Just as he predicted, living as a baby was thoroughly obliterating any sense of pride he might have still had after reincarnating. The sheer embarrassment almost became too much to handle at times. Really, the only mitigating factor was that his new family didn’t actually know how aware he already was at this age.
After just a few months, Brennan had learned a few things about the world. First, the relative lack of technology in this place. Candles being lit up in the evenings in place of electrical lighting had been a real shock. Not to mention the clothes everyone seemingly wore. Everything he witnessed suggested they lived in a rural area of some kind, likely in a medieval time period, but it wasn’t as if he could just go ahead and ask. That was as much as he could figure out with just a few glimpses of the outside world.
Second, his family. Excluding the occasional visitors that would come to fawn over him every once in a while, three people lived in this house with him that he could actually make out with his improved vision. Most frequently, he was with his mother, Doris. A pale, dark-haired woman in her mid-twenties who carried him around like he was made of gold and sang the sweetest songs to him, ones he was beginning to understand now that he’d spent some time learning their language.
George, his father, was a boisterous, brown-haired man of around the same age that was outside most of the day for what must have been work. Tan, calloused hands sometimes grabbed Brennan and spun him around in the air at terrifying speeds while his father laughed as if it was the funniest thing in the world. The man would get this look on his rugged face which prompted Brennan to start crawling away whenever he saw it. Tragically, it was never a race he could win.
Then there was his sister Junia. At six years old, she was the most energetic in the house by far and wasn’t afraid to show it. It exhausted his parents a lot of the time, and they often told her to go play with the other kids just to get some reprieve. This method never kept her away forever; she picked him up and talked his ear off whenever she got the opportunity. Brennan had learned to just roll with it unless she had dirty hands.
Skill leveled up!
[Analyze (Common) - Lv. 2] -> Lv. 18
Skill equipped.
[Focus (Common) - Lv. 1] -> Lv. 7
Most importantly, there was the system. Unlike what he had hoped, leveling proved unreasonably difficult when you got tired so easily and had no way of moving your body for too long without someone constantly watching over you. What little physical ‘training’ he managed to do was always swiftly interrupted by his mom who must have thought he was just doing normal baby stuff. A good cover, but he was trying to do crunches. They weren’t supposed to be charming!
Suffice to say, this limitation resulted in a lack of physical skills and left him concentrating on the mental for a majority of his wakeful hours. Hence the progress in his two only skills. Stubborn perseverance even when he felt bored of analyzing the wooden chairs around the kitchen table. That was how advancements were made.
Granted, he had the option of getting a third skill if he wished to, courtesy of the so-called Skill Seed. On his second day, he had gotten around to discovering what its function was and if he found it a suitable prize for reincarnating.
The answer was yes, but the problem wasn’t whether it was good or not. The problem was that it was too good. Despite having been in possession of one for months, he had yet to make a decision because of the sheer potential each choice could offer. Even with very little context as to what qualified as special in this world, he had been shocked at what the floating text told him it did.
Skill Seed: choose one of three options. Skill fusion, skill rarity upgrade, or skill selection.
Though it’d taken some deliberation, he ultimately ruled out the first two because he didn’t think either would end up being worth it in the long term. So far, Brennan hadn’t reached any bottlenecks in his training and would continue to improve to the best of his ability. Upgrading from common rarity to uncommon didn’t seem too enticing for now, especially because he didn’t need his skills yet. Skill fusion likewise had limited utility when his arsenal amounted to two measly common skills.
But even with his inclination to go for skill selection, he was presented with a slew of new choices to make.
Skill selection grants a free skill from one of the following categories: Mental, Physical, Crafting, Magic, Social
Yes, categories. Each one offered a choice between five skills that he could potentially add to his repertoire, totalling out at a whopping twenty-five options, none of which he could say were objectively bad.
Not to say all of them were particularly useful for him, but it was more the fact that he would be forfeiting the choice of getting them for free without the mind-numbing process of taking the actions required to unlock these skills first. Coming to terms with that was… difficult.
What if I end up wasting my headstart?
That was the foremost worry in his mind as he read through the options. Besides everything else, he had at least discovered that his family also had a system. That meant most if not all people in this world did, in all likelihood. So it was going to come down to his ability to distinguish himself early so as not to waste this life, like he had done on Earth.
Physical skills available: Heavy Punch, Heavy Kick, Grapple, Shoulder Bash, Endure
For all his whining about not being able to train his body, he had to hold himself back from dreaming about becoming some great warrior with the benefit of being able to choose a skill less than a year after his birth. In the end, he didn’t think he was going down this path. Or if he was, it wouldn’t be now. Picking a skill he couldn’t level up properly was tantamount to wasting the advantage he held. So with a heavy heart, Brennan buried the mental image of his infant self punching through a brick wall and moved on.
Crafting skills available: Smithing, Cooking, Tailoring, Carpentry, Alchemy
Among the options for this section, three of them were ruled out instantly. Not only would they be easy to get when the time came—they also sounded boring. The ones he was somewhat interested in were the smithing and alchemy skills. But he just didn’t know enough to tell whether it was a smart decision to take either of them prematurely. Yeah, same thing as with physical skills applied here in that he couldn’t practice them the moment he selected them.
On the other hand, if there wasn’t a teacher available for either discipline, he might struggle a lot to unlock one. Plus, under the all-seeing eye of the system, improvement was a lot more linear in the starting stages. Trial and error would have direct feedback in the form of levels. Even if he didn’t know what he was doing, he thought he could improve at alchemy by picking herbs and smashing them together in a bowl.
Not the best plan, admittedly, but he didn’t have anyone to tell him how it was done. His parents didn’t even know he could almost pronounce more than a few words, and once they did, it would be when he was able to speak more clearly. Beyond what little he had picked up so far, he needed a more thorough explanation for how the system was commonly used and what the adults in this place would recommend.
Waiting for that time was an option. Brennan recognized that much. His issue was that it was also going to take too long. Time spent waiting was time spent not grinding a skill he wouldn’t otherwise be able to acquire under normal circumstances.
For that reason, choosing something seemed better than not. As it was, he felt like he had waited far too long already. Therefore, no skill in this category made it onto his priority list.
Social skills available: Acting, Persuasion, Deception, Intimidation, Read Intentions
This was a weird category for him, he concluded. To varying degrees, each option seemed trainable, not running into the disadvantage of picking something he couldn’t improve quickly. That was a point in its favor.
Looking at it from another angle, these skills might frankly be something he needed. While he was mentally an adult, his social capabilities had never been the best. If he could improve that exponentially in this life, doors that would otherwise remain closed might open for him. An improved ability to navigate his relationships or understand them better sounded excellent. If he’d had something like this in his past life, it would have saved him a lot of grief. In fact, the chain of events leading to his death would never have occurred in the first place if he had been smart enough to cut ties sooner.
With that being said, the natural accessibility of these skills worked against them here. Were he to try his hardest to acquire them, he had a moderate amount of confidence that he could unlock them all. The reason they weren’t out of the running from the start was that there were multiple factors at play. If he could improve something like Read Intentions daily for the next ten years, Brennan had no doubt that he’d be able to become a savant at human interaction. From there, he could leverage his connections to gain access to anything else he needed.
As a foundation, having one such skill at a decent level would be great for him. What it came down to was if he wanted to spend a Skill Seed on it. Given that he had no intention of specializing in this field and it would never branch out into a full build? His answer was no.
The decision came to him on a quiet evening while Doris carried him over her shoulder into the kitchen. Following a short spell of deliberation about cutting out what wasn’t absolutely necessary, the choice became unavoidable.
Mental skills available: Memorization, Meditation, Dull Emotion, Visualization, Divide Attention
Had it not been for the fact that there was another tree with some insane options being offered, he would have been tempted to pick one of these on the spot. They were just that crazy. There wasn’t a single choice here that didn’t appeal to him in some way, and the same logic he had used to justify taking a social skill applied here even more. While it might not have as much impact on his relationship in a direct sense, every skill here would serve as a foundation for the rest of his build.
Meditation was the least interesting, but it was also the skill he had been trying the hardest to get. Sitting still and clearing his mind should have been easy to do. The system disagreed. He apparently did not meet the requirements for becoming a monk.
There’d been a thought in his mind that maybe, the system was barring him from accessing the skills presented prematurely, and it was forcing him to choose before he could unlock any of the listed options independently. That was not the case.
How did he know that? Simple. Because one of the mental choices, or more specifically, Focus, had been listed here prior to him getting it himself.
Replacing it was the Visualization skill, which held huge implications for him. For the purpose of crafting, this skill would be incredible. Aside from that, Brennan could imagine countless ways to exploit it.
Would it just outright cure someone with aphantasia and rewrite their entire mental architecture to accommodate this skill? Not like it’d apply to me. Guess I won’t know until I have people I can ask.
Memorization spoke for itself. Brilliant pick if he was trying to accrue knowledge. What turned him away from it was the fact that he hadn’t seen many books or texts in general in his environment, and suspected it might be a long time before he could get his hands on anything that could make a memory skill truly shine.
Dull Emotion was the skill that had him hesitating the most. On the surface, it didn’t look that useful. Until he remembered that he wasn’t a particularly disciplined person in his previous lifetime. Having the ability to simply dampen boredom or discomfort when doing something difficult and undesirable could prove to be the key to success. Procrastination would simply stop being a problem as he leveled it up.
Eliminating anxiety or stress sounded great as well. In the event that he got involved in a fight of any kind, something he began to think was a virtual certainty considering the nature of the system, this would keep him calm. Finally, the last upside to picking this skill was that he had no idea how to even begin practicing it the regular way. He had to assume that this was his only opportunity to ever receive it at a point where he could afford to.
The psychological consequences of abusing the ability to turn yourself into a high-functioning emotionless zombie made him wary. He didn’t know if skills had notable side effects in this world, nor did he want this to be how he found out.
Additionally, he didn’t need more motivation to make the most out of his second life. The desire to get better wasn’t lacking in the slightest.
I’m going to make it no matter what.
Meanwhile, Divide Attention was genuinely overpowered even thinking about it in a superficial manner. In terms of overall gains, being able to grind multiple skills at the same time including this one must have been ridiculous. Never mind the efficiency of executing multiple tasks simultaneously. The skill was so amazing that Brennan was glad no one would find it weird to see a baby drooling.
So he filed this one away as his most likely pick for the category, and moved on.
Magic skills available: Incantation, Sense Magic, Pure Mana Draw, Mana Spark, Warding
This was it. The gateway between the natural and supernatural in a more tangible way than any of the other categories. If he picked something from here, he would be verifiably magical, bestowed with the ability to affect the world with his will. Or so he hoped.
Given that he couldn’t speak properly, and that it wasn’t a basic skill, Incantation was eliminated. The other three skills were more overt, with one standing out from the rest: Sense Magic.
Why not Mana Sense?
That would have been more in line with the other two mana skills. Perhaps it was more general? Something else to find out at a later date.
To make an informed decision, he had needed to know what the skills did to begin with. Sense Magic worked exactly as advertised, but the others needed to be checked out before he fully understood.
[Pure Mana Draw (Uncommon)] - Draw in pure mana from any external source which contains it.
Why specifically pure mana and not just mana? And how would I know where those sources are?
[Mana Spark (Uncommon)] - Create a small spark of mana from your hands.
No mana bolt? Give me something to work with.
[Warding (Uncommon)] - Create stationary magical formations that trigger defensive effects when conditions are met.
That’s basically another crafting skill, but with magic involved.
Between the options presented, Mana Spark was the best for the sole reason that he would be able to practice it right away. This meant it would come down to Mana Spark or Sense Magic. And he was inclined to go with the latter.
Sensing magic was going to be a useful skill no matter what type of magic he chose to advance with.
The last reason, the one that ended up breaking the tie for him, was the lack of knowledge for how his parents would react if they ever caught him practicing it. None of the people he had met in his short time on this world had displayed magic, so it had to be rare in this area. If he started practicing magic in front of their faces, he would irreversibly be changing their perception of him. He… couldn’t say he was ready for that without knowing the likely outcome with more context about the world they lived in.
His training time would be severely limited if he had to hide it from them, what with how infrequent the times where he was left unattended were. Therefore, it came down to two options. Divide Attention or Sense Magic.
If I give up on one, I know how to begin training it. If I give up on the other, what would set me apart from any other precocious kid in the middle of nowhere?
He could have delayed longer, taken more time to think it over, but it had been months. Arguably, he was already behind schedule. That was why he didn’t hesitate any longer.
Skill equipped.
[Sense Magic (Uncommon) Lv. 1]
Wizard arts, here I come.
The choice Brennan made that night was a hundred percent only in support of that very noble goal, and no part of this was at all motivated by him having lost patience and wanting a shiny new toy to play with.