We don’t value time.
It doesn’t matter to us.
But it starts to matter when we have important things to do.
That’s when we begin to appreciate it.
But by then, it’s already partially wasted, isn’t it?
There are moments when we look back and realize how much we could have done.
The same thing happened to me.
When I was making plans for the future, I didn’t consider that other, equally important things might come up.
For example, when I was an infant, my plan seemed simple to me.
Of course it did.
I would focus on self-development, and most importantly, on developing my magic.
I didn’t take into account social connections, like my parents or potential friends, or even my education.
After all, I have to go to school.
Luckily, my parents and I already figured that problem out.
So what actually happened?
Not at all what I expected.
There were four main reasons for that.
First, physical development.
The body is a vessel.
Without a strong and large vessel, you can’t pour a larger amount of “liquid” into it.
Second, reading books.
Just ordinary reading.
To broaden my horizons and increase my awareness of the world around me.
The list of books includes not only textbooks for learning foreign languages but also ordinary school subjects and medical tomes.
Third, Metamorphmagus training.
I have to spend an unforgivable amount of time developing this gift.
At first, I even had to stop reading books to focus on it.
Although this reason partially overlaps with my planned goals.
Fourth, time spent with my parents.
No matter how callous I am, my parents are sacred.
With all of the above, time slipped through my fingers like sand.
And I don’t want to give up any of it.
The time I spend with my parents is priceless.
When we grow up, we regret missed opportunities.
And I regretted them in my past life.
So I spend as much time with them as possible without sacrificing my own development.
I don’t want to wake up one day as an adult and realize I didn’t spend enough time with my parents.
They won’t live forever.
As for my own development, I’ve managed to achieve quite a lot.
Every day, I meditated, channeling mana through my mana channels.
Because of this, they developed, strengthened, and expanded.
I also improved my control.
Every day after stabilization, my control grew by leaps and bounds.
Looking back now at that pathetic rattle, I can’t help but smile.
Back then, it seemed like an impossible task.
But now?
Lifting at least fifteen objects into the air?
Easy.
Lifting a total weight of fifty kilograms?
No problem.
It’s simply incredible.
***
I’ve also made significant progress in Metamorphmagus training.
At first, I could only change the length of my hair.
After a year, I could change the color of my hair, eyes, and skin.
Now, I can slightly change my build.
Metamorphmagus training is still not easy.
Changing my appearance costs mana, and maintaining the change also costs mana.
But to make the change permanent, that’s not enough.
The thing is, when I was about six years old, I decided to replace all my muscles with pink ones.
I managed to change them, but I couldn’t make the change permanent.
I tried everything.
Saturating the area with mana, oversaturating it, commanding the mana.
Nothing worked.
Studying medical books didn’t yield the expected results.
Honestly, I started studying them much earlier, as soon as I learned about my ability.
Knowing how the human body works is a crucial detail for a Metamorphmagus.
After reading and studying the medical tomes, some problems arose.
First, the metabolism of an ordinary person versus a wizard.
A wizard’s body digests food about one and a half times faster.
As I recall from the first Harry Potter book, Harry noticed the abundance of food on the feast table.
Maybe that’s because of metabolism?
Or is that just my imagination?
Second, the structure of my muscles.
My body has more pink muscle fibers than an ordinary person.
About four or five percent more.
Maybe that’s due to the influence of mana, or maybe my body is simply striving for perfection.
At the very least, I know my primary goal in the magical world.
Medical magic.
That’s what I need to learn about.
Perhaps Madam Pomfrey can help?
All that is for the future.
Back to my problem.
I thought about how to solve it for a long time.
And I found the answer in the fundamentals.
What is the body?
It’s the First shell.
What is responsible for the body’s life?
The Second shell.
And what’s needed for change?
Right, prana.
It’s a product of the body’s work, but it’s also a resource for changing the same body.
That’s why I tried to use prana to make the change permanent.
And it worked.
I just didn’t take a couple of factors into account.
First, energy consumption.
Pink muscles require much more nutrients.
Consequently, my appetite increased.
I started eating much more.
About twice as much.
Luckily, with Metamorphmagus training, I can help my body absorb useful substances and expel the useless ones so they don’t build up in my body.
Without that, I think I’d be eating about four times as much, and those are the most optimistic projections.
Speaking of muscles, all of them are now pink.
That increased my average physical performance by three times compared to a normal body.
It’s a good thing I changed them gradually.
I had time to get used to the increased performance.
Otherwise, there would have been problems.
Now I’m planning to start changing my bones.
But that’s much harder than with muscles.
I’ll have to think it all through.
Bones don’t have the same “reserve” as muscles.
***
I’ve also been training my Seventh shell.
Every day, several times, I completely emptied my reserve and then almost completely filled it.
I also tried to force more mana into it than it could hold.
These two principles are the main training methods.
I can authoritatively state that it’s painful.
At first, it feels like you’re being inflated like a balloon.
But then you start to understand that one more moment and you’ll burst.
To avoid that, I immediately released my mana in a single burst.
Each burst is like air escaping from a punctured balloon.
The balloon is my body, and the holes are my mana channels.
With each burst, some of the mana settles in my body.
Perhaps this will lead to even greater strengthening, but I can’t know for sure.
I lack basic knowledge about the structure of a wizard’s body.
I did my training in the backyard.
Where else?
Not in the house.
After my experiments, there wouldn’t be much left of the house.
But as it is, my parents and I are the proud owners of the most beautiful backyard in town.
There’s so much there.
Lush apple and birch trees, a beautiful lawn, and incredibly beautiful flowers, mostly roses.
Mom loves them very much.
We have this garden thanks to me.
With each burst of mana, I tried to direct it not just into the atmosphere but also into the ground.
That’s why we’re the owners of such a backyard.
It looks like a wild area.
Just add rose bushes to that picture.
It’s a surreal picture, but that’s the way it is.
As for my Seventh shell, if at the beginning of my journey I could produce, say, one unit of mana, now I can produce one hundred and thirty-two times that.
That’s incredibly large, for me.
But I still don’t know what the average wizard’s mana reserve is.
I hope to find out on my birthday.
It’s possible that a magically saturated place contributes to a wizard’s development.
After all, wizards raised on sources are generally stronger than others.
But the desire to know the average wizard’s reserve doesn’t go away.
***
There’s also something to say about the books.
First, I’ve fully mastered etiquette.
I hope I won’t lose face in front of aristocratic offspring.
Second, rituals.
My family and I perform all the necessary rituals.
Every time after performing them, I feel incredibly energized or clean, mostly after the flesh-severing ritual, the point of which is to sever the connection to any hair, nails, blood, etc.
taken from me.
Third, runes.
Oh, runes.
There’s so much meaning in them, but only within the boundaries of our world.
At the very beginning of the book, it was stated that runes only work within our world.
That’s why I haven’t experimented with them.
Once I find a way to use them not only here, then the experiments and trials will begin.
Fourth, Occlumency.
This is an incredible discipline.
So much is hidden in it.
Protection, structuring, memory improvement, and the fabrication of false memories for those who try to read yours.
The whole point of Occlumency comes down to working with your inner world and protecting your mind from external threats, both from mind wizards and from magical creatures like Dementors.
To get into it, you have to meditate on your Sixth shell.
I succeeded at that quite well.
My years of meditative experience, though mostly focused on my Seventh Principle, paid off.
My inner world looks like a library.
But not an ordinary one, as you might think.
There were no books in it.
Instead of books, there were crystals.
All these crystals were different.
They differed in shape, size, and color.
Some looked like multi-colored gemstones.
Others looked like clusters of crystals in rock.
Each crystal held a certain layer of my knowledge or memories.
The connections between them were through fibers that connected them.
After six years of actively practicing Occlumency, I was able to completely break down all these crystals and structure them.
I was also able to create associative chains between all my memories.
And I found the main crystal.
It was as if it wasn’t in the library at all.
The library itself is my personality core, the main crystal.
That’s good.
You’ll agree, not every intruder would guess that the room itself, which looks like a hall made of blocks containing crystals on pedestals, is the core itself.
I wouldn’t have guessed.
I also created active and passive defenses.
The passive defense looks like a sphere covering both the library itself and every crystal in it.
The active defense consists of false memories.
I created duplicates of my memories in the library itself and covered them with false ones.
These duplicates were under the defensive sphere.
The true memories were under them.
Visually, it looks like a crystal within a crystal, covered by another layer of crystal.
Overall, after practicing Occlumency, my processing speed increased fivefold.
And let me tell you, that’s a lot.
My brain already works very fast due to my lack of emotions and my well-developed Sixth shell.
My memory also improved.
Whereas before I remembered almost everything, now I remember absolutely everything.
And I shamelessly took advantage of that.
I memorized books, and then, during my Seventh shell training, I “read” the memorized books.
As if I’d awakened a Sharingan.
That’s my progress over my entire, so far, short life.
Now all that’s left is to wait for the letter from Hogwarts.
Then a new stage of my life will begin.