Ever since I experimented with ‘Fear’s Illusion’ on Julie and the other boy of my age, although making observations, my training regime didn’t really change. Rather, I just spent more time playing and experimenting with my ‘aura’ imbued with the death element more than before.

After a few months of trying to find applications of ‘Death Aura’, I realised that the topic is much harder to understand than I believed. Unlike the 4 basic elements in which I can apply knowledge from my previous world to use them, I cannot do the same with the death element.

In my previous world, there wasn’t really any text that really talked in-depth about souls and even if there was, it was considered as bogus by the general public. So my days past with me just training in ‘Fear’s Illusion’ and ‘aura’ control.

However, recently I found something else of interest. Grandma Sophia normally spends her days caring after the children with very few breaks, and one of the responsibilities she has and accomplishes is teaching younger children from the age of 5-8. I tune in to the lessons while pretending to quietly play nearby.

I realised a little while back that I had photographic memory. I initially thought that it was normal to remember this much and I never really looked back into any memory to recall it too much, so it was harder to notice.

However, after I had thought of ‘Fear’s Illusion’ and had been playing with its effects, I tried to remember every word that Betty had said to verify if he left any clues behind with which I can improve my techniques. I found myself completely entering my memories, as though I was reliving them.

Although my soul-bodies senses were incredibly dulled, I found myself being able to remember every slight smell, sound, taste, touch that I experienced and felt, not to mention having perfect memory when it came to what I had seen.

Being interested in the capabilities that photographic memory brings with its existence, I tried to relive images from my previous world in my head. Unfortunately, the memories were like still images or words on a page, as they came from my previous lives memories which subsequently erased everything that had to do with myself.

I didn’t know when I scanned images, whether they were from images seen on the internet or if it was from my actual memories at this point.

Because of my photographic memory which I could very quickly access and make judgements on at will, I was able to learn about this world fast. I made a few assumptions along the way based on my previous worlds knowledge of societies and the like.

Grandma taught a bit of history everyday, and although I was interested in it, it was clearly a disliked subject by many of the children that she took as pupils. Other than history, the lessons consisted of mathematics, writing and general knowledge.

At the beginning, I had thought that I would have to learn to write in a new language again, but that problem was apparently already solved. Whenever I read from a page, I read it as English in my head but when I had tried to read it aloud, it impressed Grandma who heard it in this worlds tongue.

The exact same thing had occurred when I tried to write in this worlds language and I had no implications at all. It appeared to me as though I wrote in English, but when I was writing I saw that my hand was making movements completely different from the letters I wrote.

Apparently Betty added a natural translator to me, and I was interested in whether this applied to other languages as well. If it did, then this might be quite a worthwhile perk.

A few more months past and I was almost four when a mark suddenly ‘appeared’ on my chest. I always had had a large black spot in the centre of my chest, but today parts of it seemed to sink in, creating a black circle with three black heads side by side in the centre.

The heads appeared to look like Cerberus, the guard dog of Hell. I quickly made a self note to myself to make sure that I remembered to ask Betty about the mark and whether Cerberus actually exists.

Before I had much time to wonder about why the mark had appeared, the mark changed from a pitch black to a glowing silver colour and then appeared to rotate quickly before stopping the rotation and turning into a pitch black spot again.

All of a sudden I felt as though a weight was dropped into my hands, and an incredibly heavy one at that.

I looked at my hands and saw that they were holding a 3 cm diameter cylindrical metal rod:

‘Death’s Weapon’. It appeared nothing different from a metal rod, with the exception of the dark ‘glow’ underneath it. The ‘glow’ doesn’t actually appear to produce any light, rather it seemed to suck up the darkness around it and this is what caused its dark ‘glow’.

… Hell, this is heavy. I can’t carry it at all with just physical strength, so I have to resort to using wind element ‘aura’ to lessen the weight by manipulating wind.

The weapon was promised to be given to me when I was 3, so I assumed he meant that at the exact time I turned 3. I remember being incredibly flustered about this as at that time, I was being watched by Julie and since having a metal rod suddenly appear in a toddlers hands isn’t the most comforting vision you can experience, I was pretty worried about the hassle if it did appear the time.

I guess that Betty had some actual complications with delivering it, because he probably would’ve jumped straight onto that opportunity to make my life difficult as revenge and entertainment for himself by giving me the ‘weapon’ at such an inconvenient time.

I quickly went into the dark corner of the baby room where the lights didn’t shine and tried to test the weapon out. I thought it best that they didn’t see me swinging a cylinder of metal around as it would probably be bad for their psyche.

I tried to swing it a bit, and although it had quite a bit of power behind it due to its weight, it was simply too difficult to swing around without being incredibly wasteful with ‘aura’ capacity. I suddenly remembered something that I learnt from the general knowledge part of Grandma’s lessons.

Although rare and expensive, there are metals and alloys that are capable of withholding ‘aura’ like a battery. They are also incredibly difficult to break and to forge weapons or certain shapes out of them are secrets which only the top blacksmith know.

I proceeded to instantly try to pour my raw ‘aura’ with no element into it but found out something rather unfortunate. The ‘aura’ was rejected and just swirled around the cylinder without going in at all.

Surely there has to be some trick behind this pole. Betty wouldn’t give it to me and claim it to be incredibly expensive and powerful for no reason, and he didn’t want revenge on me at that point in time anyways.

As I was wondering about that, Grandma Sophia walked into the room without my noticing and saw me in the corner.

“Ahh, Sephtis what are you doing there?”

Her voice gave me a jump scare as I had simply never realised she even came in since I was so deep in thought. I quickly realised that I had to somehow hide the ‘weapon’ so that it wouldn’t be confiscated. My thought process was quick and logical, as I came up with the only method that may work.

Hide -> Magic -> ‘Fear’s Illusion’

I quickly though to that point and manipulated my ‘aura’, now imbued with the death element, to surround the ‘weapon’ and impose the fear of ‘Death Aura’ to whoever tried to detect it. To my surprise, rather than my elemental ‘aura’ surrounding the pole, the pole greedily absorbed it as though it was devouring it.

The cylindrical ‘weapon’ then appeared to become even darker beneath the surface. As I was amazed at what was happening, I stupidly brought the ‘weapon’ out in front of me and observed it with pure curiosity.

“Sephtis, I know you have memories about this place, but you have to understand that is for the youngest ones even younger than you. You can’t come here as you may disturb them.”

I was suddenly awoken from my trance by Grandma’s voice, but for some reason she didn’t even seem to notice the ‘weapon’ I held straight out in front of me.

Ahhh… so that’s what happened.

After making a deduction as to why Sophia didn’t notice the pole, I quickly apologized with a simple-

“Sorry.”

-and then left quickly before my ‘aura’ was completely drained. It appeared as though ‘Fear’s Illusion’ which I had thought failed due to it being absorbed by the ‘weapon’ actually succeeded and even better than I thought.

With my aging and training, I had managed to bring my ‘Fear’s Illusion’ to a level where I could walk by without an item being noticed as long as it wasn’t in full view of the victim/test subject. I could do this with Julie but somehow, when I tried it with Grandma, she instantly noticed the toy in my hand but ignored it because she respected her childrens privacy as long as I don’t get hurt or hurt others.

Whether or not people notice the existence of the hidden item really depends on whether or not they have enough ‘aura’ to naturally override the spell. Because of this, either Grandma actually has done magic before, she was born with unnaturally high potential for magic, or people’s ‘aura’ capacity grows with age. Either way, I should not have been able to hide the ‘weapon’ from her without any help.

Because of this, I make the conclusion that ‘Death’s Weapon’ can magnify ‘Death Aura’ that is passed into it and that is what helped hide it even under the nose of Grandma.

Cliche, but at least the names aren’t misleading anyone to believe that they can’t work together.

A few more weeks past and I decide to put behind day training and instead replace it with something different. Something far more important than gaining physical power. I needed knowledge: Knowledge of the world that I now live in, a broader knowledge of magic and knowledge on my career paths.

I picked up a peculiar hobby along the way of my second life, which was to plan ahead everything, from what I should do at the age of one to my death. I placed milestones everywhere in my memory, from the event the smallest things to the large things. I had an estimated time in which I would finish a task and would start a new one.

I would follow this schedule in my brain, rarely deterring from it.

A few months ago, when she began to explain more about the history of the world, she read out of one of the few books in our possession due to their sheer expense since they were hand written. It was a small booklet really, likely without much detail about this world’s history, but it’s worth a try.

Time to learn something new about this world.

You thought there wasn't going to be a chapter release today now did you?

As I said, I will release chapters daily unless a forewarning is given. Now I'm going to sleep as I released this at 23:56