…Gurgle… …Gurgle…
He woke to the feeling of drowning.
Water crushed into his nose, his mouth, his ears, basically, everywhere it could.
It forced itself down his throat and into lungs that were too new to understand what was happening.
*THUD THUD*
His chest convulsed, trying to cough and inhale at once, but the body's instinct was too simple and absolute;
'I need air…' His first thought.
But there was none, the world had denied him of his first request.
His small hands clawed at the dark, closing on nothing.
Swoosh
His legs kicked once, weakly. His feet scraped over rough stone and soft silt. He could feel pain slowly spreading through his ribs. It was a hot and sharp feeling as his lungs tried to work with liquid instead of air.
The infant's brain beneath his skull began to blackout, gradually, but the awareness inside it did not, at least it fought not to.
He 'sat' at the back of his mind, although he didn't know how this was possible, at least not yet, and watched the 'fire' in his chest with a distant, almost bored clarity that did not belong to this trembling flesh… HIS trembling flesh.
This was his new body after all…
'So, this is how we start,' he thought, with what mental strength he had left.
His vision narrowed even further, with whatever little strength his limbs had bleeding away.
Then, it happened.
A line flared in the dark behind his eyes.
[Haki]
[Trait: Absolute Immortality]
[Stats]
[Strength: 0.1]
[Speed: 0.1]
[Agility: 0.1]
[Defense: 0.1]
[Spirit: 0.1]
[Stamina: 0.1]
[Vitality: 0.1]
The autonomy continued, as like another limb he just learnt to control, a second command came on its own, as if some deeper part of him had been waiting for exactly this.
[HEAL – Full Body]
The drowning ended. Absolutely.
He felt it at that instant, the uncomfortable feeling and pain went away instantly. There was no gentle, gradual easing, no cough that cleared his airways.
In one instance, his lungs were sacks of burning mud, and in the next, they were empty and ready. There was one thing though, and it was that pain did not fade, it was simply… cut away, and left behind as a perfect memory, or should he call it… Muscle Memory?
'What does this solve though, I am Immortal, so what? That has always been a part of me. At least cause and effect didn't take that away from me. But I remember it being called Quantum Immortality.'
'What is this… Absolution?'
Unbeknownst to him, he had casually dropped a thought that if revealed in the outside world, would make countless rush after him to conduct experiments, revealing the secrets in his tiny brain…
The water around him was still there, it was not like immortality would have suddenly respawned him somewhere else. The weight on his skin had not changed.
But the sense of dying was gone, at least for now.
He floated, a bit stunned by the absence of agony.
Bubbles slipped from between his lips and twisted upward once again, small silver spirals heading toward a pale shimmer high above. The sun?
'Up.'
He forced his arms to move.
They were tiny and almost useless, but at least they bent slightly when he asked them to and his fingers could curl like weak hooks in the silt.
'Rough stones, silt… these can exist both in shallow and deep waters. Hopefully I exist in the former…'
He dragged himself along the bottom of the water, pushing off when he could, following the bubbles he could barely see.
His head felt too heavy for his neck, the body wanted to panic again every time water brushed his face, and considering he was literally inside one, water brushed his face every second. 'Waves.' He recorded the brushy feeling, then proceeded to ignore it.
His feet left a particular stone it had lodged unto, and his weightless little frame began to rise.
The pressure eased as he moved higher and light grew stronger.
'Thankfully, its shallow water…' He concluded.
His little head finally broke the surface.
He felt the cold air slapping his face 'Air, how long' he thought.
The body coughed once, then twice, more of a reflex than need, then afterwards proceeded to drag in real breath.
'What a world. It dumped me in water the moment I decided to rear my head' he thought with a little chuckle.
The air tasted of wet rock and something green, but he didn't care. He just bobbed there, half-floating, half-sinking, his movements clumsy.
Waves from a distant splash rocked him, his head kept wanting to tip back into the water as his neck trembled with the effort of holding it up.
'Where are these waves coming from? Probably from a waterfall?'
He turned his head as far as it would go, unfortunately, only a few degrees.
'Pathetic. In that case, I better get to work.'
He could feel the uneasiness of drowning about to kick in again so he catalogued his thoughts in an organized manner.
He obviously needed a stronger vessel, so the most logical approach would be to strengthen his body, but what could he do if he couldn't even move, heck, he couldn't even see clearly.
'Drown.'
He had decided. He could vaguely sense who he actually was through memories, it wasn't fragmented memories but… It was hard to describe. All he knew was that, it actually made sense, because if the weight of his entire existence previously was suddenly transferred to the brain of a newborn…
'Wait, am I even considered a "born" how did I even end up in this wat-'
…Gurgle… …Gurgle…
His thought was interrupted by another phase of drowning which came to remind him; it was time.
As his consciousness gradually slipped away for the second time in this new world, an outside observer would have sworn they saw him smile as he slowly descended into the water.
He let himself sink.
This time around he did not kick, he did not claw. He simply relaxed every newborn muscle and allowed the weight of water to reclaim him. The surface peeled away above, a wavering sheet of pale light. The roar of the waterfall dulled, turning into a thick, muffled rumble.
…Gurgle… …Gurgle…
He could feel it more strongly this time, as cold wrapped around him like a second skin.
This time, he paid more attention. He was probably learning things he already knew from a distant past, but he didn't mind.
Learning and the pain which came with it, to him, was fun.
He felt the first reflexive spasm in his chest, the body remembering what had just happened and flinching before the real suffocation even started. He noted the tightness rising in his throat. He listened, almost clinically, to the way the infant heart began to slam against his ribs faster and faster.
His lungs demanded air but he didn't care.
'You threw me in first,' he thought at the unseen world outside the basin. 'So I'll learn you first.'
He waited until the ache behind his sternum tipped into that familiar, tearing burn.
Then he cut it off.
[HEAL – Lungs]
It wasn't a full body heal this time around. He would train his lungs until they could feel more, hold more.
As expected, the pressure vanished instantly.
The pain stayed in his new memory, sharp and clean.
His tiny body still hung limply in the water, but the suffocation had been erased as if it had never existed. His heart rate slowed, throat opened and brain got back its oxygen before damage could really set.
…Gurgle… …Gurgle…
He let out a useless little stream of bubbles and sank further, until his back brushed the rough bottom.
'Again,' he decided. But this time, he had a thought.
Even babies in his previous world, when dumped in water as a test, paddled instinctively, what more him, a conscious mind driving a baby's body.
He crouched his knees as much as his weak joints allowed and pushed.
His feet scraped stone and he barely rose a hand's width. Pathetically, the rest of the movement happened in his head.
It didn't matter though. The point wasn't how far he moved now. The point was that he had taken a motion that would have been pure instinct for any other baby; thrash, flail, survive, and had cut it down into something he chose.
He sought control of this new body.
'Continue'
He released the tension in his legs and let himself float back up.
'Release the tension in legs…' He slowly began to understand the relationship between buoyancy and floating.
'Continue.'
Another useless string of bubbles slid past his face and burst against the distant surface.
…Gurgle… …Gurgle…
He watched them go, then let the body fail again.
The fire came faster this time.
His lungs remembered the burn and this caused his heart to jump sooner.
He listened detachedly to all of it, like an examiner at the back of a classroom and when the pain reached the same sharp edge as before, he cut it again.
[HEAL – Lungs]
He kept everything else apart from his lungs in an 'unhealed' state.
The stiffness in his neck, the tired ache in his calves from that pathetic push, the faint throb behind his eyes from too much focus in a brain that wasn't ready for it.
He sank until his back met the bottom and stayed there.
'Continue.'