Mentor-Mage/ Chapter 1: The smell of opportunity.

Author note: So, I decided to remake this one, and even made a second chapter. The first oneshot had an interesting protagonist that very obviously suffered from a psychosis. That's an interesting syndrome, but one that would have completely taken over the story.

Instead, I'd rather write about a character that has slightly less serious problems to work through, in a more controlled setting. This is an attempt at exactly that. Tell me what you think.

Chapter 1: The smell of opportunity.

In my past life, I lived and died as a stockbroker. I wouldn’t say I was the richest man at the time, but I definitely wasn’t as poor as my family had been, growing up. A mother addicted to drugs and an absentee father had made for a terrible environment to grow up in, who could have guessed…

I didn’t, let that deter me, though. With the correct amount of ambition and good execution, I rose up in society. My friends had expensive cars and large houses, pretty girlfriends, and old families, yet none dared to look down on me anymore. Some might call me superficial, but I was well aware that my ‘friends’ existed to serve their purpose, first and foremost. Once I had gotten what I wanted from them, I wouldn’t invest more energy into them either.

All that wealth, and it had only taken 24 years for me to reach such a level. Things were looking up when disaster struck.

Perhaps I had been cursed since birth, because God saw one last opportunity to ruin the life I had created for myself. Cancer. It was already too late for chemotherapy and radiotherapy to do anything but give me a few more months, so I pulled the plug. Literally. First, I slipped the nurse in charge of me some sleeping pills. Then, I broke the apparati I was hooked up to, so they wouldn’t make a sound as they stopped working.

Then, with some clever googling and a knife, I broke as much as I could. Thankfully, the other patients seemed fine and didn’t require our nurse’s aid. Small mercies, I guess. They would have been acceptable casualties, anyway.

After all that setup, it was only a matter of overdosing on the strongest pills I could find, and voila.

An endless sleep.

Or so I had hoped. Turns out, life had other plans for me.

When I next became aware, I felt as if I was floating through the void. I had no form, yet sensed something anyway. Like a linen sheet wrapped around my body, I was embraced by non-existence. A little poetic for my taste, but that described the feeling somewhat accurately.

For a moment, I became scared that I would forever be doomed to awareness within this empty space, but thankfully my situation soon changed.

The linen that covered me started to heat up on one side. Then, I was being lurched in the direction of the heat. I turned into a living fireball, but felt no pain, thankfully.

The heat eventually lessened, turning into comfortable warmth instead. As the warmth spread, I regained shape. My arms and legs returned, attached to a bulbous torso. Little toes and fingers grew on the end, and I regained different senses. Strangely, everything was out of proportion… Could it be? Was I being reincarnated, as the Hinduist legends foretold?

My excitement was stymied by intense pressure. The linen wrapped around me convulsed painfully, slowly squeezing me upwards… or downwards.

I tried to resist, but found that I couldn’t, even if I wanted to. Time passed, and the pain persisted. Eventually, though, the linen fell away. The warmth was replaced by cold instead, but I could breathe now. Two large hands wrapped around me, laying me down on some cloth. I still lacked much of my sight, but could barely make out the vague outline of two people. One had been laying down, while the other was the one to put me on the cloth.

Then it hit me. I had just been born…

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5 years passed in the blink of an eye, but I hadn’t remained idle during this time. It turned out that just like in my last life, I was going to have to grow up on my own, since I hadn’t seen nor heard of my mother since my birth. Apparently, she died. Though some part of me wished for a stable family life, the larger part of me was glad that I wouldn’t be constrained by family like in my past life.

I had quickly been carted off to an orphanage in the slums of the city, where I spent the first four years of my new life. It took a while for my body and skills to grow enough for me to live by myself, and I couldn’t have been happier than I was the day I left the orphanage. Somehow, that place was even worse than my last one. The matron’s sold the girls to the brothels once they came of age, while the boy’s joined the various gangs that ruled this shitty district.

Learning about this new life took me quite a while, because it turned out that I hadn’t been reincarnated on earth. Instead, I was reborn in a medieval, savage society where it was every man for himself. For a while, I wondered whether I had just been sent back in time. Even when the city folk spoke of mages and knights with miraculous powers, I hadn’t believed them, seeing it as just another fable that the people from the dark ages spouted all the time.

That was, until I stumbled upon a gang war. One of the gang’s leaders had used some kind of superpower to coat his broadsword with a red mist. That mist had allowed him to cleave his opponent right in half, steel armor and all. A moment later, that same gang leader retreated nearly three dozen steps with a single jump, leaving me gobsmacked.

That incident had made it clear that my improvised plans would need to be revised.

In a world of super-strength and, possibly, magic, I would only be able to join the upper caste by learning one of the two practices. From what I was told, mages were far rarer and more valuable than knights, so for now, I set my sights on just such a skill. I would have to gain the necessary level of expertise if I wanted to make it in life, because one thing was for certain. There was no way that I would surrender myself to a life in the mud, as my mother had.

And so, I spent a few years learning some basic skills to get by. After five years of not meeting any mages, I knew that learning magic would require luck. Luck was born from opportunity, and opportunity was born from our efforts. That was why I learned lockpicking, stealth, and pickpocketing, the three signature skills of a street rat, here in the slums.

I, however, was determined to steal things of higher value than what the other ones were aiming for. Both bread and gold were just a means to an end, after all.

Today was just a day that started like any other… I left the rafters of the dilapidated building I had set up shop in sneakily, dodging the areas where the homeless people were sleeping. They were still sleeping off their drunkenness from the night before, so this wasn’t a difficult task. Then, once I got into the side alley that connected to the largest road in the slums, I executed my plan for the day.

First, I would steal some pastry from a bakery on the other side of the district. I worked with a rotating system of targets, so no shop ever created a vendetta against me. The bakeries in the slums were really just small operations that worked with wheat and flour that had gone bad already. Nonetheless, I needed sustenance. The baker never saw me slip past him, nor did he see me leave.

Next, I would head towards some beggar shops. Various beggars laid carpets out in front of them throughout the day, where they would sell whatever they had found the day before. That roughly translated to: whatever they hadn’t managed to pawn off.

I always checked their shops, because I was curious if anything even remotely relating to magic would ever pop up in one. Put a peal in front of a swine, and they would never recognize it. I hoped this rule counted true, even for magic. Hell, at this point, I would be happy to learn some of that swordsmanship too!

I spent the rest of the morning checking the shops, but found nothing of interest, just like always. Truthfully, my routine hadn’t brought me much opportunity yet. On the other hand, surviving would be difficult in the rest of the city. I had done some scouting and found out that while the richer folk in town were better off, they weren’t any more generous than the people in the slums. Furthermore, security was much tighter in the other districts. Even securing enough food would be difficult in the other areas, due to all the guards.

Despite these downsides, moving to the city remained a better option than joining one of the gangs in hopes of getting super strength. From what I could gather, the gang leaders guarded their knowledge jealously. It was a high-risk, high-reward strategy. One that I wasn’t willing to throw my second life away for. There had to be better options…

As the day progressed, though, I found out that today was distinctly not like any other day.

The moment I heard the commotion from a small market nearby, I could smell opportunity from a mile away. Once I got there, I found a large group of people, surrounding an old man. His beard hung low, almost touching the dirt at his feet, but ended in a twirl, which just barely allowed him to stay clean. The man’s attire was just as strange as his beard, though. He wore a simple purple robe with yellow stars embroidered on the side. The workmanship reminded me of a toddler’s crafts project.

He wore a large, pointy hat that sported the same color, and held out a glass vial filled with a red liquid to the crowd.

I inched closer, to hear what he was saying.

“This, dear folks, is the Millenia-destroying-ultima-grandiose healing potion! It heals all wounds and ailments exactly three days after drinking! Pregnant mothers, do you want to make your newborn as strong as an ox? Old men, do you want to regain the vitality from your youth? Do you want to become a knight with just one sip? Then buy this potion, for just 3 silver, because I am magnanimous!”

I sighed. It was just another charlatan. A snake-oil salesman. We had had plenty of those in my previous world, and it seemed this one was no different. There went the tiny spark of hope I had been nursing.

The people of the slums were no more gullible than I was, and instantly started cussing the old man out with every profanity they knew. Did the old man not know to set up some fake demonstration before making his claims? That was the oldest trick in the book… Not only was he a charlatan, but he was also terrible at his job. What a sad combination…

Who knew how he had scrounged enough coin together to sow that horrifying purple gown of his together? I could only shake my head and pity the man…

The situation was about to turn violent, but the old man surrendered and hurried off into an alley, disappearing from sight. The other bums lost interest and went back to their addiction of choice, which left me standing alone in the square, staring at the alley the old man had just gone down.

Suddenly, a lightbulb went on in my head. A business opportunity had just presented itself…