To answer a question that I kept asking myself time and again in my earliest days, I am not in fact colorblind, but I was at the time. Colors came in slowly and unevenly. In hindsight I vaguely remember having read that babies are born colorblind and near sighted, but it's one thing to have read that a long time ago and another thing entirely to live through it. As for the reason I could see green while everything else was white, black, or shades of grey? That's because the green was the system, not light in a real sense but rather some form of mental projection.

At this point I'd love to tell you about my loving family, but it seems I drew the short straw on family this time around. It turns out that my dad BOUGHT the service of a woman to carry his child, and then he hired a wet nurse after that to keep me fed.

Over the next few years I never did find out who my mom in this world was, and even asking would just lead to a black eye and a few bruises, so I stopped asking pretty early on. One thing that is made clear to me is that she had no legal rights to me; there aren't even any records of who she was, and my dad had no interest in letting me know further details. I don't think he even remembers who she was, though that impression may have been a deliberate deception on his part. He's a good actor.

It takes me a few years to accomplish a noteworthy linguistic capability, though in the end I seemed to be learning the vocal portions of the language at pretty close to the same rate as everyone else does, despite being rather dedicated to learning to how to read, write, and speak it as quickly as I could. The simple truth is that learning languages is still not my strong point, and I figured out how to read long before I became competent enough to speak conversationally and without an obvious accent. Aside from learning how to read much earlier than normal, another thing that I didn't learn at a comparable rate to everyone else was skills, though for a very different reason.

Ever since I learned how to perceive and manipulate that weird omnipresent substance, which it turns out is called "Aether", I'd been experimenting with it. I was thrilled at learning some of the ways I could use it, for instance learning that I could cause it to mimic the Aether in other areas, leading to an "Earth Conjuration" skill and a message that I'd gained a point of Intelligence, while the skill itself allowed me to create actual and real dirt that would melt away back into regular Aether once I stopped concentrating on it.

Similarly, I could use Aether to force actual dirt to take different shapes, and unlike the Conjuration ability, a change I made this way was persistent, not requiring any sort of attention to be paid or Aether expended after bringing it to the desired shape! Not only that, that experiment also unlocked a different skill, called "Earth Molding". When I'd spent some time practicing condensing Aether into the Earth, I learned that it would make the already frighteningly dense and resilient earth become even tougher, which also unlocked the "Infuse Earth" skill.

At this point, immediately after learning Infuse Earth, something crazy happened. I saw notifications saying that each of the previously mentioned skills had been removed and, in its place, I gained a single skill called "Earth Manipulation".

I spent days testing the new skill out and ended up deciding that it was essentially just a continuation of what I'd already been doing. I could move earth around, feel through the earth to see which parts of the earth were not earth at all and what their shapes were, I could pick out rocks, and essentially everything else I'd already been doing still worked the way I expected it to.

As described by the skill name, I was able to manipulate Earth! It was still exhausting to do anything, but my daily practice had been bearing fruit not only in providing me skills which would increase my attributes, training in general was enough to increase attributes as well, so the more I used Aether, the more I could use Aether.

Once I'd become comfortable with earth, it seemed obvious to me that I should try other elements and see if they worked too: They did. Water, Fire, and Air could all be similarly manifested and manipulated. I wasn't done with my skill related surprises, though. Infuse Air took the longest for me to get the hang of, but after weeks of effort I finally unlocked it, and exactly as I'd expected I saw my Air related skills get replaced by Air Manipulation, but then Earth, Fire, Water, and Air manipulation were removed and replaced by "Elementalist".

Having thought that I'd managed to unlock a class when I was still a toddler I was more than a little excited, but I decided to keep it to myself for a while and bring it up for discussion on one of the days when the old man wasn't drunk or angry. Unfortunately a few days went by without me having seen him in a condition to engage, when my hand was forced.

One evening the old man had a guest over for dinner. It was a stew using the meat of a rabbit like creature called a Chobit, laden with vegetables. By our standards it was a solid meal, and it even came with a hard, dark bread made from a wheatlike grain to dip into the soup.

Not that I was at the point I'd get a full and proper meal, I was still a toddler after all, so my portion of the meal was just vegetables and a few torn pieces of bread laid out in front of me on the table. I hadn't grown up enough he was willing to risk letting me use proper silverware or even a plate, yet. It's not like I was a messy eater, but coordination is pretty rough right now even for me.

As previously mentioned my ability to read had come along nicely, but I'd been comparatively struggling when it came to the spoken language. I needed people to repeat things often, speak slowly, and often ask what a word meant, but the gist of this conversation wasn't hard to grasp. The old man would say something in a grandiose fashion, he'd clearly be bragging about something or other, and the guest would laugh and agree.

It was nothing special as the old man was well to do compared to the people around us. Far from rich, at least I didn't think we were, but we were still clearly better off than the rest in our immediate vicinity despite having no apparent source of income and the absurd amount of money we must have been spending to feed his habits. At one point though, the guest pointed at me and said something, obviously he wanted to ingratiate himself by bragging on the old man's son. Pretty sure he asked for my name, and I volunteered it "Han Kenta". I thought I'd been acting politely…

The old man glanced briefly at me in annoyance before turning back to his guest, whose jaw had dropped open. He said some stuff sounding excited, and after replaying the noises a few times I realized that he'd said something about their word for "Elementalist".

I didn't know people could view my class, but by the look on Han Seoul's face, he wasn't as pleased by this as the guest was. He adopted a tight smile and steered the conversation back to bragging about something. He kept his cool for another 20 minutes before finally escorting the guest out. After that, he came back, screamed at me for a while, smacked me around a bit, and squeezed me so hard it broke my arm.

To this day I can only speculate on the reasoning for why he was so angry and what he was actually yelling about; the lesson at the time for me was that I needed to learn more about the skills in this world before I did anything else that might result in similar outcomes. In a world with magic a broken arm isn't actually a big deal, aside from the pain you experience in the moment of course, but that experience prompted me to keep my advantages as secret as possible for as long as possible.

The answer to how that guest came to know I was an Elementalist, by the way, ended up being because of an ability people are able to learn pretty easily when they are finally able to access their soul scrolls. It's called "Identify", and though I'll explain a bit more about it at a later point, the short version is that if you are significantly stronger than someone else, you can see whatever their highest tier skill is. It's a pretty limited ability, but any adult is going to be significantly stronger than a toddler, so my highest tier skill would effectively be an open book for the world no matter how desperately I would want to keep it quiet.

After that the old man actually started hiring people to help me improve. Not at magic, but he hired a speech therapist to help get rid of the worst of my accent (which he thought was related to a speech impediment), a vocal coach to teach me singing and storytelling and how to use Aether to reach a larger group at a consistent volume, Aether infused sketching's and paintings which would provide minor temporary attribute bonuses, and more. Maybe we were more rich than I'd realized, or perhaps there were many people who owed him favors.

Beyond the people he hired to teach me, he also started giving me some personal coaching. I didn't know it right away, but it turns out that the bastard was a Rogue, which means that he's good at lying, stealing, stabbing people in the back, and generally being a horrible person. He was demanding, pushy, unreasonable, and of course abusive, both of the emotional as well as physical variety.

With that in mind, for his personal lessons he had me practicing skills like hiding, moving quietly, ambushing and assassination, and much more besides. He taught me to get better at lying too, after I'd become sufficiently eloquent for elaborate falsehoods to be conveyed convincingly.

Credit to the man. He was a real piece of work, but he knew what he was doing, and he didn't shy away from having me learn as many skills as I could get my hands on in a frontier village. It was only a year or so after my arm had been healed that I was using my Aether to soften the sounds of my footsteps and bending the light around me to darken my profile, and over the course of about 5 years I'd turned my performance related skills that he'd been hiring people to instruct me on into the "Bard" skill, as well as learned a number of skills ranging from first aid to lumbering and carpentry and, most importantly in his eyes, I'd picked up what was needed to learn the "Rogue" skill as well.

Identify would only show the highest tier skill even if it worked on a person, so even though I'd always be revealing my "best" skill, as long as I had other skills of the same tier and a higher skill level I'd be able to keep my real abilities hidden.

Of course, that meant that the old man wanted me to be a Rogue who displayed as a Bard, just like him. Bards aren't very useful in a war. As terrible of a person as he was, he didn't want me dead. Having the world think I was a bard was his way of trying to protect me.

Unfortunately, even though I'd been learning a lot and growing quickly, a Lord appeared. I don't really remember that much about my first home or the people in it, my intelligence attribute wasn't high enough back then to have the kind of recollection that I do now. Most of the things I do remember are in snippets, but it wasn't a very exciting life.

I would wake up in the morning and quietly try to see if I could unlock a new type of magic skill, I even succeeded at uncovering a couple tier 1 magic skills, then I would perform some calisthenics, go for a jog, cook breakfast, spend some time with an instructor singing, drawing, memorizing some story, felling trees, or otherwise working to unlock new skills with about half of them being geared towards increasing bard related skill tiers. After that I would prepare lunch, spend some time getting my ass kicked either by an instructor or an angry alcoholic father who was pissed off about something or other, then I would spend some time recovering by reading the newspaper or any books I could get my hands on, cook dinner, then spend some time learning whatever vaguely rogue related skills the old man felt I needed to learn.

During these years I kept the most obvious of my secrets deeply hidden. On the rare occasion the old man would wake up from his drunken stupor early enough in the morning that he would find me exercising, I would simply claim that I'd just been playing, or when learning the combat skills of this world, I would be careful not to accidentally slip into habits I'd learned from Muay Thai, MAC, or MMA unless someone showed me an identical maneuver here. My dad might not have wanted me dead, but he wasn't someone I'd be willing to trust with the knowledge that this wasn't my first life.

You don't trust someone like him. You also don't love someone like him. I do respect that he was trying to care for me in his own way; but he was a terrible person, and he doesn't deserve my own or anyone else's love.

In the end though, it wouldn't have mattered if I had let him in on who I really was. Like I said, a Lord appeared, and whatever plans he had for me burned to the ground, along with the place I once called home.