After Jacob finished with his breakfast, his mother took him back to their room. She then told him to repeat the lessons she taught him yesterday.

"Revise the words that I taught you yesterday. I am going to listen to the lesson from you after I come back." Hearing that, Jacob nodded at his mother

After saying it, Rosa went out of the room to do her chores. She was the oldest maid present in the manor. So she had to teach the younger maids how to do their work.

She also had to manage the grocery finances. Due to her advanced age, all her usual maid work was taken and her only duties were to teach the new maids and manage the groceries.

Jacob went to a corner of the room and opened a small box. Inside, there was a bunch of dry leaves and a small number of papers interspersed with each other in a barely orderly manner.

All of them had a single thing in common. They were full of small and rough writings, with only a very few of them containing neat, small writings.

This was how his mother had taught him for the past two years. She started by teaching him about things verbally such as their names and how to differentiate between them, such as how to differentiate between a book and a booklet.

After that, she started to teach him how to read and write. She taught him how to write words and read them. She usually prepared neat templates for him to learn and mimic. Sometimes, he had to memorize entire sentences from those templates after his mother taught him those.

He took one from both from the top of the little pile outside of the box and started comparing the paper page containing small neat, writings to the leafy one which contained rough writings. He then started mumbling words like book, table, spoon, bench etc.

Jacob had the unwritten dry leaves and papers tucked in somewhere else in the room. His mother had started teaching him two years ago when he had turned five.

He did not know what was the purpose of that. He already knew all the things by heart. What was there to be accomplished was learning how to write them down and read them. He even had to learn and remember long cryptic sentences by heart.

He also mentioned this to his friends but he found out that a few of his friends were also learning how to read and write. But they had no idea about the long cryptic lessons that his mother taught.

This pacified him a bit and he mentally smacked his head for not trusting his mother. His mother had always said that it was for his good.

Once he asked his mother why he had to collect dry leaves while the paper was present. Her mother had told him that paper was a rare commodity in their areas. So she was only able to procure that much amount of paper from the clan.

He kept revising his precious lesson for a couple of hours with short breaks in between. He went out of the room after making sure that he remembered correctly.

He then visited many places in the manor with his friends in tow. This included the kitchen, the carpentry, the stitching house, the washing house, the smithy etc. Their purpose was to learn things from those places.

In the kitchen house, they observed the cooks milling about preparing for the launch. They tried to learn as much as possible through what they could observe. They did the same with the next places they visited in the next few hours or so.

The children of the servants started learning those little chores at an early age. So it was not an unusual sight watching little children moving around in the manor in small groups.

All the adults treated them with kindness and compassion. Nobody dared to be rude to them due to Rokas. He had strictly forbidden everyone from acting superior and treating the servants as some inferior breed.

This was one of the reasons why all the servants were happy with him and were willing to lay down his life for them.

Many poor people in Worlen wanted to apply for being a servant in the Rokas clan. But there was not enough space and need for all of them. The children of the current servants filled most of the new vacancies. Long lines were used to form outside of the manor gates whenever new seats were available.

Jacob had one lesson from his mother deeply engraved in his mind. "Never waste time. Rest when necessary. But never waste time. Time is precious. Unless you become an immortal cultivator."

Jacob became very curious about the new term "immortal cultivators". He then asked his mother about them as usual.

He was a curious boy. So whenever he heard a new term, he used to ask his mother. Her mother replied with some words that were very memorable for him.

He was sure that he would never forget them even if he never repeated them in his heart ever again. This was how much impressed by them. Those few words would shape his future.

"Cultivators are those beings who cultivate Qi in their bodies. They are very strong and can fly like birds. They live to become stronger. They fight to defend those who are close to them. They fight to defend us. Some even become immortal if they are strong enough."

By the time Rosa ended her mini-lesson, Jacob had stars in his eyes. He suddenly had a new wish. He also wanted to be strong and then fly like birds. He also wanted to protect his old mother.

"Mama, I also want to be a cultivator and fly. Can I become a cultivator?" Jacob asked his mother with innocent voice and puppy eyes.

Rosa chucked at her son's antics and replied with a soft voice, "Of course, you can also become a cultivator. You will have my full support."

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"How can I become one? Can I start cultivating now?" After getting confirmation from his mother, Jacob's face brightened. A wide smile came on his face as he immediately asked for the method to become a cultivator.

"You can become a cultivator by working hard. But you have to wait for a few years before starting cultivation. You have to become an adult first." Rosa patiently explained to her son.

Jacob made this one of his goals. He thought that flying in the skies should be very exciting and fun.

He would also talk about this goal with his friends tomorrow.

After lunch, he slept for a couple of hours as rest to prepare for what was to come in the evening.

After he woke up and met his couple of friends, he played with them for a few minutes. After having some fun, he along with his friends in tow headed toward a small training field in front of the guard's quarters.

When he reached there, he saw a few lines formed in front of a man wearing a guard's outfit. The lines were formed by the children.

The columns were formed by children of the same age. For example, the children of age seven stood in one column while the children of age eight stood in a different column. There was no intermingling. Only boys were present in the entire field.

The lengths of the columns were varied. Some columns were very short and some very long.

The line Jacob joined had three children standing there.

One of the friends accompanying him stood behind him and another separated to join the line containing children who were eight years old.

After Jacob stood there, he observed the man standing in front of the lines. The man was tanned and had a small scar on his left cheek. He was not very tall but had well-built muscles which could still be observed even though he was in a guard uniform.

It was not that the uniform was transparent and they could see through it. It was just that the bulges of his arms were about to tear the uniform if even flexed slightly according to Jacob's impression.

He was the clan's guard captain and their instructor that day. His name was Aadan. He was making a serious face and standing there like a rigid statue.

Captain Aadan himself did not become their instructor most of the time. It was the other normal guards that trained them. But whenever he acted as one, the children had to suffer from worse body aches at night than usual.

Jacob knew that he was waiting for the right time. It was ordered from him that every child in the manor had to gather in front of the guard's quarters right before 5'o clock in the evening.

Whoever came late or did not come at all would suffer severe punishment. Even the clansmen's children were not spared from it.

There were still ten minutes remaining. Jacob was an early bird. He was always there before time. He would rather be early than late.

They stood there waiting for the time and children kept arriving one after another. There was no discrimination between the servants and clansmen.

Discrimination was not allowed there.

When the time was up, Aadan started moving towards the right from the place he was standing and shouted,

"That's it, kids. The time is up. And all of you are here. I dare you to be late or absent and you will see what I do with you. Alright. Lines from eleven to fifteen, start doing the usual exercise. After that start sparing with each other."

Aadan kept shouting and fired a few sentences in a span of a few seconds. He also kept walking while addressing the children. As he reaches the rightmost line, he took a U-turn and started walking towards the leftmost line.

"As for the remaining children. Do some light running first. I want three laps of this little field from you little twerps. Now run."

As if on cue, five right-most lines separated and went to the middle of the training field. They then started doing various exercises such as push-ups, squats, planks etc. While the rest of the lines consisting of younger children started running on the track in an orderly manner.

As Jacob ran with the rest of the children, he was thinking about the words of the instructor. He has seen some of the late cases in his past two years of training.

The punishment given to them was not that horrible visually, instead, he found them funny. They just had to stand and make some weird poses as instructed by the respective instructor responsible for their training on those days. They had to keep making those weird poses until they fall due to exhaustion.

He also remembered one such day more clearly than others because the kid being punished had to make a ridiculous pose of apologizing to the sun by holding his hands together first and then raising them above his head. He also had to raise his left leg and tilt his upper body to the right.

Falling due to exhaustion was very terrible in itself but those aches and pains due to exhaustion went away quickly just a few minutes. What was terrible was what happened to the punished when they lay down at night for sleep.

On the nights of those days when they had suffered from those weird punishments, whenever they lay to sleep, an intense bone-piercing pain used to erupt throughout their whole bodies.

The pain started from their bones and spread to the whole body except the head. They wailed and cried due to pain the whole night and could not sleep at all for even a second.

When Jacob heard this from his friends, he doubted their claims. But his curious nature bared his head. Soon after that, he started a little investigation of the bus own.

He quickly found the servant kids who had been punished before and they all repeated the same things as his friends did. In fact, the details they gave him were much more detailed than what his friends had told him before. That proved that his friends were right.

He found this thing very disturbing to his innocent mind. (Isn't it too horrible? How could they do this to us?) These were his thoughts as he returned to his room. He remained restless the entire day.

Later that day, he could not hold back and finally asked his mother about this as soon as she entered the room. She simply smiled at her son and replied,

"Such punishment is lashed out for maintaining discipline. Moreover, it is also useful for their future. They have nothing to lose but some tears and snot at night." On a further query from his mother about the usefulness she was talking about, his mother did not reply.

He again searched for those punished kids the next day and found them. He asked them whether they felt something good after the punishment.

They looked at him like he was a fool and did not bother replying to him. Jacob's face flushed red with embarrassment and he ran back to his room. He didn't want to see them in the next few days at all.

He decided to never ask questions in a silly way in the future. It was too much of an embarrassment being labelled as an idiot by the people just because he asked about something in the wrong way.

Jacob trusted his mother. So he was also tempted when he thought of the usefulness of those weird poses.

But there was a problem. He had heard of some rumours related to them from his friends.

According to his friends, evil spirits used to come to those punished kids at night to occupy their bodies and cause intense pain. He scoffed at such ridiculous rumours at first.

But after thinking for a few minutes, he started having doubts about the veracity of his conclusion about them. Otherwise, how could he explain the intense pain during the night?

At the prospect of intense pain and wandering evil spirits in his room, a chill ran down his spine and he stopped himself from acting recklessly.

He decided to ask his mother about this matter. He knew that his mother was much more knowledgeable than him and must had known about such rumours.

After he asked the question, his mother looked at him with a worried expression. She instantly forbade him from trying those weird poses without any explanation.

Jacob found it a bit contradictory. He especially remembered how she told him about their usefulness. But now, she was forbidding him from trying them. He found it a bit strange but decided to forget about trying those strange poses. He trusted his mother.