Days turned to weeks, which turned to months. Soon it was winter, and the season of my beloved cherry tomatoes in the garden had come to an end. I hoped I had stashed enough in my inventory to get me through the winter. The remaining crops were turned over and the winter season seeds were planted, mostly mixed greens and fast-growing root vegetables.

The nodmice and singbirds had all but disappeared, either in hibernation or migrated for the winter season to somewhere warmer and less rainy. My experience acquisition had slowed to a crawl, and despite my desire to keep my physical training up, the wet and cold weather was a strong demotivator. The hearth regularly crackled with a warming fire in the house and the doors and windows I had become so used to seeing open were finally kept closed.

Winter was a dull time, and the food started to get fairly bland and uninspired. Grain became a primary focus of the diet, as the choppy waters made for poor fishing this time of year, and home gardens stopped yielding until the roughage and roots were ready for harvest. Bland soups and stews of barley, chopped greens, and stored root vegetables became the norm. My father did some hunting when he could, which brought in some much needed protein, but it was used frugally to fill out said soups and stews.

Without domestic livestock, stuff like eggs and dairy were simply absent from our diet. While salt was readily available here by the sea, sugar was a costly premium. I found myself daydreaming about omelets, cookies, pizza, and other delights from my home world. I thought about how I could advance this world’s culinary knowledge fairly regularly.

My mother’s birthday was in winter and when the day arrived we celebrated as a family, as was customary. The winter seasons lacked a diversity of activity so we decided to head to the piers and then to visit the fishmongers and other nearby shops on the way home to buy some things to make a hearty meal to enjoy together.

The pier was a busy place, even in this season of choppy waters. Certain amounts of fishing and transport still had to occur, regardless of the weather, so sailors and pier workers were about, tying off ropes and hauling cargo and guiding merchants. There were more semi-wild beasts around this part of town than I was seeing back at home. There were some gull-like birds, big rat-like rodents, and crab-like critters, details which I filed away for the future if I could somehow arrange how to get here on my own to grind EXP. The nearby shop stalls were still busy even in the dull and damp weather, and I saw a number of other young children out with their mothers doing some shopping.

I had started accompanying my mother for a lot more shopping trips as the weather turned cooler. I must have gone with her a lot before I regained my consciousness and simply didn’t recall. Over the past summer, our garden provided so much bounty that we didn’t have to shop much, and my father would often bring stuff home with him on the way back from guard duty, which I now realized was not the norm. My mother was a working magical researcher and a busy scribe, but a lot of the mothers with children I was seeing here likely didn’t have similar careers and instead kept home and raised children.

I didn’t get to see a lot of children normally, but noticed now that most of these mothers were in small groups with groups of kids together. My mother must have been a loner, either due to her career or personality or both, but it seemed like most young mothers had a social system and network which helped with child-rearing, especially if they had to regularly do shopping like this. It was fortunate for my mother that I didn’t need the same kind of social stimulation as other children, or I would have probably been a ways behind in social development already. If my parents ever had more children, presumably non-reincarnated children at that, I would have to step up to provide them with social experiences.

My interest in other children had much more to do with appraising and gauging their levels and abilities. Unfortunately, my appraisal skill didn’t tell me the age of the child, but at my best guess it appeared that most children under the age of five were, as I had suspected, still level 1 and had no skills. I had not seen a single infant with any skill; I had previously wondered if skills could be passed down from parents to children, but that seemed not to be the case and that every child started as a blank slate. However, I saw a surprising variety of HP and MP points in the local children.

I had an incomplete picture, of course, but since most children were with their mothers, I could at least take a look at one parent to compare to their children. Many of these mothers had very little HP for their levels and barely any MP, and most of them had fairly low levels as well. Of course, most weren’t literate, which also meant most didn’t have any magic skills. Based on the difference with my parents, I assumed that how much HP and MP one got when one leveled up had something to do with how much they practiced with stuff like magic and with combat or physical training. Almost all the children had single-digit MP, and some even had as little as 1 MP, although I didn’t see any with 0. Many of the children also had single-digit HP, although it wasn’t as common, and I saw one or two kids with a higher HP than I had at level 1. As one might expect, those kids seemed a bit more physically capable for their ages, as if they had strong parents. I was also starting to think that early HP and MP potential had something to do with their parents’ relative HP and MP, some kind of epigenetic potential that was passed on.

This meant that while skills weren’t passed on directly, it would be hard for children with non-magically trained parents to gain a footing with magic. Low MP in the early levels limited the amount a child could practice with magic, which in turn would make it hard for them to level up in a way that allowed them to gain MP. My starter MP of 13, which seemed low at the time, was actually quite a boon. Of course, as far as I knew, normal kids had no ability to be literate at level 1, lacking the skill points, so they might gain another few points of MP when they become level 2, which would open some doors for them, and furthermore it was doubtful any young child had exposure to grimoires or tutelage to allow them to gain magical skills anyway. Without a more formalized education system, many of these kids would be left behind, limited to only being able to train their physical abilities and lifestyle skills.

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As I pondered all this and looked around, I did notice some new skills I hadn’t seen before. Of course, there were a number of people around with a fishing skill, and some of the fishmongers had a butchery skill as well, but thankfully I wouldn’t need to worry about that with my inventory dismantling abilities. I saw some more crafting skills, like my mother’s needlework ability, in some of the women that my mother didn’t have. Nothing in particular really caught my eye, but I would keep looking.

There were some slightly older children running around who didn’t seem accompanied by parents, and of that group, I started to see some level 2 children, and some even older level 3 children. Many of those level 2 children still hadn’t managed to convert any SP into skills, but I saw some with a one-handed skill, presumably from engaging in “swordplay” with sticks and similar youthful activities. I saw a couple bigger boys with an unarmed skill as well, which worried me a bit, since the type of boys who would develop punching based skills that young were not likely to be friendly, and I was still a small child. I hoped I wouldn’t encounter them later on.

All of this information was useful as I fleshed out my worldview, but the most useful piece of information I gained that day was the confirmation of a theory I had been forming about the recovery abilities of food.

Thanks to advancing my appraisal ability I could now learn things about items in my inventory. I still hadn’t figured out how to appraise non-humans at a glance, but if I could put it in my inventory and take a look at the details I would continue to have a subconscious understanding of an item when I looked at it, or something nearly-identical, again later on. I couldn’t just rapidly snap an item into my inventory and then drop it back, quick enough for someone not to notice while they were watching me, but if I could keep someone distracted for about 3 seconds, that was about enough time for me to get the item in my inventory, glance at the description long enough for my metasystem to acknowledge that I had that information, and put it back, building up my understanding of the world around me.

Fortunately for me, it seemed like my parents were popular with the fishmongers, and they would often engage in conversation while ignoring me. I took that opportunity to, as stealthily as possible, reach my hand up and touch fish and other items, drop them into my inventory, read the description, then put the item back. I wanted to avoid another situation like the MP potion theft, as I didn’t need a bunch of raw fish in my inventory without a cooking skill anyway, so there was no reason to keep things.

As I had spent so much time practicing magic over the past months, I often went to mealtimes with depleted MP, and had been trying to isolate which foods had an MP restorative effect. I wasn’t regularly injured enough to figure out exactly which foods restored HP, but I had already found that many fruits and vegetables I pilfered from the garden and added to my inventory over the summer had minor HP recovery. The only times I seemed to recover MP from eating was when the dish contained meat. I couldn’t exactly drop my dinner in my inventory while at the table with my parents, so I hadn’t confirmed it yet, and it was hard to figure out how much I needed to eat to recover and how many points it would recover.

I built up my mental library of seafood-based items as we wandered from stall to stall. Most of the descriptions were not that interesting.

Seabass (deceased)

The corpse of a seabass. Inedible.

Contents: Seabass bones, seabass meat, seabass offal, seabass scales

Most of the seafood items I appraised looked something like that. Whole corpses were always listed as inedible. Unfortunately I couldn’t dismantle these, as I was not planning on stealing them and had to return them whole. After some time, my parents finally bought some fish, and in particular something for dinner that night which my mother got the fishmonger to gut, de-scale, and prepare for eating. My parents laughed when I begged to carry the fish home, but let me hold it for a while, at which point I was able to take another look.

Seabass (deceased, modified)

The corpse of a sea bass. (Modified) Edible. Restores (up to) 2 MP.

Contents: Seabass bones, seabass meat.

That had been what I was looking for. I still had many questions, but this was a hard confirmation that at least some meat, some of the time, was MP restorative. My nodmouse and singbird pieces of meat weren't, and I was still unsure if it was because it should be cooked first or if there simply wasn’t enough mass to each piece of meat. Fish, however, was something I regularly ate raw back on Earth, and I knew it was more digestible than raw bird or mammal meat. I suspected that the restorative ability of this fish would rise with cooking, as I didn’t eat an entire fish worth of meat in a bowl of fish stew but still restored some MP, and that likewise even the small pieces of nodmouse and singbird meat would gain some MP restorative ability when cooked.

Simply put, it seemed that MP restoration from food was similar to the digestibility of protein. I could have still been wrong and it was actually the animal’s fat, but for the moment I was thinking that the mechanism for MP restoration wasn’t too dissimilar from something like amino acids, and that it was largely easily acquired from animal sources. On the other hand, HP restoration seemed as if it were tied to sources of carbohydrates.

I had no idea if it could be so simply reduced or not, and I knew I could learn more once I had more freedom of action and after acquiring the cooking skill, but if I were on the right track it would mean that I could hone in on what I would need to make higher-quality restorative potions and food items. There was a kind of logic to the idea that magic could come from other living organisms.

I wished I had a protein shake or energy drink from my old world to appraise. I wasn’t sure how I could extract protein from animal sources to make an easily-consumable MP potion, anyway. A meat smoothie sounded truly unappetizing, particularly if one needed to rapidly down a potion in an emergency or during a combat situation.

As I was drifting off to sleep that night, a dark thought came to mind. If magic does build up in the meat of a living animal, and humans had the ability to gain more and more magic through training, then human meat could have a highly restorative effect on magic. I briefly considered the MP potions in my inventory, shuddered, and rolled over. I did not sleep well that night.