placed around the room.
“Wait.”
He stared at one of them.
The device was quietly displaying glowing information, likely related to the infants nearby.
Another piece of machinery hummed softly, performing tasks he could not identify.
His expression hardened.
“This artifact level…”
His gaze shifted from one device to the next.
“The entire incubation room is filled with artifacts that monitor the babies’ vitals.”
He recalled the delivery room earlier that day.
“They even used artifacts when they delivered me.”
Silas looked toward the ceiling.
There was not a single oil lamp or candle.
Instead, a flat panel emitted a steady, uniform light.
He stared at it closely.
The glow did not flicker in the slightest.
That meant fire was not the source.
He tried to sense the energy feeding it.
His confusion deepened.
“There is no spiritual energy.
If these are not spiritual artifacts, what are they?”
As far as he could tell, there was not a single trace of spiritual energy in the entire room.
Silas fell silent.
He had spent a million years in a library belonging to scholars obsessed with cosmic mechanics.
He had read about countless realms.
He had studied descriptions of artifacts capable of feats mortals could scarcely fathom.
Yet he had never seen anything like this.
A civilization where advanced tools existed completely separated from spiritual energy?
Silas stared at the glowing monitors.
For the first time in his existence, he was looking at something he could not categorize.
“This is impossible.”
His tiny fists clenched.
“What is this place?”
He had assumed that if rebirth were possible, he would at least recognize the world he entered.
That assumption was crumbling.
Was this realm even recorded within the Grand Library?
Could he have been reborn into the far future?
Had the Wizard World advanced down an unrecognizable path?
He had no answers.
Confined to this sterile room, there was only so much he could deduce; he needed to see the wider world.
The spiritual energy in the air was present, but it was shockingly thin.
If this belonged to the Heavenly Wizard World, the realm would consider such an energy density a humiliation.
Sooner or later, he would find out.
Silas closed his eyes.
A million years of reading had provided him with an explanation for nearly everything, yet he now found himself overwhelmed by questions he could not resolve.
His understanding of reality had been upended.
To figure out where he had landed, he needed time.
Silas opened his eyes.
A thread of unease lingered deep in his chest.
Yet beneath that wariness lay something else: a quiet, burning curiosity.
Whatever lay ahead in this strange world, he would unravel its workings.
For now, he had to let his new life unfold.
* * *
Nearly a month passed, and little changed.
His days were spent mostly confined to a transparent bassinet.
The initial shock of being reborn had worn off, and the sharp ache of losing a mother he had barely known had softened into a quiet memory.
Silas had spent a million years alone, an empty existence from beginning to end.
Even so, he had often wondered what having a family felt like after reading countless library chronicles detailing great clans and their devotion to their kin.
For now, his reality consisted of sheer boredom.
Hospital staff arrived on a fixed schedule to feed him, clean him, and change his diapers.
That last indignity was particularly humiliating for a soul who had lived a million years.
Still, Silas could not deny the vitality of an infant body.
Every breath filled his small lungs with clean air, sending a fresh wave of energy through his limbs.
Every cell hummed with life.
It was a remarkable sensation.
His frame overflowed with vitality, even if he lacked the motor control to use any of it.
His mind remained sharp, and his physical body was healthy.
Silas spent his waking hours wriggling within the crib, stubbornly attempting to force his uncooperative limbs to obey.
His efforts accomplished little.
The underdeveloped muscles were simply too weak.
With no other options, he spent the quiet hours analyzing his circumstances and the environment around him.
He gathered whatever information he could from the figures passing through the hallway.
In doing so, he learned the identifier they had assigned him.
The nurses consistently referred to him as “Orphan 23.”
It sounded less like a name and more like a specimen tag.
Perhaps this culture lacked any sense of poetry.
After hearing it for a month, however, Silas grew used to the label.
Several details about his surroundings stood out.
For one, the appearance of the people defied simple categorization.
There was no single lineage dominating the ward; men and women walked past with complexions ranging from pale ivory to deep bronze.
What truly held his attention, though, were the objects they carried.
Many held flat rectangular slabs, their eyes fixed on glowing glass panels.
Others wore miniature dials strapped to their wrists, and several pushed bulky machines whose internal mechanics he could not determine.
Silas watched another figure hurry by, followed shortly by a second.
His eyes tracked the objects resting in their hands.
Every tool varied in shape, casing, and color:
Red.
Blue.
Yellow.
Green.
Purple.
Silver.
Pink.
The variety seemed endless.
Silas observed the busy hallway in quiet bewilderment.
“Do they manufacture a separate device for every single task?”
He had lived in a realm where enchanted artifacts were so rare that common mortals went their entire lives without seeing one, let alone carrying them around with casual indifference.
Although these contraptions lacked spiritual cores, they clearly served functional roles.
Yet in this place, everyone had one.
Out of all the people who had passed his door over the past month, Silas had not seen a single person walking without some form of mechanical tool in hand.
His small brow creased.
“Does this world rely entirely on machinery?”
A grim possibility crossed his mind.
Had he been reborn into an artificial realm constructed by an eccentric grandmaster?
“I hope not.”
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