Astral Odyssey: Dying Ember

World 2.1: Alice

Luna woke up to feel intense pain coursing through her entire body. She hissed. First I wake up weak like I was on the verge of dying. Now I wake up in pain like I'm dying again. What next? I wake up when I'm supposed to be lying dead in a coffin?

BaoBao winced. He could not control when she would appear in the story. Do you want to receive the original soul's memories first or for me to carry you somewhere to recover first? 

Give me the memories. I need to understand the situation I'm in first before knowing where I can go.

The era of this world is when horses, carriages, and letters are still used. The first thing Luna understood was that she was in a dog eat dog society. Everything was decided by power, including the position of the ruler of the country. All they had to do was to challenge the ruler to an official death match, if the match was refused, a revolt is allowed. 

The power being referred to in this world was real magical abilities. Everyone has different kinds of abilities but they were usually some kind of element of nature. An average person would have one ability. A gifted person would have two. A talent would have three. Among each level, there was no clear distinctions in power levels like the previous world. There was only a continuum of how well you could control and understand your ability. 

Along with the variations in magical abilities, people's appearances varied a lot in this world too. People had different coloured hair and eyes, often influenced by their abilities. 

Alice is a girl born to parents who had no abilities. Being the first generation in her family to have powers, her hair and eye colour was very close to the original black but there is a blue shine to it and her eyes stayed grey like her parents. It should have been impossible for parents with no abilities to produce a child with abilities, so it was taken as a fortunate mutation. 

People with no abilities were always on the run and easy picking for tyrants. They lived in poor conditions like the slums. One day, a kind and powerful person challenged the king to a death match and successfully took the throne. He created the one and only safe haven for people with no abilities to live under his protection. The motivation behind his actions was that he had a friend who had no abilities. This friend had saved him a few times before and so have proven to the king that a non-ability user could also be strong in a different way and win weaker ability users. However, he lost his life due to a scheme of some tyrant. 

This safe haven was where her parents lived. When they found out that their child was an ability user, they scrimped and saved to send her to the best school for ability users, not knowing they would be sending their daughter to the wolves. By the time they managed to save up enough money, she was already 15 years old. Before this, she was attending a cheap but weak school for ability users. This resulted in Alice having very poor knowledge and control to start with in the good school she now goes to. Alice had been an innocent and bubbly girl as she was well loved by her parents and the people in her old school. However, that rubbed the stronger ones in her current school the wrong way. They believed that a weak person like her did not deserve to be so carefree. She became a target of bullies which changed her to become quiet and meek in just 1 year of school.

Because this was a boarding school which is far away from the capital where the safe haven her parents were staying at, Alice saved money on transport and never went home. This was how her parents were still blissfully ignorant of their daughter's suffering.

This was how she grew to idolize Violet, a two abilities user, who was the only advocate of the current king's belief in this school. Violet's eyes were a bright hazel colour and she had long beautiful blonde hair. She stood up for and protected the weaker students in school.