Chapter 1: Do-Over

  Calum had to admit it—this reincarnation thing was a total scam.

  No flaming swords. No system notifications blinking in his periphery. No dragon-riding elves offering him a destiny. Just a bad case of deceased parents. Seriously? Where was his golden finger1? His cheat skill? His OP magic? His hot demon sidekick? All he got was a bad case of the Mandela Effect2 as this world was almost identical to his last—barring one notable exception: superpowers existed. Unluckily for Calum, there was only like a 30% chance you would develop them. Even worse they only began developing during puberty, and he had started this whole reincarnation business from infancy. The doubt and anticipation had been slowly driving him insane.

  The one upside? His brain hadn’t reset to factory settings.

  Sure, being trapped in the body of an Elementary schooler sucked. But Calum’s thirty-year-old, caffeine-scorched mind? Still intact. Mostly.

  So here he was breezing through high school trigonometry while his classmates struggled to spell “Pythagoras.”Sure, Calum hadn’t been a super genius in his first life. But cramming 30+ years of memories of a doctoral candidate into a kid’s skull with enough neuroplasticity to learn just about everything? It was like giving a rampaging chimpanzee meth.

  And now, at the ripe old age of twelve, he was just days away from graduating high school, with Ivy League schools drooling over him like he’d cured taxes. But all he could think about was what kind of powers he would develop.

  It didn’t help that no one could predict what ability they’d awaken. Genetics played a role, sure, but there were too many outliers to call it a science. Some people got powers that fit their personalities or deepest desires. Others got ones that seemed entirely random.

  Graduation day arrived with the subtlety of a cymbal crash. The auditorium buzzed with parents clutching camcorders and valedictorians rehearsing speeches through gritted teeth. Calum slouched in his oversized gown, fiddling with the tassel on his cap. It was surreal—a prepubescent prodigy paraded like a circus act. The dean had begged him to give a speech, but Calum had declined. What would he say? “Thanks for the diploma, now where’s my laser vision?”

  His foster aunt, Margo, elbowed him as the procession began. “Smile, kiddo. You’re making headlines again.” She wasn’t wrong. News vans idled outside, hungry for a soundbite from the “Non-supe Twelve-Year-Old Genius.” Calum forced a grin, but his mind raced elsewhere. Puberty had been a ticking clock since he’d turned ten, and every morning he’d wake up half-expecting his skin to crackle with lightning or his thoughts to pierce the veil of reality. So far? Nothing. Just acne and a voice that squeaked when he forgot to modulate it.

  The ceremony blurred into a montage of handshakes and hollow applause. But as Calum accepted his diploma, a prickle shot up his spine—a sensation like static dancing under his skin. He froze, heart hammering. Was this it? For a breathless moment, he swore his vision flickered, the world dissolving into a mosaic of kaleidoscopic colours. Then Margo hugged him and the sensation vanished just as quickly as it appeared. While the crowd erupted in cheers Calum was stuck in contemplation. Had he imagined it? Or was the universe finally, mercifully, throwing him a bone?

  Snapping himself out of his analysis, Calum scanned the auditorium—really looked—for the first time since the “flash”. Something was off. Not wrong, exactly. Just… bizarre. Connections hummed where there shouldn’t be connections. The velvet curtain beside the stage thrummed in time with the flickering exit sign above it. The principal's coffee cup vibrated sympathetically with his wristwatch. It wasn’t a visual effect. More like a gut-deep awareness, as if the world had slipped into a language he’d always known but never learned to speak.

  He reached instinctively toward the nearest thread—a taut, invisible line but the moment his fingers grazed it, his head split. White-hot needles stabbed his temples. He staggered, catching himself on a chair as the sensation faded, leaving behind the metallic tang of blood in his mouth. Had he bitten his tongue? Around him, the crowd milled obliviously. No one noticed the boy genius clutching his skull like a grenade had gone off behind his eyes.

  The afterparty was worse.

  Balloons clung to the gym ceiling like radioactive jellyfish. A DJ played a remix of a song Calum vaguely remembered hearing in his first life. Margo had parked him at a table with a slice of cake he didn’t want and a paper crown that read “GRADU8TED!”.

  He prodded the frosting, watching it shimmer under the disco lights. Shimmer? No—pulse. The cake’s vanilla scent sharpened into something chemical, and suddenly he could taste the relationship between sugar and the plastic fork in his hand. A sharp, oily, chemical, wrong-flavored kinship, like licking a deep-fried battery.

  “You okay, kiddo?” Margo slid into the seat beside him, reeking of dollar-store perfume and secondhand smoke.

  “Peachy,” he lied. Her cigarette pack in her purse called to him. Not the nicotine—the potential? Filters + Margo = something? His fingers twitched.

  “C’mon, let’s get air.” She tugged his arm, and the thread between them snapped taut. A charge—a charge?—drained from somewhere behind his sternum. Margo’s grip turned scalding, her skin flickering translucent. For a heartbeat, he saw her skeleton, her veins, the writhing shadow of her COPD3. Then it vanished, and she was just Margo again: smoker’s laugh, crow’s feet, and all.

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  “You’re burning up!” She pressed a hand to his forehead.

  Am I? His body felt normal. But the room… The room was alive. The punch bowl whispered recipes to the paper cups. The basketball hoop overhead plotted trajectories with the deflated volleyball in the corner. And the exits—oh god, the exits itched, pulsing with a low, electromagnetic whine that made his molars ache.

  He bolted for the bathroom.

  Locked in a stall, Calum pressed his palms to the graffiti-scarred metal door. The hinges sang to the pipes in the walls. The flickering fluorescent light overhead crooned a duet with the sink’s dripping faucet. Everywhere, connections. Everywhere, combinations.

  He gagged, doubling over as a fresh wave of awareness hit. The toilet paper roll unspooled in his mind, its fibres bonding with the chlorine stench of the cleaning supplies. For one delirious second, he could feel how to "connect" them— how to make the paper repel water instead of absorb it. A stupid, useless trick. But his body thrummed with the certainty of it, like a muscle he’d forgotten he had.

  Two charges drained this time. He counted them instinctively, though he didn’t know how or why.

  By the time Margo pounded on the door, the world had settled back into its usual, boring parameters. Mostly. The fork in his pocket still vibrated softly, harmonizing with the vending machine down the hall.

  “You’re sure you’re not sick?” Margo asked later, buckling him into her rust-eaten Corolla.

  “Positive.” He stared at his hands. They looked normal. Felt normal. But between his fingers, faint threads shimmered cobwebs linking Margo’s keychain to the gum stuck under her seat, the cracked dashboard to the pine air freshener dangling from the mirror. He clenched his fists, but the connections pulsed stubbornly, humming with possibility.

  As the car pulled away, Calum watched the school shrink in the rearview mirror. For the first time since his reincarnation, he kind of missed being ordinary.

  Home was a cramped duplex that smelled of microwaved tuna and regret. Margo tossed her keys into a bowl shaped like a grinning skull—a thrift-store find she’d dubbed “Mr Optimism”—and flopped onto the couch. “Gonna nap. Don’t burn the place down, Einstein.”

  Calum retreated to his room which was barely big enough for both his bed and the mountain of textbooks Margo called “ Paper Everest.” He collapsed onto the mattress, staring at the water stain on the ceiling that looked disturbingly like one of his first life’s bosses.

  The threads followed him.

  His desk lamp buzzed a jaunty rhythm with a pair of earplugs (Margo was a very loud snorer). His half-empty water bottle harmonized with the dust bunnies under the bed. He squeezed his eyes shut, but the connections sharpened, itchier now as if his brain had decided subtlety was for cowards.

  Fine.

  He grabbed the lamp, its warmth seeping into his palms. The earplugs popped into his peripheral vision, begging to be… merged. Before he could overthink it, he pushed—not physically, but somewhere deeper. A charge snapped loose inside him, sharp as a rubber band. The earplugs disappeared, the lamp flared and then died.

  “Shit.” He flicked the switch. Nothing. Not even a flicker. But the room... Christ was the room quiet. No traffic outside. No Margo snoring. Just the deafening thud of his own heartbeat.

  Panicking, he yanked the cord from the outlet—and sound crashed back into the room. Margo’s snores, the fridge’s hum, the distant wail of a police siren. It felt like getting sucker-punched by a symphony.

  Calum spent the next 44 minutes experimenting with his new magical sound-cancelling lamp. When it it lost all mystical sound-cancelling effects he felt the loss like a phantom limb: three charges left. Nine had become six, then three, each vanishing with the visceral snap of a wishbone breaking. His ribs ached where the charges had anchored, hollowed out and raw.

  With his stomach not feeling the best dinner was saltine crackers and existential dread. During which Margo scrolled through her phone, cackling while showing him headlines like: “Prodigy Graduates, Still Powerless.” Which all had comments roasting him as a “late-blooming dud.” Joke’s on them, he thought, eyeing the saltine. It vibrated in tandem with the fridge, humming a duet. He could fuse them. Knew he could. Make the cracker cold? The fridge… crumbly?

  Sleep came in fits, his dreams a fever-dream montage: flaming textbook mountains, Margo’s skeleton “Mr Optimism” tap-dancing to Russian hard bass and other such various nonsense that he immediately forgot as he opened his eyes.

  Despite his fitful rest, he woke to the pleasant tingling of six charges buzzing under his ribs, crisp as new batteries.

  The fresh morning perspective gave him no answers. No control. Just a twelve-year-old with a PhD in regret and a superpower that gave him sensory overload. But as he lay there, dawn bleeding through the blinds, Calum grinned. Thirty years of adult cynicism warred with something he’d nearly forgotten—curiosity. The kind that made kids poke beehives and eat glue.

  A childlike smile split his face as he stood, scanning his room for test subjects. His gaze snagged on the water bottle and remembering the connection from last night he ducked under his bed. Ignoring the lint’s suspicious stickiness he grabbed both of his subjects.

  Fusing the two items—no screens flashed, no notifications popped—but he felt it. A click in his ribs, like a key turning in a rusted lock.

  Fuse Activated: Water (Object) + Lightness (Concept)

  Cost: 1 Charge | Duration: 15 Minutes

  The liquid sloshed, suddenly buoyant as a soap bubble. Not useful for fighting dragons or impressing damsels in distress. But cool? Hell yes. For ten minutes, he sat cross-legged in the dark, tossing the bottle marvelling as it drifted downward like dandelion fluff.

  It wasn’t a flaming sword. It wasn’t a cheat skill.

  But it was his.

  Footnote

  1 Golden finger: Web novel slang for a protagonist’s overpowered cheat ability. Think: instant mastery of magic, a godly artefact, or a HUD only they can see.

  2 Mandela Effect: When a bunch of people misremember the same detail—like the Berenstain Bears being spelt “Berenstein” or Darth Vader’s iconic line. Coincidence… or universe-hopping proof?

  3 COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease) is a progressive, chronic lung disease characterized by persistent airflow limitation that makes breathing difficult.