The next few months were spent refining what I had already discovered. Mark and I were severely limited in our conversation topics, with warning messages constantly popping up for both of us. Even basic questions like how to define stats were blocked, which made no sense to me.
In the meantime, I had been brainstorming different types of potential powers and advantages that I might want to have (largely inspired by all the games I had played back on Earth), but while the potential list was long (in the low hundreds), I had only managed to figure out how to truly add a few of them as 'purchase options' in my System. In order to unlock the ability to spend CP and buy something, I had to first figure out how the relevant power might actually operate in a biological, chemical, and physics-related way, while simultaneously having it entangled with, and powered by, the 'magical' universal qi-whatever-energy that I was calling 'CP'. All in all, it was fun yet exhausting work to come up with a complete concept, then visualize the complex methods required to actually manifest the working ability/power/concept in order to establish it as a part of the System – which was entirely not as easy as it sounded, and it would have been outright impossible without the aid of the Celestial's gift.
Back in the village things continued to rapidly return to normal, with the last lingering effects of the attack apparent only in the eyes of those who had lost loved ones. I knew that a large number of roofs, windows, and walls had been destroyed during the attack, but any signs of damage or repairs underway had already vanished after the first month passed. Our street had been brought back to perfection even quicker since the only damage had been a few broken doors, and my house had been completely fine after Mom swept away any loose shadow-wolf-hairs.
If there were any other lingering effects of the attack, I must have missed them as I had other things on my mind now that I was just over a year old. One of the biggest changes was that I had begun ramping up what I let other people (including my parents) see me do in terms of mobility, coordination, and linguistic prowess. I didn’t exactly have full conversations with anyone yet, but I start interacting with everyone more often as if I was slowly puzzling out the language.
I sort of wished that I had more experience interacting with kids back on Earth, since I had only the vaguest of ideas about what the normal development cycle was supposed to look like. Then again, I didn't know if we were actually human or not, so previous experience might not have mattered anyway. It was certainly possible that we were fundamentally the same as normal humans, with the addition of genetic mutations from some unknown source that transformed us randomly; but it was equally possible, however, that we were some alien race that I hadn't encountered before (which wouldn't be difficult, since I had heard of exactly zero non-human sentient races before I died...) that just looked mostly human, but had entirely different biological traits.
Luckily, with this low-technology world lacking access to things like the internet, or even books, it was unlikely that people around me in this small village would know exactly how a baby was supposed to act anyway. Oh, right! I shouldn't just gloss past that, since it was a topic that Mark and I had discussed many times - there were no books! It honestly didn't make any sense to me at all, since our society was advanced enough that I found it very hard to believe that the written word had never been invented. We had strong stone houses, well-made cobbled streets, complex iron-working traditions, and a gigantic freaking fortress that must have been an engineering feat to rival the Great Pyramid of Giza!
I did feel conflicted about pretending to be more of a normal baby than I was (and make no mistake, there was a lot about me that was very much in 'normal baby' territory), but Mark and I had both agreed that it wasn't worth the risk to freak anyone out or draw too much attention to ourselves. There was simply too much about our new world that we didn't understand!
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For instance, the vast differences in the 'home life' experience that Mark and I were going through only underscored how much of a mystery this culture was to us. As time went by his nurses (not his parents; he had only seen them twice in total...) began to take him out of his room on short walks within his place of residence, but always on the same floor of whatever gigantic structure he lived in, and never outside under the open sky. For a while, we theorized that Mark might live in the fortress that was central to my village, but it was difficult to verify since he had never really gotten the hang of my soul-rope version of astral projection (I had a feeling that it was more lack of interest than lack of ability, but it was hard to tell because whenever I asked what had him so occupied the damn warning message popped up before he could answer me). Regardless, that theory had been proven incorrect shortly afterward when one of his nurses had taken him through a hallway that ended in a huge wrought iron framed window overlooking an expansive balcony, through which there was a dazzling and magnificent view as if from a tower high above an unfamiliar archaic and beautifully gothic city. It was absolutely not the village where I lived, and it diverged enough architecturally that I would even have assumed it was from a different civilization entirely!
The view revealed enough of the structure he was in for us to guess it must have been a tall, ornate castle set in the middle of a huge city that just went on for miles and miles. The floor of the castle he lived on was much higher than the buildings we could see down below, meaning that it was either a dozen times higher than even the giant fortress in the middle of my village, or it was built into the cliffside of a large hill. The walls were much thinner than I remembered seeing from our village fortress as well, and it just gave me the impression that it was built for aesthetics rather than defense. Overall, the pictures he had sent me over the soul-link reminded me a little bit of the time I had spent in Florence, Italy - only without any of the cars or modern technology getting in the way. Just a sea of gorgeous stone buildings reaching far off out of sight over the horizon in every direction.
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Mother was delighted and responsive when I began communicating and asking questions more often, and my father always gave me a huge grin (I didn’t really find his smiles scary anymore, but they were still impressively toothy) and a slow thoughtful reply. Luckily they didn’t notice that I had a strange accent, even though it was readily apparent to me, and I was hoping they just assumed it was a childhood lisp of some kind. My main difficulty in this regard was that a number of the sounds and syllables were close enough to either English or Chinese that I had a habit of mispronouncing them very slightly... which was, I assumed, the entirely predictable result of learning a language through passive listening, without being able to engage in conversation and practice making the sounds myself. I was working on it, however, and I hoped that it would only take me a few more months to get it right.
I started moving around a lot more as well, and I spent an entire week making a show of practicing my balance as I 'learned' how to walk. I had, truthfully, been able to walk for quite a while now, but since I didn’t remember what age babies were supposed to start walking I just stuck with slowly crawling until the one-year mark (at least, I thought it was one year -they had a very odd way of keeping track of days which was based on the number 5, instead of 7 like the calendars of Earth).
They would most likely be aware that I was picking things up at an incredibly rapid pace, but I was trying to keep it within reason. For instance, when I practiced my language skills with mom I kept away from asking any of the many questions burning a hole in the back of my mind (why had the wolves attacked; who is Merrik; why is the village all stone; how come I still haven’t seen a book after a whole year) since most of them were related to issues a normal baby would completely lack the perspective to examine, or even know about in the first place (how would I even know what a book even was, for example, since they had never shown me one, and I would have been too young to understand or remember anything about the attack).
Oh... and, to be honest, some of the balance practice was real - walking around on two small stumpy baby legs was harder than it looked, dammit!