ARTHUR

Wow. I feel great!

Feeling refreshed by my breakthrough, I closed my eyes to sense my newly formed mana core. My sweet little mana core!

“Art! Oh, my baby! Are you okay?”

I jerked my head up to see my mother rushing toward me, while my father knelt on the ground.

What misdeed was Mother punishing him for this time?

My mother lifted me up and hugged me tightly enough that my underdeveloped ribs almost gave out.

I managed to squeal, “Mom, no cry. What’s wrong?”

She didn’t answer me, just continued sobbing while cradling me. My father came to stand next to her, patting her back and stroking my head, giving me a weak smile.

After a brief moment of confusion, I pulled myself away from my mother’s bosom and looked around to see that we were standing in the center of a giant crater. Most of our house was gone.

What the hell? Who did this? Who would have the audacity to destroy the home of a king? The perpetrators will rue this day! I will hunt them down day and night and not rest until—

“Congratulations, Art, honey,” my mother said weakly, while my father exclaimed, “You awakened, Champ.”

I was speechless and didn’t know what to think. We all looked at each other for a moment as I let it sink in.

I did this?

In my old world, a similar phenomenon occurred when a youth awakened; a clear barrier appeared around the awakened and a small pushing force would surround the barrier. After some thought, I came to the conclusion that the pushing force in this world was much stronger because of the mana in the atmosphere, something that wasn’t present back on Earth.

As I had once been a king who prided himself on his integrity, I decided to apologize for this situation.

“I’m sorry, Mom, Dad. Am I in trouble?”

As soon as the words left my mouth, I realized I was so disoriented that I had forgotten to talk like a three-year-old. Fortunately they didn’t notice my slip due to their shock.

“No, Art, honey, you’re not in trouble. We were just worried about you. I’m glad you’re all right.” There were tears in my mother’s eyes, but she managed to let out a soft chuckle.

My idiot father, on the other hand, was a lot more excited. “My boy is a genius! Awakened before the age of three! This is unprecedented. I thought I was fast, but this is on another level!”

That picture-perfect moment was broken when a neighbor rushed up, shouting, “What in the world?”

“We’d better clean this mess up,” my father said as he grinned, rubbing the back of his head.

______________________________________________

We decided to keep my awakening a secret. Within a few weeks, my father had managed to contact members of his old adventuring party to help rebuild our decimated house while we stayed at the nearby inn. With conjurers razing the ground for the foundation and augmenters doing the grunt work, the house didn’t take too long to finish. The beauty of magic!

Surprisingly, none of my father’s former party members questioned why our house had blown up. That seemed to say a lot about my father.

Spring came to an end midway through the reconstruction of our house, and along with it came my birthday. My parents woke me that morning with a present, and my mother carried what seemed to be a loaf of bread in her hands. Upon closer inspection, I realized it was a cake. I opened the present box to find a carefully carved wooden sword, and I hugged both my parents, thanking them for the present and the cake.

The cake and the gift surprised me; my parents hadn’t bothered to celebrate my past two birthdays, so I had assumed this world didn’t acknowledge them. I later learned that birthdays are only celebrated beginning at the age of three. It was a tradition from long ago, when babies frequently did not survive their first three years.

How medieval.

Birthday celebrations weren’t the only difference between this new world and the world I was from, where children my age would have been getting ready to start school. Seeing children as well as teens working on farms with their family and in forges as apprentice blacksmiths made me realize there was no mandatory, structured education system. Any sort of rudimentary education the children received—the basics, like reading and writing—was provided by their families.

As soon as I turned three, my mother began giving me regular lessons, teaching me how to read and write. Playing the role of a prodigy, I pretended to learn quickly, to her delight. This allowed me to read harder books in the library without drawing suspicion.

These weeks after my awakening passed by in a blast. My father taught me the basics of mana, and how to start training in it, as best as he could. He tried to simplify as much as possible so a toddler could understand it. If my cognitive abilities hadn't already been on the level of an adult, I don’t think I would’ve retained much, but I did manage to get the basics.

A mage’s strength could be easily gauged by looking at the color of his or her mana core. When a person first awakened, the mana core was black, due to the body’s blood and other impurities mixing with the mana particles as they come together to form the core. As the mana inside the person’s body became purer and imperfections were filtered out, it changed to a dark red color. The color continued to lighten as mana was distilled, going from black to red, then orange, yellow, silver, and then white. The red, orange, and yellow stages each had three sub-stages, classified as ‘dark,’ ‘solid,’ and ‘light.’ As a rule of thumb, the lighter the color of a person’s mana core, the purer it was and the more power they had access to.

While the lessons with my father proved useful, I was getting impatient with the pace we were moving at. Within a few days of him beginning to teach me, I asked my mother for books on magic.

My mother still had some connections in the Adventurers Guild, and she managed to acquire a wide collection of books on basic mana manipulation and on fighting with different weapons. Some of them were just picture books with only simple words and illustrations of the basics of mana condensation, but I ignored those. The books I’d been reading were a bit more difficult, but it wasn’t until I caught my mother giving me a strange look that I’d realized just how advanced they were. She had brought in books that she expected wouldn’t be touched for at least a year and was perplexed by my lack of interest in the simpler texts.

Most of my time was spent taking reading and writing lessons from Mother, and augmenting training with my father. After he covered the basic theory and application of augmenting, we started physical training. Since I was too small to start sparring, we opted for running and body workouts. Seeing my three-year-old body trying to do a pushup must have been the funniest thing, but my father did a good job of holding back his laughter.

When I wasn’t taking lessons from one of my parents, I usually stayed cooped up in the newly remodeled library, reading and meditating to further condense my mana core.

The year passed without much deviation from this routine. Then my father spoke up one night while we were having dinner.

“Honey, I think it’s time we get Art a proper mentor.”