Childhood is a time of true happiness and missed opportunities.
Why missed?
Because how many children think about how quickly they absorb information?
What wonderful foundations for further physical development can be laid during this wonderful period?
Take flexibility, for example.
You might think, flexibility, so what?
Well, in my past life, by the time I was twenty, I noticed I wasn’t as flexible as I used to be.
Not that flexible, big loss.
But no.
It’s not just flexibility.
Take memory, for instance.
It deteriorates over time, just like flexibility.
And many other things.
And all you had to do was devote half an hour a day to developing your body and mind from childhood, and you could reap the rewards.
Your mind works better and better.
Your body feels better and is easier to control with your mind.
Just half an hour a day, and those are the results.
And that’s just the body.
Yes, there are exceptions.
For example, children predisposed to obesity have a harder time.
And where does that predisposition come from?
The answer is simple: from their ancestors.
That’s been proven.
It’s a simple mutation in the genes that is preserved and passed on.
In case you didn’t know, the human body has three types of muscle fibers: white, red, and pink.
White fibers are, so to speak, “endurance” muscles.
They’re not strong, just enduring.
Someone with these muscles will be very enduring but also weak.
They consume little energy.
Red fibers, in contrast to white, are “strong.” In a single unit of time, they can produce a result that white fibers could never achieve.
However, as soon as they produce that result, they become incapacitated.
They need rest.
They consume colossal amounts of energy.
Pink muscles are the ideal.
They combine the advantages of the previous two muscle types, and their disadvantages are compensated for.
For example, they are both enduring and strong.
They have the explosive potential of red fibers and the endurance of white fibers.
They’re not as strong as red fibers, but they can remain in a “working” state much longer, though not as long as white fibers.
The perfect example of pink muscle is the heart.
It’s a perfectly designed set of muscles.
It works better than some motors, consumes a minimum of “fuel,” and produces maximum efficiency.
Oh, believe me, there’s a reason.
***
The beginning, I suppose, was set on my third birthday.
After talking with my parents, I received a lot of food for thought.
First, Lord Black.
From Sara and Thomas’s account, he wasn’t the most pleasant person.
A typical aristocrat and proponent of blood purity.
Judging from their conversation with Tom, he disliked Muggles but wasn’t a hater.
Maybe after discovering Voldemort’s secret, he decided to learn more about ordinary people.
Perhaps.
For now, I could only guess how such a Lord could have grown up in a family of ardent Muggle-haters.
Or maybe he learned about genetics.
Or someone enlightened him.
I wouldn’t be surprised if his future wife came from abroad.
After all, in England, all aristocratic families are related.
And I know examples from history that show what marriage between close relatives leads to.
The list is quite extensive: disease, poor blood clotting, various external deformities, mutations, and finally, shortened lifespans.
And if you consider that wizards already have a mountain of curses hanging over them, it’s terrifying to imagine what that could lead to.
Second, learning that I was a Blessed One.
Honestly, it made me happy.
I have no inheritance, no horde of relatives who could either help or stab me in the back.
But I’m a blank slate.
All of life’s paths are open to me.
True, after reading the books provided by Lord Black, specifically Etiquette and Rituals, I learned about Gifts.
Real, actual Gifts.
These Gifts are passed down from generation to generation.
It’s the same as with the body I described earlier.
Only instead of a predisposition to mental and physical development being encoded in genes, a predisposition to magical development is encoded both in genes and in the magic of the Family.
Questions might arise, so let me start from the beginning.
In the world, there are sources of mana.
These sources come in different types.
Natural, artificially created, and so-called breaches or passages to other planes.
The first type, natural sources, are those that formed on their own on our planet.
No one knows exactly how they form.
A source of mana simply appears one day.
There are various theories.
The most popular one I read suggests that natural sources of mana are not fully formed breaches into other planes.
No one knows how or why they don’t fully form.
Artificially created sources.
No one knows how to create such sources.
Over time, the knowledge of how to create them was lost.
Who knows?
Maybe I’ll find out in the future.
And the third type.
Breaches or passages to other planes.
As it was written, parallel to our world, there are an infinite number of planes.
They come into contact with our world, or the real world.
At these points of contact, stable breaches into those planes appear.
And from these breaches, mana of the corresponding hue flows into the real world.
For example, in Africa, there’s a breach to the Fire Plane.
That’s why nothing grows there.
Another striking example is the Amazon rainforests.
There, a breach to the Life Plane is open.
There are many such places on Earth.
And they are all hidden from ordinary people by a Veil.
Back in Merlin’s time, wizards faced a problem.
Breaches into other planes greatly affect the surrounding world.
Their influence is so great that the very area where they are located gradually expands.
To prevent their further expansion, the wizards of that time devised the Veil ritual.
Its purpose is to isolate such places from the real world.
Only echoes of those places continue to influence the real world.
As I said, examples are the African deserts, the Amazon rainforests, the vast expanses of the North and South Poles, and Atlantis.
Yes, that Atlantis.
A breach to the Water Plane opened on its territory.
That’s why it sank.
The list of such places could go on forever.
In fact, the Earth is much larger than it seems.
Many places have been hidden so thoroughly that even entire continents are completely concealed.
The exact size of the Earth and the number of continents are not described.
It’s just said that there are far more of them.
Because of the Veil, ordinary people don’t notice these places.
They simply don’t see them.
And the technology they’ve created can’t detect mana.
And they never will, since mana is a different order of energy.
To make technology work in a mana-saturated place, you’d need to create it using mana and materials saturated with mana.
That’s a very labor-intensive process.
True, it wasn’t described in the books.
And I only learned about it from a section devoted to the glorification of wizards and their superiority over ordinary people.
Reading this gave me the impression that ordinary people are something like a farm for producing new wizards, like me, the Blessed Ones.
Like a breeding ground.
Of course, I’ll need to verify all of this.
Blind faith isn’t what I need.