Editing/Standardisation: kubor04
Formatting/Extras: APM
Original Translation: Blastron
Additional thanks goes out to mae and Legit-rikk. Join our discord
I feel warm, almost like I’m submerged in pleasant water. I drift, wrapped in this warm embrace, and feel at peace. After a while, this comes to an end, and I’m pushed through a tiny hole into the outside world. I feel uneasy about being pushed out of that warm, safe place, but once I’m out, the world seems to open up before me.
This is my oldest memory.
“Your Highness, please come down from there! You’ll catch a cold.”
As I sit at the window, gazing outside, a maid calls out to me. Just as she says, it is quite cold out there. Everything outside is covered in a thick blanket of snow. Watching the snow fall is quite a pleasant way to pass the time, but it seems like I’ve been sitting here for quite some time. Recently, I seem to lose track of time easily when I’m concentrating.
“Alright, there, up we go!”
The maid picks me up and sets me down on the bed. The bed is huge, almost too big for just one person, but there’s already another person here: a very young baby, sleeping pleasantly and soundly. This crib seems to have been custom-made so the two of us could sleep comfortably next to each other.
By now, it should be quite obvious: I am a baby.
It may seem strange for a baby to be able to think so clearly, but I possess all of the faculties that I had in my previous life. I had been a perfectly ordinary, unassuming high school student, but something happened and before I knew it I was suddenly a baby.
It looks like this is reincarnation: the thing where a dead person is reborn as another. This, of course, means that my previous life is over. The last thing I remember was sitting in Japanese Literature. I watched a hole open up in the empty air of the classroom, and then my memories abruptly cut off.
Holes in spacetime do not generally tend to appear on Earth. That’s probably what killed me. Then, for some reason, I was reincarnated with my memories from my previous life.
If you were to ask me if I had any regrets, I really couldn’t say that I didn’t. Far from it, really. I was still in the height of my youth. I wanted to hang out some more with my friends, and I never got the chance to try dating a girl my age. My parents, my grandparents, I died before any of them. I’ve left them with such a heavy burden. I get depressed whenever I think about how I’m never going to see them again.
I’m worried about what happened to everyone else at school after I died. I remember a huge explosion when that crack opened up in the air. It certainly killed me, but what about everyone else? Kyouya and Kanata… my neighbor Hasebe… did everyone die along with me? If I think about it, that’s really scary. That morning, I greeted them like it was no big deal, but now I’ll never be able to see them again.
Ever since I was reincarnated, I’ve been fighting my way through the uneasiness that has been gripping me. Of course I would be uneasy: I was suddenly reborn as a baby, with no knowledge of how I had gotten here. Furthermore, I wasn’t reborn in Japan. I wasn’t even reborn on Earth. This is another world entirely.
This took me a little while to figure out. I didn’t understand anything they were saying, and I haven’t been outside this nursery very much, so there’s many things that it’s taken me a while to learn. At first, I thought that I was in some European country. Then, however, I saw someone use magic, and it was immediately obvious that I had thought wrong.
This world has magic. The first time I saw it was when a high-ranking priest came to bestow a blessing on me. My body was wrapped in a sparkling light, and an overflowing strength welled up within me. You might think that it was a trick, or my imagination, but this was of a level that couldn’t be covered by such a trivial explanation. It would be way too hard to fake what I felt then.
I was excited about the existence of magic as soon as I found out about it. Even still, after the initial excitement faded, I was back to being uneasy. Am I going to be able to make it in a world of magic? I was an extremely ordinary guy in my previous life. Back in Japan, this didn’t cause me any problems, but this world might not tolerate such an ordinary person. Am I going to be able to live up to what’s expected of me? I don’t know, and it’s making me nervous.
I desperately set to learning the local language. Not being able to understand anyone around me was even worse than I had ever imagined. I had no idea what anyone was saying. I never thought I could ever feel so helpless and alone. I felt so isolated, like I was the only person in the world.
The uneasiness from being reborn into another world, from not knowing the language, from not knowing if I’d be able to survive, all of these compounding fears weighed heavily on me. I was saved, though, by the baby girl peacefully sleeping next to me. My sister, born of a different mother. She has no worries at all, sleeping peacefully as if nothing in the world could possibly go wrong. Well, it’s only natural for a baby. Babies can’t do anything without help, and must rely on others to take care of them. A real baby is such a fragile existence. The only reason why I’m so worried is because of all of the memories I’ve brought with me from my previous life.
That’s when I realized. I have all of this experience from before, so I should undoubtedly be stronger, mentally, than my sister. Yet why was she sleeping so peacefully, when I was so burdened by worry? I’m this kid’s big brother, and an older brother shouldn’t make his little sister worry. I need to be an awesome big brother that she can look up to.
I may have just been putting on a brave face for my sister, but I found myself worrying less and less. My troubles haven’t all gone away, but now I have something to hold on to: I want to protect my helpless little sister.
I’ve focused on learning the language and, little by little, have come to understand what people are saying around me. I wanted to be able to move around as soon as I could, so I flailed my little baby limbs around to gain strength. Thanks to that, I learned to crawl far earlier than most babies. I kept my motivation up by remembering that I was going to be the kind of older brother that my sister was going to want to brag about.
Thus begins the story of the fourth prince of the Analeit Kingdom, Schlain Zagan Analeit.
APM - Translation 