Alien mind in infant skin

I did not belong to this body, couldn’t control it. The primal and uncontrollable heart wrenching cry that came out of me filled my mind with dread. It was the first real unpleasant and visceral testament of my new cage of flesh. Who knew if this was just a temporary situation or I’d be a prisoner in this body? But there was nothing I could do at this point. After the empowering and feeling I had in that mirific space the helplessness as my body did it’s own thing, relieving itself whenever, the feeling of continuously emerging hunger and the unmistakable cold that surrounded me was a torture unlike any I thought possible. Those sights and the feeling I had in that space filled me with a crazy obsession and drive to try and get back to it.

In my old life I had studied Taoist traditions and practices. Although honestly the rituals gave me a feeling of chunibyo that I couldn’t shake and even though all of them seemed nothing but superstition, I still couldn’t help myself but continue researching. I had found after some persistence about the practice of internal alchemy which seemed to be the root of all the other practices or rather the culmination of the entire tradition. Unlike many of the others this belonged to a repeated pattern throughout many other traditions. It was like Yoga and Kundalini meditation. Like the Nordic concepts of mana and so on. This led me to actual practice and having some benefits in my old world. However it was nothing like cultivation novels would show it was pretty meh in terms of power increase but it definitely improved your life. The end result of all this practices was developing an energy body and entering a kind of space outside of the world and normal cognition. Of course I hadn’t reached that kind of stage however the knowledge gave me hope of returning to that space.

So what do you think I did? What any sane person would, I tried to meditate. Of course, the runts of my body made it almost impossible, my sleep patterns were uncontrollable and I had no way of avoiding falling asleep. To top it off sitting in your own feces and feeling them grow cold while they were stuck to your skin was a horrifying experience and so gross I have no words to describe. So once again I had no choice but to cry to draw help. I couldn’t see and even controlling my limbs was hard. My sight had gotten a bit better but there was still a way to go until I’d be able to actually see. Anyway, with nothing else to do and several attempts every day since I settled on this I eventually succeeded to briefly sink my consciousness in my body and observe the inside. What I found gave me a scare and shook me greatly. It was the final nail in the coffin.

I was not in the world I knew, no doubt existed in my mind anymore. The space that I was used to find quiet and dark was filled with a raging energy that readily answered to my will. It wasn’t the jing or qi I was used to. It was an energy that felt alien to me. Afterwards I probed the world around me and an ocean of the same energy greeted me.

The conclusion to be drawn from this was simple and clear. The vision I had after death and before I was born was clearly real. I was in a new world. In other words it wasn’t the energy that was alien, it was me. I was the alien here! Not only did I inhabit the body of an infant, taking away the chance of my… of the parents of this body to actually raise their own child but I also replaced it with the alien I was. They couldn’t know. How would they feel if they found out that not only did they take care and wiped the feces of a grown ass man in the form of a baby, their own baby, but also brought an alien in this world? For all they could understand and all I could think of from this worlds point of view I was an invader. I was the equivalent of an eldritch horror from beyond the universe for all I knew. What was I supposed to do or tell them? As far as I knew I might have killed the actual baby just to have my mind inhabit the body… How could anyone accept someone, no something like me?

This realization sunk me into despair. Thinking back perhaps it was for the best that I finally accepted and fully realized the reality of what I was. After all the forced sleeps the clawing pain of hunger and the distress of not having any control over my excretion made it impossible to stay focused enough on this realization. For better or worse it took what I think was about two days to give in and accept my state and reach a resolution. It didn’t matter what I was or how I came to be. I will do my best to repay all the care these two new parents gave me and make them proud of their offspring. It wouldn’t be easy to live on feeling the guilt that perhaps I stole the life of another, but there was nothing I could do now placed in front of this reality. I only came to be while this body was born so I have no way of knowing if there was a soul in it beforehand. Perhaps it was cruel, however I couldn’t help but hope that this body, without me inhabiting it, would have died stillborn…

For a while longer I came to terms with everything, I couldn’t bring myself to try to meditate again. The contact with that energy would only serve to remind me of nature and throw me back into depression. In the end I gave in to my longing for that space and did it anyway. This made me discover a new problem. This foreign energy that seemed to inhabit everything wasn’t the equivalent of qi. It was something entirely new, but through its nature, it prevented me from finding my own vital force. It’s responsiveness made me wonder if I should drop the other path, after all there was a famous saying in Taoist scriptures. All paths return to the origin.

After a long time, perhaps it felt long for me, I wasn’t sure if I counted the days right at that point, I decided that it was unsafe to exert my mind on controlling this new energy. It could cause problems on the development of my new body. So all I could do until I had the capacity to speak and understand the language of this world was to try to deepen my meditation and reach beyond the noise created by this new power and find the roots of my life, the dan tians.

And so, the first days of my new life as an alien puppeteering and inhabiting a new body passed. I went from single minded obsession to depression to a new found need to learn all I could about this world. Each time this new parents came by and talked I would carefully listen trying to make sense of the words. The fact that often around me they only did what I fought were silly faces and sounds didn’t help. Having no references made this task hard. For heaven’s sake! All isekai writers where glazing over this fact but learning a new language as an adult mind in the body of an infant was hellishly hard. All I could do was to force myself to memorize words until this guys decided to start pointing at themselves and saying look this is ‘papa’ or this is ‘mama’ and go from there. Until I could properly survey my surroundings I couldn’t know what they meant and discovering words from phrases was hard. When I wasn’t trying to figure out the language I was either sleeping or meditating. You’re wondering why I didn’t mention eating? Well that was time I could effectively use to hear this two, or just my new mom, saying stuff I still couldn’t comprehend, so it was time spent figuring out speaking.

About when I reached the age of one month my vision fully clarified. I could see!!!... My ability to effectively move was still close to zero however. I could crawl a bit which allowed me to follow the movements of my parents and finally start learning expressions. For example I learned how “give me ‘x’” was said and memorized the name of a few things! Ah the beauty of progress! Of course this new ability to have vision confirmed for sure a few things. This world was inhabited by humans as well. I couldn’t tell if the proportions were the same or what not but the general shape of the body was the same. Another important thing to note was the technological level. I couldn’t say for sure if we were just living in a remote place, but the heating and cooking was done by burning wood. The stove and chimney were made of what I could only call big river stones. The two were basically united into one structure and were the only source of heat and steady light besides some candles that as far as I saw where very valued and rarely used. I truly hoped at that time that I was only born during winter and that we weren’t in some crazy cold region. I hoped even more that it wasn’t the whole world that was like this.

Of course, obtaining the limited ability to move at will meant I had a new routine and a new reason to lament that beautiful space. I was crawling around until I tired out. This feeling of tiredness not sleepiness was one I was used to from my old life but not one I could say I enjoyed. In that space I saw between death and life I felt no such thing such as tiredness. Once again I was found longing for that effortless movement and feeling of unstoppable potency and my determination to return there grew. I felt more and more like my body was a cage, but there was nothing I could do. Killing myself was of the table. In fact at this point I couldn’t do it even if I wanted… At the very least all the movement helped me warm the clothes I was kept in so I was less affected by it. I also concluded that I couldn’t complain. My bed was close to the fireplace and yet I still felt cold. I couldn’t tell if it was my weak infantile body that was to sensible or that it was really that cold. My parents were warm when touching me so obviously they couldn’t be too affected.

The growing liveliness I displayed made my parents happy. I was happy too after all my strength and stamina grew by the day. It wasn’t a bad feeling after the first month of immobility. I maintained rigorous or as rigorous of a regime as my body allowed me to. I crawled to tiredness then meditated. This proved to be very useful as results appeared by the time I was 3 months old.