The child—not yet named by custom, but known to himself simply as Sharath—was no blank slate. Within that fragile body lay the soul and full memories of Sharath Kumar, a software engineer who had spent his thirty-one years wandering through the grey alleys of burnout and apathy in Hyderabad, India.
He remembered the last day of his old life vividly. The quiet hum of the office. The persistent flicker of dying fluorescent bulbs. Fingers rhythmically hammering away on a mechanical keyboard. His heart had failed—quietly, suddenly. No drama. Just darkness.
And now… this.
At first, he had thought it was a dying dream—a neural cascade of the brain trying to comfort itself in its final moments. But as hours stretched into days, and days into weeks, the permanence of his new reality solidified.
He was a baby. But only in flesh. His mind remained sharp. The syntax of this world's magical tongue—Eldora—drifted through his ears, its tonal purity reminiscent of Sanskrit, its structure precise like a programming language. He clung to it. An anchor.
His consciousness watched, parsed, and adapted. With every whispered lullaby, every chant of healing spells, he absorbed more of this ancient linguistic framework. The logic soothed him—it gave this madness rules. Even in helplessness, he was decoding.