ARTHUR

Two years had passed since I’d made my first difficult journey to the study room.

Since then, I had been constantly gathering the little bits of mana spread out in my body and focusing it, attempting to form a mana core. It was a slow and arduous task. I would have had an easier time learning to walk on my hands and eat with my feet in this damnable body than trying to will my mana core to condense.

It had become clear why the book said it took until adolescence for a person to ‘awaken.’ If I had let the mana particles in my body move by themselves, it would have taken at least a decade for them to gravitate toward each other enough to form anything remotely close to a mana core.

Instead, having the mental capacity of an adult meant I had the cognitive ability to consciously will my mana particles together. This was something I had done in school in my past life, where they taught you from childhood how to control ki. The key lay in being able to sense the ki—or mana, now—in your own body and force the particles together toward the solar plexus. If left alone, they would eventually slowly float toward each other, like goose-down drifting toward the bottom of an open sack, but I had decided to grab the feathers and shove them into the twill sack, figuratively speaking, instead of waiting for them to float down by themselves.

My daily rituals consisted of trying to spend as much of my limited energy as possible on gathering my mana, while not arousing suspicion in my mother and father. My father seemed to think that being thrown into the air would be quite enjoyable for a child. While I understand that the adrenaline effect might excite some people, when he used mana to reinforce his arms and throw me into the air like a high-speed projectile, the only feelings I had were nausea and a traumatic fear of heights.

Fortunately, my mother had a firm handle on my father, but she scared me sometimes too. I often caught her staring at me, practically drooling, looking at me like I was some kind of premium meat.

I tried to match my behavior to my body by only speaking in very simple sentences, talking just enough to get the point across, no grammar necessary. The first time I said “mama,” to let her know I wanted more food, she almost burst into tears of joy. It had been a long time since I’d received that sort of motherly affection.

The pace of my training was strenuous and slow, but I was getting a head start compared to everyone else so I wasn’t complaining. The past two years had not gone to waste, for I had finally gathered all my mana into my solar plexus and was in the process of condensing a mana core when...

*BOOM*