I am four years old. I have been training for over three years and I don’t plan on stopping. My progress wasn’t anything to scoff at. All I did was meditate, do some basic exercises to evenly develop my body while preventing muscle overdevelopment. I don’t want to have bulging muscles. Overdeveloped muscles can hold back your growth, keeping you short. So it is important to give body space to grow.
Besides my body I also trained my mind. The meditation tempered it and allowed me to better control my emotions. But just mental discipline isn’t enough. So I trained various aspects of my mind. Brains are like muscles, the more you train them, the faster they run. Over the years, I developed over a hundred mental exercises, everything from memorising strings of random numbers and remembering past events I also did things like replacing a word with another while talking all about it. Repeat this for dozens of words and add rules like all words starting with letter ‘z’ must be spoken backwards and every word starting with ‘c’ must be separated into syllables and shuffled. My mind was incredibly developed.
But I did this in private. The only time I did this in front of others was when I was trying to speak. The weird words didn’t alert anyone.
Regarding meditation, I managed to reach a good level. I could feel blood flow in my body, my heartbeat, my digestion and could even feel there was something beyond that. Something aetherial. It was either aura or life force, I don’t know yet. But whichever it was, it meant that I was close to awakening my aura nodes. It took me three years to come to this point. So why was my progress so ‘slow’? Well it wasn’t. Considering I have never even confirmed the existence of aura it weighed on my mind. It is incredibly difficult to find something you weren't even sure existed. On top of that, my talent isn’t anything impressive. From what I remember from the story, Gon and Killua were truly monsters. Hunters who trained for decades could barely match them, who trained for a year. But they did have ‘good’ teachers and each other as ‘rivals’. Even Zushi had only meditated for two months before awakening his nen. But he too had a teacher to guide him and demonstrate nen. His talent wasn’t anything to scoff at. It was actually quite impressive. He had a 1 in 100,000 talent.
[Author note: I will refer to this as a 100k talent. And having a 10 times rearer talent, doesn’t mean that it is 10 times as powerful. It will only be around 20% increase per 10 times rarity. (1000 talent has 1000 TP (talent points), 10000 has 1200 TP, 100000 has 1440 TP, 1 million 1728 TP, and 10 million has 2073.6 TP). Besides talent, dedication, will and drive will affect progress (Take Kurapika for example, he has 1 million talent (in this FanFic) but can progress faster than gon and killua (10 million in canon)) - End of author note]
But Alan was different. He felt that he had far lower talent, but nothing to confirm it.
‘I guess I am not one of the hyper talented MCs who one shot Meruem as children’
But he wasn’t sad. Well he would prefer to have better talent but he wouldn’t sulk over it. This reincarnation opportunity is invaluable and giving up just because of low talent is laughable. People had ZERO talent on Earth, so this is a massive improvement.
So he spent some more time meditating. One of his hobbies was looking at the village plans. They were full of patterns everywhere. And Muno Riki, the architect, who drew the plans was crippled. He went to the hunter exam only for it to turn out to be a cruel joke. The current hunter association chairman was insane. He stranded the people on an island filled with monsters and said that they could leave after half a year, or when less than hundred out of two thousand participants survive. And some powerful individuals got tired of waiting and started a massacre. The weaker ones directly left the island while the slightly stronger ones stayed. It was a foolish decision in hindsight. The participants probably weren’t aware of nen so they thought some clever traps could help them survive. Oh how wrong they were. Miki, who was now chairbound, came to the village on his way back. He was offered a place to stay, but he refused saying that he would rather go to his home village and stay there. His eccentric personality was replaced by a never ending depression. It was truly sad to see. How much can failed ambition destroy a person? I will never let this happen to me. If I have to, I'll sacrifice a lot to create a nen ability that would allow me to be healthy again.
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When I was thinking this, I could feel my senses touching something. Something deep inside of my body. The thing they were ‘touching’ was aetherial and ever present within me.
“I found it!” I screamed at the top of my lungs. Quickly focusing on the feeling I probed within me. I searched for a while but I couldn’t find it again. I damned myself and sighed. It was enough for today.
But there were still people coming to me and asking me what I found. My outburst attracted a few caretakers and children. I quickly tried making up an excuse.
“Its nothing. I just found a rock I was searching for.” I said
“But why were you searching for it?” Asked a caretaker
“Well I like to play a game where I throw a rock and try to find it”
“Isn’t that lonely? Come and play with Anim and the others. They miss your company.”
‘DAMN!’ I swore in my heart. I hate being around them. They are just so childish. They do nothing but play. I had to copy games from my previous world so they wouldn’t annoy me. They were intrigued by them and so were the caretakers. When they asked me about it, I just denied everything. They can’t get anything out of me.
Anim was the only one of the children I didn’t actively despise. He was quiet and four years older. He became my partner while playing connect 4. All of the others were just throwing pieces everywhere. His parents and younger brother died in the incident almost four years ago. He stays with the younger children because they remind him of his brother. He became a caretaker of Natasha’s son after his previous caretaker grew up.
Being caretaker of Natasha’s son is a bonus. Without her, I would have to suffer in hunger. So I was thankful for her and decided to do some random acts of kindness towards Aron. That was his name by the way.
Alan was playing a game of connect four with Anim while Aron looked on in curiosity. The two kids were tied and the victor will be decided by the amount of free slots in the grid.
As it turned out, Alan lost the game. Because of the bet he had to entertain Aron for a whole afternoon. It was a difficult job but Alan didn’t mind it. He was taking a day off and a tinge of human interaction would be helpful. If not for anything else, his training. It has been proven that one learn’s faster if he is around other people. If you socialize, you could learn faster. And Alan was taking full advantage of it. He drew different fractals in the sandbox while memorising them.
The others were already used to his strange behaviour. They didn’t even bother asking so they just looked in appreciation at the unknown geometric patterns. The fan favoured was the sierpinski triangle and the close second was the Koch fractal. Even though they lost most of their beauty due to inaccuracies in sand, they still looked mind blowing to children, who never saw anything like that.
And so the day drew to a close. Alan lay in bed looking at the familiar ceiling. He thought of his previous life. He thought of all of those he left behind. Even though he outlived his family he still had friends. But the nukes probably didn’t bother to distinguish friend from foe. So the dead rock once called Earth floated in space without a trace of life left. Humans are truly destructive.
A depressed sigh escaped his mouth as he was about to fall asleep. But just then, he felt the thing within him again. The aetherial feeling was back. The strange energy could be sensed again! With excitement he grabbed at it violently and grasped it. The feeling was weird. But it was not the time for idle thoughts. He quickly focused on gathering as much energy as he could before pushing it out with full force. He felt it moving. He was so excited. With all of his strength he pushed. But something unexpected happened. He felt like his skin was tearing apart. He knew he shouldn’t have done that. He restrained himself and calmed down a bit. But just then he realised something else. His pants were heavier than they should be. With a red face he left for the bathroom.