Sun rays pierced the poor leaves hanging for their life to the swaying tree as a worn-out wood sword clashed against its bark. Tremors shook the surrounding ground, moist from the blood and sweat shed by the young knight. The wind came carrying echoes of voices in the distance, reaching the ears of the loner whose sword was creating slashes on the already well marked tree. 

The man halted his continuous movements to listen more closely to the sound, much unpleasant considering the fact that he had chosen this abandoned clearing on purpose to avoid unnecessary trouble. The knights of his family had always despised him for having close to no talent for swordsmanship, even though he came from a knight's household renowned in the empire. They always tried to disturb his training to stop him from escaping his doomed status of a burden, because they knew what kind of wrath they would face if he was to become stronger than them.

The world he lived in was after all one of dungeons and magic where one's power determined the treatment they would receive and the honor linked to their name. Each individual belonged to an innate element, be it fire, water, earth or wind. There were also some deviants like ice, darkness or light, but those were considered weaker. The reason for such popular opinion was the fact that your capacity to execute high level spells was determined by the amount of mana from your element that you could gather around you to form your attack or your defense, called mana affinity. For those with basic elements, the mana from the nature surrounding them was way more abundant than for deviants, which led to discrimination.

Your ability to control the mana, mana awareness, also had an impact on the level of your spell, but it could be practiced as opposed to the talent to gather mana that only came from lineage. It was not for no reason that nobles and royalty put high importance on the bloodline.

The young knight that had just stopped his training, named Adam Salovski, came from the Salovski family, a noble household that had always produced talented children gifted with high compatibility with the element of water. They were also known to not only depend on their power, but also use swords in their fights which made them differ from other families that only used mana.

However, unluckily for Adam, he was born with an affinity to ice and no talent for the art of the sword. Deemed as a failure, his family had still tried to make something out of him by hiring well-known teachers so he could somewhat use his power in a useful way, but it had always ended in the teacher giving up on Adam. 

His father, Duke Arang Salovski, and his wife, Bella Salovski, had then both decided to have him focus on swordsmanship instead, to make him good in at least something. Unfortunately, this only led to another defeat as Adam had taken more time than even the worst knight to learn the basics. Thus, his own parents had given up on him and had sent him to the furthest wing in the mansion so he could live quietly in a dark corner, trying to make him disappear from their family so as to not bring them any more shame.

But did Adam really do as they wanted? Of course not. Why should he care about others when they gave up on him first? He was determined to prove them wrong, to show them just how far he could go without their so-called help. Adam was going to make his own path that really fitted him, not to follow the way others would want him to go. Which was why he was training until not too long ago.

He may be a bit slow to fully assimilate something, but it didn't mean that he wouldn't ever get it. For the past eight years, the young man had been training non-stop on his swordsmanship and on his body. Now just turned eighteen years old, the age of majority in Kesenka kingdom, where he resided, Adam could now call himself a good knight. He may not be an expert at B rank like his mother was at his age, but he sure was better than the C rank knights that were hired by his family and always mocked him. 

Everything in the continent of Feloja was measured by a ranking that goes from F to A rank, followed by S, SS and finally SSS, obviously in order of strength. The dungeons, the skills of someone, and the beasts were all ranked that way, making it easier for everyone to get the level of danger of something or someone.

Even though Adam's level was higher than the knights', just recalling all the times his family had punished him when he had failed their expectations made him reject the idea of announcing to them that he was now not so useless. They would surely try to break him again and force him out of his boundaries to get more from him.

Also, the young swordsman still had a long way to go if he wanted to be acknowledged by his so-called parents. For starters, he would need to be able to use mana at the same level, which is far from where he was, still stuck at rank D. The combined score for his skills with the sword and the ones with mana placed him to a mere rank C+, far from exceptional at his age and considering his lineage. The lower class was normally around F-E, the middle class D-C, the nobles B-A, even S sometimes, and the royals were above S. He could barely consider himself a noble.

As Adam walked back to his isolated wing in the mansion, he tried to conjure small ice cubes to cool down his water gourd, only for snowflakes to form instead, as if to confirm the thought he had just had about being of lower rank. Long ago, he would have been frustrated at the feeling of hopelessness, but now, his mind was clear and serene, his resolve not fluctuating in the slightless. 

The young man stopped abruptly, keeping himself from falling face first on the ground as a small box laid before him, ready to make him trip. Covered in dust, the box couldn’t be seen with the naked eyes, only his sharp senses had allowed Adam to save himself from embarrassment. Everything around him was covered in dusk, spiders’ web and stains, which made it harder to see. The floor was marked by Adam’s steps only, no maids or servants had been sent to help the rejected son. The young man had other concerns than cleaning up, so the rooms assigned to him, in the farthest corner of the mansion, looked as if it was abandoned. No meals were served, no water was provided, his existence itself was only remembered when he went out to exercise, needing to pass by the knights’ training grounds to get a wooden sword to practice. 

Coming out of his depressive thoughts, Adam glanced back at the small box.

Hey dear readers, hope you liked the first chapter! Sorry for all the world building, but it’s important if you want to be able to follow the story :) The first few chapters contain all the information and then we will get to the action.

What is your first impression of Adam?

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(1 203 words)