Around the one-year mark following his inexplicable reincarnation into this world, Brennan finally managed it. He overcame his greatest limitation.
He walked.
The first steps were small, triumphant and free. Rather than cheering out loud and getting caught immediately, he kept silent, sneaking his way through the house after climbing out of his crib. This was it. For a few minutes, he was able to go anywhere he wanted. Inside, anyway. If he opened the front door, that would give the game away, so he didn’t.
Near the back of the corridor outside his door, they had a storage room that no one was using. Inside he found lumber, dried food, some tools, and other miscellaneous stuff that wasn’t important right now. Without further ado, he sat on the hardwood floor and read his progress notifications of the recent months.
Skill leveled up!
[Analyze (Common) Lv. 18] -> Lv. 26
[Focus (Common) Lv. 7] -> Lv. 20
[Sense Magic (Uncommon) Lv. 1] -> Lv. 9
Seeing his hard work depicted like this felt unreal, but so gratifying. He could easily see how addicting this was—he was probably already addicted himself—and lamented the day where his level progress would slow down to an excruciating pace that didn’t allow for regular instances of numbers going up. Sense Magic, his first higher-rarity skill, was already difficult to level compared to the other two despite him spending the most time on it. Though at the same time, there was another avenue of growth that had made itself known during the time he’d been spending to push his skills up in level.
Attributes increased!
INT + 2
WIS + 1
PER + 1
AGI + 1
SPI + 1
The gains were small, it seemed like, made over many months and giving him miniscule amounts of noticeable improvement; he didn’t suddenly feel twice as smart for having his intellect score go from two to four, and wisdom was the same story. Agility felt like natural progression that he would have likely gotten regardless of whether he trained his body, which annoyed him.
As for the last stat, it felt a bit less intuitive than the rest…
SPI (Spirit): the link between one’s soul and reality.
That was it. No further explanation offered despite his endless attempts to get the system to give context. Not since he arrived in this world. The only way for him to gain any clarity as to its workings was to compare the difference between before he gained the additional point and after.
The skill he had been using when it increased, Sense Magic, was a profound one compared to his mundane skills. Taking it had opened up a new world to Brennan, small colorful motes in the air and ground everywhere. It clung to different things and changed its nature accordingly. Honestly, he didn’t even know how he knew they were colorful. What the skill granted him wasn’t sight, precisely, more like a sixth sense that didn’t neatly fit into any of the other five. If he had to describe it to someone from his old world, he would tell them it was close hearing or feeling colors, although that wasn’t quite it either.
Over time, he grew confident that these tiny adaptive particles enriching the world were in fact mana. Functionally speaking, he didn’t know how this would be different from a hypothetical Mana Sense skill if that was the only thing he could perceive. He had yet to find anything else that fell under the skill’s purview. But for the time being, it would serve his purposes just fine. As long as he could actually influence this mana stuff.
As it turned out, he couldn’t. In no way that he had discovered was he able to control magic in the air and progress his way to new skills from there. The revelation was as satisfying as it was frustrating. On the one hand, it meant he was right about magic skills being hard to gain and served to justify his decision to spend his Skill Seed like this in retrospect. On the other hand, this didn’t actually make him feel any closer to magic than he had been before his new skill.
Spirit attribute points brought him ‘closer’ to the mana, in a way. This held the most promise in his opinion. He didn’t gain the ability to sense them better, perception took care of that, but there was a kind of underlying connection that he felt was clearer to him after the increase.
Articulating it any more concretely than that was difficult. The powers he was working with were nebulous in nature, and tying comprehensible principles to them was a slow, tedious process. He wasn’t going to stop though. Whatever it took, he was going to use magic one of these days.
Briefly, a pang of regret flashed through him when he thought about how he could have already been doing that if he picked Mana Spark, but no. This was the right decision. While there was no basis for that belief, he knew he would go crazy if he kept beating himself up about a decision he’d been forced to make with limited information. It would work because he made it work.
Brennan took a deep breath, working to get closer to that meditation state which kept eluding him. He did all the stuff he’d seen in movies, sitting cross-legged, pinching his index finger and thumb together with both hands, and closing his eyes. None of it worked, tragically. But at the very least, the relative isolation of this room made his concentration slightly better. Sensing the mana, while not necessarily easier, was more of an isolated occurrence when he had the ability to choose where he sat.
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His range was quite small, a bit smaller than the house they lived in. He would be lying if he said he had grasped even half of what the sensory skill was telling him. Individual clusters of mana were simple enough to make out. Where he ran into trouble was at the edges of one mana type that was in the process of transitioning into another. The most frequent example was between air or wind mana, as he had taken to calling it, and earth mana. Whenever they traveled one way or the other, there would be this process he couldn’t completely grasp where the green wind particles transformed into brown earth ones or vice versa.
The problem, he guessed, was a lack of practice. There were hints of what was going on, and he could feel he was close. Sense Magic just needed to be a higher level before it could tell him exactly how that worked. And once it did, he could begin converting the mana for his own use. That was the hope, anyway. Plans rarely survived contact with reality, so he refrained from getting too excited about that prospect.
Currently, he was still stuck in the stage where he would walk up to a relatively dense cluster of mana, wave his hand through it, and gain absolutely nothing of substance. Day in and day out, this was his reality. He just wanted magic, damn it!
What else do I have to do? Shave my head and tattoo my whole body in honor of the dark lord?
At one point, he had entertained the thought that proper mage skills were simply gated behind a proper class for it, and the Skill Seed had been his only opportunity to perform magic prematurely. The theory had led him to investigate when his empty class slot would be filled, and the system had been surprisingly open about the age requirement for classes being twelve years.
Eleven more years to figure it out. I just don’t know where to start. I’ve tried the obvious methods…
Footsteps drew his attention away from agonizing further, the sound light as it approached from behind him. The door smashed open with all the subtlety of a brick, and he came face-to-face with his sister.
“Mama!” Junia shouted. “Brennan snuck out of his bed!”
“Bring him here,” was the response she got from the other side of the house. Obviously, this encouraged her to pick him up and carry him all the way to the kitchen, in spite of his physical and verbal protests.
When they made their way into the kitchen, Brennan saw his mother preparing dinner. Considering it was late afternoon, he figured it made sense. But one thing that did stand out was the lack of meat, which would generally already be nearby for the stew she was making.
Junia set him down on his specially made baby chair at the end of the table and took her own seat next to him. Her hands tapped an unfamiliar beat on the wooden surface, no rhyme or reason to it other than a way of expressing juvenile excitement.
“Mama,” he said. If there was a more formal or mature way of addressing your parents in this language, he wouldn't have learned it because Junia was his only frame of reference. So he just copied her instead.
“Yes, dear?” Doris replied, looking up from her sliced vegetables. The crops in this world were largely unfamiliar to him, with onions being the one commonality he had found with his old world. Though not to misunderstand, that wasn’t a knock against the food of this world. So far, his mother’s cooking had blown him away every time he tasted it. Each spoonful he put in his mouth made him suspect she had a dedicated skill for it, but that wasn’t what he was going to ask today.
“Are you strong?” He made the question sound nonchalant and innocent. While he was unwilling to volunteer information about the fact that he had successfully accessed and navigated the system, he hoped that by establishing his curiosity early in his childhood, building an accurate mental picture of other people’s usage of skills and classes would become manageable without tipping them off with a full-blown interview about complex system mechanics that a regular one-year-old would have no way of understanding.
His mother chuckled at that, just the reaction he had been aiming for. “All adults are,” she said. “When you grow up, you’ll be plenty strong too.”
“Oh,” he said as if that surprised him. “Does that mean Papa is also strong?”
“Way strong!” Junia exclaimed. “I saw him carrying a boulder as big as the living room once.”
Their mother smiled along, but Brennan could see her eyes sharpen as she observed him more closely. He stilled, heart pounding in his little chest. Shit, had his sentences sounded too mature? He wasn’t an expert on child development. If they caught on to the fact that he wasn’t an actual kid, he had no idea how they would react.
“That’s right,” Doris said in response to her daughter before turning back to him. “But I think it might be time to get you a reading and writing skill first.”
“Already!?” Junia gasped, her face looking shocked.
“I was going to do it later, but your brother might have a knack for it. What do you say, Brennan?”
Yes! When do we start?
Outwardly, he asked, “Reading?”
“You know the books Mama looks at sometimes? I’m going to show you how to know what the letters inside mean,” she explained patiently.
Hearing that, Brennan made his eyes light up, the most authentic childlike reaction he could muster.
Skill unlocked!
[Acting (Common) Lv. 1]
Would you like to equip this skill?
By reflex, he wanted to take it instantly, but something stopped him. Did he actually need this skill? How often was he going to have interactions like this that required him to act less mature than he really was? Fairly often, he imagined, given that he had over a decade to go before the system considered him adult enough to decide what he wanted to be.
His reluctance was because he thought he had it fairly well in hand already, and if he wasted a slot now, he didn’t want to have to discard the skill later if it turned out to be superfluous. In that regard, he would rather save the skill for later if possible.
Skill archived.
He… had not known that was a thing, but it was good to find out early. He had to remind himself that there wasn’t much he knew about the system compared to adults who had lived here their entire lives. Even the sight of his mother cooking was a display of proficiency that might be more advanced than he could see with his untrained eye.
Then, something odd entered his awareness. A bundle of something absolutely packed with mana, more than anything he had ever felt before, traveling a short distance above the ground. In front of the door, it stopped.
Just as he was about to call out to his mother, the door opened, and in the entryway stood his father, carrying the thing he had been sensing: a dead boar with gray hide.
…Are we going to eat that?