5 years -

Another astounding leap forward in time as I once again took inventory of my situation. The past several years had been very fortunate for me. Even though I would describe life in this village as “slow” and “tedious” the wide swaths of unfilled free time were incredibly useful to me. Most of my goals at the moment were things that required dedicated practice and frequent repetition, and being left alone for hours at a time nearly every day allowed me to make significant strides in my efforts. Of course, my parents only saw this as ‘playing’ but I knew that each centimeter crawled towards my return to glory was another milestone.

Though, I was doing much less crawling if I was being honest. It had gotten to the point where I was finally comfortable running, jumping, or climbing just about anything in my usual surroundings. I did still get tired quite easily, the stamina of a child was laughable. Not to mention the frequent tumbles and falls I took from a lack of coordination. My one saving grace in this matter was the recent growth of my body. I thought the first few years of growth to be impressive, but the recent ones proved prodigious. I had easily doubled in size, though that’s not saying much about my current form, just the diminutive nature of the former.

My body does of course still maintained a slight and angular demeanor owing to my elven blood, but it was not a circumstance I would mourn for. I’d never been a particularly determined athlete and a lack of musculature was not a great loss. No, instead my attentions were turned to a far larger and more robust injustice. A terror laid upon me not once, but twice. I knew the eventual day would come, but I had prayed for it to be much later than this.

I had lost a tooth.

Now, this alone wasn’t too bad. The offending incisor naturally loosened over the course of several days from my first notice and fell out naturally while eating. The issue was, the new tooth growing in. There was still a gap in my jaw from the original, but the sharp corners of the new protrusion working its way up and out of my skull was only slightly less painful than growing teeth the first time. To think I would have to experience this perhaps a dozen more times when the rest of my teeth fell out sent shivers down my spine.

That was a problem for the future though, no use living in fear of the present. No, I had to continue to plunge forward every single day until my system unlock. To lay a flawless foundation for the life I desired. I couldn’t level up or manually take skills, the system locked me out of all of that. However, I should have been able to build up experience points, in fact they were likely to carry over and level up several times when the system did indeed unlock.

One thing I’d been pondering on lately was parental override. In my first life I didn’t have parents when I was growing up, Not that I can remember, and as far back as I could remember the system was always unlocked. This time though? I had a loving family that wouldn’t leave me alone even if I asked. I’d be able to meet the requirements for a skill and get Neia to run the parental override for me. Of course, this did run several risks. She could refuse, which I doubted my mother would do, or she could pick skills that would be nearly useless to me and I’d have to wait more than a decade to get rid of them.

My best chance was to explain what I wanted to her after I’d already qualified for a handful of skills and hope she understood the sentiments that burned like eternal embers in my heart. Thankfully mother and I had grown much closer over the past few years of my reading lessons. What started out initially as a very simple teaching of letters had since evolved into a system where she was slowly teaching me new words. Both in the language of the region which I learned was “Hikos” as well as her mother tongue, Elvish. “Learning” Elvish had been quite the experience I must say. I was frankly already fluent in what is known as ‘Low Elvish’ or the tongue of Elves and their descendants outside the native Elven lands. My mother, apparently, spoke High Elvish, and while most of the vocabulary and rules were shown to be transferable she had given me strange looks and corrected my pronunciation on more than one occasion.

My reading lessons were becoming more and more rare as Neia ran out of subjects for me to learn. After a certain point she ran out of real, usable vocabulary and we devolved into theory and impractical edge cases, matters I would never use and matters Neia was unqualified to teach. If I wished to proceed with my education any further I would have had to either turn to new subjects or seek a new teacher, neither of which was particularly useful. Now that I’d grasped the numerical system for Hikos math was not an issue either, so my attentions turned to the system.

At that time, my parents and I had come to an agreement, where so long as I promised not to wander away from the house on my lonesome, they would leave me alone in our garden with little interference. My request prompted a rather spirited discussion about young people needing privacy. It’s of little consequence either way, but I relished the time for experimentation.

I had recently learned how to query the system for my status despite being locked out of everything else, and in preparation for my discussion with mother I reviewed it in full.

Name:

Vincent Stesk

Strength:

10

Classes:

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Half-Elf Child lvl 1

Hp:

20

Vitality:

10

Mp:

60

Agility:

10

Active Class:

Half-Elf Child

Intelligence:

50

Charisma:

5

Willpower:

100

General Skills:

Class Skills: Half-Elf Child

When I first reincarnated I would have given anything for a [Magical Prodigy] or [Boy Genius] class on the prospects of their stat increases alone. To be saddled with a racial variant of the common [Child] class was grating to no small measure, but there was nothing I could do about it now. With a child class it was practically guaranteed to meet the lvl 1 experience requirements before my system unlocked. Honestly, since I’d gain [Child] class xp until I’m 18 it would be rather simple to hit the first three class milestones from the beginning. I expected to catapult directly to my level 25 class with no issues what so ever.

Skill acquisition as a child was also boosted, so my experiments would receive sizable dividends either way. I had ten general skill slots that would last the entirety of my life in this body. Unlearning a skill was possible, but both dramatically inefficient and remarkably painful. It was best to aim for my general skills as early as possible. I didn’t expect the class skill list for a child to be overly impressive. My request list for mother was as follows.

[Dubtiful Student] - I was certain I’d already met the prerequisite number of study hours for my age, and the bonus to skill acquisition and experience gain in the future would be one of my better options. If for whatever reason it seemed to be locked any form of study boost or experience buff would be good enough.

[Bountiful Energy] - while not directly something I was keen on, needing to sleep and rest less often was extremely useful when skill and level grinding would come up later. Probably not the intended use of the skill, but good for my purposes.

[Curious Kid], [Quick Learner], were both useful in this regard as they helped pick up on new topics faster. The final class slot was my bargaining chip with mother, allowing her to choose one of my class skills was likely to make the rest more appealing to her. Even if all my skills were positive buffs to learning, she might want me to take something like [Well behaved] or [Polite] since I had a tendency to ‘get out of hand’ and ‘not listen to instructions’. Pfft. Mothers.

The only three general skills I was concerned with were [Mana Shaping], [Mana Sense], and [Mana Control] which would allow me to become more aware of the mana both inside and out of my body, and to exert my will on it. [Spell shaping], would be useful, but it was likely to be more powerful if I picked it up as a class skill and once I had [Mana Shaping] I would be able to do spellforms manually.

These seven skills, plus whatever mother chooses for my class, were hand picked to make the acquisition of magic easier once my system unlocked.

Thus, my labor of passion began. I would meet all the prerequisites for each of these skills before I approached mother about the parental override and she would be astounded by my aptitude for magic! I would become the talk of the town and no longer would my parents equivocate on the topic of “chores”, the future would be dedicated to magic! I would not rake the leaves!

Let out into the garden every morning, I dedicated myself solely to the gathering of new and more powerful skills than I was granted in my first life. Stopping only for meals and the occasional nap, my efforts were as tireless as my body allowed. My first step, [Mana Shaping]. Mana itself was more akin to the breath of reality than an external energy source. It could build and fade, ebb and flow, much like water. Unfortunately, attempting to grasp it was like trying to catch water with your bare hands. Sure, you can close your hand in a river and there would always be some water in your grasp, you can even cup your hands together and lift some of the water up and out. However, you can never hold it for long, nor can you hold as much as you would like.

It was far easier for most to focus on the manipulation of the raw mana within their own body. A resource many physically inclined individuals called “Stamina”. This would not work if I sought to return to my magically fueled glory. So, my mind was pushed to it’s limit stretching to grasp the fundamental behaviors of mana once again from the start. It felt similar to retraining a muscle after years of disuse. It was difficult, but not impossible.

That was of course, usually. Here in Hikos the mana was like a thundering avalanche compared to the subtle snowfall I was familiar with. That was not a good sign. All historical records point to mana signatures rising gradually for the preceding five hundred years before my death, for it to cycle so fully can only mean one of two things. Either I had been propelled so vastly far into the future that the outer bounds of my spell were shattered into dust, and the mana reserves had to account for another thirty thousand years of forward travel. Or I’d accidentally gone backwards.

Mana cycling occurs on an order of magnitude longer than human civilizations, so I would have expected advanced technology and magic to be everywhere if I truly went that far forward.

But then all the pieces began to fall into place. Mother only spoke High Elvish, no one here seemed to have ever heard a single gasp of the Terraqi language, and Hikos followed no language group I was familiar with. The higher mana signature, the lack of mass produced books, the lack of mass produced anything!

Dear gods. Half the spells I knew hadn’t even been invented yet, and the other half were reliant on the first half.

Shit. Shitshitshitshitshit.

In my moment of panic, an idea dawned on me. If these spells didn’t exist yet, could I invent them first? Would I be heralded as the greatest mage of an era? That would certainly divert my current present from the timeline my past-future occupies. Right?

I could stop Vincent from being born. I could prevent him from betraying me.

Hell, If I went back as far as I thought, I could prevent Terraq from ever being founded.

How hard could rewriting history actually be?