If you choose to be reborn, you will not have magic powers, but you will unlock a status window and a skill tree that you can use to give yourself new skills and abilities and improve your physical characteristics.
You’ll get the same thing if you choose to be reincarnated, however, magic will be a factor. And the age of the world will be somewhere like 50-ish years before the full rollout of the industrial revolution, technology-wise. (minor clarification, you keep your current knowledge either way)
However, you will not be the hero or the chosen one. You’re just going to be a person with a perk.
I really don’t understand what magic you think we don’t have? Chances are you typed this question on a slate of crystal and wire that allows you to see and hear across the planet in nearly real time. There are people who, with the right tools can summon fire at their fingertips, unleash arcs of lightning, draw water from thin air, and make rocks that talk. We are surrounded by forces that both well mapped (at least locally) and are completely incomprehensible to the best of us. While we have not mastered the veil between life and death, we have certainly learned to draw it back.
You are, I fear demonstrating the old adage that familiarity breeds contempt. You’re confusing the comprehensibility of the world with mundanity. We are living in a world full of “magic”… It just doesn’t look like the magic you read about in old fairy tales, and importantly, it’s not shared equally to everyone.
I’ll take reincarnation with my mind intact.
This take lacks whimsy, and that’s my entire gripe with it.
If I can’t use the force to levitate a building or by simply calling on the spirits learn things that are verifiably true, then it’s not cool enough.
Sure, many of the things that we have may seem magical to a caveman brought here from 47,000 BC, but it’s not castles floating in the sky without a visible means of propulsion. It’s not mind-melding with a bird and seeing the world from its point of view.
We have an imitation of magic and not the real thing.
And what makes you think we haven’t got those still in store? The island of our knowledge and the vast coastline of our discovery is still insignificant compared to the vast sea of our ignorance and the oceans of possibility we have yet to travel.
Whimsy is in short supply, but it’s not because the world lacks magic. It’s more because of choices made by people who chose to be dead inside, and shaped the world in their image. I’m not asking you to stop demanding more whimsy, far from it. This old grey bearded man is asking you to form a party, accept a quest and perhaps one day lead the charge of an army in pursuit of returning the whimsy to the world.
Do you accept, traveller?