The next morning I began my project of gaining 73 experience points.
I had gained my first 27 EXP over the past almost-four years, although I was not entirely sure how. Still, from this I could assume that I couldn’t simply walk around to acquire additional EXP, at least not at a sufficient rate. My hypothesis was that I would need to push myself to new heights and or achieve novel experiences to acquire more EXP.
The problem is, I was still only almost-four. I was limited to what I could get away with in my mother’s presence, while she scribed at the table. Fortunately, she tended to get rather engrossed in the work, which was only possible because I wasn’t exactly a normal child and didn’t usually do things which would give her cause for concern. I didn’t want to break that trust, but I had to push my own boundaries a bit, so this was a delicate balance.
Hmm, I thought. Balance. An almost-four-year old should be developing more advanced balance abilities at that age, right? I certainly hadn’t spent any real effort trying to keep myself upright beyond the norm. I had tried yoga in my previous life a few times and even as an adult, it was hard to balance on one leg for a long period of time. Perhaps this could be a way to quietly gain some experience points.
I brought up my profile screen first so I could monitor my EXP as I trained. Holding my hands out to either side, I carefully shifted my weight to my right foot, and tried to lift my left foot into a tree pose, and carefully…
…fell directly on my bottom. My mother glanced over and I gave her a big, reassuring smile, as if I had entirely meant to sit down. She smiled back and went back to her scribing.
Damn useless baby legs! Although I supposed this was exactly the point. I needed to shape these childish reflexes into something usable, but it was in the process of doing so that I would gain the experience.
I closed my eyes and thought about walking. One doesn’t normally think about the mechanics of walking, as it was an almost automatic reflex. I simply would think about where I wanted to go, and my legs would carry me there. Each time I took a step, I was, for a moment, balanced on one leg. So to start, I tried marching in place. As a young child, my walking was a bit more akin to waddling than the gait of an adult, so marching in place was a bit awkward. My knees would go out to the sides, my hips would twist more than I intended. I kept my focus on my movements, trying to slowly shape my spastic dance into a clean march on the spot, knees raising towards the front while keeping my body still. Once I had that under control, I slowed the march down.
As I slowed the movements, I also started taking smaller steps. I wanted intentional, focused steps. Once I was sufficiently slow, I raised one leg as if to take a step, and held it just above the ground. I took three, careful breaths, then placed it back down. Then I lifted the other foot, took three breaths, then set it back down. I opened my eyes. My EXP now reported 28/100. I grinned.
Over the next hour, I kept practicing my balancing act. My initial assumptions proved to be more or less correct; doing the same thing didn’t earn me more experience, but improving the amount of time or the difficulty of the balance would occasionally earn me another point. A child can only improve so much in one session, though. I needed to literally grow new muscle in order to improve further. An almost-four year old was too young to start lifting weights.
Frankly, I didn’t even think I had the physical capabilities to do a push-up at this age. I did not want to push resistance training too far at this age, anyway, as I wanted to maximize my growth potential and wouldn’t risk damaging my growth plates. I allowed myself to do a few things, though. I did some bodyweight squats in place until I felt the first hints of a burn in my legs, then stopped, which earned me another experience point, and I did baby’s first plank to earn yet another.
That was probably more than enough until my body could rest and recover, so I decided to focus on hand-eye coordination and reflexes next. In the garden, I grabbed a cherry tomato, and practiced tossing it into the air and catching it with my other hand. I was surprised at how much I failed, but eventually was tossing it pretty high up and still catching it more often than not. I also failed to notice just how many tomatoes I had let explode on the ground around me until my mother came outside and scolded me for wasting food, so I ended my self-improvement course for the day. In the end, I had gained 9 experience points, which didn’t sound like much but was equivalent to what I earned on average over a whole year prior to this.
That night, I slept like a log, and the next day I experienced delayed onset muscle soreness for the first time in this life, before I had even turned four years old.
* * *
While recovering from the previous day’s exercise, I decided to experiment with my new inventory metasystem.
When I pulled up the inventory menu, I found that I could navigate it in either a grid view or a list view. Both were convenient ways to see, at a glance, what was stored inside. I again borrowed from my mother’s garden and stored away a dozen cherry tomatoes. While the interface allowed me to view the contents of the inventory, it wasn’t necessary to actually use the menu at all; I could deposit and withdraw from the inventory simply through thinking about it, so long as I was touching the object. That meant withdrawn items would appear touching my hand as well, so I couldn’t use the inventory to summon objects at a distance from me, but I did have a lot of control as to where the summoned object would spawn. I found a stick which I used to experiment with this idea; I could withdraw the stick in whatever orientation I desired, my grip on it at the imagined hilt, or at the center, or with a reverse grip. I could also summon it tabled on open palms, or summon it to appear on the ground with my palm face-down over it, with the barest of contact, and likewise I could summon it with my hand face down in the air such that the item immediately dropped, but I could not summon it in mid-air in front of me with my hands at my sides.
I wandered around the yard looking for sticks and stones to add to the inventory, and added some other garden fruits and vegetables while I was at it, though not so much that my mother would notice and complain about. I could not see an inventory limit on the screen, either in terms of item count or weight, but as I added more and more to the inventory, I started to feel an almost imagined weight to my body. I inferred that at this beginner level, I could probably over-encumber myself if I added sufficient mass to my inventory, and wondered how that might change if I could advance the skill. I would have to convince my parents to take me for a walk, maybe to the beach, where I could test larger rocks without getting caught.
I also noticed none of the items stacked in my inventory. Each was a discrete item. This made sense once I thought about it, since each item was slightly different from the other. If I had deposited ten different sticks, each slightly different, and they were stored as a stack of x10 sticks in my inventory, which would come out when I summoned one? By not stacking, that question wouldn’t have to be asked, but I was curious if there was any condition which would have allowed for stacked items.
Was this inventory something other people could use? The interface of both this and appraisal leveraged my knowledge about video games from my previous life, and I saw no evidence that this was something other people could do as well. In both cases, I gained the skills from doing things with my metasystem, as opposed to something that one could learn from the natural world.
The problem was not so much a lack of information as it was my complete nescience. I didn’t even know what I didn’t know about this world, nor the rules of this reality. I needed to acquire knowledge. If this were my old world, I would do that from reading books and information on the internet. So, I needed to learn this world’s written language systems.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
I knew written language was a thing, since my mother was a scribe. That, and she had an advanced literacy skill. My father had it too, so literacy couldn’t be that rare. Actually, what was more peculiar was the fact that I had two literate parents and neither of them had ever tried to teach me how to read or write. I was almost four years old already! On Earth, I was already reading picture books by age three. I decided to prod my mother about this, if she wasn’t too involved in her work.
Waddling back in the house on my sore legs, I made my way to the table and climbed up on the chair adjacent to my mother, who was scribbling away on her parchment. Paper and the printing press clearly hadn’t been invented in this world yet, but my mother did have a couple of books–though tucked away on high shelves out of my reach–and my mother had produced a tremendous number of copies of parchment in the short while I was conscious. I just hoped there was some useful information to be gleaned from what little writing was done in this world. How devastating it would have been if all she was copying was tax records or the like.
“Mama, can you teach me to read?” I asked her when she looked up from her scribing.
She looked mildly surprised at that. “What brought this on?” she asked.
“Mama is always reading and writing all day, I want to too!” I responded as innocently as possible.
She smiled at me. “Well, that makes me happy. But I think you might be too young!” she laughed.
Huh. “How old were you when you learned?”
“I was eight.”
Whoa, so late. “Is that when everyone learns to read?”
She laughed again. “No, not everyone learns to read, and of those that do, most only learn to read when they start studying magic.”
Oh, that was a big reveal. So literacy was not necessarily common in this world but was a prerequisite for learning magic, which also explained why my father had the literacy skill despite doing no obvious reading or writing in his day to day life. He must have needed it to learn his 4-point magic skill. It also sounded like magic wasn’t taught to young children, which makes sense, since it was probably dangerous. I needed an in, though, something to convince my mother to show me the basics. “I want to see my name written down!” I said.
“Well, ok,” my mother responded, grabbing a slate and chalk. Parchment and ink was probably expensive; temporary notes weren’t recorded with those, but with several slates my mother had scattered across the table. She wiped one clean with a cloth and picked up her chalk and wrote a letter on the board. “This is a P,” she said, pointing to the letter. She wrote another, and pointed at that. “This is an L, and this,” she said as she wrote a third, “is an S. Those are the letters in your name.” She then made a particular connecting mark between the P and the L, and a different connecting mark between the L and the S. “This here is how you make the I sound between the P and the L, and this here is how you make the U sound between the L and the S. Those are the diacritics–er, the accent marks.”
I looked at the three letters and two connecting accent marks. I had just watched her write them and explain them. Yet strangely, I couldn’t parse it at all. “Show me mama’s name!” I said, hiding the frustration from my voice.
She wrote down three more letters, connecting the first and second with an accent for the vowel and adding a second trailing diacritic off the last letter. “Sh-a-r-m-a,” she sounded out, pointing to each component as she went.
My brow furrowed against my will. Admittedly it wasn’t my native language and I would have to learn the new letters, but, something was odd. I couldn’t hold a mental image of these letters in my head at all. As soon as I blinked it was like I was looking at meaningless scribbles. My mother reached over and patted my head.
“It’s ok if you can’t read it yet, you’re too young,” she explained.
Except that I’m not too young, I thought, as I was in my thirties before my reincarnation. I understood that my thinking was limited by my new brain, which was why I couldn’t form memories properly as a baby, but I should have had all the neuroplasticity of youth right now, which was why I was able to learn to speak and comprehend this language with ease. Why couldn’t I read?
I had hit a roadblock. This world’s writing was gibberish to me, for reasons I couldn’t understand. I was already reading the appraisal and skill screens in my native language, and I could speak and understand this world’s language, so why was it impossible for me to learn the letters?
This must have been a flaw in my way of thinking. I was comparing this to Earth, but in this new world, I actually wasn’t trying to learn to read. I was trying to gain a skill called “Literacy.”
I summed up what I thought I knew about this world so far, with regards to skill acquisition. My mother said I was too young to learn to read, by which she technically must have meant I was too young to acquire the literacy skill. She didn’t learn until she was eight, but even that seemed to be young compared to many. I also knew, from my skill board, that I had 0 SP. If the initial acquisition of skills in this world normally required 1 SP, then a child would have to first acquire 1 SP before they could gain the literacy skill, which probably first required leveling up. A child gains a lot of physical capabilities between the ages of four and eight, probably enough to acquire the sufficient experience to grow to level 2, at least in my mother’s case.
Since I had no SP, I probably couldn’t acquire the literacy skill from my mother’s tutelage. Except… I already could read my native language. While that doesn’t apply to this world, I did gain the appraisal and inventory skills for free from my metasystem, so why not literacy?
Literacy. The ability to read.
The ability to read… and write.
“Can I try?” I asked, and my mother handed me the piece of chalk. I tried to copy the scribbles on the board, but even keeping the shape of them in my head was a challenge. I found that I could trace them, but tracing wasn’t writing. I sighed. Then, a lightbulb moment. Surely I could write in my old language? So I wrote out “Hello, world!” and just like that:
Skill acquired: Literacy
Progress! So my ability to gain “free” skills started and ended with knowledge from my old world. Learning new things from this world would require the mechanics of this world, which was to say it required skill points. I wondered how much the people of this world even understood that without appraisal abilities. I looked back at the names my mother had written in this world’s language, Pilus and Sharma, and found that now I could read them, and hold the image of the letters in my head. Success.
It might have seemed suspicious if I displayed too much potential to my mother, so I wasn’t sure what to do next. As it was, I had already written words in a different language, but at that moment my mother took the chalk from me and said, “if you’re just going to scribble nonsense, I should get back to work.”
“Wait,” I said, and wiped away the Hello, world! message. “Can you show me papa’s name too? Please?”
I got my mother to write out “Horg” and a few more names and words, memorizing the letters as she did, which was effectively instantaneous due to the literacy skill. It seemed like reading and writing came pretty much all-at-once in this world, which was fascinating. This whole world could easily have been literate if writing and paper technologies could advance and there was a concerted effort to teach children, at least once they had the skill points for it. After a few more minutes of that, my mother dismissed me to go play so she could get back to her work.
She picked me up off the chair and set me on the ground. I wanted to test this skill out, but I needed something to read. Fortunately, my mother had dropped a piece of parchment under the table and hadn’t noticed yet. I picked it up and started scanning it, and my eyes widened.
I must have made a sound, because she glanced at me, and took the parchment from my hands, mistakenly thinking I was returning it and thanking me. “Mama… you’re a scribe, right?” I asked.
“Well, I’m scribing my master’s research now, but I only do this when needed,” she answered off-hand. She muttered to herself something about taking time off to raise a certain someone and getting back into her master’s good graces, which I was clearly not supposed to understand.
“If you’re not a scribe, then what are you?” I asked again.
She looked at me and grinned with pride. “Mama’s a magical researcher!”
Interesting. Very interesting.