“Did we break him?” [Violet]

“Can’t tell. New strangers must be big shock to him.” [Blue]

“Well, other than the adults, he doesn’t make much effort in getting close to other people, so I guess it’s difficult for him to really know how to deal with this. Actually, wasn’t he bullied at this age in the previous world, too? And from what I’ve seen, not much of that had changed with his new classmates.” [Violet]

“No friends on Earth. No friends on Manara. All hope is lost.” [Blue]

“All right, all right, settle down, you two, or we might just make history of giving the youngest boy alive a heart attack.” [Green]

I swear, I really felt like a kid getting excited seeing magic for the first time again as I marveled at the 3 fairies hovering in front of me. I was so dumbstruck that I had no idea what kind of face I was making.

“You’re all … so cute.” That was the most I could get out of my mouth under those circumstances.

“Aww, why thank you, Soar. We prettied ourselves up for this fateful meeting, you know,” the violet-clad fairy said before giving a flirtatious wink in my direction. On closer inspection, despite her small size, she had the most curves out of the three of them. Her bust and bum looked like they could burst out of her dress containing it all at any given moment. With her long, wavy, violet-black, glittery locks that stretch past her shoulders, if she were human-sized, she’d fit right into a jazz club or a high-class bar.

“Cute, Soar says … cute. Hehehe …” The blue-clad one was the ‘smallest’ of the three. Very lithe in figure with barely a chest and butt to stand out with, but it had a charm that made you want to hold her in your arms if she were human-sized. With her long, straight, glittery navy-blue hair that went down to her lower back, not even hindering the wings that kept her afloat, she had a bit of a broody, yet charming appearance. If it weren’t for the creepy stalker-like giggle and look in her eye that wasn’t covered by her uneven bangs, she’d have a mysterious air that guys wouldn’t keep their gaze off of.

“Okay, girls, we must make haste. We need to make that contract.”

As soon as the green-dressed fairy said that, I was snapped back into reality. “W-Wait! Hold on! I still don’t know why I’m being offered this so soon! Or how to make a contract!”

“Isn’t it obvious?” the green fairy asked. “From how early you started casting magic, do you know how long one would take to be able to do something that advanced without us providing assistance? Calling you a prodigy would be an understatement with these circumstances.”

“With that, we and the Great Mother figured you were more than ready now to take the next step into mastering the magic in this world before most others,” the violet one added.

“Two Fathers butted heads at first. Agree or disagree, majority ruled for former. Truth, we want to make contract now. Would have done it sooner if we could. Could not wait any longer,” the blue one admitted with awkward phrasing.

“As for how making the contract works is really easy to do and would take almost no time at all. That is, of course, if you want to make a contract with us,” the green one said before she and the others deflated.

“No no no! I do! I would love to form a contract with you all! Tell me what it is I need to do to make this happen!” I still had some reservations but those were the least of my worries at the moment.

“Wonderful! Let’s get started, then! First, straighten up and close your eyes. Good! Now, hold that pose …”

I was about to ask what they were doing before I felt a strange sensation on both my cheeks and forehead while I could hear all of their wings beating very close. I opened my eyes and saw all of them taking each spot with their faces pressing on them.

I’ll admit, I had never played with the idea of 3 tiny and cute girls kissing me at the same time ever happening, even in my most fantastic of fantasies. They may not have been on the lips, but compared to the occasions that Mom would shower me with kisses, my face heated up from the kind of embarrassment I thought I wouldn’t have anymore with my mental age.

After they savored it long enough, they all pulled back with a peck.

“And with that, our contract is sealed! Now, we just need to be given our names!” the violet one exclaimed.

“Huh? A-Ah, come to think of it, I did hear about that in class … please give me a moment.” I was still taking in the fact that I got kissed in a unique fashion to answer her. I had to remind myself that was only for the contract and wondered if that should count as my first kiss.

Something to point out first, but like the number of elements that exist in magic, there are 6 different types of fairies that specialize in each one. I had never named anything other than my video-game avatars before so I didn’t really know where to begin other than knowing that much about Manara’s magic.

That said, I broke each of their names down like this: the Green Wind Fairy, Breezy; the Blue Water Fairy, Mist; and finally the Violet Darkness Fairy, Shadina.

That all took me 20 minutes to come up with their names, and it looked like I got it done right as it was time for breakfast when Mom called for me. From there, the fairies made a quick decision of hiding out of sight for the time being. I knew what they were trying to do and I agreed, so I went downstairs and ate breakfast with Mom, Dad, Dew, and Tyra like I would every day. When I looked at the fairies together on the table, though, something had hit me that I didn’t even notice until then. Out of the two, Tyra was distinguishably bigger than Dew, and my new fairies looked to be around the same size as the latter. I would ask Dad why that was later on.

I ate my breakfast quickly and told my parents I would be playing outside that day, so I quickly cleaned and dressed up before I left the house and my new fairies met me outside. We decided to move to a more distant location that was away from the town, but not so far that I would leave its boundaries. As we moved, I noticed the world around me seemed a lot more colorful and vibrant than before, especially being able to see fairies flying about clear as day. They were either doing their own thing or escorting their Chaperones as they went about their lives.

I felt like I was in a new magical world all over again. A pair of rose-colored glasses on top of another one I was already wearing.

Finally, when we got to a secluded spot, we continued where we left off while I sat on a rock, starting with what I had noticed since I left the house.

“Ah~, that could be a gift of yours at work,” Shadina answered. “Once a contract is made, its magical effects are immediately effective, starting with the gifts you were born with. Forming a contract with 3 fairies at once would certainly increase your magical prowess by leaps and bounds.”

Gifts … they were what the Great Mother and Two Fathers gave people in the time of birth—or in my case, my soul before it was implanted in a baby. Everyone has at least one, and it was said that not even they, the ‘gifters,’ know what it was when we were born. Some were granted to them once they met certain conditions, including making a contract with a fairy. Some may be the same or have similar effects that were expected in whatever occupation one chooses, others were rare and unheard of, they would even ‘evolve’ after much time and effort training to wield them. You may call them the ‘skills’ or ‘abilities’ you might see from RPG games, but in this world, they were what helped a person live while going about their occupations, whether in their daily lives in towns or cities, or in a heat of battle with monsters on the field. Either way, everyone is born with at least one, but some may never find out what their gift is until they make a contract with a fairy. There were services to help those who haven’t done so in order to find some direction in life, though.

“And since I made a contract with you guys, that means I could see what my gift is now, right?” I asked.

“Correct, as well as many other things. Now, sit tight, and let us take care of that.”

After I followed Breezy’s instruction, she and the other 2 fairies started circling around me at increasing speeds until they all became blurs of light. A pillar of sparkling glitter rained down on me before they disappeared on contact with my body or the ground. They then shot up and cross over each other like one would see at an airshow before a bright metal-like card appeared from the clash of lights. It slowly hovered down that I lightly caught in my hands before I read what was on it.

[Name: Soar Osmis

Level (LV): 1

Aptitude: S

Fairies: Breezy LV 1, Mist LV 1, Shadina LV 1

Affinities: WIND*, WATER*, DARKNESS*

Strength (STR): G-

Intelligence (INT): S+

Vitality (VIT): G-

Endurance (END): E-

Dexterity (DEX): D-

Agility (AGI): G

Magic (MAG): C

Gifts: Wizard > Sage]

After I read it all, I felt a sort of insight was implanted in my mind that gave me a general understanding of what my gifts were and how to use them.

To start off, the Wizard gift. It gave me the knowledge and intelligence I needed to learn and understand the world around me while granting the ability to cast magic with a high aptitude. That was actually the reason why I was able to understand people when I was first born even though they didn’t speak English and how Ms. Renne saw my aptitude for magic as ‘S-Rank.’ Was it also how I was able to retain my memories in my previous life? I don’t know, but I know that I was very fortunate to be granted such a gift at birth.

Then, there was the Sage gift, which evolved from the Wizard. Not only did Sage heightened the effects of its previous form, but I was granted the ability to perceive mana in all things of my surroundings. I recalled suddenly being able to see that 1 year after I was reincarnated in Manara, so this evolution from Wizard to Sage was the cause of that change.

Why that change happened when I did nothing but eat, sleep, and poop from birth to then, aside from conditioning my baby body along the way, I had to think, but then I remembered how I died in my previous life.

I had just turned 39 years old that day, well past the benchmark of becoming a ‘wizard’ and one more step away to become a ‘sage.’ Both of those concepts were likely made as jokes somewhere on the internet, but apparently, they played a bigger role in how I gained these gifts in Manara than I thought.

I was going through my 5th year in Manara as Soar Osmis, which meant my ‘soul,’ the one thing where my memories in my past life came from, was 44 years old then.

Does this mean … if I wait another 6 years, then my Sage gift would evolve into Great Sage? I thought.

On Earth, there was a saying that turning 50 while still having no sex would grant you the title as a ‘great sage.’ There might have been different variations of what happened after reaching ‘sage,’ but I thought settling with ‘great sage’ at 50 would be best.

After I came to that conclusion while talking with the fairies, I slapped my cheeks and pumped my fists in a ‘guts’ pose. “Okay! I’ve been at it for this long and I’m still considered young with this body, why shouldn’t I try to take it a step further?” I asked before turning to the fairies hovering around me. “How about it, ladies? Would you help me in learning to become the greatest Chaperone I can be as a Great Sage?”

““Yeah!””

And so, though it would be a little longer before I could meet someone I could love—not that I would likely find it in a couple of years from back then—I resolved into bettering myself in magic.

~~

Of course, there was the matter of defending myself should something go wrong with my magic while keeping my body conditioned. I definitely needed to get stronger with how low in rank most of my stats were, which my fairies explained to me as they start from the bottom with H, then G, F, E, D, C, B, A, and finally S at the very top. The (+)’s and (-)’s would mark where I’d be in that specified rank and how close would I be to the next step up, while those not marked with either meaning I was at the middle.

So, I would go to Dad’s own ‘classes’ after school some days to learn fighting techniques, some of the monsters in this world and how to deal with them, and skills to know in the field as a hunter. While he tried to be fair with everyone who participated, it was plain to see how happy he was to teach me these things. Hell, even on his days off, he’d take me a little away from the town—after letting Mom know where we were going, of course—so I would learn more about the arts of battle first-hand. I picked them all up rather quickly, despite some hesitations I experienced at first like cutting open a deer, for example, but even then, Dad couldn’t have expressed his pride for me enough.

In fact, I was doing so well in his training that he upped the difficulty to crazy heights. If I didn’t know any better, that ‘proud smile’ of his could’ve been placed on a demon’s face and it wouldn’t change much on how I was perceived. On the bright side, under some drastic measures and with the help of my fairies, I learned to speed up my repairs from muscle damage with recovery magic as well as how I can control my mana to strengthen my body, but for the sake of improving myself, I took the harder way of getting stronger while I actively trained.

Aside from the cruelty in his training, I was having a lot of fun having these father-son moments with him, too. I didn’t remember having these moments with my old dad on Earth, if I had any memories of that time, anyway.

Of course, when I was capable enough, I not only helped Mom with the house chores and even cooking like a good son, I took the liberty of helping out the neighbors and other townsfolk. I wanted to change how I was with people in my previous life while making an attempt to create some genuine friendships and relationships, so I thought being more proactive and lending a helping hand when I had the chance would better me that way. I also took those chances to work on increasing my mana capacity, control, and efficiency by constantly running mana throughout the body over the course of my days while taking note of how it affected the functions of different areas accordingly.

I still wouldn’t get close to the kids, though. Seeing how noisy and immature they all were with each other when I wasn’t in the picture, aside from the one exception I mentioned a while back, I felt I was getting dumber just being near them, and it was suffocating. My new Companions kept me enough company when I was lonely by talking with them and learning more about magic. I also got to know each of them pretty well on a personal level.

I had to keep my contract with 3 fairies along with using my magic a secret all the while so I wouldn’t attract the wrong attention for various reasons. It wasn’t like I didn’t know how to do everything on my own without their assistance since Earth never had magic in the first place, so while I took a break training my mana on some occasions so I wouldn’t learn to depend on it too much, I had gone through most things with no problems. I had then started going outside of the town at one point to better my magic and fighting skills by hunting animals and lower-tier monsters on my own in secret. Though I was sacrificing a few hours of sleep a day, it was worth getting the experience (EXP) needed to level myself up as well as my Companions while growing stronger. I had soon made a routine of hunting a set number of animals and monsters a day. As I got better, I ventured further away from town and took out more of them before repeating the process.

Time continued on like that while I practiced pretty much everything in secret. Aside from getting better with some of the townsfolk, I invested most if not all of my time into my training and getting closer with my Companions, my parents, and some select adults like Ms. Renne. It was a small handful of people out of the total number in Lunargrove’s population, but it was more than I could ever attain back on Earth, I had those people as well as Elmyra to thank for making my life more worthwhile to live.

Of course, as happy as I was having 3 cute fairies as my Companions, I still wanted to find romantic love, but that wouldn’t be for a while whether or not I was working towards my ‘Great Sagehood.’