In the Womb

  Two life forms floated in front of each other, both reincarnations, as they stared each other down in the womb.

  Both boys now activated their inner space, fighting for dominance.

  They stood before each other with their souls formed, resembling what they would look like in the future—tall, 190 cm, fair-skinned, and broad-shouldered, with curly bck hair and golden eyes.

  They looked at each other in this form for a second as their worlds collided, viewing the presence of the other as a rivalry.

  William, the MC, was yet to be named but already knew his name. He knew because he had the absurd ability to manipute time and understood that the time in the womb was when this power would be at its strongest. He also knew of his brother’s power—soul manipution—and he knew that killing him in the womb now would give him that power. He wanted the ability to manipute souls, although it could only be done to someone once, but to oneself, infinitely.

  It didn’t matter to him—the shared blood, the matching DNA—as the realms collided. Leon’s inner world was a shifting ndscape of massive clockwork gears, like those of a watch, sinking endlessly into the ground. Between and beneath the gears, sand poured infinitely, a silent cascade of time itself. His brother’s realm, by contrast, was a violent ocean, thrashing with chaotic energy—until it was consumed by William’s horrific barrage of power.

  In the physical world, his brother’s body was disintegrating. He panicked, but it was too te—he could do nothing. Leon had already stolen their mother’s power, using his brother’s own soul manipution against him. He had twisted her will, reshaped her completely. And because the ability had belonged to his brother—now named Nekros—he alone had lost the capacity to ever control her soul again. But Leon, having taken that gift, would be able to use it anew in the future.

  Nekros was now dead. What remained of his fetal form—shredded, dismembered—was being absorbed into Leon, who grew stronger with every piece, devouring power, potential, and identity alike.

  –Birth–

  My birth was celebrated as a healthy rge baby boy. My mother had tears streaming down her face from the birth itself and was happy to see that her child was strong and that it wasn’t all for nothing. She had felt the pain of my battle in the womb. She knew something was wrong when her body began to kill my brother. I found out that touching him with my innerspace gave me the ability to wield his power without restriction and would only affect him but now I had the ability to manipute the soul of anyone I wished. I can no longer see the future and any previous memories of the future I had was now gone.

  “What a healthy boy!” A little girl said as her mother the midwife washed me before putting me in a white bnket.

  I could barely see what was going around me. Now it was time to eat, sleep, cry and shit while getting praised as prince of the kingdom of Engnd.

  —

  Years passed as I was a child going through life figuring I would just enjoy it for now since the happiness of being a child would not st forever or in my case ever I barely dodged assassination attempts since forever the only thing keeping me alive is my ability to reverse the injuries to a point where that didn’t happen.

  “What game do you want to py?” Henry, my younger brother asked me.

  “I can’t, I have to go to tutoring.” How could I not? I need to know more about this world. It wasn't the historical Europe of my past life.

  –

  “And so, that's how the Byzantines reconquered Egypt,” Zepelli concluded, his voice plodding along as if he were reading from a script he had long since grown bored of himself.

  Zepelli—a name that always sounded to me like a reference I was supposed to understand but never quite did—was my tutor, imported all the way from Tuscany. He spoke with the heavy weight of someone who had seen too much of life to pretend he still cared whether I remembered the dates he recited.

  I sat slouched at my desk, absently sketching diagrams along the margins of my notes. Not out of any grand artistic ambition; it was just what my hands did when my mind wandered. And my mind wandered often. I suppose anyone would, trapped listening to a man who taught history as if he were addressing a roomful of unruly schoolchildren, despite the fact that it was only me sitting there.

  Still, I couldn’t dislike him entirely. His son, Caesar—named with almost painful earnestness after the Roman general—was one of my closest friends. It made Zepelli’s lectures easier to endure, somehow, knowing that even the driest of men could produce someone like Caesar, full of life and fire.

  The history Zepelli taught was familiar—eerily so. It mirrored the world I remembered from before, right up until a few centuries ago, when things had... shifted. Byzantium had refused to die its slow death and instead surged back to life, while the Holy Roman Empire had somehow stitched itself into a true centralized power. Meanwhile, France, ever France, gnawed at itself with a thousand noble rebellions, too fractured to reform, too proud to yield.

  I added a zy spiral to the corner of the page, half-listening as Zepelli droned on about treaties and generals long dead, wondering—not for the first time—if anyone else remembered the way history should have gone.

  —

  Celeste, my little sister, sat beside me once my lessons ended and Zepelli had finally left. She was less than a year younger—born from superfetation, conceived four months after me, while I was still growing in the womb. Had we been the same gender, nature would have demanded one of us die before birth. I would have killed her there and then. But that was not how fate pyed out.

  Inside me, my brother’s soul still lingers—a second presence intertwined with my own. Thanks to him, I can perform soul manipution twice within my inner world. There, he remains forever a fetus, an unborn thing, a symbol of what he will never become. He is bound to me for eternity, just as I am bound to a body that will never wither with age.

  I do not think of it as cruelty. He cks the cognitive spark needed to suffer or understand his existence. He is not a prisoner in any meaningful sense—merely an extension of my will, a second heartbeat I can call upon when needed.

  Celeste put her arm around mine possessively as though she were my lover. And she is my lover having maniputed her soul once in the womb I transformed her into my lover.

  “Zeppeli is a real blow you know it feels like he is here to just make your life harder.” She looked up at me with her eyes as though she were seducing me–She probably is– as she caressed my arm further.

  “WILLIAM!” a voice from across the room called Caesar. He probably just wanted to py a game although from the sound of his voice probably not.

  “What is it?” I asked ignoring my sister’s possessiveness, something I gave all the women I knew my mother loved me in a sexual sense as did my aunt living with my family after her husband died and was unable to be wed again. I made sure no one would know so that this never gets out.

  “Your father is… dead.” I didn’t care too much about my father as he was the one stopping my ambition a staunch conservative in a crumbling kingdom

  I am 19 at the moment and four years ago I would have been considered an adult so I did what any normal reincarnated 15 year old would do I built factories in secret that made me ludicrously wealthy to the point were I was able to keep a private army of my own while the kingdom of Leon was struggling

  “I see… I will go now.” I walked away from the two but I heard