[Year 8049, Spivuss 41st.]

The words, numbers and an elaborate carving of the sun rising over Skyisle valley signified the year, season and date on the wooden dial-calendar hanging on the wall of our living room.

The clockwork mechanism in front of me was exceptionally curious. Today my mom was describing its functions to me.

“The Ishikarian calendar consists of six seasons,” Mom held me as she turned the dial on dad’s wooden calendar counter-clockwise and hundreds of gears inside it softly rumbled, moving the stars, the moon and the sun above the carving of Skyisle. “The six months relate to various times of day. Each new year starts with Dawn [Ecaminuss]. There are approximately fifty days in each month.”

Being educated about things was nice. I made appropriate appreciation noises.

Destiny/Delta wasn't with us. For some reason mom chose me over spending time with her daughter. She fed her, sure, but she was extremely cold to her, didn't really talk to her about magic like she did to me.

Maybe it was because of how silent and distracted my sister was, or how she constantly stared past us into some distant elsewhere. Maybe some other reason was at play. Regardless, I was mom's favorite and she carried me all around the house telling me about various things, while dad was assigned to be the one to hang out with Destiny and to change her diapers and dress her.

Mom spun the dial forward, Ishikarian hex-numbers and letters changing from one to another.

“Dad carved this calendar himself two years ago for me,” she commented. “His woodworking magical signature is imprinted onto it. Let me show you the seasons!"

I nodded eagerly, reaching out to the wooden calendar with an Infoscope thread extending from my chubby, small arm.

She spun the wooden dial faster. A carving of the sun painted gold revealed itself. “Foreday [Spivuss]. This is the current season. Early spring. Time for planting.”

I nodded. Mom turned the dial forward. The wooden sun rose higher over the carving of a field.

“Noon [Temminus]. Summer. Hot and sunny weather.”

The gears clicked forward. “Sunset [Eaminnus]- Autumn, mild and windy.” A carving of a tree bending in the wind emerged out of the ground.

She spun the dial.

“Twilight [Ottamuss]. Winter weather, frost and first snow.” The wooden display window now showed a snow-covered village.

“Midnight [Ximinnus]. Darkest & deepest winter, lit mostly by the glow of Lunaria and Inaria.” The wooden sun vanished and Lunaria covered in golden rings came up and then Inaria emerged with its giant, silver rings.

The mechanism inside this calendar was very interesting from what the Infoscope showed me. The gearwork beneath the panels was made of various magic-reinforced wood. It was incredibly precise and reminded me of the Antikythera mechanism.

As mom described what she did in the field each season, I smiled, recalling how I had read about the Ancient Greek hand-powered orrery in a Soviet magazine of scientific discoveries. The Antikythera mechanism was fascinating because it was the oldest known, 2000-year-old, mechanical computer used for predicting the orbits of the moon and planets.

The people of Ishikaria clearly understand gears well enough to make analogue clockwork, just like ancient Greeks from Earth. I just need to push them in the right direction, to guide them away from skill sacrifices. I knew that it would not be easy - millennia of religious indoctrination would be hard for a single individual to oppose, but I was willing to try anyway.

But first, I had to make myself unnoticeable, invisible to LV scanners just like my sister somehow did.

. . .

I figured out exactly why my Infoscope was no longer crashing inside of my parents house - dad tied me into the house Ward System. Therefore, all magic cast by me inside of the house was no longer considered hostile.

Thus, I spent months flying the Infoscope around the house and its Ward, figuring out how everything functioned.

Also, it took a lot of brain-racking, but I eventually figured out how Delta made her outer layers Level 0.

I had sliced our souls apart with Sectus when we were already merged within the human blastocyst phylactery. This meant that some small part of my soul including the skills of Kopusha and Leemy had carried over into Delta.

She wasn't very responsive to me because she was using the [Chrysalis] skill to change and adapt her body, to become undetectable.

Whatever Delta was, she likely didn't have my Infoscope, nor any desire to communicate with me. Her mind was asleep, her body set to automatic mode as she gradually evolved like a dryad, except that she was a somewhat damaged human soul within a body of a newborn child. I wasn't sure what she would evolve into or why, since I had no way to communicate with her.

There was only one option here, to wait until her Chrysalis ended, until she woke up.

. . .

Months flew by.

I kept myself occupied by wiggling my arms and legs as much as I could to get fitter. Scanning my soul with the Infoscope I determined that the System worked thus - it modified the soul first and then the soul gradually modified the body. Investing points into strength strengthened the threads of my soul and then those threads were able to incrementally reinforce my muscles.

My father was an example of a dexterity and strength build. I observed him hefting massive logs on his shoulders, cutting trees in the garden and working in his workshop with a variety of tools.

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He was ridiculously strong, far stronger than the fittest Soviet weightlifter Vasily Alekseyev. Vasili set 80 world records and 81 Soviet records in weightlifting and won Olympic gold medals at the 1972 and 1976 games. If Georgi Alan Skyisle was somehow magically transported to 1970's USSR I'm certain that he would outdo Vasily at least 3-5 times in weightlifting championship. Magic was incredible because it allowed the body to evolve beyond mere human capabilities.

High Strength allowed my father to work nearly all day lifting logs without tiring. High dexterity allowed him to carve incredible detail into the wood, gave him the ability to create incredibly precise, minute wooden gears for the calendar-clock.

Because of magic, a single Skyisle craftsman could build a house all by himself. Magic permitted a small village population of 1500 people to be fully self-sufficient as agromancers like my mother made the vegetable and fruit fields produce five times more yield than on Earth.

Novazem would be a utopia if only kind, productive people could level up. Unfortunately, magic also produced all sorts of quirky, hostile creatures like Wood Snails, Fire Ants, Blood Elks and even Dragons which constantly harassed Skyisle and gradually dismantled what the locals built.

Using my Infoscope, I thoroughly examined the nearest blackened patch of forest decimated by Aradria.

Dragon-fire did something to the land it touched, changed it biochemically. Natural forest fires caused by lightning strikes commonly occurred in Skyisle and nature rebounded back pretty quickly, but nothing at all grew in the dead zone produced by dragonfire. It was as if the land touched by the flames of the LV 209 dragon was somehow cursed, irradiated beyond use, made permanently barren. Perhaps a LV 209 agromancer could have repaired the dead forest, but everyone here was capped at 20.

Eventually, I discovered minute crystalline structures within the black ash-covered landscape. The Infoscope identified them as

[ Blighted Ash ]

According to my calculations, Blighted Ash radiated [death] to everything organic in the vicinity of about 1 meters from itself.

I wondered if I could somehow produce crystalline structures that radiated life and then I considered Agromancy. Agromancy literally produced life. The cracked crystal wand hanging on the wall of our living room contained a prismatic gem within it. The mana of a green mage likely passed through this gemstone producing an effect opposite of dragonfire.

My thoughts drifted back to a novel I had read as a child, "The Fatal Eggs" by Mikhail Bulgakov. Written in 1924, the story focused on a Soviet scientist who stumbled upon a "ray of life", an enigmatic force that caused all living things to grow a hundred times more powerful. And now, here I was, face-to-face with an actual, tangible manifestation of a similarly amazing energy that defied entropy and death itself!

I was fairly certain that midwife Tamara, the local healer, had tools in her bag that could produce a human-targeting "ray of life", something that repaired and healed wounds.

I used NeuroVista to rewind my memory to the point when Tamara restarted my heart and slowly reviewed the hexagrams she struck my body with. Unfortunately I was half-dead at the moment, so the memory was imperfect, corrupted. I very badly wanted to spy on Tamara's work to replicate her magic, but alas, my Infoscope turned off as soon as I tried to push it inside her cottage.

. . .

Thanks to observing Delta, I knew that Chrysalis could make my skin level 0, but I refused to lose my sense of self to it and become a nearly unresponsive, plant-like child.

Thus, I focused my research on creating a spell that would confuse incoming [Identify] spells.

The problem was that if I was knocked out or didn't expect it, then my future enemies could still Identify me. Thankfully, I found an empty LV 20 crystal battery in my father's workshop, buried deep in a shelf underneath a pile of other misc junk.

Using [Info-tether] I began to push my mana into the battery. It was a difficult process and my mana refreshed insanely slowly and transferred poorly over the long-distance tether, so it took me weeks to fill the battery up. When it was full, I carefully stilled my soul with [Tamus-Anima], sliced a tiny shard of my soul off myself and attached it to the crystalline battery using [Conjugo-Anima] via the [Info-Tether].

My soul stat now showed up as:

Soul 6 [-1]

I felt the shard of my soul within the crystal battery, as if it was part of me and also wasn't. This was likely how Alanians made their magitec artifacts.

I named my first Anima-Artifact "Battie". It was mainly because in Russian language the word "battery" was automatically assigned a female gender.

When I did, Battie showed up in my Stats as:

Phylactery LV 0: [Battie] [Crystal Battery] [20/20 mana]

As long as I had an [Info-Tether] connected to the little soul-shard in the Astral, I could draw extra mana from Battie.

However, my purpose wasn't merely to create myself a Phylactery/battery, so I spent another 4 months designing a [level concealment] fractal made up of heavily modified [No-Spy] spellwork.

It took me far too much time to attach the spell I made to Battie via the tether and the Infoscope.

Eventually, I was rewarded with a sight of:

Phylactery [Level Concealment] LV 1 [Battie] [Crystal Battery] [20/20 mana]

Firing the basic Soul-Song [Identify] at Battie showed it as [LV 0].

Great success! Now I just needed to make the [Level Concealment] into an active defense mechanism that would conceal MY level and not Battie's.

. . .

At nine months old I learned how to crawl just to get to Battie as I became worried that father would empty out the shelf she was in and throw her out or damage her accidentally.

My parents were very impressed and clapped as I crawled across the living room from the crib to the fireplace and back.

As I attempted to stand, my baby body struggled to support the weight of my disproportionately large head. My chubby limbs quivered beneath me, threatening to give way at any moment. Frustration welled up inside me as I watched my parents' encouraging smiles, their eyes filled with pride. They believed in me, in my ability to conquer this simple task. But in that moment, all I could feel was the overwhelming weight of my own limitations.

With focus, I pushed through the physical discomfort, the strain of my muscles, and managed to steady myself on jelly-like baby legs. A triumphant smile spread across my face as I stood for the first time, celebrating a tiny victory in the face of great adversity of walking as a toddler.

Mother leaned down to me and grabbed my tiny hands, aiding me in walking forward.

Destiny stared past us from the crib. She had no desire to move whatsoever. I winked at her as I traversed towards the fireplace.

. . .

In the darkest hour of night I escaped from the crib, walking across the quiet house. Using a rope with a rock tied to it I grabbed the handle and unlocked the door to my father's workshop. Then using a chair I reached the shelf with Battie. The entire operation took me nearly two hours because I was so damn small and everything was so large, heavy and out of reach.

Rays of gold light from Lunaria and silver from Inaria colored the house in dancing shadows.

Clutching Battie in my arms, I returned to the crib approximately at 3 in the morning.

Delta's large, blue eyes stared past me as I climbed over the wooden ledge and collapsed back into the crib panting from the exhaustion. Yes, she sometimes slept with her eyes open. It was very unnerving and annoyed me to no end.

"Well, that takes care of that," I muttered in Russian, ignoring my catatonic twin and wiping sweat from my brow as I admired the glittering reflections of moonlight on the large mana crystal in my chubby hands.

"Where have you been, brother?" Delta suddenly asked in Russian, her voice clear and cold like a glacier brook.

I froze like a rabbit that was suddenly spotted by a large, dangerous python.

Delta was finally awake.