Chapter 4 - More Years, More Family, More Power?

The white furball had failed her transformation, apparently this wasn't her most powerful spell and by swearing to the God of Cliches you are almost asking for a bad outcome, or at least a funny one that may or may not put you in a compromising position.

So here she was, half way between a human, a dragon and a bunny, mostly human, but strong traits from the other too.

Her name appeared to be nigh incomprehensible and unpronounceable names. Mom decided to call her Rudui (pronounced Roo-doo-ee) and it stuck, she doesn't look too angry at the fact that she's getting daughter treatment and getting pampered by our parents. This doesn’t stop her from still ask me to do stuff.

After said event things quickly went back to normal, as far as things can be normal here. Which basically meant more training, meditation and finally, I started to experiment with my God's Gift, sounds great, but not so much.

As to explain things again, people get to Reincarnia with as many Blessings, Perks, Advantages, and Skills as a technician may hold tools in their toolbox, and that’s more than one can imagine.

Me on the other hand, I got here with just 1 tool and some basic normal science world knowledge.

Given this many tools and skills, they have been studied, categorized, generalized, systematized, so to say, when I got here and got my blessings tested, it got a category, a series of numbers describing its potential, flexibility and other details.

To make this large mess (which turns out to be a lot of the things here), let’s get an example to explain things:

Say someone gets a blessing from a God of War, this blessing (usually) can be of two types, a Front Line o Back Line blessing.

* Front Line is for those who are in the midst of the fight, you usually have weapon masteries, physical augmentations, Improved Intuition, etc…

* Back Line has tactics knowledge, willpower enhancement, improved training methods, etc…

And this is just to take some of the most basic, you then have Skills that can be pretty much encompass anything someone has seen in an RPG game, Encyclopedic knowledge of multiple types of realities, Contacts with beings who can even represent abstract things, etc.

And then you have Power Level, which is a simplified number to represent potential, flexibility, extent, reach, etc… Most simple tests can quantify the first two or three and that gives a pretty clear reading from the average. The scales of each quality go from 0, meaning none (If used on Power Level it means the absence of the power, and left for non-standard powers in the qualities), to 10, which declares the maximum (even when two people with the same Blessing and Power Level of 10 are compared, it doesn’t mean they are equal since this is a simplification and there’re things over PL 10).

Mine sounds simple in comparison. It's a Blessing of a Generic God; this means the God in question is from a monotheist religion or doesn't share his area with other gods. To make it even more of a generic and simple blessing, what I got is ‘Energy Control’ with a power level of 10.

This sounds great at first, but after a little though it becomes a nightmare, having a Power Level of 10 for a Control Blessing puts me in the same situation of someone having the right of flying a space shuttle but no previous experience for it, and I have to use it to go buy milk.

Control type Blessings were one of the more open to internal categorization, and usually left plenty of room for their users to mimic other types of blessings. In the Internal Categorization of Control Blessings, Energy Control was Emperor.

Having Power Level 10 for my Energy Control put me just below an actual God’s Omnipotence. I could even control Mana and Qi, two of the most basic build blocks for most sentient things around this part of Existence. Sadly I not only lack the knowledge or experience to use this Blessing, I also lack the energy to force my will over different types of energies. In other words, I also lack the Rocket Fuel for my spaceship.

My mother and Daevas soon fixed my problem, putting their knowledge together they found a simple solution to my case. Daevas put her large amounts of knowledge and experience, my mother put her knowledge of being a mother.

Since my power was too vast they fixed it with a simple item, a bracelet, a cursed bracelet meant to restrain someone’s powers.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

Ok, this sounds worse than it actually is. Is not cursed on the way that I can't remove it, it's cursed on my ability to use my Blessing, since I only got one, and from a pretty generic branch of blessings, she managed to make a cursed bracelet that restrains the categories of energies that my power can control. This quickly turned out to be a salvation.

To explain my case, I remember an old movie from my previous life, "X: The Man with X-Ray Vision" his power to see through things quickly turns too powerful for him, letting him see even the eye of god and making him go mad, now how much better would it be for him to have had a pair of sunglasses to tone things down? In my case, this bracelet fixes the upper edge of my power.

Now, with my powers restrained, I started something called Shaping Exercises.

These are simple exercises that mix meditation with normal body exercises, they are meant to improve someone’s magic dexterity.

It’s mostly used by people with small amounts of magic power or for people to aiming for complex magic.

In my case it’s for both. If you compare normal magic to a medium level programing language, then Energy Control is not a low level programming language, I’m directly programing with hardware.

This exercises helped me improve my control over the basic energies I had access and also helped me improve my internal energy reserves when practiced along with my meditation.

Going back to the story, 5 more years quickly passed.

Rudui's not bad as a sister, and anyone with a younger sister will empathize with me, she feels like a brat, but you can't stop yourself from looking after her.

My case is similar, except my younger sister beats my actual age by several times, her knowledge, power, skills and contacts beats mine too. I think she only acts the younger sister because it fits her. What I mean, is that she's a younger sister for looking younger than me and being a total brat, not the other way around.

Mom and Dad, are pretty much Mom and Dad, for a couple of people who have lived as long as them, they act young and inexperienced, sometimes I forget they wield powers I barely understand, this world really makes me feel like a child once more, not that I have lived that much, even with the amount of years I lived in this second life.

Ten years of Age, I look like an adult already, one would give me between 16 and 20 years old, I actually don't look too far from my parents, which makes things quite strange from my point of view.

Nearing my tenth birthday I also go an important piece of information.

“My side of the family will be getting here on Friday’s night; I already prepared the guest rooms. I will make sure that half of them are reserved for your side” My mother shouted from the kitchen as Rudui and me relaxed on the couch watching what can I only call a 3D magic TV.

“That's good honey, my parents and my brother will be getting here on Saturday” My father placed his hand on my shoulder “So we can celebrate your tenth birthday with all the family and declare you an adult”

“Wait, I have more family? How come I never saw them before? Or even heard of them?” I wasn't actually that surprised that I suddenly had found my family wasn’t just this 3 people.

“Yeah, they actually didn't felt bothered to contact us after we got married, moved out and had you” My father says as he thinks for a moment. “I don’t think they even know about Rudui, maybe grandpa knows, but your mother’s father was always a little more attentive to his family”

“What do you mean by that they didn’t bother? A new family member isn't important enough?” I ask, maybe a little less incredulous than I sounded.

“Yup, you just weren't important enough, especially after they found about your...’condition’; Most of them actually made bets that you wouldn't get to your 8th birthday. Don't worry, Daddy bet you would get to your 10th birthday without dying” I could barely comment on the amount of faith my father had on me “Don't worry, I'm sure you will be happy that I will use the winnings on buying you some stuff so you can go out and prove yourself to them. After all, you were the one that lived this long.

After your birthday you will be able to go out and explore the world...and leave your mother and me to have some time alone once more” My father whispered the last in a still quite audible level, again, I'm impressed on the amount of faith my father had on me.