I Built a Divine Zoo in Another World

Even without mastering the language and without being able to speak, he could already identify a few words that were repeated frequently.

His adult brain was far more efficient at recognizing patterns than that of an ordinary baby, and he maintained an ever-expanding mental glossary.

’Mother’ was easy. ’Father’ as well. ’Brother’ Asmon. ’Sister’ Judite. ’Lukas’ himself. ’Eat,’ Aurora said that before nursing him.

’Sleep,’ Clavor would say while extinguishing the candles. 𝘧𝓇𝑒𝑒𝑤ℯ𝑏𝓃𝘰𝑣ℯ𝘭.𝘤ℴ𝘮

The words were like small bricks of meaning, stacking day after day, building a rudimentary understanding of the world around him.

It was on a sunny day, exactly one month after his birth, that something changed his perception of the world forever.

Aurora decided to take him outside the main bedroom.

Until that moment, Lukas only knew four places. The room where he had been born, the outer corridor, glimpsed briefly whenever Aurora carried him to bathe. The bathing room itself, a small chamber with a wooden tub and water heated in cauldrons, and the improvised nursery beside his parents’ room. The rest of the mansion remained a mystery.

That morning, however, Aurora wrapped him in a soft light-blue wool blanket with small embroidered stars along the edges and carried him in her arms as she walked through the hallways.

Her bare feet made little noise against the polished wooden floorboards. Judite followed beside her, hopping like a rabbit, her brown hair flying in every direction.

Asmon appeared shortly afterward, coming from somewhere in the back of the house, still sweating, his face flushed red, and his hair stuck to his forehead.

"Training already finished?" Aurora asked her eldest son.

"Father said he wanted to see me."

They arrived at a spacious courtyard behind the property. Lukas widened his eyes.

The space was enormous, at least by the standards he could judge from the height of Aurora’s arms.

It was surrounded by low stone walls covered with moss in some places, with packed earth underfoot, compacted by constant use.

At one end, wooden posts driven into the ground supported training dummies, crude mannequins with articulated arms, dressed in padded clothing and marked by countless sword cuts.

Clavor was already there.

He wore a simple linen shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, revealing muscular arms covered in old and recent scars. A longsword rested in his hands, its blade gleaming beneath the morning sun. He raised it in greeting when he saw the family approaching.

"Come, Asmon. Show me what you’ve learned this week."

His voice was firm but not severe. It was the voice of a teacher confident in his student.

Lukas, nestled in Aurora’s arms, stared at everything with wide eyes. The sky was a deeper shade of blue than he remembered from Earth, or perhaps that was only his imagination.

The sun was warm but not oppressive, and a gentle breeze swayed the leaves of the trees beyond the walls.

He could hear birds singing somewhere in the distance, sounds both familiar and strange at the same time, as though they were songs from birds he knew but with notes slightly out of tune.

"It’s his first time outside," said Judite, resting her chin on Aurora’s shoulder to look at her brother.

"He thinks everything is really big, doesn’t he, Mom?"

"The world is big, Judite. None of us could ever explore all of it."

Asmon walked into the courtyard. He carried a sword shorter than his father’s, but equally well-maintained, the leather-wrapped hilt polished by use, the blade shining like a mirror.

"Finally," said Clavor.

"Take your stance."

What happened next left Lukas completely shocked.

Asmon moved first.

The motion was so fast that Lukas could barely follow it with his eyes, and that was despite concentrating with all his might, trying to catch every detail.

The boy’s feet barely seemed to touch the ground, gliding across the packed earth as though friction did not exist. The sword cut through the air with a sharp hum, and Clavor dodged at the last instant, the sound of impact, clang, echoing through the courtyard like a sharpened bell.

The two moved in a way that ordinary humans from Earth simply could not.

It was not merely skill or technique.

It was pure speed.

Superhuman precision.

Lukas watched Asmon leap, spin through the air, and deliver a downward strike that would have split an ordinary man in half.

Clavor blocked with a horizontal blade, and sparks burst from the metal like tiny fireworks.

The sound of clashing swords was constant now, clang, clang, clang, at ever-shorter intervals. Lukas tried counting the strikes but lost track after ten.

It was like watching a dance choreography rehearsed for millennia, executed by bodies that defied physics.

Then something even more absurd happened.

Clavor’s skin began to glow.

It was not a strong, blinding glow. It was soft and silver, like moonlight reflected upon the surface of a tranquil lake.

The light emanated from his skin as though it came from within, bathing him in an ethereal radiance that made his features appear sculpted from living silver.

The next instant, Asmon’s skin glowed as well.

The same silver hue, though slightly weaker, as if his light were still learning how to burn.

The glow enveloped their bodies for a few seconds, two, perhaps three, and when it faded, both of them were even faster.

Their strikes were now almost a blur to Lukas’s eyes. He could hear the metal slicing through the air and hear the impacts but could barely see the blades moving. What had once been a dance was now a whirlwind of steel and light.

’What... what is this?’

Lukas blinked several times, trying to process what he was seeing.

Back on Earth, he had never been much of a fan of anime, manga, or fantasy novels.

His favorite entertainment consisted of wildlife documentaries and biology books. Real stories. Real animals. Real science.

He could spend hours watching a documentary about the behavior of colossal squids in the depths of the ocean or reading articles about bird migration across the Himalayas.

Even so, he had heard people talk about "magic" in casual conversations at school or seen it in movies that played on the orphanage television.

’Is this magic!?’

The realization struck him like a bucket of cold water.

’I’m not on Earth anymore.’

Of course, he had already suspected as much.

Aurora’s appearance, the foreign language, the medieval clothing, the sword at his father’s belt, everything pointed toward a different place.

But until that moment, it could still have been some remote country, some isolated culture. There were many languages in the world he did not know. There were people with unusual genetic traits.

But there was no place on Earth where people glowed with silver light and moved at impossible speeds.

’This is a different world. A fantasy world.’

’Well... I probably should have guessed.’

The idea should have been terrifying.

He was alone in an unknown world, trapped in the body of a baby, without understanding the rules, without knowing the dangers, without knowing whether he would ever be able to return home.

Instead, a wave of excitement grew within Lukas’s tiny chest.

’If this is a fantasy world, then there must be different animals.’

’Creatures I’ve never seen before. Entire species that don’t exist on Earth.’

’What else exists here?’

He felt his heart beating faster, accelerating, almost leaping from his chest.

The curiosity that had always defined him in his previous life, the same curiosity that had made him spend countless hours in the orphanage library, awakened with full force, burning through his veins like fire.

’I need to see them.’

’I need to see all of them.’