I woke up early as I usually do and spent the next few minutes emptying out my mana pool before going doing the same to half my stamina and then continuing to make progress on my next big challenge: walking.

It’s far too often that I find just how many things I had taken for granted in my past life at the age of 24, but not having the muscle memory to walk makes learning to walk similar to walking drunk out of your mind without the added inebriation stopping you from noticing you just about kiss the floor every few steps.

My frustrating exercises come to a close as my mother comes to get me ready telling me that my brother has left home and that we(and by we I mean her while I am put somewhere in her line of sight) can begin preparing for the party we are having for him tonight.

As I am sat at the table working on my drawing as I found that to be the best way to get my Dexterity to increase and regain a few of my skills in design I start to smell the food cooking not 5 feet from me and it smells better than anything else I have had in the past 3 years.

“What’s that?” I ask trying as hard as I can to be cute in the hopes that she will answer me in detail instead of the bland answer ”just food". "It smells so good!”.

“That is meat from a monster that was Lvl 20 according to the merchant I bought it from.” My mother answers like its nothing.

“M-M-Monster?” I ask freaking out on the inside that there are monsters in this world, forgetting entirely that a polar bear would have been a monster to people during the middle ages.

“Yes silly, unlike humans all animals that level past level 19 gain access to mana and start to form a mana core inside them. That mana circulating their body makes them stronger and in most cases taste much better and be more nutritious.” My sister actually answers me, with a tone of voice that makes it clear that she had asked the same question before mother got me from my room and probably many others and is now making it seem like she is the sage of all knowledge.

This information takes over my mind as I start thinking about all sorts of high level creatures and how they could evolve like that. With the information of my past life as well as the bounty of fiction I have read in my teens about fantasy stories I start to wonder about what their existence could mean for this world.

Are humans not the dominant species on this planet? Does killing them grant a lot of experience? Can they be tamed or are they always aggressive? Can they learn skills just like we can?

“Wow! That looks really good! "Judy exclaims as she is looking at the paper I am drawing on. Without realizing it as my mind was wondering about all the possibilities of monsters, the drawings which I had purposely made look like child scribbles before now had started to look a lot more like the designs I was doing for my architecture courses. Its not too much since it started only in the middle of the drawing but enough to get my mother to look over and look at me surprised.

“Did you get the Drawing skill?” She kindly asks me. Trying to hide her excitement.

“Drawing but he’s only 2. I only got that skill Last year when I was 6” My sister sounds equally impressed and jealous.

“Y-Yes.”I stutter knowing I might just have blown my cover, that combined with my new knowledge of the existence of monsters is praying that normal kids can gain skills early and this doesn’t mark me as a changeling or something to burst at the stake.

“Congratulations darling, you’ll do well to level it up as much as you can before you’re 15 after that it will stop giving you experience” My mother says while not only calming me down about my sudden slip-up and also making me wonder what she means only up until I turn 15.

My wondering is cut short by my father entering the house and announcing” He’s on his way, is everything ready?”

“Yes the stew only has a few more minutes until it is ready, did you finish his sword?”

“Yeah it’s right here, I hope he’ll like it.”

My brother entered the house to find our family wishing him a happy birthday. He doesn’t seem surprised at all, telling me that he knew what our parents were planning but seems very happy regardless of it being a successful surprise or not.

After all the well wishing and idle conversation is over, as my mother is going to set the table my father pulls Tom aside and starts questioning him.

“So did you make up your mind about what you wanted to do?”

“Yeah, I talked with Vex and he said I can tag along with them to get to Lessis when he leaves.”

This was all news to me. Where was Lessis, who is this Vex and why is my brother leaving?. As my mind is running 100 miles a minute my dad’s next question fills up a few of the holes I had.

“You’re sure you want to be a guard? If you changed your mind about becoming a blacksmith I can train you myself”

“Yes, dad, I’m sure. We both know I have been helping out and even with you trying to teach me in the past I still don’t have any skills for the hammer much less blacksmithing.” He says like it was the 50th times they had the same conversation, which considering he was planning on leaving the village it probably was." You don’t have to worry and Lessis is less than two weeks travel on a merchant caravan it's not like I’m planning on going to the capital to become a mage.”

A smirk forming upon his lips as he is looking at my sister who was drawing closer to eavesdrop on the pair. A bit of a sore spot for her as we’d all been made well aware in the past year that while my sister finds magic to be the best thing there is, she has yet to gain any mana skills. Mother says that it's very rare only 1 in 50 people is blessed with mana and that is a skewed statistic as most of them are nobles, the chances of a villager having access to mana is more like 1 in 500.

My sister seems upset at hearing that but I figured that both my parents and my brother have been trying to gently let her down, as she only has 3 more years herself before she has to make the choice of what path she wants to travel down.