"While children can still open their status screens to see their stats and any skills or traits they may have, they are unable to gain EXP or acquire classes until they reach maturity, and there are even many titles and achievements that are unobtainable until they do."

-Excerpt from 'A Primer on The System', by Arwynn Yakob

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As the arrival date quickly approached, the prices for almost everything skyrocketed as everyone prepared for their children, or orphans in the town's case, and when the day finally did arrive, I was with my original group as we all waited to welcome Jackson's sister. While I had no way of telling when she would arrive, apparently Jackson's mom had a countdown similar to the tutorial one that appeared after the system asked her if she wanted to claim her daughter, and we all watched the last few seconds tick down after she shared it with us.

00:00:05 00:00:04 00:00:03 00:00:02 00:00:01

Once the timer hit zero, a small blonde child appeared in front of Jackson's mom, no light or other disturbance to announce her presence, she simply appeared, before being engulfed in a hug at speeds I was pretty sure were superhuman before the System. The rest of us watched on with smiles as the Corday family had their tearful reunion, all of them having a group hug that wasn't released for at least ten minutes. Eventually, they did separate, though they still remained within arms reach of one another, and we started telling her about what had happened when the System took her, all of us showing off our various magical abilities and making her visibly pout. We also learned what she had been doing in the tutorial meant for children, which apparently was pretty much a daycare, all of the children having to attend a class every day about basic functions of the system with other optional classes ranging from magic to cooking, apparently the System's way of letting kids get a head start on obtaining their desired classes as they weren't offered any gems.

Unsurprisingly, the magic classes were by far the most populated according to Heather, which was Jackson's little sisters name, but she also attended some classes for cooking and other survivalist based classes, as she had always been mature for her age and a somewhat pessimistic realist. It seemed that even though those under the age of 16, which was what the system deemed the age of maturity for humans, didn't get an orientation like the rest of us, their two months of what was essentially system school meant that Heather actually knew more about the system and how it worked than the rest of us, likely a trait that would be shared by most of the older kids that were in the children tutorial, as the class was apparently only separated into those under five and those over five.

While Heather hadn't obtained any system skills from any of her lessons, she still knew a few tricks that she shared with us, only after getting us to promise to try and teach her our classes, the most important of which being a series of mana control exercises that could be done to improve our energy control without actually spending any mana, and she showed off a simple spell that lit a candleflame on the tip of her finger, though apparently it cost five mana per second and couldn't be scaled up, being more of a training exercise to learn how spells work as opposed to an actual spell itself, but we were all still very interested in learning it ourselves, and she was more than happy to act as a smug teacher as she ran us through the basics of spellcrafting and casting, Jackson's mom nodding her head a few times as what she said aligned with what she had learned through her own experimentation.

All spells originated from what was called a spellform, which decided the shape and actions of the mana, and while you could technically put any kind of mana into a spellform, different kinds of mana would react differently to the same spellform, as such you would usually need to tweak or outright change spellforms if you used mana of a different attribute for the spell than what it was originally made for. The only spell that Heather was taught in the tutorial was aptly named Candleflame, which only had three segments to its spellform, though apparently she wasn't told what those segments were, and according to Jackson's mom, the two spellforms she was given by her class were at least three times larger and more complex, and it was made to be used with fire attribute mana, but was simple enough to work for any vaguely flame related mana types according whatever taught it to her. Since she had both the spellform and the method to make fire attributed mana, which was just focusing on what we knew about fire and the concept of flames and flexing our will to make our mana take on those concepts and attributes, it wasn't long before we were all attempting to learn the spell, her saying it took her multiple days to learn, as apparently the class had been almost entirely theoretical, and you had to pass a very hard test before the System would teach you any spells.

The rest of the day was spent with everyone trying to learn the candleflame spell, Heather creating the spellform inside of our bodies rather than hers so that we would get a feel for it, though it was an intensely uncomfortable feeling to have someone else's mana inside you and it was difficult to stop yourself from purposefully expelling it, Jackson's mom being the only one to succeed by the time dinner rolled around, which made Heather mutter about the unfairness of higher stats, with most people having varying levels of progress, most people able to convert their mana to be fire attribute with some effort, but failing on the spellform construction, or unable to do both at once. Unfortunately, the downside of my class meant that I was completely unable to make fire attributed mana, as whenever I tried it would collapse into pure mana whenever I was on the verge of succeeding, and I could instinctually tell that somehow my body was simply incapable of creating or storing that type of mana, but I was able to construct the spellform itself, though I was only able to assume that it was correct as no one had the ability to check and neither pure mana nor any of my elements worked with the spellform. Heather's mention of the method of making fire attribute mana did make us ask how Jackson's mom made shadow mana, but apparently it was purely instinctual due to the first skill she got from the system, so she couldn't actually teach us, making Heather pout as she said that the main advantage of specialized mage classes was that very skill, as it meant they only had to focus on making the spellforms rather than splitting their attention to make sure their mana was attributed correctly.

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Even without the ability to cast the spell myself, I was very happy to finally learn for certain how actual spellcasting worked, as neither of my classes actually used spells, though [Bestial Constructor] actually used something similar for its [Construct Beast] skill, in that the shells I made were somewhat similar in concept to spellforms. Since I was unable to make fire mana, I stopped practicing once I made what I thought was the correct spellform and asked Heather for some more specifics of how they worked, and while she didn't understand the intricacies herself, she was able to repeat the lesson she had been given about how spellforms were a combination of a 3d puzzle and coding. Apparently each part of a spellform was a command, and it was a mages job to combine those parts in the correct method to achieve the desired result while also being stable enough to withstand the mana passing through, but unfortunately she hadn't gotten to the point in the class where she learned what the various components that made up the candleflame spell were, and Jackson's mom was even less educated on spellforms so even though she had a mage class she was unable to help in any way. Since I couldn't learn anything from a spell I was unable to cast, I spent a few minutes disappointed that spellcasting was still out of reach until I had an epiphany and facepalmed loudly, drawing everyone's gaze for a few seconds before they returned to practice.

I had completely forgotten about Roxy, and her [Crystal Mage] class, which would have spells that I would definitely be able to use. The only reason that I hadn't asked her about her spells beforehand was because I could already do everything she could with more efficiency, and I didn't know the specifics of the magic system, as the descriptions given by Jackson's mom made it sound like each spell was completely separate, likely due to the fact that the spells given by her class did completely different things, as each mage class was given two spellforms alongside their first skill when they obtained the class, with her getting a shadow spike and a stealth skill while Roxy got a crystal spike and wall. The information about how spellforms worked also shed light on to how Roxy got her third spell, as while I originally thought she got it via SP, it was now far more likely that she just made a new spellform from the parts of her wall and spike spell, meaning that if she was willing I could get not only the spellforms but also have the components identified. Of course, I wasn't expecting to get this information for free just because we were in a hunting group together, but I had managed to save up a relatively large amount of contribution points over this last week or two, and I was more than willing to spend them in exchange for the spellforms and components, and thankfully Roxy didn't seem like the type to refuse to sell the information no matter what.

Since it was already pretty late, I decided to visit Roxy the next day instead, as I knew that she wasn't receiving anybody so I wouldn't intrude on any reunions. With my plans for the next day decided, I joined the rest of the group, who by now had stopped their attempts to cast the candleflame spell, and spent the rest of the night socializing and answering Heathers questions about our various experiences in the tutorial and the month afterwards, sugarcoating our near death experiences somewhat since she was still a kid, and explaining our various classes to her, though she was only really interested in her mom and my classes since they were the only magical ones, the maturity and seriousness she always tried to exude no match for the childlike wonder of actual magic, as she spent most of the night having us talk her through how we did our various things, though she quickly got frustrated and gave up on my elementalist abilities when I said the process was entirely through intent and instinct, all the heavy lifting done by the attunement itself, apparently she hadn't even heard of attunements in any of the classes she had attended. While the others smugly watched as we were both forced to repeatedly cast our skills and answer an unending barrage of questions, most of which were answered with 'I don't know', I was actually happy that there was finally someone else in the group as interested in the intricacies of our abilities as I was, and the questions she asked actually made me think about things that hadn't occurred to me before and gave me ideas for more tests to hopefully answer some of the questions that she asked, as I hadn't even realized just how little I knew about my own abilities until I was interrogated by an interested 13 year old.

Eventually however, the questions came to an end as the shadows started to stretch, everyone returning to their homes for the night, the interaction with someone mostly untouched by the stress and danger of the new world managing to make all of us more relaxed than ever, though I was worried how the town would deal with the sudden influx of people, as even without children unable to meaningfully contribute the town was still only just able to provide for its residents, especially since the amount of food that all the various hunting groups brought back was lessening as all the low levelled animals had either already died or ran away, reducing the number of people that could reliably hunt to only thirty or so, since only those who had two classes would be able to keep up. Thankfully, as our group had Jason, Leo, and I who either already had their second class, or was close to getting it, as capable hunters, our group was in a better position than most others so we faced less risk even if something happened.