A Sky Full of Tropes [Reincarnated Psychic Child LitRPG]

The first time I'm actually taken outside of the village walls is after the end of the indigo season, April 1st, when the sky changes to a bright sky blue. The azure season is here. Spring is starting and the early flowers are in full bloom. My mom carries me down a dirt road through an apple orchard, each tree covered in buds that haven't quite opened yet.

We arrive at the festival grounds, where vendor stalls have been set up selling books, crafts, and food. In the center of the grounds stands a massive oak tree full of buds. Under it, several benches made of logs sliced in half are situated around a fire pit. Several people are gathered around a bonfire, laughing and talking and having a good time.

I watch everything closely, trying to see more than just what my eyes can see. I've been trying to unlock the magical sight Corwen said I was supposed to have for months without apparent progress, but exposure to a bunch of new things is enough to tip it over the line.

With my third eye, I'm starting to be able to see green life energy slowly wafting off of each tree. The people in my sight have auras as well, but theirs are a different flavor, more complex but each of them with a backdrop of violet. There's a few animals around the festival as well, most of them with an orange aura, but there's one of those creepy devil-goats that my family keeps bearing an ominous red aura instead.

There's some older children playing games, but I'm only a few months old and not quite up to playing Tag yet. My mom and one of my uncles are willing to push around a ball in the grass so I can play something, at least. A ball that, strangely enough, looks identical to a soccer ball I might have expected to be able to buy in California. Where did they get this? Did someone make this?

Unfortunately, any answers are going to have to wait until I can actually talk. I never actually had kids in my first life and don't really want to try too hard to remember the other five million and whatever lives I apparently had. I'm pretty sure I'm not supposed to be doing much in the way of walking and talking until I'm at least a year old, though. I can wait. There's still plenty of other skills I can unlock in the meantime.

The highlight of the spring festival is the Skill Fair, where people get up in front of the log benches and show off their skills. One young man juggles flaming torches to much applause. A woman in a flashy green dress plays the flute and dances lightly. An older woman recites poetry using quite a lot of fancy words I don't quite catch.

I don't have the Stamina to make it through the entire festival. I'm already dozing off to baby naps by the time my mom takes me back to the Hearth.

More time passes, and the turning of the sky from azure to green is heralded by a Beer Festival to which babies aren't invited. My mom goes off to have fun and leaves me in the care of Aunt Myrtle.

"Now you behave, do you hear?" Aunt Myrtle says. "I won't stand for any babies messing up my hearth."

I pretend I don't understand her and just coo and try to examine everything as best as I can. The kitchen is full of weird magitech appliances that only vaguely resemble familiar ones. There's one with a glass pot that resembles some sort of coffee maker, just powered by glowing magic sigils rather than electricity. Aunt Myrtle is very busy but she must have some sort of detection skill herself, because the minute I try to get into anything, she's swooping in to stop me. I don't give up in my attempts to sneak around, though. Sadly, no sneaking skills are forthcoming just yet.

On July 1st, when the green sky turns yellow, my mom takes me out to a summer festival. This one is a trade fair, and people have brought a lot of crafted goods to show off as examples of their expertise.

"I wonder what kind of class you're going to pick when you grow up," my mom muses aloud. "The wood carver over there has a xylophone. I'm betting you could annoy the shit out of the elders with that. You ever think about being a bard?"

I make some noncommittal baby noises and she carries me on past some more stalls.

"Nobody's going to let me get you anything sharp yet, of course," Mom goes on, unconcerned by my lack of coherent response. "You're gonna need to wait some years before I get you a knife."

I've been starting to learn that my mom is not the most responsible of parents.

"How about a puzzle?" Mom suggests. "You seem like a smart kid and that'll help you train smarty skills."

One of the stands has some beautifully painted jigsaw puzzles, and my mom lets me pick one out with a dragon on it.

"Be careful that he doesn't try to eat the pieces," warns the vendor, but my mom waves off his concerns and pays with a handful of coins.

When we get back to the Hearth and I get a chance to play around with it, I am very careful with the pieces and don't put them in my mouth. Fine, it might be more baby-like to do that, but it's too nice to mess up and I don't want it to get taken away from me. As it is, it takes hours to complete with my low attributes. Once it's finally done, I'm rewarded with a system message.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

I clap my little hands together in glee and giggle loudly as I admire the completed dragon image. I didn't expect to get a message and a skill out of it!

At six months old, my physical stats are all now up to 0.5 points. I'm going to infer that they'll hit a full 1 point each when I reach my first birthday.

Mid-August sees the sky turning from yellow to orange. There's a Harvest Festival in September that seems Thanksgiving-inspired, but no one actually says Thanksgiving. I'm almost ten months old by this point, and some of my relatives let me have a little bit of mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce. My mom even gives me one small spoonful of pumpkin pie filling.

The centerpiece of the harvest feast is a whole roast devil-goat with an apple in its mouth that takes up an entire table inside the hearth. I'm not allowed any of it, so maybe next year.

People have been piling into the Hearth over the course of the orange season, and by the time the sky turns red, it's packed and I'm back to sharing a room with my mom's twin sister, Aunt Hazel. She's six months pregnant with twins and seems to take up half the room all by herself.

There's an undercurrent of tension among my relatives, as well as a fair bit of anticipation and excitement. "What kind of monsters will we see this year?" is a common sentiment. There seem to be a number of adventurers in the Hearth who are eager to fight something.

The Hearth has gone into siege mode and the overworld is swarming with monsters beneath the blood red sky. Some of my aunts and uncles take to the village walls and snipe at them with arrows and fire spells. Dead giant spiders are brought into the hearth and turned into 'seafood'. I don't think I'm up to eating spider chowder yet, even if people say the meat in their limbs is like lobster.

"I scryed a Legendary Headless Horseman riding around on the roads between the Hearths," says one of my aunts, Heather. "I don't want anyone under Epic rank going far from the walls. Laurel and I are the only ones that can go toe-to-toe with a Legendary ranked monster."

"I want its horse," Grandma Laurel says.

"Of course you do," Aunt Heather says with a longsuffering sigh.

Being not quite a year old yet, I will obviously not be participating in my great-grandmother's quest to tame a spooky high-level mount, but I can cheer her on from home. And also thoroughly avoid going near the stable anytime soon because I'm sure the thing is even scarier than those devil-goats.

I'm becoming more mobile, and with so many more people in the Hearth, my mom is trusting them to keep me out of trouble while she snipes giant spiders from the village walls. Anise is only Elite ranked, and eager to get in as many kills she can of the monsters she's able to handle.

"If I'd been more dedicated, I should have hit Heroic before I turned 21," Mom says. "But my party went and out-leveled me and left me in the dust when I got pregnant."

"You're still young," Aunt Heather says. "Immortality is still well within your reach. Having children need not be a setback."

"My son is smart," Mom says. "Hopefully he wants to be an adventurer because I can't really help much if he wants to be a Hearthkeeper."

I circle around the edge of the hearth. There's a mural on the walls of depicting a family tree sprawling up the central tower and out of sight beyond the upper floors. I don't think I'm up to climbing a tower yet, but I take a closer look at the names and faces on the ground floor.

The earliest generation is comprised of two individuals with golden plaques near the floor bearing the faces of a man and a woman. I squint at them, and can manage to read the words etched into them. They're written in Common, but with the auto-translator they just look like English to me.

So the two founders of Corwen Hearth were… spawned? Did Corwen just clone them in a vat or something? I wonder what those early days of the Hearth must have been like.

No death date is listed for Apple. Does that mean she might still be alive somewhere? Neither of the pictures show any sign of age. Do higher rank individuals live longer? I'm guessing the golden plaques signify Legendary rank. Higher up, there are plaques of wood, iron, bronze, and silver, which might represent Basic, Elite, Heroic, and Epic ranks. If there's something higher than Legendary, I don't see any examples of it visible from the ground floor.

Ash didn't have any kids, or at least there aren't any noted here. Apple had five children by five different fathers. I'm sure a Legendary [Guardian Hearthkeeper] must have made a fantastic uncle for them.

I finally manage to slip out of the hearth to explore the Hearth without some aunt or uncle stopping me and plunking me back down in the middle of the room with a toy.

My hard work (or mischief) has paid off with another addition to my character screen. What kind of a baby would I be if I didn't push the limits of what I can get away with?

Many of the rooms in the Hearth's four wings are bedrooms, and even the ones normally used mostly for storage are full of relatives during this time of the year. There's even multiple bathrooms with sigil-covered faucets that seem to produce water from nothing and drain it to nowhere. I'm quite happy that my new home isn't so medieval that it lacks indoor plumbing.

It doesn't take long for me to get caught and be returned to the hearth by a well-meaning aunt, but I'm not about to give up yet. My adventures have only just begun.