It took me hours to part out the meat and wrap each parts with leaves in order to bring them in with my pack to sell off to Bosh. Since I didn’t have a good surface to do the work on, I first had to prepare a stone surface which I could clean so I could work on the meat, which first required recovering sufficient MP. It took me a few days before I was ready to bring the meat in for sale. I told Bosh outright my father had brought home a ramhog while hunting, more or less the same original lie I had told to develop my relationship with the butcher, but this time it was legitimately believable as there really was no other way a child like me possibly could have done this. I was worried he would be suspicious since I had all but confessed to hunting the treehoppers and vicaws myself, but I think he was so happy to stock up on the meat that he just turned off his brain and accepted it. I sold him five large wrapped bundles for a large copper coin each. Half a silver worth of meat, and I had roughly three or four times that much still in my inventory.

I didn’t want to cook this on some campfire, so I broke into my house while my parents were at work, and cooked it up in the kitchen. “I beat you,” I said to my meal, biting into the juicy meat. Treepo chirped happily while eating the small pieces which I had infused with MP.

I had first tried to put the cooked cut of meat back in my inventory before I ate, which reported that it was modified and would recover up to 4 MP. I tried to extrapolate to the whole carcass. The whole hog was probably worth something like 200 MP of recovery. Of course, I had used almost 100 MP taking it out, including one of my potions.

I really had to figure out how to make potions.

Treepo grunted with satisfaction, finishing his meat, then immediately flopping on his side to nap it off. I grinned at him and dug back into my own meal, then cleaned up the kitchen to keep my secrets hidden.

* * *

I had gained a couple hundred experience points from the ramhog, plus more from cooking, infusing MP for Treepo, and other odds and ends. It was hard to track every EXP point and where it came from by now, so I just rolled it all together. I was roughly halfway to level 7.

Unfortunately, a ramhog was clearly beyond my skill level if I wanted to play things safe. They could destroy trees with ease, so hiding in the treetops and trying to outwit them using my intelligence was still dangerous. I needed much more impressive strategy or skill before I went back out, and more importantly, I needed MP potions. I was going to have to figure out how I could learn about it eventually, and the only person I knew in town who could do that was the magic store proprietor. I wasn’t sure how I would go about solving that problem.

In the meanwhile, I knew of a way to protect myself better that I wasn’t currently leveraging. I had seen a child get buffed at the Church with a protection spell, so I knew that I could get more out of my own 6-point magic, especially now that I had advanced.

Sitting in my hidden practice spot in the yard, I summoned my 6-point magic circle stone disc and lay it on the ground before me. I was topped up on MP and had some recovery food items on standby in case I overtaxed myself and zeroed out my magic. I mentally mapped what I considered each point to be, a practice I didn’t really think was necessary based on how I used elemental magic, but just in case it helped I oriented the magic circle so that I was in line with a self-buff. I closed my eyes and focused my thoughts.

I knew how to use magic to heal myself, but my body understood healing on an intrinsic level; I just sped up the process, and used magic to make it immediate and perfect. A buff would be something different. I reached through my thoughts for something comparable. In a video game, a protection buff was like a shield, something akin to magic armor. I wanted to wrap my body with magic such that the magic absorbed or deflected the incoming forces and energy, so that it wasn’t channeled into my body, damaging me. “Protection,” I murmured.

I gasped as I felt a healthy amount of MP whoosh out of my body, but rather than disappear it seemed to settle outwards on my skin. I checked my status, and it wasn’t too bad. That spell might have killed me a level or two earlier and without advanced 6-point magic, but not now. I could afford this if I was going into a battle I was worried about getting hurt in, at least one that I had an out for if I ran out of MP. I could always punch my way out, although not against something like a ramhog.

I checked out the buff, and saw it was the same minor protection buff I had seen on the boy at the Church. That was what I was targeting, and that was what I got. How long would this buff last, though?

I decided to sit, wait, and see.

After a long, boring afternoon of largely just sitting and waiting, trying not to fall asleep and miss it, the buff finally wore off. With no clocks in this world, it was hard to say exactly how much time passed, but it seemed to be somewhere in the four to six hour range. This introduced some new questions.

Why did the buff last as long as it did? Was that fixed, or variable depending on how much MP I used for the spell? How could I advance the spell from minor protection to regular protection, or even major protection?

I recast the buff, but this time intentionally channeling half as much MP into the spell. I wasn’t sure if it would work or not, but I received the buff, so I decided to wait some more and see. I had Treepo headbutt me while I waited, hoping one or both of us would gain some EXP from using the buff.

Approximately two to three hours later, the buff wore off, like I expected from the reduced MP. That was perfect. Battles didn’t usually take very long, so I would only need a protection buff that would last for even less time than this; maybe even mere minutes. I tried casting the buff with only 1 MP, and counted out the time it lasted. I did that a few times with small amounts of MP and averaged out my count to extrapolate an MP-to-time formula. Short, cheap casts were an option.

Over the next couple of days I tried experimenting with putting all my MP into it. No matter how much MP I used, I could only ever cast a longer running “minor” version of the buff. No amount of MP turned the buff into an upgraded version for additional protection. I couldn’t seem to cast any kind of upgraded buff.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

I hadn’t intentionally tried to cast minor protection in the first place, only “protection” in general, and it mimicked what I had seen at the Church. Was that because I had seen it, or because of my skill level? Normal, non-minor protection might simply require double-advanced 6-point magic. Major protection might require triple-advanced. It would stand to reason that master level protection would require a master skill for buffing of some kind.

In the end, it wasn’t worth trying to intentionally cast a stronger buff without advancing my skill further. I was a level 6 child, not even six years old, and I was working with guesswork and forbidden knowledge. A wrong assumption could be deadly, no matter how useful it would be if I were right and managed to succeed. When I got another 100 SP into 6-point magic, I would try stronger buffs again, and hope it worked out.

I thought of some other types of buffs I could try casting, and they all should work as minor buffs with my current skill with 6-point magic, particularly if I metered my MP while I tried to cast them, so I got to work testing and discovering more.

* * *

“Absorption,” I cast, stretching as I climbed out of bed. Of all the buffs I had experimented with and discovered, this was probably the most useful in the long run. I was getting experience when casting it, for the moment, which was worth the trade-off. Absorption increased the rate at which I absorbed magic out of the atmosphere, at least as far as I could tell, which increased my natural rate of MP recovery. I had been experimenting with buffing MP recovery and figured it out. In a way, it confirmed my theory about the true nature of magic, or at least brought me closer to an understanding of it.

Unfortunately, even with the increased rate of MP recovery, as a minor spell it didn’t recover as much MP during the duration of the buff than it cost to cast it. I suspected people didn’t really use it, because of this. I figured that might change if I could further advance my skill and bring down the cost, or increase the power and potential. For now, I cast it every morning to get a feel for it.

Absorption also seemed to work faster in areas of concentrated magic. In the morning, my mother was the best source of that. I had checked and saw that if I was in contact with her with the buff cast, I actually drained some of her MP and took that in myself. It wasn’t one-to-one so some must be lost into the atmosphere. One of us would reabsorb the lost MP eventually if it was in the air in the house. Probably. Maybe. I was still guessing a lot.

Sharma had plenty of MP, anyway. A couple of hugs in the morning before she left for work and I went about my day wouldn’t even affect her, but it would give me a little boost after the loss from the spell, which was incredibly helpful for me. Also, who doesn’t like hugs?

I thought about what this meant for combat with future magical enemies. Even if it wasn’t extremely effective, depleting the enemy’s MP while restoring my own, for any amount, would be a boon.

Unfortunately, it did also drain MP from Treepo, since it wasn’t worth the extra MP cost to cast it on him to balance things out. It only seemed to pull it from him until he hit 1 MP point remaining, at which point it seemed the concentration of MP was low enough that it was easier for the buff to just draw down from the atmosphere, so there was no risk of my buff causing him to zero out, and he still couldn’t cast anything on his own anyway. He might never be able to. Of course, I would infuse meat with MP and feed it to him, and the meat was already MP restorative, so it was a constant game of give-and-take. I just hoped it would accelerate EXP gain.

I was limited to virtually no combat situations at this point in the summer. The beach was crowded and the jungle was too dangerous for now. Most of my practice was based around the study of magic, particularly 5-point and 6-point magic, and physical training. My body was growing fast at this age, and I was able to do more and more pushups. I found a few trees around town with good branches to squeeze out some pull-ups through the day, went for runs, and started to add some functional resistance in the yard at home. I shaped some stone into bars, and worked on some overhead carries, some squats, rows, as well as some swings, get-ups, and snatches with a small stone kettlebell I made.

Magic healed up my broken rib perfectly from the ramhog battle, so I wasn’t too worried about damaging my growth plates anymore. Pursuing weighted resistance exercise with this body was a good way to gain some experience and also physical strength, and I healed myself after every training session to avoid developing any injuries. I didn’t push too far beyond what a normal human on Earth would do, such as progressing through multiple workouts in one day, but I did at least one workout session every day. I wasn’t using that much weight anyway, although probably a lot for an almost-six year old.

It didn’t take long for Horg to start to comment.

“Pilus, you’re such an active kid! Look at these little muscles,” he said one night after dinner, squeezing my arms. “Hard to believe this was the same kid who’d sit around all day watching you scribe, huh?” He winked at Sharma. “Maybe I should teach you some swordplay…”

“No forcing him, we agreed,” Sharma said. “And he showed an interest in magic first, as I recall.”

Horg laughed, but looked at me expectantly. Unfortunately for him, I was well aware that I didn’t have the available skill points to learn to wield a sword, but I did already have an unarmed skill.

“Um… do you know any hand-to-hand combat?” I asked, knowing full well that he had double-advanced mastery in the unarmed skill.

Horg grinned, a grin I wasn’t sure I liked the look of. Thus began a daily evening ritual of being taught Horg’s various hand-to-hand combat arts. I spent a lot more of my own time sleeping, recovering from the work. Horg had no issue drilling an almost-six year old hard, which was probably the case for his own childhood. Well, he grew up well enough, I suppose.

The remaining summer weeks flew by between training, naps, and more magical experimentation when I had the clarity of mind to focus on it. The days began to cool off as fall set in.

“You’re good, but you aren’t really getting better,” Horg commented after training one day, as we headed back inside. I was acquiring the theories he taught me, and practicing the movements, but I knew that without the SP to apply to the skill I had a limit. From the outside, especially compared to Earth, it would appear to be the limit of childhood, instead of something as straightforward as skill points. Unfortunately for Horg’s excitement, which had waned without results, if I leveled up I would be spending those skill points elsewhere.

“Oh well, maybe I don’t have what it takes,” I shrugged. “Besides, it’s getting cold out, and Mum won’t let us practice in the house.”

“Give it a rest, Horg, he’s barely 6,” Sharma said. “Maybe he’ll take to it more next year.”

Thankfully, that brought the training to a slow trickle. Every now and then Horg would badger me to do some more, but I started offering less and less enthusiasm. I had squeezed out just about all the EXP I thought I could get from practicing unarmed strikes and stances from Horg’s tutelage, at least until I advanced in the skill and gained the abilities, as determined by the structure of this reality, to do better.

Another summer had ended.