1 week.

My dad showed me how to add notes into the system today. A beginner’s introduction to the system library feature. The system is a lot more helpful now that I’ve been learning how to use it. I appreciate the privacy it gives me. The restrictions for notes are tough. I can’t hide symbols here or write more than a couple of pages of meaningful information per day.

I’m going to start keeping a diary.

Self-imposed training wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. Babies get a lot of free time and if they’re playing with a toy nobody bothers them. I would shove my hand inside the inventory box and pretend to get it stuck, and fire dirt into it while my co-workers weren’t looking.

I had used the Mark seven times. It had refreshed after the first day, and this repeated in a twenty-four-hour cycle. The pain hadn’t gotten easier to handle.

At this rate I would reach Gerial in no time.

I wonder how that kid is doing.

1 month.

[You have unlocked the skill: Pain Tolerance]

I got the pain tolerance skill today. It doesn’t stop the pain, but it does help me tolerate it. I’d wondered why it had happened now, instead of when I’d first started using the Mark. There was a simple explanation.

The pain was getting worse with each use of the Mark.

The mana swam beside me, comforting me. I could handle a little pain.

1 month, 1 week.

It doesn’t come up much when you’re a baby, but I was only now realising that there are seven days to the week.

In my defence it hadn’t mattered to me until now.

Artus, Mehta, Vita, Ength, Inné, Crijik, Fue.

One day for each of the divines.

Hearing the word ‘Crijik’ coming out my dad’s mouth had given me a shock. I thought he’d discovered my secret. He hadn’t. Nobody worked on Fue and Crijik. Except scribers. Lucky us.

I’m wondering if I should tell him about the Mark. He wouldn’t force me to reveal it to the world. He’d accept it and help me.

I know he would.

1 month, 2 weeks.

[Meditation has reached rank 2]

How many mistakes had my fear driven me to make?

I didn’t look back often on the past, but today I’d seen a shadow in the tree outside our house. It was a bird. I’d thought about the puffer a lot. I hadn’t seen it since I’d told it to leave the house.

I regretted that.

I’d made that decision out of fear. I’d discovered I was going to die, again, and that information had hit me harder than I would admit. It was only budding, but I had lost a friendship that day.

That memory was my reminder that I didn’t do everything right. I made mistakes, and those mistakes had consequences.

A shadow fell over me as I looked at the tree.

It was my mum.

“Sweety.”

She’d noticed the bird had gone. How could she not. My dad hadn’t said anything, and neither had she. I thought she was going to now, but instead she sat beside me, a mother and son sitting in the dirt.

“It’s out of your hands now.” She spoke. “You’ve made a mistake, but you’re not the one that decides if that mistake is ready to be fixed.”

We’d sat there that day and talked. It had taken her a while to accept I could talk, and that I was growing faster than I should be.

My dad and the magicians were the exceptions it seems. Fighting giant monsters and intercepting war symbols made an intelligent baby a footnote for the day’s work.

2 months, 1 week.

A twig was on my lawn, a delicate symbol carved into it, and the marks of a seven-taloned bird’s foot was pressed into the dirt.

2 months, 2 weeks.

[Earth Manipulation has reached rank 2] [Earth Creation has reached rank 3]

My voice suddenly cut out mid-conversation. I was happily chatting with Indra when I felt the shift in the mana around me. Some of it had disappeared.

Gerial had broken off his spell.

Indra laughed his head off as I tried to figure out how to talk properly. I could do it, my body was physically capable of it now, but I just wasn’t used to it.

We didn’t get much of the lesson done after that.

3 months, 3 weeks.

[Meditation has reached rank 3]

I was growing more than the average baby. It wasn’t just my skill levels that had increased, my body had grown too.

I looked like a two-year-old now.

There was one benefit. Nobody questioned the fact that I could talk. Ordinary people in the city found it a bit strange, but that was chalked down to me being slightly more intelligent than other toddlers.

Except I’m still technically a baby.

What goal was the Mark building my body towards?

If I kept growing, then at this rate I’d be an old man by my teens and be dead by the time I hit twenty five. That’d be a real shock to my plans of survival.

Another question sat in the back of my mind. If I have the mind of an adult, the body of a toddler, and the age of a baby, what does that make me?

4 months, 2 weeks.

[Mark of the Crijik has reached rank 2] [Earth Manipulation has reached rank 3] [Earth Creation has reached rank 4]

Jackson finally let Indra reveal to me the secret of unlocking the metal element. I’d been looking forward to this since I’d unlocked earth creation.

It wouldn’t be easy to unlock.

First, I had to get my earth creation to rank five, and my earth manipulation to rank five as well. Then I would be able to begin trying to communicate with magic and seeing if I could attune to metal.

This wasn’t common knowledge, but it wasn’t rare either among the different organisations around the country.

The problem was that more than hard work was needed to attune to the metal element. Talent, and luck, both played strong parts. Magic was a friend, but you couldn’t force it to give you what you wanted.

I would have to discover the metal element by myself. Only then would magic aid me.

It helped you if you helped yourself.

5 months, 4 weeks.

[Mana Manipulation has reached rank 2] [Meditation has reached rank 4] [Earth Creation has reached rank 5]

Earth Creation(V): Level 1, experience 0.01%

I did it!

I couldn’t believe my eyes. Months of training and mountains of dirt and rocks and stones cascading into the inventory had finally paid off.

Forget the other elements. Even if I learnt them, I’d never be able to train that much again in my life. It was nonstop usage of my skill every day and night. I woke up and sometimes I had sleep cast into the inventory, which is like sleep walking but for spells.

My earth manipulation still had a way to go. Every time I manipulated the earth, I gained experience in mana manipulation as well, but there was an incongruence between the two that I had yet to figure out. Mana manipulation was a lot harder to level.

It was okay, the magic was helping me. I didn’t need to control it, I just needed to accept it.

Soon, I would connect and attune to the metal element.

6 months, 2 weeks.

[Mana Sense has reached rank 2] [Earth Manipulation has reached rank 4]

An interesting incident happened today.

I’d been staying away from regent creation at work. I was allowed to study basic symbols and memorise them, but my dad didn’t want… that thing… seeing our plans.

If I knew what my dad was making, then it would know too.

My knowledge on how to use symbols was at a minimum. I could activate regents with my mana but identifying what was a regent and what wasn’t was tough if it wasn’t glowing with magic. Or being used. If it was being used, I could sense the mana inside it. When a regent wasn’t being used it was manaless.

A lot more regents were hidden than I’d thought.

My tree was one of them.

I’d been thinking of the puffer today as well. I’d thought I’d been seeing it for months, hiding every now and then. I think it followed me into the city whenever we went shopping.

I left out food beneath the tree every day now. Training was amazing, but it was also lonely.

I could use a friend. There were no intelligent toddlers I could hang out with. Gerial was guarded like a hawk, and I didn’t even know where William lived. Probably not in this country.

I refused to hang out with other babies. Did you know the average baby is super annoying?

That brings me to the tree.

Today, I leaned against the tree. My earth manipulation was on the verge of breaking through to rank five, and I would finally be able to try and attune to the metal element.

It wouldn’t be easy. To even try you needed to be attuned to either earth or nature. Advanced elements weren’t the same as basic ones, they were picky.

I’d put all of my effort into my earth manipulation, and I’d decided to infuse the dirt around me with mana. I got it everywhere, and I tried to make it as deep and powerful as I could.

The tree had lit up like the sun.

The symbols had been invisible to my eyes, tiny intricate lines delicately scratched into the bark. Hundreds of them. They connected in ways I couldn’t fathom, the effort of months of work.

An orange light expanded across the tree and the house, glowing bright and then turning transparent. I’d seen this phenomenon before. It was a shield.

I smiled.

I would leave bigger portions of food from now on.

7 months, 1 week.

[Earth Manipulation has reached rank 5]

Are magic and mana one and the same? Or are they two that share one mind?

It was impossible to find an answer that sated my curiosity. I’d asked Indra, and he’d asked me how my metal attunement was going.

Talk about bringing a gun to a knife fight.

No, I was not procrastinating. I wanted to learn more about my friend. This has nothing to do with my lack of progress.

Some magicians spent their entire lives searching for the metal element without success. A few months was nothing.

Now, time to try and create a rock carving of myself from a single earth creation casting. Because I’m not procrastinating, I’m practicing my skill.

10 months, 1 week.

[Mana Manipulation has reached rank 3] [Mana Sense has reached rank 3]

There were so many changes that I’d experienced, and so much I’d had to forgo. My life had centred around my house, and the Zodiac compound. I hadn’t even explored my neighbourhood.

Each day I was in and out of the house and work, training nonstop and learning symbols. Magic guided me, and my lack of social life helped my solitude, but I did want to go out.

My dad took another drop of blood from my fingertip, leaving with it and adding it to what I assumed was a tank of my blood floating around somewhere.

I hadn’t gone out, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t experiencing new things. I was the most developed baby I’d ever seen. I looked five years old. There was also something strange.

I didn’t have purple eyes.

Gerial had said that every Marked one took on the characteristics of the divine one that granted them the Mark. In our case that change would be purple eyes.

I’d assumed that the purple would come with more uses of the Mark, but there was nothing. I had used the Mark almost as much as Gerial by now.

What did it mean?

I didn’t know, but I’d ask. We’d be seeing each other soon, in less than a month in fact. I wondered how he’d react to my use of the Mark, and my growth.

I had used the Mark one hundred and sixty times. My mana pool increase from that portion of the skill was eight thousand.

Eight thousand mana.

Then there was the intelligence boost. I’d been so grateful that the intelligence boost didn’t ravage my brain with pain. I don’t think I could have handled that. Instead, it didn’t feel like anything. It gave me a single intelligence point for each golden ball, and the balls appeared randomly. There was roughly one for every three uses of the Mark.

I wasn’t sure what triggered them.

I received a total of fifty intelligence points from them. Leaving me with sixty five intelligence. My dad had been right, I didn’t feel any different. I would have to test the impact it had on me.

[Mana: 8650/8650]

I’d almost reached Gerial, and he’d been seven years old. It was the difference between fleeing the Mark and embracing it.

I hadn’t used the Mark as much as I’d planned to. That wasn’t by choice. There was a major problem with using the Mark once I hit the hundredth time. I couldn’t activate all of the conditions as quickly as I could before.

There were three conditions for activating my mark.

One: I could only activate it once in a twenty-four-hour cycle.

Two: I had to run out of mana to activate it.

Three: I had to have regenerated 75% of my maximum mana pool at least once from one activation to the next.

You would think that with all the magic training I would have trouble regenerating my mana. It was the opposite. Running out of mana was proving to be my toughest obstacle.

I had no spells that used that much mana, and my meditation leveling had stalled because I couldn’t risk regenerating my mana too quickly. At this rate I wouldn’t be able to activate the Mark for another month.

I would have to ask Gerial about it when I saw him.

11 months, 1 week.

I used magic to remove the dirt and stone from my body. Today was a special day and I didn’t want to embarrass my dad in front of the nobles. I took a final look at the statue garden I had created in my room.

A sword, a knight, a magician, a bird, and an eye. Each was created using a single piece of stone. I was getting better at creating earth that came out with the shapes I wanted, and my earth manipulation helped me shape the finer details.

I raised them into the air and gently nudged them into my inventory. It still gave me a headache every time I saw the huge objects disappear into the tiny box.

I had outgrown the cot, and in its place was a dirt bed.

I know, I know. I could have finally moved away from the dirt life. The truth was that I liked it now. The dirt wasn’t just dirt, it was a friend. It housed mana and brought me comfort.

There was a letter next to my bed. I’d pulled it out of its hiding place that I’d kept it in since my dad had received it.

‘You have been cordially invited to the birthday of Young Master William Wilhelm at…’

My dad came into my room and brought with him a tiny suit. It was adorable.

It was fit for the body of a five-year-old.

I took a deep breath. I’d gone through a lot of changes these past few months, and now for the first time I was going to reveal myself to the world.

It was time to party.