“If you want to keep a secret then you have to hide it from yourself.”

George Orwell

Now, this I had to see! My eyes spasmed open enough for me to be able to look between the lids. I left them where they were. It would have been nice to open them further but I couldn’t have guaranteed that they would have remained open at all. So, I left them where they were and was fortunate enough to be able to watch as my family turned towards my mother. I kept breathing in and out. Staying calm enough to stay slow enough to listen. The moment I had attempted to move I had lost control of the movement. My eyelids both started and finished opening before they had moved a finger.

“From his birth?” grandfather questioned my mother. “No one has stats when they are born. No one. Not the commoners, not the nobles, not the kings, and if the unification of the compass kingdoms ever happens in the far distant future not even the future emperor. It simply does not happen.” He adamantly argued his position.

Grandfather had some very fixed views of what was and wasn’t possible. According to what he was describing, what I had achieved simply was not possible. Beyond improbable but then wasn’t my whole existent one improbability stacked on top of another. I had died, become aware, been born again, on another world another planet. Who knew if I was even in the same universe? The stars here certainly didn’t look the same. And when the whole world existed within a system of levels, stats, experience, and traits it was clear that whatever Gods existed here were vastly different from the ones in the world where I came from.

“I never mentioned it because I knew you were already against the pregnancy after my last miscarriage.” She explained defensively.

I had heard parts of this before from Grandfather but never had I heard my mother’s side of the story before. I knew I had been lucky to be born alive. As angry as I had been at the time I knew that the points my mother had somehow assigned to my vitality had been what had stopped my health from hitting 0. What would have happened had they hit 0? It didn’t take a genius to guess and it wasn't something I wanted to test anytime soon.

“I am happy Kai was born alive but I was against it because you were simply too strong to bring him to term. On this island, without a dedicated healer to assist in the birth, the fact that Kai was born alive at all was a miracle. I told you this before but you didn’t listen and it isn’t just the child that is at risk when giving birth, it is the mother too. How could I protect you from what your body is doing to itself? You and Aleera, are all I have left to protect. I didn’t want you to die just to give Kaius a son. It was not worth it.” He defended his position emotionally.

It was strange to see my grandfather, who was normally so gruff and emotionless with my sister and me, so emotional about something he had been unable to control. Angry, yes. Particularly, when we had not listened or even entertained sometimes by our failures. But perhaps, it was precisely because he was unable to control my mother’s decisions to grow the family with my father, that he was so emotional about the outcome and the possible failures inherent in it.

“Exactly, I was too strong to deliver a system-less Kai alive.” She reiterated her point.

I could see where mother was going with this and possibly my sister could too, judging by the slow micro-expressions flickering across her face. But the point she was developing seemed to still be going over grandfather’s head. I guessed we all have our own blind spots and sometimes being able to listen to loved ones are often our largest ones. He wasn’t listening to what my mother was trying to say.

“That’s what I said. It was a miracle.” He repeated himself.

Double or nothing. He doubled down on his position unwilling or unable to see beyond what he had thought was possible. Father had caught on too or perhaps he had already been aware informed of the fact by my Mother. Perhaps, that was the impetuous for the swimming lessons he had subjected me to if he had been aware. We all awaited my Grandfathers enlightenment through my mother’s words.

Finally, “There was a miracle indeed. But, it wasn’t his survival. He wasn’t born without a system. He wasn’t born without stats. At the moment of his birth when things looked like they had begun to go wrong. I was offered the option to assign him his points. Parental override the system called it while he was still attached by his umbilical cord a part of me so to speak. Offered I believe because he was dying. I could feel him failing, faltering before he had even drawn his first breath. So, I did what the system suddenly allowed me to do, the only thing I could do, and assigned whatever he had accrued to Vitality. How he had anything to assign I don’t know. How many points he had to assign I don’t know.”

My family stared at my mother either in surprise and disbelief or in a confirmation of a revelation they had teetered around for so long now. I was so busted. But it was hardly as if they were all idiots. The writing had always been on the wall they just had different pieces of the mosaic and when they put them together it was immediately obvious. But then everything always is in hindsight.

“As I said, I don’t know how many points I assigned or how much he had in each stat. But when he was born, I was given that option. I believe that he has been able to see his stats from the very moment of his birth, if not even before then when he was within the womb.” She sighed with exhaustion as she relieved herself of her secret.

She had finally, explicitly, told him what had to be, after the accident of my rebirth in another world, my deepest, darkest secret. Was nothing sacred any longer? But, I supposed keeping secrets had not ended up well for me today. Any light shed on the matter could hopefully only improve matters. She had botched the delivery repeating herself and going around the issue more than once but it was finally clear to all the family. I was and always had been a little monster.

“But that’s . . .” he hesitated clearly wanting to way the word impossible. But with the evidence slowly mounting up against him. He found himself unable to repeat a position he knew was no longer tenable.

Grandfather finally sat down resting his head in his hands as he considered the possibility and what it might have meant for everything I had achieved and done so far. A child that had been born with an almost unhealthy amount of health who had awakened magic before his time. Had it always been there? He didn’t know about my traits yet and I was currently unable to tell them. When discussing becoming imbalanced he had never mentioned how big the ratios need to be to induce it. Was it 5 to 1 or 10 to 1. Either way, I had never managed to reach those ratios. The imbalances only happened after my traits were activated. They were clearly multipliers for the stats I had gained them from. Although by how much I didn't know.

“What difference would that make?” Father asked. “We always knew he was special. So what if he could see his status. That doesn’t necessarily mean he could understand . . .” he hesitated here.

He was probably going to say that I would not have been able to understand it, but if there was one thing that my family knew, it was that I was not stupid. And thinking about what he was going to say, even despite the unlikelihood of a newborn understanding numbers and the system when shown to them for the very first time, it was still not something my father was going to bet against me knowing. Especially seeing as the status and stats was something instinctually understood by most, even those without literacy skills, the illiterate among us. Aleera had spoken of seeing pearls to represent her stats. While I was unsure that a newborn with no concept of the world or of numbers would have been able to use to represent such things. It was clear that my father was not going to state that I couldn’t have done it.

“Well, that would explain the lack of sleep compared to other children. When he was first born.” Grandfather finally responded to my mother’s final statement. “He always did need less sleep than a newborn.” He began to talk again. Whether he was simply talking it out, out loud to himself or explaining it to the family I couldn’t tell. “Still doesn’t explain why he is smarter than average but if his Stats were already viewable from within the womb then he must have been sentient as well then too. The leveling with your skills, I always suspected that the unborn infant could hear and react to words outside the womb, but that right there is proof. You were not simply singing to yourself but you were singing to him, teaching him. That’s why you were leveling quicker than usual because he was aware because he was gaining skills, levels, experience, and levels before we had even met him. What kind of soul could support this? An old soul in a new body?” he pontificated.

That right there was awfully close to the truth. But with my crippled body, I had the best poker face, a reincarnated adult from another world could ever hope to ask for. It was not simply that my face was calm and collected. It was as if nobody was at home at all. My eyes might have been minutely opened but I was unable to change the direction they were pointing in without the risk of being left looking at the back of my eyelids for the next subjective hour. I was left looking in whatever direction my mother pointed me in. and luckily right now it was still towards the rest of my family. While this was all immensely interesting this trip through memory lane and the revelations of my mother epiphanies of my grandfather did little to change my situation. I had been hoping to hear a solution.

Aleera suddenly sat straight up. “If Mother . . . If you allocated his stats before can’t you do so now too? We all know Kai. We all know he can do more than he should be able to do. If he has had his stats since the very beginning there is no way that he hasn’t gained another level or two since then. Especially not with him purchasing the island and surviving an assassination and all. He should have free points to spare. Couldn’t you put them into his physical stats to balance his body? His dexterity if that is where the problem seems to lie.” She asked putting forth a solution.

I felt a moment of glee. I was sitting on at least 30 free points. If all of that was added to my dexterity it would take me up to 64 surely that would take my body up to speed. Allow my brain and body to reconnect. Or at least connect better than it was currently doing so. Unfortunately, my moment of hope was dashed quickly.

“That only ever happened once. It hasn’t happened since and it is something I, your father, or grandfather, have never heard of happening at all.” She said sadly.

I gave up on listening to the conversation surrounding me, seeing as no solution was immediately forthcoming, I settled back into my mind fortress. It had been a home away from home for so long now. I had well and truly messed up my progression this time. As I stopped trying to slow everything down my subjective time sped up and I had time to sense everything around me. This would probably do wonders for leveling up any skills that relied on my senses with so much more time to analyse them. There were bound to be plenty of ways in which I could take advantage of this. But having spent months in isolation I was not keen to start that again. Although I had not known my family long I had also known them all of my life. I loved them and missed them. There had to be a way to work this one out. Crippled, I may be, in body but not in mind. The question was what could I do with my mind and the answer . . . a lot.