Three years had passed since her rebirth. Being a newborn had been extremely hard on her. She wasn’t able to take any actions, and had a lot of trouble not going crazy. Luckily she had her father, no matter how exceptional she acted in front of him, he would not find it suspicious. Actually the more exceptional she was the prouder it made him for having the greatest daughter of them all. But in front of her mother she did not dare show that she was any different from a normal child. She was extremely caring but always started worrying that something was wrong with her child that was not acting like one and even less the way a young girl should act.

The first thing she had done was to learn the language that had taken up most of her first six months. The rest of the time she had spent training her body to get stronger.

Her father was a scholar, as such he was the one who spent the most time with Zona since he noticed her high intelligence and that she already understood everything going on. He of course told his wife, but she would not believe him, and thought he was just making up excuses to spend more time with his beloved daughter.

Zona sometimes felt, that her mother was jealous of the relationship between them. But at the same time she seemed happy that she did not have to take care of her child alone like most women did.

When she was two year of age, her father had started to teach her reading and writing. She had an extremely hard time to learn, that was of course in her own standards, compared to other children she could not even be considered a genius but was more like the god of geniuses. Of course to her father it just seemed natural.

The reason why she had such trouble was because the writing system of this world just did not make sense, there was no fixed orthography and tons of letters that were unnecessary. So she pushed her father to make up a new more practical system. Under her guidance, with the knowledge she had from her past life, he made up a system that was extremely efficient with clear and simple rules.

Originally there had been a total of 157 letters not counting the large amount of different punctuation symbols and the thousands of variations used by different authors. Since the language contained a lot of different sounds, they ended up with 56 letters. Which was still a lot, when she thought about the alphabet of her past life. Then they started to formulate a clear orthography.

When they had finally finished, her father felt that if this new system spread it would be one of his biggest achievements in life, but he did not believe that the other scholars would accept such an innovation and refuse it completely especially in the capital. If he had known what plans his daughter had in stock for him, he would probably have gone crazy.

After having finished making up the new system, her father had started copying it down to send it to his friends. Seeing this she had shaken her head, apparently the press had not been, invented yet. Her father looked quite passionate when copying it down but, after making a few copies he would need to make a pause. As she had been watching him, she had been scheming on how she could make him invent the press…

The invention of the press would be absolutely necessary for her future plans. She would need to reproduce a massive amount of writings in the future to support her plans of revolution. That was not the only thing she would also have to spread literacy amongst the normal people.

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She had been able to find out of things through that father of hers, and also by sneakily looking at the letters he would get from his friends and fellow scholars.

The world she was in was extremely backwards, it almost did not have any form of technology! People still had to go fetch water by hand from a well or from the river. Even thought they were living in bad conditions, she could only thank her stars for her luck since her father was a scholar.

Most people in this era had to work for nobles, that would mistreat them. A normal person could not even open a business. If they were not serfs, they would still have to find a noble they could serve under even thought they were not bound to one noble there was no other way to make money.

There were two exceptions traders and the travelling folk would make up one group of people that did not serve, the other were scholars. Her father did not like to work much for nobles, so he had gone to a place far away from the capital and had opened a small shop that would accept any requests that would require somebody that could write. As he was the only scholar in the city and its surroundings that would accept work from almost anyone, and he was barely able to come by.

The other thing she had found out was that they were living in a huge empire that had existed for, what they said, a thousand years. The long-lasting success to the empire had been attributed to an old tradition. Even though most things were male dominated, there was no emperor but empress. The empress of each generation was not allowed to have any male children, any male descendent would be killed right at birth. This had ensured that no ruler that was unfair had ever come into power or so the legend went. But this had changed with the current empress.

The current empress Virela the first was extremely belligerent and short tempered. She had started of her reign in an extremely bloody fashion executing all her sisters and everyone affiliated to them. Then she had gone on to declare war to a smaller weaker neighbouring country. Letting any form of resistance be executed.

Her actions had made most of her subjects extremely scared and those nobles and scholars, like her father, who had the possibility to leave the capital had done so as quietly as possible, seeking refuge in far away provinces.

Her father had gone to the city of Baylim, that was situated at the foot of the Yales mountain range in between two rivers that had their source in it. It was a peaceful place far from all the mess in the capital. It was renowned for its smithing and woodworkers and had a fair amount of merchants coming to it.

After having found out about this, she was able to formulate her first plans. That had begun with her fathers reform of writing. Continuing with the invention of the press. So one day as he was copying down things again, she asked him innocently “Father, why do you keep copying down the same thing over and over?”

Her father looked at her chuckling “My dear daughter, how else would I be able to send this to my friends?”

“Can’t you just stamp it, like the seal you put under documents?” she replied.

“Wouldn’t it take even longer stamping the letters instead of writing them.” he said laughing.

“Dummy” she replied, “you just have to stick the stamps together to make a big stamp like this” She expanded her arms trying to look as innocent as possible.

Her father was dumbfounded, completely oblivious to how abnormal his daughter was, as he thought about what his daughter had said. ‘How did not realise that this was possible? Or anyone in the whole world? As expect of my daughter.’, this overly filial father thought.

The next day he started experimenting, with making such a big composite stamp, and under the questions and careful guidance of his daughter, he finally managed to make a working small scale press. Of course printing as such was not something new in this world but no one had ever thought of movable type printing yet. And would this would change the course of history and make the name of Zonas father Urdic Martelson resound through the lands.

Of course Zona could not leave it at that, through questioning how her fathers press worked she would further improve over the following years.