I desperately wanted to get a look at my mother’s books, which I had already started calling grimoires in my head. Surely a magic researcher’s books would contain information about magic. The question was, could I learn magic without SP? The first experiment with literacy suggested I could not. I needed to level up more.

The next day, recovered from my first bout with physical training, I was back at it. I still felt limited by my young body and further limited by a desire to protect my health and growth potential, but there was still a lot I could do. Out in the yard and away from prying eyes, I did jumping jacks to exhaustion. I sprinted up and down the paths between the garden. I grabbed the top of the fence and hung until my grip failed. I practiced throwing small stones at targets to improve my accuracy. I held a straight-arm plank, albeit for a pitiful amount of time, and then squatted and held a horse stance until my legs burned.

I wasn’t sure what exactly was safe or not for a child this age, but in short, I avoided any additionally loaded muscle contractions and instead focused on motion, coordination, and limited isometric muscle training. If I could gain some SP, perhaps I could learn some form of healing magic, and then I could risk pushing my body a lot farther.

This train of thought led me to wondering more about my HP and MP. How did they work? I didn’t want to take damage to test out HP, but if a small wound could cause even 1 HP damage, and I only had 10 HP total, would ten small wounds kill me? Could I survive anything, no matter how dangerous, if I still retained 1 HP? What would happen when I run out of MP, once I could figure out how to use magic in the first place? There was no representation for stamina, either, but that was obviously something else that had a limit. I knew enough about biology from Earth to know about cellular ATP, so was my MP something like that, but for magic? Was there a biological component?

The fact that HP increased, presumably upon leveling up, was also curious. I could understand if HP was a representation of my total health, and that 0 HP would be death, in which case my loss of 1 HP would be a loss of 10% of my total health. Yet, when I leveled up, I would presumably gain more total HP, without physically changing. So would the value of 1 HP have changed, or have I changed?

HP itself might not actually even be real. It was a representation that I could see because of my appraisal skill. The fact that it was something I could see suggested something about the underlying world, but might not be something that can be analyzed biologically, because it might not actually exist. Nonetheless, I was sure that “more HP” was good, and “losing HP” would be bad. I probably didn’t need to understand more than that.

Status conditions were something else to worry about. I cursed myself for not thinking to check my status the day before, when I was suffering the consequences of the previous day’s training. Did that kind of fatigue show up as a status condition? I didn’t get the impression that various human conditions were reflected in my status; no “hungry” or “tired” or “confused” ever appeared that I could see. What would, then? I assumed something which affected my other attributes, something which altered my HP or MP and maybe my skills, would display. I wasn’t eager to discover the finer details anytime soon.

I pushed myself hard again that day so I took a nice long nap after training. I woke up hungry, but with dinner still a ways off I had to satisfy myself with stealing snacks from the garden. I loaded up my inventory and sat in the shade of a tree, pulling things out and eating them. I noticed that the previous day’s items had maintained their condition in the inventory, so they seemed to exist in a kind of stasis when stored, meaning they were immune from rot and degradation. Convenient.

I pulled up my status screen and looked it over again.

Pilus Horgson (Lv 1)

HP: 10/10

MP: 13/13

Status: none

EXP: 54/100

Skills: Appraisal, Inventory, Literacy

I was more than halfway to my level up and, hopefully, to gaining some SP, which I’m sure would come in handy. Just then, I felt an insect crawling up my leg.

It was an ugly little thing, but I never did have much of a love for insects. It was about the size of one of the cherry tomatoes, although that was mostly its legs, of which it had six. The main body wasn’t too large, but it did seem to have some kind of pincer-like mouth on the front. I reactively swatted it off my leg before I could get bitten, and saw it plop onto the ground. It had no wings, but it was starting to scurry back towards me. I summoned one of the rocks I had in my inventory, and brought it down hard on the bug.

When I looked back at my status screen, I saw that my EXP grew to 55/100.

I was a bit surprised that killing such a small bug was worth anything, but it was my first intentional kill, I supposed. Given what I had discovered so far about experience, I doubted I could grind by killing more bugs like this, unless I did so en masse. Regardless, this confirmed what I had suspected, which was that combat and killing likely did bring in a lot of experience. That was almost certainly how my father had advanced his level so high.

I pondered what I could do with this new information.

* * *

In retrospect, this period in my life was probably my most psychopathic. Or at least, the first wave of psychopathy. Every chance I got, I hunted down and killed insects and small animals.

What started as an innocent defense turned into an aggressive offense. I combed through the garden and yard finding the biggest and nastiest looking bugs I could find, and crushed them with rocks. I found some kind of sleepy-looking, light blue mouse-like rodent nibbling on some garden veggies and smashed it too. I threw rocks at nearby birds, pink feathered with green feet, and if they fell, I impaled them with a sharp stick I had found. I had nothing against these creatures, and I didn’t glee in their deaths, but I had a goal and I was determined to achieve it.

When I wasn’t engaging in the murder of small animals, I continued my physical training. In my time off, I continued ruminating on the nature of reality and the world, myself and my stats, my future and my goals. I started meditating as well, in the hopes of stumbling on some enlightenment and higher understanding, or at the very least getting a feel for magic within me. I realized at some point that I was as unlikely to feel my MP inside myself as I was to feel my ATP; it would be possible, I presumed, to feel the depletion of my MP, but since I still couldn’t use any magic, that would have to wait until later.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

I started asking my parents more questions about things, as curiosity seemed acceptable at my age. Knowledge is power and I wanted to learn as much as I could. I had to be careful to ask questions that made sense for me to be asking, as opposed to asking about information and technologies that either don’t exist or that I shouldn’t know about. These cautious lines of questioning yielded some results.

For one thing, I learned that all the things I had been killing, bugs and animals both, were called “beasts” in this world. Beasts were, largely, considered enemies, and no differentiation was made between the ones we could hunt and eat and the ones we could not. I had presumed incorrectly that the former would be “animals” and the latter “monsters,” but that was my mistake. It was through learning this that I also learned there were no domesticated animals in this world. Some beasts were “tamed” by individuals with the talent for it, and tamed creatures were used in certain ways–like mounts, cart-pulling, and plow-driving beasts of burden–but they were never intentionally bred. In fact, it sounded like tamed beasts wouldn’t breed at all, although I was careful not to question about undiscovered animal husbandry methods which I wouldn’t be able to explain how I knew about.

That explained why I saw no one ever out and walking a dog, and why we so rarely ate meat, if there was no livestock. I decided I would definitely have to learn more about taming in the future. I wondered how no beasts ever self-domesticated in all this time, like something akin to cats who would feast on the rodent-like beasts that, I assumed, would gather where grain was stored, but I couldn’t figure out how to ask those questions at this age without arousing suspicion. Perhaps I could meet someone in a farming family and learn more.

I also learned a little more about my parents. My father worked, as best as I could tell, as some kind of town guard. He defended us from beasts and brigands. I guessed that was a part of how he gained his skills and level. This town was also home to some institutions of magical research, where my mother had worked before my birth, and was going to work again when I was no longer a small child. Being a sea-side town with a small port, it was a good place for the exchange of ideas and easy to get to and from the institutions. I wagered that with enough technological growth potential, it could be a major city some day, but civilization wasn’t advanced enough for that level of human population concentration.

A lot of grain came in through the port, as opposed to being farmed locally. Most of the rest of our diet was from fishing, small-scale horticulture like my mother’s garden, and the occasional hunt outside of town. It sounded relatively dangerous for individuals to go out hunting, and edible beasts slain by the town guard would be sold on the open market to fund town defense, so it was a bit of a luxury as it was often priced rather high. There were some hunting-based social groups in the town which would organize hunts to provide additional meat to the markets, but never enough to allow the price to get competitive.

Fortunately, this region was very temperate, so gardens yielded vegetables nearly year-round. “Winter” here really meant a darker, cooler, rainy season. There was almost never any snow. Additionally, summers weren’t too oppressively hot thanks to the cool winds which blew in off the ocean. In a lot of ways, we were living in a paradise, although I missed being able to grab a cheap burger or a slice on the regular like I could on Earth.

It took a few more weeks, but just before my birthday, I finally gained enough experience to level up. I looked at my profile screen with pride.

Pilus Horgson (Lv 2)

HP: 21/21

MP: 19/19

Status: none

EXP: 0/200

Skills: Appraisal, Inventory, Literacy

It had been a tremendous effort–and I had shed much innocent beast blood–but it was worth it.

SP: 2

+ Appraisal (0/10)

+ Inventory (0/10)

+ Literacy (0/10)

Two whole skill points! I had only really been expecting one, and even prepared myself that I might earn none. Two was an interesting number, since that was the level I had just earned. I would need to gain another level to see if a pattern developed.

Still, this meant, if my assumptions were accurate, that I could gain skills the traditional way in this world. I had been putting off figuring out how to steal a look at my mother’s grimoires since I figured I wouldn’t be able to learn their contents without the requisite SP, but now I had something to work with. If I got caught, I figured I would be in a lot of trouble, but it would be worth it.

Moreover, I was pretty thrilled that I hit my level goal before my birthday. I was almost certainly the youngest person to hit level 2 in this town, maybe even the world! At least, I pitied any child who had to suffer the kind of life that would lead to leveling up so young, otherwise. No doubt it would be a less peaceful existence to force that much experience gain at such a young age.

I mentally made my next goal to hit level 3 by the coming spring. It was getting harder to squeeze out experience points, as the amount of physical training I had to do for a single point had risen dramatically, and there were only so many small beasts I could kill from my home’s yard. I would also need twice as much experience to reach the next level. I would have to brainstorm additional ways I could gain EXP; surely there were more ways that I hadn’t discovered yet and I simply needed to broaden my mind and use my imagination.

Fortunately for me, an interesting opportunity fell in my lap rather promptly.

“What would you like for your birthday?” my mother asked me in the days leading up to me being able to call myself four, rather than almost-four.

I wasn’t particularly expecting gifts, since this culture didn’t seem to have much of a gift-giving tradition. It was very much a civilization where one was expected to provide for oneself: if you studied magic, you scribed your own grimoire; if you wanted meat, you hunted beasts for yourself; if you wanted to learn something, you learned it yourself, although without knowing more about the world I didn’t truly know if there was a schooling system I was simply unaware of.

Yet this world did have calendars and so the anniversaries of things such as births were remembered and observed. In a family, one’s birthday tended to be about the family itself, not the individual, and so celebrations were often about being together and sharing experiences, which made all the more sense when I considered how infrequently I was seeing my father. For his birthday, we had spent the day at the beach together, but he otherwise had been largely absent from home and out on guard duty, leaving before I was awake most days and returning for dinner, with a mere fraction of the day together in the evening before bed. When mother went back to her research at the institute she worked at, I probably wouldn’t see her much either, which begged the question what I would be doing with my days.

This didn’t really concern me, however, as I wasn’t an actual child, mentally. In fact, more freedom would be a good thing. As for my father, I enjoyed the time together when he was home but didn’t feel that strongly about seeing him more. I think my mother was expecting me to ask for him when she asked me what I wanted for my birthday, so she was surprised when I told her that I wanted to see where she worked.

“You want to see the research institute?” she asked.

“Yeah! Mama worked there before I was born, right? And that’s where your master works? I want to meet him!” I responded.

Sharma made a bit of a face at that. “Well, Master is a busy man so we shouldn’t trouble him, but I can show you the institute and the magic lab if you really want. Wouldn’t you rather see where Papa guards the town?”

“Nope!”

“Well… ok then. I’ll tell Papa and we’ll all visit together,” she said. “I guess I’ll use this opportunity to turn in these parchments. I’ll have to finish my allotment early,” she muttered, more to herself than me, and frowned as she turned back to the table, wandering off and leaving me. This woman was fortunate she had me as a child; I worried about how well she would have taken care of an ordinary child. I ignored the fact that her current child had spent weeks trying to kill things in the yard and what that said about her parenting.

So when my birthday came, with Horg taking the day off work, the three of us set off through town to visit the magical research institute.