It’s been four weeks now. It took me a little more than two and a half weeks to be able to deal with all the aura damage accumulated from splitting wood, but I have managed to surpass it.

Then, half a week I expended preparing terrain.

I asked mother to be allowed to train for a few days, only so I could create a façade for learning to do three swings.

She negated vehemently, and father also didn’t approve of me getting off my wood splitting duties to try and learn the new technique.

It was a bit annoying, but I expended half of the week focusing on doing a little more than the needed amount of split wood.

Expending a morning’s worth of aura to cut a day’s worth of wood is a thing. But to try and recover enough aura to do it again with just a few daily hours… considering I wasn’t dispensed from spear training as well, this meant I could skip only body strengthening training and sword swing training to try and recover aura to do extra splitting.

So, I only accumulated enough extra wood by the end of the week. Then mother accepted for me to try the sword swings once.

Of course I was able to do three.

I went a bit overboard with the act, so it looked like the result of a lot of effort and desire, but that meant I passed out for a few hours after doing that.

It was super effective.

Father believed and Jacen was motivated, but not downhearted. Sister also seemed to think something on the lines of “well done”.

…

I feel a bit guilty.

Sorry guys, this isn’t the fruit of late night training and surpassing my limits.

This is just cheat talent I was born with.

Please don’t hate me.

Please don’t compliment me as well. It hurts.

…

Well, the result was – I learned the cladding technique, and expended the last week practicing it.

Jacen is well more advanced in it than I thought he would be, and I might say he has almost surpassed my own skill.

To surpass my cheat skills with effort alone.

As I thought brother, you are an achiever.

So, today father will test our cladding. If we pass we get to learn the next step in the technique. If we fail, we lose the chance.

Let’s put a good façade here as well.

***

In the end I lost.

How come?

Well, I prepared myself to put up the façade, but…

“Very well All, let’s test yours now. Clad your twig and put it here.”

Father was pointing to the splitting stump. It’s an old three stump we use as the base for splitting the wood.

What is supposed to happen?

Well, if I look at Jacen’s test I’m supposed to clad my weapon (my spear twig) with aura, and then put it on the stump.

Father will hit it with the axe, and if it is hard enough to withstand a single hit I will pass.

Jacen passed by a hair breath. His aura got exhausted almost immediately and his twig had a small mark by the end.

He is laid on the ground over there.

And now is my turn.

The problem is, I don’t have almost any aura left.

I’m confident I can do as much as Jacen if I have my aura as usual, but I depleted almost all of it earlier.

This is so unfair!

“Pa, I don’t have aura!”

Why are you smiling, old fart?

“No matter. Do it anyway.”

I did it and he obviously split my twig in half without any effort.

I’m done. My aura is totally drained now.

So I will just go and sleep a bit.

***

I woke up when dinner was being served. I ate with everyone, but I was feeling like I had been cheated.

Father was giggling when sister gave her impressions on today’s events.

“Usually All have much more aura than Jacen, so I was surprised. It was smart.”

Smart. You call that cheating smart?!

I will have a say on this!

“No! It was unfair! I want a remach!”

Father is openly laughing now.

I look at him with a piercing glare.

He patted my head and turned a bit more serious. It seems this thing was his plan all along.

“Listen All. In real life you have to be prepared for this kind of things. You have a faster aura speed recovery than the usual person, but you have also a hard time controlling it, so you have to put more effort in training that. If I let you take the test while rested, you would have passed even if your control was poor and the twig was soft. Because you would use a lot to compensate for having a bad control. Do you understand?”

Well, he is mistaken about the part where I supposedly don’t have good control of my aura. I would say I have top skills in that area. But he isn’t wrong.

“It’s important to control well your aura. So keep training. In one or two months from now I will let you repeat the test, okay?”

So, roughly the same amount of time brother took to do it.

In another words, he is trying to make me try harder to compensate for my “lack” of talent.

…well, so be it. However.

“But will father teach me then? Don’t you have to work?”

“The difference between hardening and sharpening is small. I can teach you easily, and your brother can do it as well. Then you can try for yourself to learn how to use both at the same time.”

That is the skill I want to learn.

Sharpening.

If I learn how to sharpen my weapons, wouldn’t even a twig become a dreadful weapon?

Plus, I will be able to use it on the axe and finish my chores quickly.

Still, a whole month of pretending to suck at aura control.

Lying was a bad move after all.

***

I’m ashamed of myself.

I’m seriously ashamed.

It happened during hot bath today.

I won’t tell what happened.

Not at all.

I will forget it.

It’s already too difficult for me to keep my lust in check with the image of sister in the nude glued to my head. Now with this on top of that….

…yeah, we have been taking baths together for some time now.

Since no disgusting accidents ever happened with me on the bath, mother and father have entrusted me to sister.

She, me and brother have been taking the hot baths together ever since. It’s a bit embarrassing, really. I thought it was weird from the first day, to be fair.

Cleaning the front part of the body like that.

But it’s all this poop-world’s fault, right?

…or isn’t it?

How people on earth take care of this kind of stuff?

…

That’s it. I will just forget about this and go to sleep. Forget! My lustful memories filled with sin and corruption! Bygone at once, I expel thee!

***

Mother has been making medicine. Which is super weird, because we aren’t in the winter anymore.

During winter many villagers get sick with colds, the flu or stomach pains because of badly preserved food.

Of course the whole village acts to help in those times. We are a small village, so people dying suddenly increase everyone’s burden on protecting the place and producing more crops.

If the situation is very serious, someone will try using healing and detoxification magic even.

However, usually this much isn’t needed or wanted. Since the aura damage for those spells isn’t small, we tend to avoid using them. And that’s why we use herbal medicines, like pinebush (rosemary) essence for clearing one’s nose.

Most people seem to have this kind of basic knowledge in the village, but today mother is making something unusual.

Not only because we are in spring already, and therefore cases of cold or flu shouldn’t be abundant, but also because she is using the special pot.

That is, the pot where she keeps her weird, more potent and powerful herbs.

There are plenty of plants there I don’t know, and some which just vaguely resemble plants from earth.

But the most important thing is, those plants aren’t common.

Mother has learned how to deal with them from grandmother’s knowledge and a lot of personal skill and talent. But those herbs are top class stuff, and very dangerous if used in the wrong amounts.

Some of them can even kill.

That’s why mother keeps them stored on the highest shelf on the kitchen and the further in the back as she can.

Even she has to use a stool to get it. So, today’s lesson is on advanced medicine making.

“All, go outside. Ma has to make special medicine for your grandpa.”

“But Ma, I want to learn!”

“No. This is too dangerous. I will teach you when you get older.”

…seriously? I have been doing this since I was one-and-a-half years old! Give me some credit here!

“Ma, let me help you!”

I approached the table. Then it happened.

I was suddenly taken by her and carried on a rude manner.

She sat on a stool in the backyard and put me on her knee.

This… this isn’t what I’m thinking, right?

You won’t do it, right?

This is too barbaric! You can do it with Jacen, but not with me!

Ma, not with me, no!

She slapped my butt.

She slapped it so hard I couldn’t help but let a surprised sound get out of my mouth.

She isn’t holding back.

There was even aura on that attack. Probably because she sensed I was releasing my own automatically.

It hurt. It hurt bad.

Then she did it again.

I’m accumulating a lot of aura damage. I can’t even react. I’m just too surprised.

Ah, my eyes are watering out.

I’m going to cry.

After a long time playing the big boy, training as if I was getting ready to become an adult… I’m crying again.

This is so humiliating. Why do that to me, Ma?

She slapped my bottom quite a few more times, until she was satisfied. In the end I had no more aura left.

I’m just a young child after all. Had I been getting too high on my image of myself?

Here I was, all happy that I could lift a 3kg axe a few times. Or my own weight with my arms.

I have seriously overestimated myself. I shouldn’t get so cocky.

Mother’s spanking finished with a scolding.

“When I say it’s dangerous, it’s dangerous! Don’t come if I don’t allow you to!”

“Yes Ma.”

“What else?”

“…I’m sorry Ma. I won’t do it again.”

I might have become too entranced on this world’s new stuff.

Suddenly the whole of my past life bitterness comes to me. I’m making a really ugly face.

Ugh.

Woman. Mothers. They are all the same. They will hit you and humiliate you. They will destroy you for trying to help and do good things. Even when they are wrong. Even when they are the ignorant ones. The stupid ones doing stuff without knowing what they are doing.

They are just the worse.

*sigh* “Now, come here… you don’t need to make that face. Ma just want’s what is better for you, okay?”

Mother is patting my back and burying my face on her skirt.

I start crying again. This time something else comes out. It’s not just my body that’s crying. My soul and my mind, my memories of another time.

This mother of mine will have to bear the grudge of two lives. Even If it’s unfair, I cannot do anything about it.

It’s just how I feel.

“All… Alvin, son.”

She is patting my head.

“Thinking well, this is the first time I hit you, right? You have been a good boy all this time. But I can’t let you get close to those. Even if I have taught you about others, those are too dangerous, okay? Listen to Mama on this.”

“Okay Ma….”

It’s finally over. My heart is steeled.

But I cannot love mother the same way again.

Have I just fallen in the same mistakes as the “I” in my previous life?

Maybe I should just forget what happened today.

Let’s do this. Consciously forget what happened.

…

It’s not getting any better. I still look at mother with different eyes, even if I don’t remember what happened.

As I thought, even if I forget something consciously, that’s just from my conscience. My subconscious mind still keeps record of everything I lived.

That is the limitation of my Perfect Memory. Or should I say that it is insurance?

***

It’s been little less than a week now.

Since the spanking.

I have to say, this really is a loving family.

For the first day I actually reverted to my old self. I overslept and quit training. I stopped doing anything, and didn’t even wanted to eat.

It was depression all over again, but there are no medics in this world, so I can’t get any happy pills.

Still, father and mother pulled me out of it.

They would get me to the table with a smile, and pat me in the head.

Ann started to sleep with me, and even Jacen patted me in the head one at breakfast in the second day.

Even though I was being mean, spoiled and stubborn, once it crossed the simple line of children stubbornness they wouldn’t push on it.

They wouldn’t hurt me more in order to reaffirm what they did.

That is, mother wouldn’t hurt me more to justify the delusion of “that wasn’t a big thing at all”.

It was a big thing for me. It’s something she did and would do again without a hitch of doubt.

But it wasn’t something bad, it wasn’t something meaning she didn’t love me.

It wasn’t a “little bitterness to compensate the sweetness of love” either. There is no such thing as being bitter and evil because too much love is bad.

The love is fine. Giving yourself to your own satisfaction and being irresponsible trying to receive more proves of love from your children. That is what spoiling a child is. Not too much love, but too much weakness of heart to endure the children thinking bad things of you, when you did what you did for a fair reason.

It was the needed heat to forge steel out of iron. It was like when father scolded Jacen, even if father loved him so much.

Wouldn’t it be easy for father?

To have Jacen do silly stuff and congratulate him?

Differently from me, Jacen doesn’t seem to think it’s good to have a hard but fair coach. He doesn’t see the playfulness I see in a hard master which makes you get better by being good at being a teacher.

He only sees a father which is displeased and hurting him with his displeasure.

Still, that shouldn’t be brought to the table, that shouldn’t offset the parent. Even when Jacen cried, even when Jacen was stubborn, even when Jacen was depressed for doing something bad and being rightfully reprimanded.

Even then father received him at the table with a smile. Even then father rugged him to help get rid of sadness.

Even when I did something mother was right to fear me doing, and was rightfully punished, the punishment ended there.

There was no more punishment at dinner, breakfast or in the days.

There was just loving. There was just helping me heal from my sadness and depression.

Because the sadness isn’t part of the punishment. Because mother doesn’t want for me to feel bad or sad.

Because mother just wanted to stop me before I became conceited and did things without hearing her.

Spanking wasn’t a way to humiliate me. To make me a bad person and enslave me in a shadow of depression.

It was just to wake me up to her warnings and limits.

All of that I realized with such simple acts. With such simple feelings and beauty. The beauty of a loving family.

Thank you goddess dear, for giving me this family.

Thank you.

***

The gossiping hags are at it again. I usually get freedom from hearing their poisonous words, but today mother had a huge amount of sewing to do – so she took me from spear training after the afternoon snack and made me knit and sew with her.

That because Jacen’s clothes had become too small for him, so she is opening some of them and sewing more cloth into the existing shape.

It’s a temporary measure while she doesn’t knit him at least one or two new sets of clothing, but it’s also a needed measure.

He just hit a small growth spurt which mother intended to countermeasure by giving him one of sister’s old clothes, however…

Sister’s old clothes were no more.

There was a rat in the house.

More specifically, it had eaten the bottom of the old clothing chest she had in the corner of her room and eaten most of sister’s old clothing.

I was looking from the door and thought mother would just scream and run away, but for my surprise she became furious instead.

Really furious.

Mother became an Ashura and turned the rat and it’s breed into a bloody pulp with her own hand.

The worst part of all… she kept a half-composed smile during the whole thing.

It was a bit sickening to see, but I understand her anger.

Every single one of those clothes had been knitted or crocheted by hand. She made it sturdy believing someday a new son or daughter would be born and she wouldn’t have to worry about that.

And now those rats had taken it to make their nest.

Scary.

Mother can be scary.

Father protect us from this Ashura’s anger!

Or, rather, protect me from this old snake’s venom also! It’s hard to listen to it without losing my mind!

***