I was reincarnated.
I was born again.
At first, I was confused and didn't understand what had happened, but after a few days I accepted the reality.
At first, I thought it was a dream.
I got sleepy so easily, and my consciousness felt fuzzy and unfocused for something that was supposed to be real.
So I figured this must be happening in a dream, and that I had fallen asleep during class.
But there was no way a dream could last for days on end.
I was a baby now.
Sleep, wake up, eat, soil myself, cry, and sleep again.
That was my life.
During the gaps between all that, I observed my surroundings and tried to get a grasp on my current situation.
First of all, this was not Japan.
That much was certain.
And it didn't seem to be Earth, either.
There were no black-haired, black-eyed people anywhere, and there was no sign of electrical appliances.
The atmosphere was something like medieval Europe, but this was an era where even places like Africa had electrical appliances unless you went far enough into the boondocks, so it made no sense for even the remotest corner of Europe to be completely devoid of modern technology.
Could it be one of those isekai reincarnation stories?
A person dies, retains the memories of their previous life, and is reborn in another world.
I never imagined something like that could happen to me, but now that it had, there was no point lamenting it.
Rather than dwelling on what had happened, it was far more constructive to think about what came next.
And besides, I was welcoming this situation with open arms.
Because I had been reborn.
A brand-new life, freed from that old body of mine.
It was all starting from scratch.
I was so happy I could barely contain it.
The fact that my parents were both gorgeous only made it better.
My mother had a soft, fluffy sort of elegance — the quintessential high-born lady vibe.
My father was the complete opposite of her: sharp, composed, the picture of a capable man.
They were both striking in their own ways, but both undeniably beautiful.
If those two were my parents, then I was sure to be good-looking too.
And from the looks of it, they were people of fairly high status.
The room I was in was quite spacious.
In terms of sheer size alone, it dwarfed the cheap apartment I had lived in during my previous life.
And there were any number of servants attending to me.
They didn't seem to be royalty or anything quite that lofty, but they were almost certainly nobles.
God had surely given me a reward for all the hardships I endured in my last life.
Just thinking about the life ahead of me made me smile involuntarily.
Seeing that smile, the maid who cared for me and my mother couldn't help but smile in return.
I was happy.
Babies sleep a lot.
A lot — but I was awake sometimes too, of course.
And when you're a baby, there's nothing to do.
For some reason I seemed to be a night owl; I was awake more during the nighttime hours than during the day.
Having been a high school student in my previous life, I really didn't want to make a habit of crying in the middle of the night.
I couldn't exactly ignore my biological needs, but I felt bad about waking my family and the servants up just because I was bored.
So I used that idle time to practice magic.
This world had magic.
I had spotted a male servant using fire magic to light the lamps.
Back in elementary and middle school, the boys used to mess around pretending to cast spells, and at the time I'd thought, "Are these guys idiots or what?" But now I felt like I finally understood how those boys had felt.
If magic existed here, I wanted to use it.
So to satisfy that urge, I started practicing.
That said, I had no idea how magic actually worked.
During the short stretches of time I was awake, I grumbled and muttered to myself while trying every approach I could think of.
The result was that I gradually began to get a feel for something called magic power.
《Proficiency has reached a certain threshold. Skill "Magic Power Perception LV1" has been acquired.》 The moment I grasped the sensation of magic power, that voice arrived in my ears almost simultaneously.
It hadn't been that long, so "nostalgic" wasn't quite the right word, but it was the first time I had heard Japanese since arriving in this world.
I looked all around me, but there was no one there.
That eerie voice had come from nowhere, and it gave me a creeping sense of unease that kept me from falling asleep for a long while that night.
Apparently, the voice belonged to God.
This world apparently had something called Skills, and whenever you acquired one or leveled one up, you would hear the voice of God.
That was the information I'd pieced together from fragmentary overheard conversations.
But it was strange that God's voice spoke in Japanese.
The conversations I overheard in this world were not in Japanese.
They weren't in English, either.
It had to be the native language of this world.
Since I never heard Japanese even in fragments from anyone else, God's voice must normally speak in the local language when anyone else hears it.
If that was the case, then why was I the only one who heard it in Japanese?
The only explanation I could think of was that the being behind this voice was the god who had reincarnated me into this world.
In which case, speaking Japanese was hardly surprising.
I quietly sent a word of thanks to God in my heart.
And so, I grew.
Being unable to move around was inconvenient, so I started practicing crawling sooner rather than later.
I picked it up fairly quickly, but moving around too early might attract suspicion, so I made sure to stay still whenever people were around.
I picked up the language too.
I couldn't say I had mastered all of it yet, but I could understand the general content of everyday conversations.
I eavesdropped on conversations and slowly learned more about this world.
The Goddess religion.
The culture and history.
This family's position in it all.
Little by little, I absorbed it all.
The way people thought and the social norms were completely different from Japan.
I felt disoriented by those differences, but I did my best to reconcile them within myself.
And so, amid those tranquil days, I lived my life as a baby.
That was when it happened.