Qiānlǐ zhī xíng, shǐyú zú xià

A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step.

Lao Tzu

A week later. . .

It turned out that Grandfather would be gone by the time we woke up most mornings. Not sure what it is that he does or where it is that he disappears to but he sails back at noon, most days, in time for lunch. I thought that this might mean we get to lie in and enjoy the morning for ourselves. But not so. He left his list of tasks for us to do and Aleera has become something of a taskmaster. There are a certain amount of steps to our journey back home and she is insistent that I tackle each and every step.

Every morning I’m dragged out of bed and thrown into the lake to practice swimming. It’s hard to believe that someone could be worse at teaching swimming than my father but she is! If I didn’t already know how to swim, in mind if not fully in body yet, I would probably be dead. I’m not sure if she is naturally this bad at teaching someone how to swim or if she simply knows that I’m capable of more than most. Anyway, my swimming is improving rapidly and I’m beginning to catch up where I imagine I would be with a full-size body, that worked as well as my last.

After swimming I am dragged out of the water and forced to clamber and climb after Aleera if I want to have any breakfast. I now have the skill Climb (Lv 1) for my efforts but I won’t be scaling any mountains anytime soon as my limbs are too short to make most of the moves found on a climbing wall. It is more scrambling than bouldering but the system seems to accept it as some form of climbing.

Then we run back to our new home. I tried pointing out to Aleera that we didn’t need to do this that we were going to do it with Grandfather later in the afternoons. But her response was, "You’ll see."

Not at all ominous!

Once back to the house, she involves me in everything from tending the fire, to setting out our meager breakfast, often leftovers from last night. She suffers no fools and no longer has as much patience for me. Our rough and tumble play mean that she knows I am stronger, quicker, and will endure longer than a normal baby could or should. She knows me better than my parents and has pushed me all the harder for it.

After breakfast, she always pulled out the books as we started working on my reading, writing, and arithmetic. It seems relatively straightforward to me. As I already understand the majority of the concepts if not the abstract forms they are written down in.

Bulosa did not prove to be too challenging to learn to write. Phonetically simpler like Spanish or Japanese the characters used are artistic, more like calligraphy than English letters but the rules are simpler and there seem to be fewer exceptions to them. I quickly gained another skill Calligraphy(Lv 1) perhaps reflecting my belief that the writing was more artistic than functionally necessary. Does our own focus shift the skills we can gain? Is it arbitrary or does it follow a set of rules and criteria?

Next every day, she would move on to maths. Again, having the majority of the concepts, she was teaching it was easy to answer her questions verbally although more challenging to decode the squiggles used to represent them. Ultimately progress was smooth and I soon had another skill Mathematics(Lv 1) that I would be able to level quickly within my mind. Much as I would be able to do with Calligraphy and Climb.

The issue as always with new skills was that it would increase the level displayed on my Sham Status beyond what I had the points to support. The sole consolation to this was that the morning swim, climb and run were beginning to prop up the physical growth of my stats. I hadn’t seen so much growth in them, so quickly, in a long time.

Finally, she would finish our school sessions with reading. I already had the majority of the alphabet understood it was just a process of putting them together to then read them out. Interestingly enough the system did not award me literacy as a skill but rather Decoding (Lv1) perhaps because I can already read and am functionally literate, if not in Bulosa yet. I wonder if this skill will support translation skills later as well. Either way my ability to read is speeding up although I am yet to be left unsupervised with what are clearly expensive and possibly irreplaceable books.

I feel there is some resentment from Aleera though. Something about having been made to move out here with me. She looks after me without fault and teaches me with precision but she has lost some of her softness, some of the playfulness that she had around me, toughening me up as she is forced to toughen up herself up when Grandfather returns home.

His knife work lessons begin as soon as he returns and he can be a little brutal in his teaching methods.

The series of thrusts blocks stabs and slashes she can make are remarkable for a 10-year-old but Grandfather is insanely fast. His knife flickers and flashes catching any thrust she makes towards him flicking them away and past them occasionally he simply steps out the way. The speed he can move shows the importance of stats. His dexterity, must be incredibly high.

They danced back across the islands back towards home. The terrain is as much a weapon as the knives they hold in their hands during their running battles. I trundled and ran along behind them as they moved quickly back home. After almost a week of knocking the rust off Aleera’s knife skills, Grandfather moved on to the next step of our training. The next step was that she had to defend me from him whilst he attacked.

The consequence for our failure, if we were caught, no dinner.

It basically meant no lunch at all because he can outrace any block that Aleera can make and I’m clearly not quick enough to get home before him on my own.

The rules to this exercise were that we needed to be in sight of him when he landed around lunchtime.

When we realised that we couldn't face him or block him or come anywhere near defeating him we saw our best option was to put me on Aleera’s back and for her to simply rush back as soon as it was possible to see him pulling up to the dock. This got us one meal of the week. But he was quick to change the rules of the training exercise and we continued to lose. Aleera seemed to be expecting this having been through this with Grandfather before and this might explain some of the resentment I am feeling.

Some amount of starvation seems to be part of his training process but I’m now so hungry that as soon as we awake and before I am thrown into the sea we started to hunt for muscles and shellfish to eat along the shoreline. I have never been a fan of seafood but hunger truly is the most effective spice. Perhaps this is all part of his training regime to teach us how to forage for ourselves. He has not been entirely clear.

Interestingly enough catching and eating the shellfish is giving me small amounts of experience each time for their deaths. A lot more than the ants did. Perhaps it's their size. This must be how fishermen gain their experience and levels. We kill what we catch gaining sustenance and experience in the process. Something I never gained for eating food before.

Frustratingly when stood on the shoreline, I can sense where some of the fish are in the water using mana sense and echolocation and they are often only just out of reach. Out of conventional sight and out of reach. Maybe I can convince my father to part with a net or a fishing rod. Echolocation and Mana Sense make it simple for me to see where they are. Fresh fish, fresh food, just teasingly out of touch. I need to work out a way to catch them or I need to work out how to pick the lock to the larder. Why are the rooms even locked? There is nobody around. So now that we are starving a little less after our morning snacks we have a little bit more energy to be a little bit more creative about foraging for food. He isn’t going to let us starve hopefully but we could do more to make the most of our enforced time here.

The other thing that we do to add a little flavour to our foraging of food is harvesting sea salt. If Aleera is happy about one thing with me this week it is my ability to speed up the process of harvesting sea salt. She calls it white gold as the price of salt is rather high at the market. She has a few places she knows to collect it from around the island but I can go one step further in filling the basins she’s found over the years then evaporating it off using the skill boil. It’s hardly an industrial production of salt, yet. But she is passing half of it to me. So when I return to the mainland I will probably have my body's weight's worth of sea salt to spend however I want. The trick, as always, will be to get it past grandfather somehow without him noticing.

Today I am a baby imprisoned unfairly on an island, tomorrow salt merchant of the world!

As the morning mists cleared, we could see across the bay. It’s a long way across the lake towards home. In a way, we have a lot more freedom on the island to run and practice magic out of sight. But I miss my mother. We prepare ourselves for our run back home. We can just see our Grandfather approaching. Slowly we backed away, always staying just on the edge of his sight. Aleera bends to pick me up.

Ready, steady, Run!

Will we be getting dinner today?

Level: 10 Name: Kai

Experience: 63,350/ 204,800

Age: 13 months, 2 weeks, 4 days, 12 hours

Health: 1110/1110 Stamina: 523/523 Mana: 1020/1020 Psi: 1090/1090

Trait: Long Lived, Fast Learner, Super Senses, Source of Mana,

Vitality: 111

Endurance: 23

Strength: 23

Dexterity: 24

Senses: 110

Mind: 109

Clarity: 40

Magic: 102

Free Points: 20

Skills:

Tier 1: Time sense (LV 23) Listening (LV 26) Meditation (LV 32) Swimming (LV 24)

Humming (Lv 21) Sneak (Lv 22) Whistling (Lv 21) Singing (Lv 21) and Drumming (Lv 21)

Running (Lv 12), Acting (17), English (Lv 15), Spanish (Lv 15), Japanese (Lv 15),

German (Lv 10), French (Lv 7) Dodge (Lv 5) Breath Control (Lv 5) Sight (Lv 12)

Scent (Lv 12) Detect (Lv 12) Taste (Lv 12) Bulosa (Lv 5) Draw (Lv 2) Climb (Lv 2) Calligraphy (Lv 2) Mathematics (Lv 2) Decoding (Lv 2)

Tier 2: Sense Mana (LV 31) Eavesdrop (LV 23) Memorisation (LV 21) Composition (Lv 21)

Recall (Lv21) Pain tolerance (Lv 8) Piano (Lv 20) Violin (Lv 20), Trombone (Lv 20),

Saxophone (Lv 20) Linguistics (Lv 16) Translation (Lv 16) Stealth (Lv 11) Quick reflexes (Lv 5)

Tier 3: Echolocation (LV 23) Expel Mana (Lv 29) Absorb Mana (Lv 29)

Mana Manipulation (Lv 12) Ignite (Lv 12) Freeze (Lv 3) Boil (Lv 5)

Tier 4: Mana Drain (Lv 20) Parallel Processing (Lv 11)

Tier 5: Mind fortress (Lv 16)

Skill experience: 7000

Origin experience: 1000

Combat experience: 550

Crafting experience: 0