It has been almost 3 years since I said goodbye to my brother, and I find myself in the garden tending to my little pet project. It all started with the silly superstition that X marks the spot, and I was convinced that there had to be a treasure there. Don’t judge me, if there is one thing that I figured out throughout all this time being reincarnated is that while my thought process may take advantage of my previous knowledge my body does not, meaning that my emotional reaction was the same as any other child, meaning I was absolutely over excited and convinced I was right.

Surprise surprise I was wrong. I can’t say it threw me through a loop because the revelation that the X was something that my brother did to keep my 5 year old sister occupied while I was being born makes sense. What doesn’t is the fact that said not only survived but also thrived. I regret to say that it took me 4 cycles to figure out a reason that had anything to back it up, but in my defence my proof was outside and I wasn’t really allowed to spend that much time outside until I turned 3.

My discovery was the vibrant plant life around my window that lost more and more of its shine as it went further and further away. Seeing as they were all the same plants and that the wind always beat into my window instead of away from it and that the sun rose from the side meant all the plants were given the same amount of water and sun. Only thing that made sense to me was mana. The further away from the house they were the more diluted the mana I released into the air was, which did make sense seeing as how the plant in the room basically lived off of my mana alone.

My new project was a garden, an idea I barely managed to sell to my mom. And its difficulty should not be underestimated as I got a merchant skill just for being able to convince her. Apparently kids should be out playing until they approach the age of 10 with no worries at all in this world.

As much as I would like to say that it was my past experiences that led me to make the choice to keep true to my initial plan of raising my stats and skills as my main focus even through the heavy temptations of slacking, it's not really true. I took pretty much every chance I found to do play around, thing is in a mediaeval society and stuck in a young body there pretty much was nothing else for me to do, even the activities kids my age did take part in I found myself trying to use to improve either my stats or my skills, the things that distracted were my sister and her friends.

While kids in this world were pretty much layabouts that all changed as being 10 approached, seeing it was like making the change from early middle school to college. They were forced to adapt quickly if they were to survive in life, that mixed with the fact that my only non running and athleticism skills I could level up were drawing, reading, writing and any other household skills I found myself spending a lot of time with them trying to improve myself, beside mana of course but I still didn’t feel comfortable showing that to anyone yet.

Gardening was the latest in that list of skills that I found myself practicing. The only difference was after I was basically given a tutorial on how to do it, I started experimenting with releasing my mana right on top of my little spot of the garden 3-4 times a day in my early years and 1-2 times as of late.

One thing I can say is that I was having results, these plants were growing 2-3 times faster than any other that were planted, I can’t yet tell if its because the solid I planted them on has been infused with mana over the last 3 years or that they are being given mana as they grow, maybe it was a mix of the two but I didn’t really mind all that much as far as I was concerned this was a success.

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There was one big change that happened ever since my brother left for Lessis, and that was that Jonny was now my dad's live-in apprentice, meaning I got moved into the same room as my sister and he took my old room. This made it so I got most of my mana practice during the day with little done at night, mostly an end of day meditation and quick release of all that I managed to meditate back.

I did not like Jonny at all, in my opinion he was not really someone who was interested in smithing like my father and he mostly decided that smithing was the safest way to become someone important in the village, then used the fact that he was a friend of Toms to get his apprenticeship. It wasn’t so much that he wasn’t willing to work, it was that he wasn’t willing to try to push himself to improve his skills. Instead of taking the trial and error way of doing things over and over to get something right resmelting it so it came out just right he would always be begging to just have it spoon-fed to him the way to do it despite being repeatedly warned that this would slow down his speed in levelling the skills and lower the amount of experience he got for each creation.

Besides that he also hung out with Derk, the headman's youngest son. They were the same age and where Jonny was lazy Derk thought the world owed him just because his dad was the village headman.

It was a good day when I found out that the headman had an older son he was grooming to become the headman after his passing. All this I learned from Alana, the headman’s youngest child and only daughter, despite being almost a year older than Jenny they got along very well. They both bonded over the fact that they both had wanted to use mana yet neither had been gifted with it, although Jenny wanted to become a mage and Alana a healer.

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Sam P.O.V :

I was starting to get worried. Ajax seemed to be more interested in doing house chores instead of playing with kids his own age. While being able to do chores was good I couldn’t help but think that this would not be good for him later on. After all Jenny had grown up with Tom as an older brother and as a result had been a bit tomboyish, had it not been for the fact that she got along so well with Alana over their mutual misfortune of not having mana I was worried the girls would not have made any friends at all. But once Alana took the space left by Tom's departure she seemed to mellow out a bit more.

“Tomorrow I am going to start teaching Ajax some smithing. He needs to learn how to do something other than housework. Hopefully he is different from Tom and might enjoy crafting.” I told Silvia as we were laying in bed.

“I won’t say I am not worried by his habits but are you sure it's not a bit too early to start with that he is not even 6 years old yet” she answered back in a worried tone yet her soft smile showed that she more or less agreed with my decision and was happy I chose blacksmithing over sword fighting like I did with Tom when he went through the same thing, albeit to a lesser extend using Silvia as a role model, which led to him going off to become a guard.

I had learnt from my mistakes I was going to start him off with something nice and safe and go from there, we might just make a smith of this one yet.

This thinking about children's future lead me to thinking again about the issue the headman brought up at the last meeting, that our village healer Karen was starting to grow old and with so little work to do here she didn’t have the strength to stay for longer than the next 6 years or so before she would head to the city where here talents could be better monetized.

With no children with mana being born in the village training a new healer didn’t seem to be in the cards, the last mana born child had been “invited” by the local noble house to visit their home and got an apprenticeship that same trip. She came back home to pick up her family and off they went.

Of course I understood why there had been a drastic increase in how far the nobles would go in order to recruit somebody with magic, but I don’t think we had yet felt the effect this would have on remote populations such as our little out of the way village. But there was nothing I could do about that, I had better get some rest and focus on starting Ajax’s training tomorrow.