Tom stared upwards. He was drifting in and out of sleep. There was a comfortable silence, and warm blankets were covering him. His vision resolved itself into a ceiling he recognised - one he had spent most mornings of his first twenty years staring up at. It was perfect right down to the very distinctive peeling paint patch off to the side.

He was back in his old bedroom, but why?

Everything that took place over the last few hours felt hazy.

There was a shape to the side. He tilted his head to look at her, and the effort caused pain that vibrated through his head. He saw enough to confirm that April was sitting with him.

“What happened?” he asked her.

“Skill exhaustion.” She told him.

He stared blankly at her. That statement made sense and yet didn’t. It explained the headache, but he had overstressed Power Strike before, and it didn’t feel anything like this.

“I don’t…”

“Understand? Yeah, I know. It’s a complex field, but the summary is that it hits harder when you’re overusing newly acquired skills.”

His brain recalled the dings… and then - had there been trumpets as well? Tom found he couldn’t remember. Everything was lost in a haze of hunting butterflies, and then the café and the crystals.

“Did you just imply that I have a new skill?”

“Yes. Four, in fact.”

“What?” he tried to sit up, and it was like a frozen pick axe was driven into his forehead. Something like the worse brain freeze ever crossed with a bad migraine struck him. With an involuntary gasp, he collapsed back onto the bed.

“Yeah, don’t move. I’m healing you, but this type of damage is tricky. But yes, you have new skills. Seven acquisitions, in total, but you have lost the tier zero ones when you evolved and merged them into tier one versions.”

Tom lay there, looking up at the familiar roof, as he considered what she had said. Four skills sounded like a lot, especially since he didn’t have access to an easy way to check them.

“Um… is it possible? I mean, can you-” He winced as even talking softly caused the headache to build again.

April smiled.

“Can I show you the skills? Because otherwise you’ll never find them until you turn ten? Is that what you’re stammering about?”

“Yes.” He would have said more, but he worried about another repeat of that headache.

Her face softened in response to his clear distress:

“Since you discovered them during the trial, yes, I can display them for you. I have to say, you’re an overachiever. For the crafting you’ll be doing, you only needed one of these.” She waved her hand, and the four skills appeared conveniently on the ceiling.

“Only one of three were needed?”

She laughed:

“Any apart from the storage ability would have been sufficient. Of course, more means faster crafting, which is better.”

Tom stared at the four skills in wonder. He had created these himself. Yes, the situation had been perfect to facilitate the development, but it was his effort that had got him here.

Skill: Manipulate Precognition Mana – Tier 1

This skill allows the user to manipulate up to sixteen points of precognition attuned mana at once

“There’s a tier zero version of this, which would also have been adequate for our purposes.” April told him. “For crafting, you’re just transferring the energy from one spot to another. But this isn’t that limiting. It’ll let you drain any object up to tier three easily, and give you a chance of limited success on stronger items. It’ll basically enable you to power down wards and objects that rely on precognition energy. I wouldn’t say they’re common, but they do exist, and when they do, they’re the hardest to bring down. This skill will make the effort far easier for you.”

She was finished with her explanation, so he turned his attention to the next skill.

Skill: Store Precognition Mana – Tier 1

With a conscious effort, you can store up to thirty-two points of precognition affinity mana. 2% of stored energy will be lost every minute.

Tom frowned.

“That doesn’t mention cavities?”

“You mean your fingernail trick?”

He started to nod and regretted the attempt instantly:

“Yes.”

“This will only apply to the energy held in your body. If you want to disfigure yourself, you’ll be able to break that mana limit.”

“That’s a pretty good skill, isn’t it?”

She wrinkled her nose in disgust and then shook her head at that.

“No, it’s a bad skill. I don’t see much use for it. Situationally, it can increase the amount of mana you have available.” She did not look like she thought that was a good idea. “Nah, not worth it, and the decay is too great. Hopefully, you can use it as fuel to upgrade one of the other abilities.”

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Tom checked the final two skills.

Skill: Convert Unaspected mana to Precognition Affinity – Tier 1

Can convert 16 points of unaspected mana to precognition aspected mana per minute.

Skill: Create Precognition Attuned Mana – Tier 1

Can create 4 points of precognition aspected mana per minute.

“Despite them all being the same tier, that last is the most powerful of the four.”

The off-hand comment April had made about the storage skill was troubling him.

“Can I really use this mana to cast other spells?”

April looked speculatively at him. “Oh, you’ve picked up on that throwaway comment. Don’t tell me, Tom, is there really more to you than a fanatical battle maniac?”

“Of course I’m more than that. My success in my first life was because of my planning skills.”

Her lips quirked:

“The one you lasted six months in?”

“I…” he started and then ground to a halt as, for a moment, he couldn’t think of a witty retort.

“Like, I don’t want to be that person, but dying that quickly would support my stereotyping.”

“I was ranked number one out of all the humans in Existentia.”

She laughed.

“I don’t think that’s quite the counter you think it is. But to answer your question - if you’re not using your natural mana pool, it adds an extra step to the casting, so it slows things down. Having said that, there’s no reason the mana your skill generated can’t be used in normal spells.” She hesitated. “Of course, using aspected mana is tricky, especially with something as exotic as precognition. It has a potential to cause unexpected outcomes. The classic example is casting an air spell with earth-attuned mana. The resulting spell has terrible efficiency. Some communities think the efficacy is so bad the spells don’t work, but in practice nine hundred and ninety-nine mana out of every thousand is lost.”

“And on my spell lines?”

April frowned:

“You’ll need to test, but it’ll probably weaken earth and living wood. I’m confident it’ll make your other two magic types more powerful, though. Especially lightning. Having the electricity you make predicting where it needs to be will be a massive advantage to guiding it and increasing its damage levels.”

“I can use this for healing and lightning,” Tom reasoned. “That almost triples my mana regeneration levels.”

She laughed:

“It really doesn’t. You can’t use skills constantly, but it’ll definitely give you periods of increased regeneration.”

Tom considered that. Skills, by their nature, were almost always limiting. But if he could get a couple of hours or even a day use out of this new one, it would be more than worthwhile.

“True, but I’ll take any advantage I can get. Besides, that convert is useful too, isn’t it? Anything that gets better by putting the smart in front of it will be stronger with precognition aspected mana. I can probably enhance items just as easily as destroy them.”

“To a limited extent.” She agreed. “You’ll need to experiment.”

“I’m going to…” Tom stopped talking and stared at April in wonder. The implications of what these skills could truly do hit him. It was more than just extra mana. What did precognition mana do to incomplete or poorly crafted spell forms? There was no rulebook for him to consult. But surely some of the mana’s primary purpose would seep through just by using it. Could it help him? What about adding fate to that mix as well? He could almost taste the possibilities.

This foray into crafting had been purely to allow April to buy skill stones under the rules, so she could create training programs for useful abilities like Power Strike. He had expected the crafting process to be a waste of his time. Instead, she had given him this: a way to accelerate his development further. It was cheating, pure and unadulterated cheating.

“Stop looking at me like that. I know I’m gorgeous and everything, but really.” She pretended to be shy, waving her hand in a fan-like motion.

“Thank you, April. Thank you so much.”

“No need to get sappy. You did this yourself. You’ve earned them all through hard work.”

Tom knew that was an outright lie. Bits of the previous hours were coming back to him. There was the fact that he had only fought three groups of monsters over what must have been more than ten hours. She had removed them to let him focus. Then there was the scarcity of white butterflies that had forced him to push his creation skills, the mana crystals being right there when he was in the zone to drive him a little further…

She might claim he had done it himself, but she had been pulling the strings.

“No, I didn’t do much.”

“It was a great effort.” She said loudly, interrupting him. She raised a finger threateningly to insist on silence. “Please, don’t say what you’re thinking. My job is to help within the rules. I have an agreement that allows me to teach crafting skills - crafting skills with a defined value that has to be paid back before I can do anything more. That is all that is allowed.”

Understanding flooded through him. It was one of those don’t ask, don’t tell situations. Usually a bad policy, but sometimes it was the right choice. He started to nod, and then caught himself. Physically moving his head like that would hurt, even talking threatened to make the migraine stronger, but he didn’t let that stop him.

“Anyway, thanks for helping me get the crafting skill so quickly.” He studied the ceiling. There were just the four skills displayed. “My mind wasn’t fully with it, but what were the trumpets for?”

April grinned.

“This is something I won’t talk about at all. I refuse to answer any questions. But I can show you.”

The ceiling above his head changed, and a new text appeared on it.

Title: Underage Skill Development (I) - Upgradable - Grants 1 free attribute point every eight levels.

* Awarded for. Developing skills sufficient to be awarded four points from scratch.

* Each uniquely created skill will award skill points equal to the tier level squared. This means the following.

* A tier 1 skill contributes 1 point.

* A tier 2 skill contributes 4 points.

* A tier 3 skill contributes 9 points and so on.

* No double counting of skill points may occur.

* Eligible skills must be wholly created. If any part of the merged skill was acquired from a skill stone or trainer, then no skill points are awarded.

* Uncommon Title: Competition Rank: 2741, Experience: NA. Ranking Points – NA.

If he wasn’t bed bound, he would have started jumping up and down in joy.

There was so much to unpack in that single title. The number of human children who had developed at least four skills from scratch, for instance. Almost three thousand were a lot more than he expected, but the real nugget of knowledge was the fact that the title even existed.

It provided clues to how underage titles worked, too. There would be similar ones for traits and spells – and they were upgradable. Tom was sure the title would upgrade if he got four more tier one skills, and he would get a free point every four levels.

The question was this - how many times could he upgrade it? At its current level, it wasn’t worth anything, but he hadn’t even been reincarnated for four months yet. What could he achieve in the next ten years? If he could develop two tier four skills, then that would mean a free attribute point at every level. Four of them would give him two free points per level, and, given your basic class only gave four attribute points, that benefit would be huge.

If he could repeat the same for spells and traits… Tom shut his eyes to imagine the base he could build with that. Last time he had got an extra five and a half points per level. If he maximised just what he had discovered so far, he would be able to double that advantage.

“I see you like that.” The amusement in April’s voice was stark.

“Like? Not even close. I love it.”

“I’m going to send you back to sleep to recover. I’ll wake you up in two hours.”

“Wait,” he protested, but blackness took him once more.