The great explorer sets out on his journey.His mission? To uncover the truth of a strange new world.His challenge? A distance of three meters… and a wooden floor that squeaks like it's tattling on him.
That's right.
The explorer is me.And I am currently crawling.
It started one morning when my mother left the study door slightly ajar.
I'd noticed it before — the smell of ink and parchment drifting through whenever she tended to her records. Books were rare in small villages like ours. Most families owned a Bible, a few weather manuals, or maybe an old spellbook passed down generations.
But Elara was different.
Her father had apparently been a scholar, and she'd inherited his small library: leather-bound tomes, faded scrolls, and journals thick with dust. Every time I saw those shelves, something in me stirred. Curiosity, maybe. Or nostalgia.
As a god, I'd known everything — the flow of stars, the origins of mana, the secrets of souls. But now, stripped of divinity, I realized I didn't even know where I was.
What kind of world was this?What era?What rules governed it?
Was it one of my old creations, or something entirely new?
I needed to know.
So, I began my first expedition.
My arms trembled as I pulled myself forward, inch by inch across the floorboards. My diaper rustled like a battle standard.
Every creak of the wood was a thunderclap of betrayal.
"Quiet," I hissed under my breath, glaring at the floor. "I'm trying to perform divine research here."
The floor, as expected, did not care.
I stopped for a moment to catch my breath. My limbs ached, and my forehead was sticky with sweat. Crawling was harder than bending the laws of creation, apparently.
If any of my old worshippers could see me now, I thought grimly, they'd probably build a temple to irony.
After what felt like an eternity (and was, in reality, about five minutes), I reached the bookshelf.
It towered over me like a wall of forgotten wisdom, the scent of old paper tickling my nose. My little hands reached out, brushing against the lower shelves.
And there — half-buried between a weathered atlas and a cracked grimoire — was a book bound in blue leather.
Its title read, "A Beginner's Chronicle of The Four Realms."
A history book. Perfect.
Of course, I couldn't read yet. My infant body's eyes and brain weren't ready for long strings of written language — but divine memory is stubborn. My mind recognized the patterns of mana etched into the ink, the faint traces of magic used to copy text in this world.
By focusing, I could feel the meaning behind the symbols. Not perfectly — like listening to a song underwater — but enough.
I grinned, dragging the book off the shelf with an undignified grunt. It landed with a thud, startling me so badly I froze for ten full seconds.
When no one came rushing in, I exhaled slowly and opened the cover.
The first pages were filled with drawings: maps, sigils, portraits of kings and beasts.
The world was called Eldara.
It was divided into Four Realms:
The Human Kingdoms of the central plains.
The Elven Woods to the west.
The Beast Tribes roaming the southern savannas.
And the Demon Territories beyond the northern mountains.
Typical structure, really. Balanced, classic — almost nostalgic. I'd used a similar model when designing older worlds.
But what caught my attention was a note scrawled in the margins, written in a more personal tone:
"After the Fall of the High Gods, mana has thinned. Commoners rarely wield magic now, and even nobles struggle without divine blessing."
I blinked.
Fall of the High Gods?
So this world did have gods. Plural. Maybe even… me?
But if I'd truly died and been reborn here, it meant this world existed after my divinity was gone.A world without its creators.A world left to evolve alone.
The realization hit me like a cold wind.
Before I could process it, the door creaked open.
"Auren?"
Elara's voice.
My blood ran cold.
She peeked in, finding me sitting proudly beside the open book, drool glistening on the corner of my mouth.
"Oh, my stars," she gasped. "You crawled all the way here?"
She rushed over, scooping me up like a hero retrieving a lost relic.
Gelen appeared in the doorway moments later, holding his mug of morning tea. "What's going on?"
"He crawled!" she said, beaming. "He really did! Look how far he went!"
Gelen grinned. "That's my boy! Already exploring. You'll be walking before harvest season, I bet."
I wanted to say, Actually, I was in the middle of uncovering divine historical truth, thank you very much.
Instead, I burped.
"See? He's proud," Gelen said confidently.
As Elara carried me back, I glanced over her shoulder at the book still lying open on the floor. The words shimmered faintly in the sunlight.
After the Fall of the High Gods.
The phrase burned in my mind like a prophecy.
If gods had truly fallen…If mana had weakened because of that…
Then maybe, just maybe, my rebirth wasn't random.
Maybe fate had sent me here for a reason.
That night, I lay awake in my crib, staring at the faint glow of the moonlight filtering through the shutters.
Eldara.Four Realms.The Fall of the High Gods.
A world once divine, now forgotten.
And in that silence, I made a quiet promise to myself:
"I will learn everything about this place… and find out why I, of all beings, was sent here."
The faint shimmer of mana around me pulsed gently — as if the world itself was listening.