“Stone,” Doris said slowly.
“Stone,” Brennan parroted.
“Wall.”
“Wall.”
“Stone wall.”
“Stone wall.”
“You’re doing great, dear!” she cheered, kissing him on the forehead. “Just a few more lines.”
Brennan simply nodded and paid attention to the next word. The progress he made wasn’t as quick as he would like, since he didn’t have access to the small number of books they had in the house without her, and they hadn’t been at this for more than three weeks. But it was there.
Skill leveled up!
[Reading (Common) Lv. 8] -> Lv. 9
These gains were the result of dedicated sessions guided by his mother, who praised him every time he correctly repeated something she showed him. On some base level, he enjoyed the compliments, though at the same time it felt somewhat exaggerated. While he knew it wasn’t, receiving positive feedback for an easy task like this one did feel slightly patronizing when you knew you had the mind of someone over twenty times your apparent age. Learning how to spell the local word for ‘rock’ or ‘stone’ wasn’t a great achievement compared to what he knew he could do.
So he hid his giddy smile at the level increase, refocusing on what she was teaching him. Honestly, these sessions were extremely good for him. But he was hoping to be old enough soon to get somewhere in the village by himself in order to read more complicated material. If he could rush that, he would, but his vocabulary hadn’t been fully translated into literary form yet.
When it did, he suspected that his level would be around fifteen. A goal he thought he could reach in the next week or two, if things kept up at the pace they were setting. If they didn’t, and his early skill improvements started to show diminishing returns, it would take a bit longer than that. Facing such a setback wouldn’t discourage him from putting in the effort regardless.
It was just a shame he wasn’t being taught Writing immediately as well. The stated reason for that being that his mother wanted him to practice pronunciation and grammar more before handing him a quill pen again. And ‘again’ was the key word here, because he had already tried to hold one and failed to get more than scribbles on the parchment. Given time he would have been able to do more, but that was apparently enough for his mother to say he wasn’t ready.
Stupid, if you asked him. And yet he lacked the authority or ability to do anything about it. All he had was a couple of skills that hadn’t grown to the point where he could truly refer to them as a power base of any kind. Not even after weeks of additional practice.
Skill leveled up!
[Analyze (Common) Lv. 35] -> Lv. 40
[Focus (Common) Lv. 29] -> Lv. 35
[Sense Magic (Uncommon) Lv. 25] -> Lv. 29
[Memorization (Common) Lv. 1] -> Lv. 11
Truthfully, he had twisted himself inside and out just to get levels for the first three skills, and the only straightforward one was Memorization, which he suspected would become unreasonably tricky to level as well after a dozen or so more levels. In a sense, he understood that it worked that way. The levels had to slow down at some point, otherwise every adult would have their skills in the thousands, and that obviously wasn’t the case—he had asked, and Doris had denied it.
“But Mama,” he said a bit further into their reading session, “if Crassidge—”
“Craswidge,” she corrected.
“If Craswidge is surrounded by a wall, what if a big bird comes out of the zones? A bird that wants to eat us. Can’t it just fly over?” he asked.
The question had been on his mind for a while, how the people of Craswidge, as was the name of their small village near the woods, prevented certain dangers from reaching them over the course of many years spent living here. They must have systems, ways to mitigate the risk of being eaten alive by dangerous zonebeasts in this environment.
“Zone breaks are rare, Brennan. The people here make sure of that,” his mother answered with a fond smile on her lips. “But if that did happen, we have bowmen who would get rid of them.”
“Bowmen?”
“Yes, people that take skills for shooting arrows with a bow,” she explained.
So that’s the word for it. Wait, it seems so obvious now. A lot of people would be specializing in a weapon and taking skills for it. Just because I haven’t seen it doesn’t mean it’s not happening.
He made eye contact with her. “Do they have a Class for that?”
“Some do.”
“Oh. Can we do a book about weapons next?” he pleaded, hopeful.
“No. I’m showing you the map first, and then we’ll see how well you behave. If you’re good, I might consider it for the book after that,” she teased.
“Mama!” he whined.
“If you’re good,” she warned. “Now, let’s continue. The trees…” She launched into an explanation of the surrounding plant life, and he was unsure if she expected him to understand all of it, but he repeated plenty of words and thought he had more of a working understanding of the linguistic conventions for sentence structure. Still, it would take more training to refine his diction and reading prowess.
Once it turned out that he had completed the prepared material and it wasn’t noon yet, he pushed her to continue. Doris was clearly surprised to see he had so much attention for learning at his age, though not as surprised as he thought an adult should be at a child that could sit down and absorb learning material for hours on end at one year and a couple of months.
The explanation, he realized, was stats. Or it could have been. If stat gain at a young age could happen naturally or even subconsciously, it made sense for the cognitive development of children to be accelerated for the rare few who had mental stats with a value higher than one. Maybe even the ones who started at the baseline stat number and stayed there for a while matured faster than Earth children.
Either way, he was just happy that it let him learn a bit more and grind up his skills when he was very young so that when he became more independent, he already had a respectable arsenal to fall back on. Granted, his mother still referred to him as her ‘genius son,’ something he only denied in his head. That meant he was above the other children she had known in her life. Including Junia, to the girl’s visible frustration at times.
Brennan’s older sibling wasn’t one for endless training, he had learned. With five more years until she gained her Class, she preferred to spend time playing with other kids outside, doing who knew what. If she was home, though, she would assert her dominance over him by picking him up any time he needed it, a phrase that translated to: whenever she felt like it.
Having been in the position of older sibling himself in another life, he couldn’t blame her for it too much. There was no resentment there, it was as endearing as it was irritating, even if he was going to make sure she got what was coming to her one of these days.
As the late morning passed, the rest of his mother’s lesson gave him details about the wider kingdom they lived in. There were plenty of abridged parts so as not to overwhelm him, or perhaps there were parts she didn’t think were fit for him to hear.
Parental censorship wasn’t on the list of obstacles he had envisioned when he first reincarnated. Funny, how easily the adults in his life could decide on something, and his entire world would shift due to that decision. They held unlimited power over him. In his past life, those interventions had been what sent him into the spiral that ended years later with him being too tired to pay attention in traffic, leading to a deadly crash and him spending his final moments in agony.
This time around, Brennan would make sure it didn’t come to that.
“We get food from other villages?” was one of his questions.
“We do, it’s called trade. They give us something, we give them something back in return.”
“So we just get people from there coming to Craswidge? Is there anyone else? People who want to see the zones?”
Doris was quiet for a long moment. “There are others. Every ten years, a royal ma- ugh, you know what, never mind that.” A dark look flashed across her face as she stood up. “You shouldn’t worry about it. Come, you need to eat. Lesson over.”
And so Brennan followed his mother to the dining table for lunch, wondering what she’d been talking about. Curiosity aside, he was hesitant to bring it up again with how bad her mood had gotten. Visually, there were no indicators that her emotional state was worse than usual. Her expression was back to normal, that wasn’t what gave it away.
What stood out to him was the silence. Where she would be humming or engaging him in idle chatter when he was in the kitchen, her mouth was now pressed into a thin line. Every so often, she would look at him with this intensity. Not anger, precisely, not directed at him anyway. He wanted to ask what was wrong. He had the sense not to do that, best to give her time to simmer.
He waited, both hands on the table as if something would pop up at any moment. He kept waiting.
…Nothing? No skill unlocks for my profoundly mediocre social insight?
Seeing that the floating screens wouldn’t entertain his awkward attempt to distract himself from an uncomfortable situation, he slumped, deciding to wait for his food. Not long after, it arrived, and they ate, neither of them exchanging a word.
For the remainder of the day, he continued training because what else could someone his age possibly be doing at this time of day that wasn’t a complete waste? So maybe he did throw himself into it with more fervor, with the hope of becoming dependable to the point his mother would actually tell him things that he thought involved him.
The whole house was stifling, he simultaneously couldn’t bear to be here for another second and also wanted to remain here for the rest of time. The days of staying inside had to come to an end soon, else he would go crazy. There could be consequences to that, he had learned. Potential dangers lurked outside. Intellectually, Brennan had become aware of that. Of the relative safety back in his old world that wasn’t commonplace here in the same way.
In a place where you could run five miles out your settlement and might just die for it, preparation was paramount. There was just no other way. His skills needed to be up to par for the time he went exploring, first throughout the village, then later beyond it.
To work towards that goal, he had to have tools to defend himself, considering how monsters existed and a substantial portion of the population practiced violence for a living. One option was becoming a mage, a pursuit that he had hit a roadblock on, and the other option was something physical. Could his father teach him a way to use his body better?
His mother had told him it was fine to take new skills if he wanted, because it wasn’t as big of a deal before he gained his Class anyway. It was just good to have a solid foundation to actually unlock one to begin with. But getting the average kid to settle on one thing without switching to something else soon after was hard enough, and his mother hadn’t seemed too concerned about the matter herself. “I’m teaching you to read,” Doris had said at the beginning of their study session. “That’s just one skill. When you’re older, you can choose more, and that’s okay. Just come to me if your list is full.”
He had no plans of winging it though. And he wasn’t going to let it get that far unless he had something he really wanted. The physical prowess would be a holdover, ideally. Leaning into it too heavily felt unwise with what he’d learned.
Ideas were evaluated and discarded in his mind, potential workout schedules from someone who had lived a sedentary lifestyle prior to reincarnating. In this life, after he reached the appropriate age to push his muscles to the limit, getting stronger was an option.
Should he pick up a weapon? Probably not. He decided against it for now, not knowing how much room he would have with magic hypothetically occupying a third or more of his skill slots. The mystery of how long that would take lingered in his head, but he pushed it down. He would keep trying until he had it.
Treading down the beaten path wasn’t going to set him apart. Quite the opposite. Logically speaking, it would bring him the same outcomes as the people around him. And he didn’t want their life. He wanted to live for himself.
That was going to start here.