After his first success at water bending, no matter how meager it was, Atlas began to train every day before he slept and after he woke up. Every time Thi came over, she would try to teach him something, and even his mother sometimes gave him a few tips, even if she was quite insecure when she said anything. His progress during that time was slow but steady, but he quickly realized that he couldn’t rush his training. With his limited Chi reserves, it was impossible to train anything more advanced than creating a few waves in a bucket. So even when he knew all the water-bending movements from the northern water tribe or the water-bending style from Republic City, he was unable to train at the speed he wanted.
After experiencing it a few times, he realized that chi exhaustion caused a combination of physical and mental exhaustion, which meant that he should prioritize physical training during the day as he didn’t want to become useless after throwing a bit of water at an enemy. Since he could communicate with his mother more, it had become far easier to get what he wanted, so while she didn’t allow him to go for a run around alone, play near the river, or generally without her supervision, he was able to convince her to allow him to play in the mud behind the house.
He naturally would have preferred doing real physical exercises, but a one-year-old boy who understood the concept of physical training and the desire to actually do it would have looked strange. Playing in the mud allowed him to do something similar to squats, planks, and other less obvious exercises that could be done while masquerading as normal playing.
After a few days of these exercises, he realized another problem. Food. The foggy swamp tribe was a hunter-gatherer society, with a heavy focus on hunting rather than gathering. This led to quite an unbalanced diet, especially if one was still growing or wanted to gain muscles.
So after a week of playing in the mud, he got an idea. He had face-palmed himself when it came to him. In his first life, he had been a farmer, and it would be quite easy for him to introduce agriculture to the foggy swamp tribe, even in their admittedly difficult geographical position. This would further many of his goals. For one, he would be able to get the nutrition he needed for healthy growth, and secondly, it would probably lead to some goodwill among the tribesmen, which would make it easier to use them as soldiers later on.
The first task for that project was obviously to find the right crops. In the village, he had seen a few lonely batches of wild rice growing here and there, which was like the holy grain for a farmer in a swamp, and it was quite easy for Atlas to plant the first rice in his backyard without it looking strange. The second plant he noticed to have potential for feeding the tribe was water spinach. While he didn’t know how to specifically grow it, he had heard of a few autonomous farms in his first life that used water spinach as a water purifier that was also edible. He had to thank Ethan for the memory potion that refreshed all his memories, or he wouldn’t have been able to recognize the plant that was growing in a small pond near the center of the village.
He also thought about planting cattails, as they would make more durable fiber, but it wasn’t really a priority for him, as it already took him a lot of time to prepare the “field” for those two crops. Especially wild rice wasn’t as easy to grow, and so far Atlas had only experience with domesticated white rice from his own farm, but he assumed that the difference wouldn’t be too big.
His mother at first thought he was trying to decorate his mud playyard with the plants and didn’t say anything, even when he started to flood the field by connecting it to the nearby river with a hand wide kanal. Only a month later, when the first rice had germinated, Huu had asked him what Su had been growing in her backyard as the concept of planting something wasn’t really new to the tribe.
Huu, as someone who had left the swamp on more than one occasion, naturally knew about farms, even though he never had the idea to make one in the tribe. Atlas, of course, had played dumb and insisted that he only wanted to play around, but he used this chance to convince his mother to build a farm with him. His mother was a bit helpless, but after Huu said that it wasn’t something difficult or dangerous to do, Su agreed. She even began to help him by bending the water in and out of the field, depending on Atlas requirements.
In the following five years, Atlas had grown a farm big enough to feed Su and him, with enough food left for Thi and Huu to visit from time to time. In these five years, a lot has changed in the tribe. One change was that a few shacks had small rice fields next to their homes, while Thi’s and Pak’s shacks had something that resembled herbal gardens. To accommodate these small fields, many small artificial river arms were created that took care of the fields.
Another great change was that the village itself had grown. Atlas had counted 311 wooden shacks in the village, with on average 3 inhabitants. This meant that in those five years, the village had grown by 78 people. The main reason for that was that the number of people who died during hunts had decreased as the village needed fewer huntersquads, which meant the experienced hunters could teach the new ones for a longer time. Another theory, one that Atlas couldn’t prove, was that child mortality had gone down. The water quality was improved by the water spinach and the food most children ate was boiled before being eaten, which was a blessing as Atlas wasn’t really sure if the insects, small rodents, and birds the tribe hunted were free of parasites or similar things.
But the greatest change was Atlas himself. He had grown from a toddler to a healthy six-year-old boy. His long black hair was usually a mess because hair care wasn’t something that was really well developed in the tribe. His skin looked a bit olive, and like all members of the foggy swamp tribe, his eyes were green. But compared to the other tribe members, Atlas wore green trousers and a green shirt. On first glance, he would look like the woman of the tribe who usually wore green skirts with green shirts, but Atlas didn’t care. He didn’t see the appeal of running around half naked, even if the temperature in the tribe would allow him to do just that. The big leaf that the tribe usually wore as hats, on the other hand, had some appeal to him as it was the ideal protection from the rain, especially in the rainy season.
As usual, Atlas was training waterbending on his rice field. As his chi reserves were only slowly growing, his first attempts were limited to a few droplets of water, but after five years, he had made significant progress in his control, and so he became able to do much more than he had hoped. The drops of water had slowly formed into fist-sized balls, and those had formed into a few bucks full of water. His morning routine usually was to use water bending to harvest some water spinach or rice. The next step of his training was to boil the food via water bending. It was a technique Atlas had more or less self-developed.
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At first, he struggled with changing the phase of water. Even using the full moon hadn’t helped in that regard. The major problem was that the freezing or melting didn’t require extra movements. Some benders used breaths to freeze the water; others used touch, others incorporated it into normal bending movements. The problem with that was that it made it clear that changing the temperature of the water didn’t depend on the movement.
Atlas had asked Huu about a phase change technique, but surprisingly, Huu only knew about the freezing part.
By questioning Huu about freezing water, Atlas learned that changing the state of the water required a strong image and control. It was a technique Atlas had easily mastered after learning about that small but important piece of information. Knowing how the molecular structure changes when water freezes helped a lot with his image, and his control was also improving each day. It was also the reason he was able to learn how to use water bending to boil water so easily. But as boiling required more chi than freezing, he didn’t train it as often.
After he broke down the theory on that, he even taught the technique to Huu, Thi, his mother, and a few other tribe members. Even a few of the tribe's children had swarmed him. What fascinated Atlas was that most children learned to bend after turning three or four, but only after they turned six would they be professionally educated by the village elder. This naturally meant that they played around with it and only received a few minor lessons from their parents. So when those children learned that a child their age was able to use a technique even the village elder couldn’t use, they naturally got curious.
But after the first child severely burned his arm, Su and Thi prohibited him from teaching the other children. Atlas wasn’t really that angry about it, especially because teaching children, or even adults, to imagine that water was made out of hydrogen and oxygen was quite a difficult task. Even when Atlas broke down the theory to drops of water move really fast when they boil, they only had limited success. But success nonetheless.
“Ati, don’t train too long today; I have to bring you to the village elder today. You don’t want to miss your second day.” Said Su while leaning out of the door from their shack.
“Yes, mom. Food is also ready in a moment.” Answered Atlas. As he had turned six a few months ago and the rain season had ended, he started the lessons with the old man with a new batch of students.
Atlas was a bit conflicted about those lessons. On one hand, he would learn more about the foggy swamp waterbending style. Ironically, this was the style he knew the least about. On the other hand, he would be required to learn about the tribe's history, culture, customs, and structure.
The problem with that wasn’t necessarily that Atlas thought that it wasn’t interesting; on the contrary, the tribe had surprised him again and again in the past few years because the tribe, despite its lack of technology, had quite modern and social customs. People were taken care of when ill, old, or orphaned. People valued music and art, and the status between women and men was as equal as it could get. They also had their own stories, fables, and fairytales that were quite entertaining to hear. The only thing that Atlas missed was their drive to improve themselves. The people were content with what they had and just enjoyed their lives. It was painfully similar to how the people in his first world lived, but at the same time totally different, as they could actually survive that way. But the major problem with those lessons was that the village elder spoke extremely slowly and monotonously. It was a lot like Professor Bin’s classes in Hogwarts, with the difference that if one was really interested in history, one could have read about the topics in the library in Hogwarts. The foggy swamp tribe didn’t have a library. They didn’t even have books. Everything was taught mouth-to-mouth.
After the rice was cooked, he used waterbending to form a long water arm and funneled the rice into two wooden bowls. The waterarm split around foot over the bowls, and Atlas tried to control the stream of rice so that every third rice corn, the bowel the rice went to changed. Most of the time, he did manage it, but in a few rare cases, he was too late, and a fourth corn slipped through. It wasn’t really the most efficient way of using his chi to train, but he liked the finesse that was required to actually do it.
He knew that with his limited chi reserves, he would need to focus on his control, as he would never catch up with a talented bender of this world, not to mention the avatar or the hero. But with the progress he was making, he would still be able to fight with people like the Dai Li or the average benders from the Fire Nation. But even if he grew his control to that point, he wouldn’t choose a frontal fight if it was somehow evitable. The final fight with Voldemort, Ethan, Dumbledore, and Professor Ward had shown him that during the fight, unexpected things were bound to happen. Especially if something like magic or bending was involved.
After distributing the rice between the two bowls, he went into his shak. His mother had prepared a few giant fly legs together with a specially made hot sauce made from the glowing liquid from a swamp firefly.
All in all, the food was bearable. Atlas still wasn’t really a large fan of the cuisine in the foggy swamp tribe, but after some time he had stopped to care. In a way, he had realized that Hogwarts had pampered him quite a lot when it came to certain things. Not only on the food department, but on the sleeping quarter’s part or the silent ever-present assistance from the house elves. His first world wasn’t really better, as robots did everything he needed. Compared to that, most lives in other universes will feel burdensome. But after five years of adjusting, it became better, even though he would probably kill someone for a delicious steak with oven potatoes.
After the meal, his mother walked him to the town center. A few kids and their parents were already there. Some of the kids were trying to stay close to their parents while others were already walking around with their friends, and two boys were already sitting in front of the village elder’s house.
The atmosphere reminded Atlas of his enrolment in elementary school in his last life, where Jason had kind of adopted him as his friend. Remembering it made Atlas regret not writing Jason a letter or even visiting him during the Christmas holidays, because even if Jason was just a regular muggle child and vanished from his life since he started to attend Hogwarts, he was still his first real friend.
Atlas sighed in nostalgia, not trying to remind himself of what he had done.
He stared around, as it was already the second day; the excitement wasn’t as great as the day prior, and so far he hadn’t been adopted by another extrovert. Not that he intended for that to happen, even if he couldn’t help but think that one “close” friend could help him in the future when it came to recruiting the tribe. But even knowing that he couldn’t bring himself to openly run to a bunch of kids and acting so unlike him.
As he reflected on his past experience, he knew that if he acted like a kid for too long, at some point he would start to think like one too, which might be fine if he planned to use this life as a third chance at life, but with Adam’s threat in addition to his actual mission, that wasn’t really an option.