"Dong... dong... dong..."
"Dinner!"
The church bell next door rang three times, signaling that the sun was about to slip below the horizon.
Along with the nun's call, Arno Yewen, who had just returned from school, followed the crowd and hurried into the dining hall.
It was a spacious but plain room, with two long rows of tables set neatly down the middle.
Simple utensils were laid out on the tabletops, and on the wall straight ahead hung a large painting of the Virgin Mary.
This was where Arno ate every day. It never changed.
Tonight's dinner was the same as usual: a slice of bread spread with butter, a serving of chips, unlimited mashed potatoes, and a soup made from potatoes and onions.
The ingredients might have been cheap, but to be fair, the food didn't taste bad at all. In fact, it was fairly good.
It just always involved an awful lot of potatoes.
Arno moved with the line into the dining hall and, unhurried, made his way to his seat. The other children sat down one after another as well, quietly waiting for the nun's next instruction.
Once everyone had taken their places...
"Children, let us begin today's prayer."
Standing beneath the painting, the nun smiled gently, closed her eyes, and prayed with reverence. "Bless us, O Lord, and these Thy gifts, which we are about to receive, through Thy bounty. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen..."
The children below recited the prayer along with her, though very few of them truly meant it.
"Eat."
The nun's voice rang out again, followed at once by the clatter of cutlery and the hurried sound of chewing, with scraps of conversation mixed in between.
Maybe because summer break was just around the corner, the children all seemed to be in a good mood today.
Arno held his bread in one hand and speared a chip with his fork in the other, bringing it to his mouth at an easy pace.
Except for Sunday meals, lunch and supper at the orphanage had no time limit, so Arno liked to take his time and enjoy his food.
It was absolutely not because he'd grown sick to death of the same old British fare.
Fish and chips, chips and fish, mashed potatoes, shepherd's pie.
That was practically his daily menu, day in and day out, to the point where just seeing a potato was enough to make him feel ill.
Why was he living like this? Because he was in an orphanage.
Even though most orphanages in Britain in the 1980s were strapped for cash, this one, run by the Catholic Church on the outskirts of Exeter in Devon, was not quite so desperate.
At the very least, it kept everyone fed and clothed, and every now and then they even got pudding.
But one thing never changed: children living here had no say in what they ate.
Arno, as one of them, had no other choice either.
He was not originally from this world. Because of an accident, he had been reincarnated into Britain in the 1980s.
From the day he first became aware of himself, he had found that he was living in this orphanage.
If he remembered correctly, this was the eleventh year since his reincarnation, which meant it should be... 1991.
What a catastrophic start.
Swallowing the bread in his mouth, Arno let out a silent sigh.
In this life, he had just turned eleven yesterday, which put him at a thoroughly awkward age.
Although he knew about the major events that would unfold over the next thirty years and possessed the advantage of foreknowledge, he was still only a child.
If he'd been born ninety years earlier, he could at least have sold newspapers or worked in a factory; but in this day and age... with a body this young, there was practically nothing he could do.
So for now, the only thing he could do was grow up safely until he reached adulthood.
After dinner came homework time, followed by the children's free time.
Thanks to reforms in the welfare system in recent years, the orphanage did not take in as many children as it once had, and because of that, the dormitories could now house only two children to a room.
"Whew... Arno, we're about to graduate. Where are you planning to go for secondary school?" As soon as Arno stepped back into the room, a brown-haired boy sitting on the bed spoke to him. "I'll probably end up at a state school in Manchester. At least there I won't have to worry about tuition."
"Winchester College." Arno lay back on the bed, folded his hands behind his head, and yawned as he answered lazily. "They waived my fees and promised me a stipend too, James."
"Ha... I knew it." There was a tone of exactly-as-expected in James's voice. "A genius like you was obviously going to get into a place like that."
It wasn't really envy. In James's eyes, it was simply a foregone conclusion, not something worth showing off.
At this orphanage, Arno had always been different from the others.
No one even knew when it had started, but Arno had seemed to become a completely different person. He stopped roughhousing with the others and instead developed a fondness for thick books that gave everyone else a headache just looking at them. And on every end-of-term report, he always had a few more A's than anyone else.
After all, studying was the one thing Arno could still do well in his current life.
Not only because it could earn him a brighter future, but because it also brought in extra scholarship money.
Each individual scholarship was not much, but over the years they added up to a respectable sum.
That money would be a tremendous help once Arno eventually left the orphanage and had to support himself.
Of course, most important of all, the cheat ability he'd brought with him through reincarnation required him to study in order to unlock it.
Although he had no idea what use that ability could possibly be in ordinary life in 1980s Britain.
Yes, Arno had been reincarnated with the classic overpowered perk. From the day he became conscious, there had been a peculiar spellbook in his mind: [Arcane Handbook].
This magical book recorded a huge number of arcane spells. Through it, as long as he had enough mental strength, he did not need to prepare spells in advance. He only needed to expend his own magical reserves to cast the various arcane spells recorded within.
What was more, it behaved like a real book. As long as Arno gave the command in his mind, or simply manifested it physically in his hands, he could flip through it at any time and read its contents.
At first, however, all the spells in the book had been sealed. Only by learning and increasing his mental strength could Arno gradually unlock and study the magic inside.
As time passed, he was able to see more and more of its contents. Even though most of the arcane spells were still hidden from view, that hardly mattered to Arno.
After all, he had never seen anything resembling superpowers or magic in this world, so the whole cheat ability felt rather useless.
As for casting spells in front of ordinary people?
Please. If he actually did that, they would treat him like a freak. There was no way he could stand against an entire country, and the most likely end waiting for him would be getting dragged off to some laboratory and experimented on.
If this had been two or three hundred years earlier, he'd probably have been burned at the stake as a witch.
"Actually, James, Eton wrote to me too," Arno added. "But they weren't offering a living allowance, so I turned them down."
"All right, Arno, let's stop this conversation here." James quickly cut him off before he could continue.
He might not have been jealous, exactly, but too much of this sort of talk was just rude.
"All right." Arno rolled over on the bed and dropped the subject.
"Bang!"
Just as James was about to complain to Arno about dinner, a sudden crash came from the window not far from their dorm room.
The window, whose latch had long since broken, was blown open hard by the wind and slammed violently into the wall, making the panes shiver.
"Oh, bloody hell!"
James irritably raked a hand through his short brown hair and strode over to the window. "This stupid latch has been broken for ages. If the glass breaks too, Sister Anna will never let us hear the end of it!"
As he spoke, he reached out to shut the window.
"Huh? What the... bloody...!"
Thud!
Before he could react, there came a frantic beating of wings from outside the window, and the next instant James's face collided head-on with a huge grey-white shape.
Then that grey-white figure landed neatly on the rail of Arno's bed, while James, still not understanding what had just happened, toppled straight onto the floor with stars in his eyes.
"Oi! James! You all right?"
Arno got up at once and gave the boy on the floor a quick shake. Seeing that he had only been knocked out, he finally let out a breath of relief, then turned to look at the grey-white thing perched on the bed rail.
"Huh? An owl?"
"Wait. Is that... a letter in its beak?"
Arno's heart skipped a beat, and an almost unbelievable thought flashed through his mind. He hurried forward and, at the owl's prompting, took the envelope from its beak.
Parchment. A dark red wax seal. A shield-shaped crest, surrounded by a lion, an eagle, a badger, and a serpent.
And written in emerald-green ink was the address:
[Devon - St. Mary's Abbey - Third Dormitory, Left-Hand Bed]
[Mr. Arno Yewen]
Yes. The familiar seal. The address precise right down to the bed. There was no mistaking it.
"Uh... James." After a long moment of silence, he looked down at James and murmured, "I may have to turn down Winchester too..."