The first thing he noticed was the smell. It was the earthy, damp scent of wet soil and unwashed wool.

  The second thing he noticed was that he couldn't move his arms properly. They were chubby, flailing, and frustratingly weak.

  Kaito Tanaka—the man who could silence boardrooms with a glance—was currently staring up at a thatched roof full of spiders, clad in scratchy swaddling clothes. He tried to speak, to demand an explanation, but all that came out was a pathetic, high-pitched wail.

  "Oh, hush now, little Ren," a tired, gentle voice cooed. A woman with a face aged prematurely by hard labor leaned over him. Her clothes were patched burlap, her hands rough as sandpaper, but her eyes were kind. "Mama is here. Mama is here."

  Ren. My name is Ren now.

  It took him weeks to piece together his reality. He had not been reborn as a prince or a hero. He was the fifth child of a dirt-poor tenant farmer family on the outskirts of the Kingdom of Terraris. Their home was a single-room mud-brick hut. They ate thin vegetable gruel twice a day. They were the lowest of the low.

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  It was humbling. It was infuriating.

  Yet, as he lay in his wooden crib carved from a hollowed-out log, he felt a thrumming beneath his skin that didn't belong to a human baby. It was a terrifying, deep-seated vibration, like standing next to a dormant volcano that also happened to be a nuclear reactor.

  He closed his eyes and focused inward.

  System. Are you there? He thought, projecting the same mental authority he had used on junior executives.

  A translucent blue screen, visible only to him, flickered into existence against the back of his eyelids.

  [Affirmative, Host.]

  Explain my situation. The voices before I died mentioned 'the Primordial Fourteen'.

  [Correct. Your soul currently houses the dormant authorities of the Seven Demon Lords and the Seven Archangels of this reality. You are, theoretically, the most powerful being in existence.]

  Ren tried to wiggle his chubby toes. Theoretically? I can't even lift my own head.

  [Correction: If you accessed even 1% of that power right now in this underdeveloped body, you would vaporize yourself and everything within a fifty-mile radius. The powers are sealed for your protection.]

  Ren mentally sighed. A negotiator with an infinitely large bank account that was frozen. Wonderful. He would have to bide his time. He had started with nothing in his previous life and worked his way to the top. He could do it again.

  He would just have to wait until he could walk.