My mother was sick in bed, and my father was trying to take care of her and prepare study materials for me. That meant that I had the entire day to myself.

What would I do?

Practice magic of course. Dust flew through the air and my stone ball flew around the puffer’s head, annoying it. It was glorious.

Earth creation: level 1. Experience 15%.

Earth manipulation: level 1. Experience 3%

Meditation: level 1. Experience 4%

Mark of the Crijik: level. 1 experience 2.3%

My earth manipulation and creation skills had grown the most. The earth creation benefitted from my higher mana pool, and I had my stone to practice earth manipulation.

Speaking of my stone. It had returned to normal after cracking apart last night. It flew through the air and I brought it close to me. I’d thought it was because the stone was actually a liquid, but that wasn’t the case. I tapped it.

It was rock solid.

I shrugged. A mystery that could be solved later. Earth manipulation didn’t use up any mana. My theory was that I was only connecting with mana and the stone, and no mana was used during the process. That left more mana for my earth creation.

Every time my mana ran low, I would meditate to recharge. I felt a twitch in my stomach and stopped creating dirt.

[Mana: 30/250]

I had started feeling the amount of mana I had. It wasn’t as obvious as the pain that came when it was depleted, but low mana led to other consequences. A grumbling stomach, a feeling of dryness in my skin, and a weakness in my bones. They were small, and if I wasn’t looking for them then I wouldn’t notice them.

I could also feel the lack of mana itself, slightly. I was still working on it. It was like feeling hunger, it was a natural sensation that was just out of reach of my understanding.

I didn’t let my mana deplete fully.

The Mark of the Crijik was the only skill I hadn’t actively worked on. The pain made me hesitate every time I was close to running out of mana.

What if I was doing permanent damage to myself?

I didn’t know enough about the phenomenon, and mana. Now I could ask Indra about it. I’d resolved not to activate the Mark until I found out more about running out of mana.

After all, I knew what would happen if I ran out of health. I might be doing something equally as bad but with mana.

A shadow passed over me, and I felt something grabbing onto me. Grabbing onto the stone. The puffer held it in its talons, and then dropped it next to me. It stared at me and clacked its beak. The message was clear.

It was telling me ‘Stop hitting me with your damn ball’.

I moved the stone out of the puffer’s talons and dropped it into my hands. The puffer nodded its head at me, and then squawked loudly as it was patted on the side by a patch of dirt.

I’d also been experimenting with how much earth I could control at once. The answer was not much. I don’t know why it was different at the wall, but at home I could only control a ball of dirt the size of my fist. My baby fist. This was the case even if I was controlling my stone ball, which acted independently from any other substance I was controlling.

When I wasn’t controlling the stone ball my ability to control dirt didn’t increase. That meant I had to control the stone ball and a patch of dirt to reach my limit. Or maybe my limit was just the patch of dirt, and the stone wasn’t included.

More experiments to conduct, and more questions to ask Indra.

I lay on my back with the puffer watching over me. The bird was growing on me. At first, I was annoyed that it had stolen my dirt. I’d also had some bias against it because it had terrified me the first time I’d seen it, but it was just a regular bird, if a bit intelligent. It would periodically take dirt from the pile around me and build its nest. Sometimes it would fly out the door on its own and not return for the entire day.

My parents knew to let it in when it started tapping its talons on the ceiling. The first time it happened they’d thought it was raining.

I took a deep breath and entered my meditative state. It couldn’t replace sleep, but it calmed my mind, so I was trying to meditate every night before I went to sleep.

The light of the morning sun woke me up. It’s bright orange glow filled my room.

Bright orange?

“Morning, champ.” My father greeted me cheerfully.

He was setting up papers and had placed the inscriber cube onto the stones my parents had moved into my room. He tried to shoo the bird off its stone and failed.

“It looks like I’ll be teaching two of you today.” The puffer refused to budge from its nest, staring at the inscriber and father with interest.

My father took a while to get ready, and I reached towards the magical cube. It was the most interesting thing in the room. My father saw me and moved it out of my reach.

“The inscriber.” My dad slapped the top of the machine. “You won’t be using this. It’s a crutch, and also, I need it for work. Instead, you’ll be doing it the old-fashioned way.”

He waved a piece of paper in the air.

“Once you can write, this will be your best friend. Now, normally we would be going through writing exercises several hours a day. But because you can't write, we’re gonna have to do this a little differently.” He put the paper aside. “Instead, I’m going to explain what inscribing is, why we do it, and anything else that comes to mind.”

I sat up straight and faced my father. I was ready. He nodded and moved towards the walls where he had placed the symbols inscribed on paper.

“Simply put, inscribing is the process of placing, writing, or etching symbols into physical materials.” My father checked to see that I wasn’t bored. I gave him a grin and clapped my hands together. “Good. Now, you’ll find that many people equate- I mean, they think, that inscribing has to involve magic and mana. This isn’t true, and this belief can be hurtful when it comes to unlocking inscribing skills. Many inscribers fail because they can’t separate the concepts of magic and symbols.”

It was like earth manipulation. There was a difference between forcibly controlling the earth with your mind and accepting it as a part of you.

“That leads me to symbols. The hardest part of any inscribers job, and the most crucial, is understanding what symbols are.” My dad frowned. “I can’t make this easy. So, I’m going to beat your head with it over and over again until you understand it.”

Totally understandable.

“A symbol is a conduit between concept and reality that takes the form of a language.”

I understood none of that.

“You’re not supposed to.” He’d read my expression. “What my father used to tell me is that symbols make things happen. What happens is based on the symbol you use.”

My father ran a hand over the symbols displayed on my wall. “It’s easy to think that we’ve discovered every symbol possible. After all, that’s how our language works. You don’t go discovering letters to the alphabet. They’re already there.” My father’s eyes widened. “Actually, do you know what an alphabet is?”

I nodded. It was a reasonable question. Nobody had told me about the alphabet yet. Or anything else.

“Good, good.” My father was still trying to work out how much I knew. “Well, symbols don’t work like a traditional language. We haven’t discovered all of them, and others have been lost over time. Symbols manifest when a concept is created or changes. They transform and branch out because we are always thinking of new things. A symbol represents a concept, and if there are two different ways of thinking about a concept, then there are two different ways of inscribing the symbol for it.”

“That means that symbol variations are infinite.” My father crossed his arms. “This is the second obstacle that any good scriber has to cross, accepting that they won’t know all the symbols in existence.”

The thought had crossed my mind when he mentioned it. It annoyed me to not be able to know everything about a subject. My father brought out a pen and drew a symbol on an empty paper.

“It’s simple to draw a symbol. Any layman can do it. The trick is combining them to create an item with workable effects.” My father showed me the lone symbol, the one for ‘sun’.

Then he added a few extra lines and passed the paper to me. “Take a good look here. How many symbols are there on this paper?”

I examined it carefully. The sun symbol was still there, but the new lines didn’t seem to form symbols on their own. They were separate lines that sort of looked like waves.

“The answer is two.” My father tapped the wavy lines. “The second symbol doesn’t have a set meaning. Or rather, its meaning is to connect two other symbols together.” He added a third symbol to the paper. “This is the symbol for ash, rebirth, and beginnings.”

“We have a sun symbol, a connecting symbol, and the symbol for Ash. Press your hand against the paper.”

My father passed the paper to me, and I placed my hand on it.

[Would you like to activate this item?]

The system message popped up in my face and I let go of the paper in surprise. My father chuckled and I blushed. I slammed my hand down on the paper and willed the acceptance. It worked.

The paper glowed bright and then vanished. A small thin layer of ash floated in the air where the paper had been, and then it fell over my lap.

A real magic item. My eyes sparkled. My dad had created it in seconds.

“That’s a simple one. The really complicated ones take days, weeks, and I know a scriber who worked on a suit of armour for years. Also, if you get a single line wrong then the entire thing won’t work. You can’t erase a mistake from cut metal. That’s why we spend years learning how to perfectly draw the symbols.”

“It’s time to tell you what a scriber actually does.” My father brought the inscriber cube forward. “I’ll begin by showing you our greatest tool. The inscriber. This makes the process a lot easier.”

I’d seen two of these while in this world. The one that my father has and the one in Hendral’s engineering shop. My father tinkered with the machine and the glowing stopped. Without the mana it looked like an ordinary metal box with symbols on it.

“This is not an ordinary inscriber. For one thing, we don’t need mana to operate it. Normal inscribers do require mana.” My father fiddled with it and it started glowing again. “You will only find three others like this one in the entire country. And all of them belong to my birth family.”

I stared at it curiously. Nothing about the box screamed magic. But I had seen it accomplish amazing things.

“Try to use it.”

I put my hand out of the cot and touched the box. Nothing happened.

“Normally, this kind of machine relies on mana to run. What makes our inscribers special is that they do not rely on mana, but on our bloodline. Even then, it will take years of effort to learn the techniques needed to use it. This is why it hasn’t been stolen from us… among other reasons.”

My father grinned, laughing at his own private joke. I didn’t get it.

“The reason my family created this inscriber with these kinds of safety precautions is because of what our scribers do. Our family is different from the usual scriber family. We have a very diverse field of operation. But when it comes to what we’re most famous for, well…”

“… we win wars.”