Since last week i posted with a delay, this week i will post earlier.

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Volume 1

Chapter 6

Our rat problem got worse.

They seem to be everywhere.

They have infiltrated our food stocks, our bedrooms, my firewood cabin… even the toiled had a few in an underground nest.

I managed to see many Ashura the last few days. The whole family has showed me a side I didn’t knew existed.

There is no mercy for the poor rats.

Or should I say, there is no mercy for these damn bastards?!

They ate our food!

We are eating shitty soups and even more meager meals because they ate and spoiled so much.

We cannot eat anything the rats have eaten, because they may have pissed or pooped in it and their excrements usually carry a lot of diseases. It’s almost certain to get diarrhea for two weeks if you eat rat excrement. That if you don’t get something worse.

Father didn’t even try to decontaminate it with detoxification magic. It was just too much spoiled food.

Almost our entire pantry.

I could eat it, of course, since I don’t get sick. But the family doesn’t know it, so I share everyone’s fate.

The fate of eating only meager and spare food.

This requires for me to explain better.

The village doesn’t recognize land ownership. First, because no one of common background owns land in this place.

We live in a county inside a kingdom. So the land here belongs in first place to royalty, and in second place to nobility.

What the village have is usage permission from the local Lord.

The lord allows for the villagers to have farms around the place, both for planting as well as for raising livestock.

So most of the villagers are farmers, exception for a few people like father.

Father is a militia guard. The militia receives a stipend from the Lord, but since it would be useless in a small village like ours, with less than twenty families spread on some thirty houses or something, they don’t get it in money.

Instead, they get it in food and goods.

Besides father, the non-farmers of the village include a blacksmith and a brewer master. They are the ones who produce the beer and iron goods we may need.

We also have a few hunters. It seems they are in a number of five. They are the ones who get wild animal’s meat and leather for us. They also tan all the leather produced in the village. However, since in spring they don’t hunt much, it could be said they are half-farmers.

All of those are paid by the villagers with food, goods and services.

So of course there would be almost no use for currency amongst us.

Instead the militia’s pay is taken from the Lord’s taxes. It’s the militia’s chef duty to correctly collect the taxes, separate the part of the militia, and then give them to the Lord’s men when they come, once a year. 

Which means father only gets paid once a year as well – at the end of harvest’s season. 

So the rats eating our pantry means the rats eating not only our food, but also all the “money” we had stored to buy anything.

Of course, we won’t starve.

We have chickens on the backyard, and grandmother has sent us some staple food. Plus, if we really need we can beg our neighbors for some help. That happens sometimes, and the whole village helps when it’s the case.

But still, it’s only because of those damn rats!

***

The rats have started attacking our chickens.

Two of them were dead this morning.

This isn’t a joke anymore.

These things can get us to starve and reduce our whole family to live by the goodwill of others.

Everyone is in a state of alert.

Father took a day out of work.

Ann has stopped training for today.

The neighbor wives have come to help.

Mother has demanded Jacen stay at home and help. Even Jacen’s friend, a boy who’s one year older, has come as well.

Today is rat hunting day.

We have to find them, and kill them all. We don’t know where they came from, but after eating all of our pantry they could spread around the village and cause a disaster.

A rat infestation in the whole village. This would be catastrophic.

So we started hunting them.

***

We found five nests until now. Two hidden in the ceiling, one in the empty pantry, two in the backyard.

No matter how one looks at it, it’s just too many rats. Something weird is going on here.

Father has decided to call for help from the hunters. A small and well-build man came to our house the next day.

He talked with father in an easy tone, until it was time to start searching. Then he became totally different.

Focused, silent.

He looked around attentively and I immediately felt something tingling around me.

That’s aura, I have no doubt. And it seems to be aura like the one I developed to be able to manipulate my own qi beyond my body. It wriggles and touches stuff, reacting and adapting as if alive.

It’s aura with “nerves” on it.

I guess this is a hunting technique, and another defeat for me. He is really good at this. I can’t come even close to reach such a wide range with my aura.

Not only the amount needed is over twice what I have now, the amount of information he must be receiving and processing with his brain is much more than I usually have to deal with.

It didn’t take long for him to find the problem.

It was outside.

Buried deeply in the ground, he sensed the source of our misery.

We started digging, and after a couple hours’ father and the hunter uncovered the nest.

The thing was as big as a dog, and it had a huge, swollen belly. There were a lot of other, normal rats around it, and father did his best to kill all of them as well.

It was a monster called a “hex rat”. It’s main power is to give birth to wave after wave of a big number of rats.

Since it can easily plague and destroy whole villages, they called it a hex. Even if it’s one of the weakest types of monsters, with zero mobility and no fighting power at all.

Father knows it well, as adventurers are seldom paid to deal with it, but he said that wasn’t good news.

Because hex rats become so in a distinctive way.

When a common wild rat eats monster meat, it hurriedly dives deep into the ground and hibernate for months at once.

When it finally wakes up, the monster will give birth to wave after wave of rats for weeks, until it dies of starvation.

Then things will return to normal.

They are monsters which are mostly harmless in a dungeon or in the wild, but they become very problematic on a human settling.

Also, they pose a problem for me personally.

That is the fact that hex rats don’t burrow much further from the place where it feed from monster meat. It’s almost instantaneous. It eats and then dig.

So it must have feed in our backyard.

Father took another day off to search the backyard for clues, and looked everywhere to try and find signs of monster invasion.

But he won’t find them, will he?

It’s the fruit of my recklessness after all.

***

I have been feeling pretty horrible the last couple weeks. 

Not that this world has the concept of “weeks”. It’s just an entire month hasn’t gone by yet.

Still.

All of my ingenious techniques to become stronger seem to already exist in this world.

Not only that, but stronger techniques exist as well.

My experimentation with aura was reckless, and give birth to a huge problem for our family.

Everyone got affected in a negative way.

And that is only the beginning of my family problems.

I have allowed myself to be taken by lust, to defy my mother, to lie to all of them, to repress feelings I can’t deal with, but which are still eating me alive inside.

And all of that brought forth no positive results at all.

I thought I ought to be a cheat character in a fantasy world, so why do I feel to lag behind so much? To have failed so much?

It’s such a heavy burden. My whole body feels heavy. Almost as if I had returned to my fat days.

Maybe I’m just putting the cart in front of the horses.

I have underestimated this world. I thought I would come here and be an expert in everything just because it has similarities to my own world.

But it seems I have been wrong.

This third year of my life have come with a realization.

I was arrogant and impulsive. I must take time to learn again.

Let’s not give up. Let’s persevere. Not in the same path, but with a new attitude.

Should I just stop pretending and get ahead of them in everything?

Should I just stop worrying about how the family will see me?

No. I shouldn’t do that. That’s just another path to failure.

I need to learn to be sincerer and open. But I must also learn how to do it without upsetting too much the balance of this family.

I love them, I want to be loved by them.

Someday, maybe, I can tell them my whole story even.

But until there, let’s be a little more “me”, and also show then that I am “me”.

Let’s apologize. Let’s be sincere. And let’s do it calmly.

First the thing I know I can do.

I will be sincere with them about my aura control, and I will be sincere about the whole deal with the monster earthworm.

Let’s do this.

***

It was dinner time, and it was normal.

Everyone was talking as if nothing had happened wrong. As if no one knew who was the one responsible for the meager dinner we were having.

Beer, thin soup and boiled eggs.

Just this much.

And they indeed didn’t know yet. But I knew. I knew.

I wanted to tell, but I was afraid.

Will they stop loving me?

Will Jacen become somewhat mad that I have been lying to him?

How will father and mother react?

And Ann?

Should I tell her I touched her knowingly?

…I’m scared. I’m afraid.

Still, I can’t bear it.

Every single time I see father taking the spoon to his mouth with a dismayed look.

Every single time I see Jacen with a face like “I don’t like it, but ok, it’s food”.

When I look at Ann and notice the small wrinkles of dissatisfaction on her face.

I’m guilty. I’m guilty. I’m guilty.

I’m guilty of too many things.

I.. I need to talk… I need to confess… I need to be forgiven.

But will I?

I finally can’t endure it anymore. Dinner is almost over. Mother is asking why I haven’t touched my soup yet.

“Alvin. Why don’t you want to eat? Is it bad?”

I don’t know. I haven’t been able to sense taste for days now.

I can’t do it anymore.

I can’t keep it inside.

“I DID IT! IT WAS ME! I’M SORRY!”

I start to cry torrentially.

This cry. It’s just like the one that time. It’s strong. It comes from somewhere deep.

I feel that my body is being pulled towards something soft. I don’t know what it is. I can’t see, I can’t hear. It’s all crying for now. I bury my face in it and sob.

I sob, and sob, and sob.

Until I’m almost done.

Then I’m released gently.

“There son, what happened?”

It was mother who gave me a hug.

I talk while hiccupping.

“It… was… me… I hide from you… I did.. I am guilty!”

She patted my head a bit. I could feel father’s hand on my shoulder.

“Calm down Alvin. And tell us what happened”

I feel so fragile right now. I just want to obey. It’s acceptance I guess.

There is no more point for strength. For hiding. For keeping things concealed.

I started to talk.

I talked about how I could do lots of aura control, but didn’t want them to know about it.

I talked about how I thought Jacen would be down if I showed my whole skill. I said I loved him, but I felt false when I pretended.

I talked about how I discovered about body strengthening from an early age and had been practicing it instead of trying to do slashes.

I talked about how I got entangled on these lies.

Then I talked about how I had developed a way to insert aura on things. On how I had created two monsters, and how I thought the monstrous earthworm was why the hex rat had been born.

And then… finally… I talked about how I touched sister in the bath. I said I knew I was doing something bad and that I couldn’t control myself. That I felt I liked her. That I wanted her in a sense I shouldn’t want.

In the end I managed to hold my tongue on being a reincarnated person and also the things related to that, but I told them a lot.

Even the thing about sister was said.

So I was ready for anything.

But no one talked.

It was a long silence. At least mother’s hands still held my shoulders.

What will happen to me now?

***

It started plainly. Father took me to his lap and slapped me. Then again, and again and again.

He slapped strongly at first, but he didn’t stop when my aura was depleted. He kept going for a while.

He only stopped when I snapped out of it.

That weird state I was in, I mean.

I was totally passive. I just accepted it as my punishment and let it be. Just hit me. Hit me stronger so I stop feeling so bad about myself.

Then, eventually it faded away and I started to react. My muscles tensed a bit and he probably felt I had changed a bit.

Everyone is looking at me with bad eyes.

I feel terrible.

“Alvin. That was very bad. Don’t do it ever again. Don’t you EVER again lie to us like this, you hear me?”

Father is angry. I have made father angry. That easy-going and happy father. Angry.

“I’m sorry…”

“Apologize to your sister first.”

I turned to Ann and kneeled to the ground. Then I hung my head low.

“I’m sorry.”

“Uhm. I don’t mind.”

Did she just said something really unsettling now?

No, no, she may not mind, but I do.

Plus, mother does as well.

“Yes you do Ann. And you won’t allow him to touch you anymore.”

Father may be a little more poop-worlded than mother, but I guess I won’t get any support in this situation.

“Okay.”

Ann is taking this far too naturally, isn’t she?

“Now apologize to everyone.”

I did as father ordered, and lowered my head for every one of them, one by one.

“Sorry Pa”

“Uhm.”

“Sorry Ma”

“Keep going.”

“Sorry Ann”

“Uhm.”

“….Sorry Jacen”

“Stupid.”

… one of them is different from the rest, isn’t it?

Well, I can’t wait to be forgiven by Jacen at this point. I just hope he will forgive me in a few days.

“Apologize to your brother again”

… what?

… okay, I will do it.

“Sorry Jacen.”

“Stupid!”

“Again”

“Sorry”

“Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!”

Jacen left the table and went to his room.

… even though the one I touched was sister, why are you acting like this.

“I will go.”

“Uhum.”

Mother went to comfort my older brother, and father remained with me and Ann.

“Alvin.”

“Yes Pa.”

“Don’t touch your sister again. Since your sister is fine I don’t think it’s too bad, but your mother doesn’t like it. And you Ann, make sure you don’t let him touch you. If he tries tell me or your mother. We will put him back on track.”

“Okay. Sorry.”

Sister apologized. That’s a rare sight.

Well, she doesn’t do many mistakes, so that much would be expected.

“And Alvin.”

“…yes Pa.”

“You are not so smart as you think, so don’t lie to me. If you had told me about the flesh-eating earthworm I would have told you how to take care of it. None of this would have happened.”

I bite my lip.

Should I tell him about reincarnation? About the goddess?

No… I could get out of this with just this much because they see me as a three-years-old. Plus, the goddess said it to me, right?

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

This isn’t a world used to heroes. To people who come from somewhere else and do stuff. I’m pretty sure it also isn’t a world used to reincarnation, or they would have asked me about my previous life.

Unless there is some kind of religious cult or sect teaching about this.

…it would make sense.

How people are so free-minded about sex and nudity. Father even said he didn’t mind me touching sister’s down area since she was fine with it.

Could it be?

That reincarnation is common in this world?

That my family is of reincarnated people?

Maybe I should try…

Maybe I should tell him.

“Common, spit it out.”

I guess my silence and anxiety have given me away. Well, I don’t know the word for [reincarnation] or if this world even has one of those, so… I guess I will have to explain.

“Pa… I… I remembered something…”

“What?”

“I was from another place… and I died… and I ended up here…”

“That is just dream.”

Uh.

I guess they don’t have this concept here after all.

My mind is a bit more at ease now.

“Uhm.”

“Right. Here is what we will do. Tomorrow I will teach you how to make rice mature. Then you will learn it and take care of increasing our meals until they pay me. It will be very hard on you, but you must make things right for what you did. That will be your new chore for a while. Understood?”

How to make rice mature?

Does he mean like the grain I had put my aura into and it germinated?

I had thought it should be possible to mature it quickly with aura, but won’t it turn into a monster?

… I will worry about that tomorrow. If I can somewhat atone for what I did, then I don’t care if we have to breed treants in the backyard and kill them to eat.

Yes, this world has treants.

They seem to be very common in places with high aura concentration like the surroundings of labyrinths and in old battlefields where many people died at once. Especially if it was a forest battlefield.

Anyhow.

“Okay Pa.”

“Also… uuhm… no… I have to talk with Ma first..”

He murmured something.

“Go to sleep.”

“Okay.”

I went to our room. Ann was ready to follow me, but father called her.

“Ann, stay for a bit.”

And that was that.

Should I try and listen to what will be said amongst them?

…no.

I have a greater challenge in front of me right now.

Jacen’s eyes are piercing me like javelins. 

***

“Now, tell Alvin what you told me.”

Mother has made me kneel in front of Jacen, which is on her lap.

I’m listening attentively.

“Alvin is unfair! You don’t train and you still get strong! That’s unfair!”

… I cannot say you are wrong poop.. no, older brother.

You are definitely right.

This is what I chose before reincarnating. To be stronger than others even while doing less work.

Well.. there’s more than it, though.

After all there’s all that talk about divinity seed and whatnot.

I’m useful to the goddess in a way others aren’t, and because of that I’m blessed with powers others don’t have.

It’s the subordinate’s lottery, and I just got first prize. To receive income without having to work.

Still… I would feel bad as well if someone just got stronger than me based on talent alone.

I would feel bad.

…I do feel bad. I have experienced this is the past. In my past life. To be unable to do what other people did with ease.

…or maybe that’s another kind of experience, I don’t know.

“What else Jacen”

“…brother is unfair, but I’m still Older Brother!”

“That is right. And what else?”

“Umu.”

Jacen is patting my head.

Well.

Isn’t mother a miracle worker.

I wonder what he said to him. I thought he would develop into an “I will kill you because you robbed me of the rights I had from birth!” kind of person.

Still here he is, patting my head.

Weird. Definitely weird.

Wait, doesn’t that means that…

“That is right Jacen. What do we say now?”

“Alvin is younger brother, and I am older brother, so forgive you.”

Yep, that is it.

Filial piety.

The concept that family comes first than meritocracy or personal power.

Even god incarnate must bow his head to his human mother. Isn’t that how the story goes?

On another words, that’s the price for me being allowed to fully display my powers – to recon Jacen as my older brother and, therefore, as someone I must respect even if he becomes weaker than me.

…

That’s not a bad price.

He IS older than the current me and my older brother.

Plus, the deep unconscious mind doesn’t care for things like status gained by having power.

If it’s things like that, unless you have a complex or something, it won’t matter.

You should treat your older siblings as older siblings, even if you are more talented than them.

Why?

Because your mind will go insane if you don’t.

That is how things work. I don’t know why, but that is how they work.

So I just accepted poop-brother’s patting.

I guess… in the end… this was less of a tragedy than I thought it would be.

Silly me and my silly secrets.

Let’s be more honest from now on.

It will spare everyone trouble, including myself. And if something is wrong people can tell me about it and we avoid stuff like the crazy thoughts I had been having before this whole thing.

…the heavy conscience made me thing of some very awful things, which would have been much disgrace.

I even thought of running away or… doing bad stuff to the family, only so I felt less bad about what I did.

Of course, I would probably feel worse.

Sanity is a strange thing indeed. Sometimes it requires for you to ignore your deeper fears and everything that seems logic.

Others it requires for you to ignore the rationalizations and follow your guts.

And there is no indication as to what Is the appropriate course.

There is only trial and error.

So let’s sleep knowing I have won the bet this time.

At least this time…. I didn’t go the other way. At least this time, it seems I did it right.

I’m sorry mother.

I’m sorry siblings.

I’m sorry father.

Not Alice, John, Ann and Jacen.

The other ones.

I’m sorry.

***

Well, that was weird!

But now I’m back in shape!

Let’s start this new day with pride and energy!

It’s a new day, it’s a new place, it’s a brand new world!

And I will learn some amazing things today, I’m sure!

So let’s be happy and take my punishment with goodwill! I deserve it and it’s more of an opportunity to undo my mistakes than something to make me feel bad, not to mention being also a way to teach me something totally new about aura, so it’s wonderful!

Opportunities of redemption are wonderful!

Redemption is wonderful!

…

I take it back.

This is gruesome.

Please father, don’t make me do it again.

Argh.

I just finished eating a small treant and now I have to eat another.

Plus I’m super tired!

Yeah.

This is awful.

***

Let’s go back to the beginning, shall we?

Father took me to the backyard first thing in the morning. It was even before breakfast.

Jacen came as well, but Ann and Mother are preparing the meal for us.

It will be just boiled eggs today.

“Now, first get some soil.”

Father took the tube we use for bathing and I started to shovel some dirt inside of it. He allowed me to stop when half of the tube was full.

“Now, put a lot of water.”

I started pouring water in the tube, stopping only when the dirt stopped absorbing it and a small amount remained there, as if flooded.

The family was eating breakfast at this point, but I wasn’t allowed to eat. For now on I wouldn’t eat until my chores where done. 

That is what father decided. 

Then, after filling half of the tub with dirt, father told me to start pouring aura on it.

I did as ask, but he corrected me on many aspects.

The amount poured had to be smaller, the area covered had to be bigger, this kind of things.

In the end I dumped a meal’s worth of aura in it.

Since I didn’t do night training the night prior, that was extenuating. Father allowed me to eat an egg and do some light exercise.

In the meanwhile, he took some garbage and started to mix it with the dirt.

It was eggshells, pieces of herbs mother wouldn’t use, chicken feathers, chicken poop, fruit remnants like orange skins, bean pods and the such.

Usually those things would be thrown in a far corner of our backyard and let there to rot. This would attract insects, but had the plus side of producing fertilizer mother could use for the garden.

Also, since we have the toilet in the middle of the yard, insects would appear anyway, so it wasn’t make the place more prone to their appearance.

Anyhow, as he mixed those I started to do exercise without expending aura. It took a couple hours until we went back to practice. During this time, father turned the garbage into fertilizer by using magic. It was originally his intention to have me do this, but mother talked him out of it.

Because the next step was to use a magic father didn’t tell me existed until this moment. It was called “toxin magic” and it had the opposite effect of the “detoxify” magic.

Meaning it would increase the number of pathogens and toxins when applied.

“Maybe it’s better to wait a bit more before teaching him this kind of things”.

And like this mother convinced father to do that part himself. He also chanted the mantra very quietly, so I couldn’t hear all of it.

I became worried that father would expend a lot of aura to do that, but from what I can sense the use was minimal – because he only enchanted a very small piece of bean pod, which started to get eroded immediately.

If I think in terms of biology this can be explained with a terrible idea.

If the bacterial growth and decomposition ability has been increased by magic, it would surely lead to a very fast pace of garbage eating.

Basically it’s the same concept as creating bacteria monsters.

No. Probably those were created the moment I infused the soil with my aura. If an earthworm can only teak a week worth of aura, how much can a bacteria possible store?

The idea of superinfections passed through my mind, but then I remembered monster corpses could make rats mutate… then normal bacteria would mutate as well, I wonder?

If this is so, then why are there any living beings in this world at all? Shouldn’t we all be dead already, victim of monster bacterial infection?

The fact there’s people living around me contradicts this line of thought. Maybe the people in this world have a way to deal with monster bacteria? Or maybe bacteria don’t mutate at all?

Then how to explain the fast decomposition happening in the tube right now? Could the magic be needed to “activate” mutation on microscopic beings?

This is a mystery for me in the end. Well, father’s still teaching me, so let’s make some research in the future or something.

“Listen All. When you inject raw aura into something, it will change and you don’t know what will happen. It can just destroy, or explode, or it can become a monster. The more aura you just pour in there, the more dangerous it is, because it can get beyond its natural limit and mutate into something else. So you must never infuse things with your aura directly, okay?”

But then, the soil…

“Pa… what about the dirt?”

“That was an exception since we needed fertilizer. Don’t do it without having me around.”

It’s the same principle of why people don’t try to accumulate aura beyond their body’s limit. If they do it, they can die or mutate into monsters. Except it doesn’t seem to apply to microorganisms.

“The only safe way to put aura on things is to use magic. Then you know what will happen to the thing.”

“Uhm.”

Should I believe this is the same principle by which people can quit being simple humans and become Superior Beings?

If it’s so, then the process may be more complicated than I originally thought. My first impression was that they learned body techniques which allowed them to do that, not that they used magic.

Should I ask father?

…

I have learned something these past days, so let’s ask.

“Pa, is that like how people become Superior Beings?”

“I heard there are many ways to do it son, but I don’t know any. We are not talking about that now, so pay attention.”

“Sorry.”

“The magic I want you to learn is called Crop Growth. It’s long and difficult, so be sure to listen. You will have to cast this from now on, so pay a lot of attention.”

“Yes.”

The mantra was really long.

The healing mantra had only ten words, but this one has over thirty.

Plus, the level of singing needed to sing it is totally different. I would say it is at least three times as difficult.

Luckily I have perfect memory, so I can try.

Then, obviously, I failed.

And what grew from the rice seeds I had planted on the tube wasn’t rice grass, but rater weird deformed bushes with tentacles. It’s only 2cm high, so it isn’t menacing, but it surely is a bit unsettling.

“This is a rice treant. It’s still young, but it can appear when you fail chanting Crop Growth magic.”

I thought as much. That helps explain why people wait the whole year to harvest crops the old way.

After all, Aura damage aside, if growing crops with magic is a thing, then why not use it for everyday foods and eating?

I thought that maybe it was because the aura harvested from the crops growth by magic would be inferior, but if they grow from normal fertilizers in the soil, then it should be around the same amount of our regular food, right?

Right?

“Now, to dispose of monsters we usually burn then. But you need the aura you have expended back, so you will cook it and then eat it.”

Uh.

Uh?!

“But Pa… isn’t that dangerous?”

The tentacles wriggled menacingly. Father shoved his hand on the dirt and took them off.

“Not at all. These are small and rice treants aren’t poisonous. But some other species are, so don’t eat without asking me first. Also, if you ever produce one which is bigger than your hands, don’t come near it. Call me, your mother or your sister instead.”

“Okay.”

“Now, come with me. You can eat them raw if you want, but the taste is very bad. So you should at least cook them a bit before doing it. Like this.”

Father cooked the rice treants and gave me them to eat.

They taste seriously gross. It’s a mixture of the chewiness of hard meat with the taste of grass and poorly cooked, unseasoned rice.

Plus, they seem to have only a very small amount of aura. Around one tenth more than what I used to create them. In fact, this must be the first time I eat some food from this world and feel it as being outrageously low on aura.

But if they have only 10% more aura than what I expended and common exercise gives me only a fraction of the foods aura… doesn’t this mean it’s useless to eat it?

I mean, it expends more energy to create than it gives when eaten.

“Pa… this is too bad… and it doesn’t have any aura…”

“If you do the magic right it should be the same as regular food. But don’t complain. You are the one responsible for the hex rat, so you will be doing that. Your mother doesn’t use much of her aura, but I, Ann and Jacen use it every day for training and work. So try your best to produce normal rice soon, okay?”

“…yes. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t mind that. It was just a mistake. But it was your fault, so work hard to make up for it.”

“…”

“Common All. Will you do it?”

“Yes.”

“Say it louder son.”

“Yes!”

“Good. Now back to practice. I will sing the spell again, and you try to remember it.”

I can remember it already, but this is part of the secrets I don’t want to tell father yet.