My name is Borus. It was just a normal day, I got up, had breakfast, and went to school. That was until not 1, not 2, but 4 different 18-wheelers ran me over. It was like if a bunch of your friends decided to troll you in Grand theft vehicle X, one hit me into another that ran me over, a third one flipped over while swerving and collapsed on me when the fourth hit that one off me trying to break and that one also hit me.
It wasn’t even a highway! City streets can get cramped but that was just excessive. So I am surprised when I find myself awake, albeit damp and my body feels very…. small. My eyes also hurt so they are tearing up quite a bit. I can feel someone holding on to me, and people are congratulating this person called Dahlia for being a new mother.
Well, all my nihilistic thoughts on death being nothingness panned out wrong, but I can’t exactly say I am disappointed as being alive is much better that not. Life still has no grand purpose, but that doesn’t mean your meaningless existence can’t be fun.
Being held as a baby is strange, people are just much larger than I’ve been used too for a long time. I can’t tell from their conversations if this is still earth or not, I can understand the language but it is best not to assume anything, for all I know reincarnation is common here.
People are introducing the mother and father to the baby as people tend to do, only this time the baby is actually paying attention. My father is named Frederick and apparently works as a farmer, I do not look forward to the manual labor that a child has to go through on a farm, but there is unfortunately a near 0 chance to escape that fate.
I still can’t open my eyes to see yet so I can’t tell much. I am practicing making sounds with my vocal chords but avoiding words as a talented baby might be seen as a monstrous or bad thing in a closed off community where anything different or strange is inherently witchcraft and therefore evil.
It takes several months in a crib before I can move about a little, the few tools I’ve seen are exceptionally low quality and the crib looks handmade, the night sky has no familiar constellations, and one other thing sticks out to make me think this is another world. Everyone is blue, I am blue, we ae all some nonhuman species here.
My father is a serf who works on the farm in a village that pays tribute to a nearby town where the local baron lives. I have 2 brothers and 2 sisters who help with the farm work, and it is clear that I will be expected to as well. The lack of books also suggest that education will be very difficult. Humans have also never been mentioned in the stories they tell me.
5 years of farmer life pass with me going along with farming space plants and raising space animals on the space farm. The sky is orange, the ground is a lighter shade of blue than the people, but nothing is extremely different. The plants still have similar leaves and stems as earth ones, the animals are a bit weird but nothing too bizarre, and the people look very humanoid except for the blue color. The people here refer to themselves as the raltors, but I will just refer to them as people.
Over the past 5 years I have learned that these people have already discovered the earth is round despite relatively medieval technologies, and that the local legends describe powerful warriors capable of leaping over mountains and crushing boulders, but whether these are genuine or exaggerated is yet to be determined.
Or that was the case until I met Norfy. You see Norfy is another kid in the village who is 7 years old at the moment, and he can leap over houses. He is boasting about how he will become the world’s strongest warrior so that he can be the best king ever. You see, the feudal system here has a warrior mentality where the strongest in one on one combat is the ruler, and any nobility can be challenged to a duel where losing the dual means losing your position in the government. I personally see this as a terrible method of governance as a good warrior is not always a good strategist, and you need the strategists to plan while the warriors battle, but the government could be so much worse so I won’t complain too much.
Norfy has an odd position in the village, he is an adopted son of the village chief and doesn’t have any work that he has to do, instead he chooses to exercise like crazy climbing the nearby mountain, swimming up rivers, ect. This world may lack magic and systems, but if you can be a super soldier by exercising it gives me something besides farming to do. So after helping out with the farm work each day I begin to stretch and then do some extra exercise before I collapse, wait a few minutes, and then exercise until I collapse again. I also approach Norfy to talk some, but he is busy exercising and says he will talk with me if I can keep up, which I clearly can’t, and after he is tired from the end of his routine he rests in the village chiefs house where you cannot enter without a good reason.
After exercising for 5 months, I begin to tie rocks using ropes to myself while doing the farm work as doing it regularly doesn’t even tire me anymore, and I can already work harder than some of my teenage siblings, and I can leap over houses too now, but am still extremely behind Norfy. I have however made a discovery. There is this strange energy in my body now that seems to flow with my movements, I cannot manifest it outside my body or even move it much, but I can feel it move to assist my own movements. This energy clearly wasn’t there when I checked for magic when I was born, and there isn’t a lot of it but it is there.
I spend a long time testing out how it flows naturally when I move, and what happens when I try to disrupt the flow. Disrupting the flow makes the direction of my body’s motion change slightly, and reversing the flow completely makes moving more difficult. I can also push the energy in the direction it was already flowing for a small burst of speed, but doing all of these is tiring. I can tire myself out 8/3 times faster when reversing the flow while exercising than I would normally, and meditating and focusing on the places the energy comes from actually decreases the time it takes for me to recover after I am tired. The speed of my training rises dramatically after this discovery.
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As I am exercising one day, I notice one of the village girls hiding up in a tree on my parent’s farm.
“Hi there, what are you doing up there?” (Borus)
“I am climbing a tree, I don’t care if you think it is unladylike because you can’t stop me!” (Village girl)
“I never said it was unladylike and I didn’t say I wanted you to stop, all I asked was what you were doing since you are on my parent’s property and are super suspicious” (Borus)
“I am not suspicious!” (Village girl)
She actually looks offended that I would consider her suspicious, so I obviously decide to tease her more.
“Ah, so hiding in the trees on another person’s property isn’t suspicious behavior? I suppose I should just climb on top of your house sometime and dance on your roof if that is the case, when your parents ask why I am doing it I will tell them you said it was okay” (Borus)
“NO! Please don’t, I’ll climb down just absolutely DO. NOT. under any circumstances ever tell my parents about this” (Village girl)
She climbs down from the tree and it turns out she was the baker’s daughter…… who’s name I never bothered remembering.
“There, are you happy now that you ruined my fun?” (Baker’s daughter)
“I never told you to climb down, I just said it was suspicious and you just jumped to that conclusion just like you assumed I found climbing trees to be unladylike and was here to stop you” (Borus)
She takes a few seconds to think about it, and the face she makes when she realizes I am right is hilarious.
“But then why did you say I was suspicious!” (Baker’s daughter)
“Because you were suspicious, I just didn’t care whether you stopped or not and wanted to know why you did it in the first place” (Borus)
“And why do you care why I was doing it?” (Baker’s daughter)
“Cause I was curious, and besides do you always need a reason for wanting to do things?” (Borus)
She finally seems to calm down a bit, although it was amusing when she was constantly flustered.
“I climbed your tree to hide from my family for a bit” (Baker’s daughter)
Abuse, neglect, all sorts of terrible scenarios go through my head, but I ask first in case it is something petty.
“And why are you avoiding your family?” (Borus)
“Because they keep talking about how I should be more proper, how I should walk more elegantly, and how I should try to be more appealing so that a rich man will want to take care of me….. I tell them that I just want to take care of myself and then my mother scolds me about how women can’t do that, even after I beat up some of the neighborhood kids to prove that I could she just went on about how unladylike that was and didn’t believe I could handle myself” (Baker’s daughter)
“For what its worth….. women can take care of themselves, but children can’t. One day you will be able to forge your own path, but for now you have to go along with what your parents want. It isn’t that you are wrong, but that now is not the time to be right. Learn what they want you to learn and do what they want you to do until you can prove that you are right, not just by beating up some people, but by getting a steady income from working odd jobs and truly supporting yourself” (Borus)
Aaaanndd she is crying. Based on the sobbing thank yous it doesn’t seem like I did too bad, but there is still clearly a heavy emotional burden she is dealing with. She heads back home once she is done sobbing and has cleaned herself up some, and I finish up my routine.
8 more months of training pass, I learned that the baker’s daughter is named Betty, and she occasionally sneaks off to train with me. Her parents still want her to be a quiet pretty trophy, but it seems to do her some good to complain about it with me while we train. I was able to teach her how to notice the strange energy 2 months in, and she has also begun to get stronger at a much more rapid pace after implementing it in her training.
We also spar occasionally, but I have to hold back a lot both because I have a large head start in strength, and because we can’t leave any bruises behind or her parents will become much more vigilant. This means that we usually spar by grappling each other or by using touch rule where the first to touch the other one without being countered or blocked wins.
I can detect this energy far easier now, I used to have to focus extremely hard to find it in myself, but can now sense it easily within not only myself, but others as well. I can see it in the other people and even plants in trace amounts I could never detect before, and I can even detect this energy in Norfy in huge amounts. I am not surprised that Norfy has over 3 times this amount of energy than me, what does surprise me is that he doesn’t use it while training. The energy moves with his body during training quite naturally, but he doesn’t ever use a burst of speed or even change the flow, and when he is tired from lifting boulders up and down the mountain he still hasn’t used up all of his energy by the time his body tires. Despite all the flaws in his training regimen, I only barely surpass him in the rate of increasing my strength, if I try mimicking his exact way of training my rate of growth is far slower than doing it with energy, so my method isn’t wrong.
I decide to try approaching Norfy once again, he once again tells me that he will only talk with me if I can keep up. So I do. Norfy has far more energy than me, but he can’t utilize it properly. By using bursts of speed over and over again I can not only keep up, but even pass him while carrying boulders up and down the mountain. Now I see a competitive glint in his eyes, he strains his muscles and I can see that the energy is flowing slightly faster, but it is doing so the natural way which is less efficient than controlled bursts so I can still keep pace. I can’t keep the lead anymore though as even with better control, the disparity in brute strength is too large for me to out match.
We keep this up for a few hours, I run out of energy first and slow down as without it my body can’t keep up, and after a few minutes Norfy’s body collapses. The boulder is still on his back when he collapses, I rush over to push it off him but he seems to be fine, there are no bruises and he is breathing but he managed to fall asleep with a boulder on his back. I carry him back to the village chiefs house and plan to have a chat with him tomorrow.