ARTHUR LEYWIN'S POV:
About two years have passed since I made my difficult journey to the study room.
From then, I had been constantly trying to gather the little bits of mana spread out in my body and focus it in an attempt to form a mana core. Let me tell you, it was a slow and arduous task. I would find myself having an easier time trying to learn how to walk on my hands and eat with my feet in this damnable body than trying to will my mana core to condense.
The pace of my training was strenuous and slow, but I was getting a pretty big head start compared to everybody else so I wasn't complaining.
For the past two years, I have been concentrating on gathering and consolidating my mana into seven key points of my body. These points include each shoulder joint, each knee, the crown of my head, one above the pelvis region, and my sternum, just like how I had seven Ki centers in my previous life. I was in the process of condensing my energy into the cores when...
*BOOM*
*Boom* *Boom* *Boom* *Boom* *Boom* *Boom*
One major followed by six smaller-sized explosions occurred.
Wow, I feel great!
Feeling refreshed at my breakthrough, I closed my eyes to sense my newly formed mana cores. My sweet little mana cores!
"ART! OH MY BABY! Are you okay?"
I spotted my mother rushing towards me while my father was on the ground kneeling.
What did he do this time that caused him to get punished by my mother?
My mother lifted me up and hugged me, almost to the point where my underdeveloped ribs gave out.
I managed to squeak out a "Mom, no cry. What's wrong?"
She didn't answer me and continued sobbing while cradling me. My father arrived next to her, patting her back and patting my head as well, giving me a weak smile.
After a brief moment of confusion, I peeled my head away from my mother's bosom and I looked around to see that we were standing in the center of a giant crater, with most of our house, if not all of it gone.
...What the fuck?
Who did this? Who had the audacity to destroy the home of a King?! The perpetrators will rue this day! I will hunt them down day and night and not rest until...
"Congrats, Art honey. You awakened, Champ."
"..."
"..."
I did this?
In my old world on Earth, a similar phenomenon happened when a youth awakened. A clear barrier appeared around the awakened and a small pushing force would surround the barrier. I'm guessing, though, that the repelling force in this world was a lot stronger because of the mana in the atmosphere, something that wasn't present back on Earth.
As once a King of integrity, I decided to apologize for this... er.. situation.
"I'm sorry Mom, Dad. Am I in trouble?"
"Haha... No Art honey, you're not in trouble. We were just worried about you. I'm glad you're alright." My mother managed to chuckle through half-teary eyes.
My idiot father, on the other hand, was a lot more excited.
"My boy is a genius! Awakened at the age of less than three! This is unprecedented! I thought I was fast, but jeez!"
So a couple of moments of a picture-perfect atmosphere was broken when a neighbor passing by screamed, "What in the world?!"
"Haha, we better clean this mess up," my father said as he grinned, rubbing the back of his head.
_________________________________________________________________________________
A couple of weeks had passed since then. We decided to keep my awakening a secret for now. Fortunately, my mother and father have only noticed my mana core at my sternum and I was able to conceal my other six cores similar to how I did during my times as a ki practitioner to hide it from instructors.
My father managed to contact a couple of his past Adventurer party members to help rebuild the decimated part of our house while we stayed in the nearby inn. With conjurers raising the ground for the foundation and augmenters doing the grunt work, the house didn't take too long to finish. The beauty of magic! Surprisingly, none of my father's ex-party members seemed to question why our house blew up.
That seemed to say a lot about my idiot father.
During the middle of reconstructing our house, my birthday came around (May 29). My parents woke me up that morning with a present, and what seemed to be a loaf of....bread(?) in their hands.
Ahh! It was a cake!... would've been easier to tell if it wasn't black.
Opening the present box to find a carefully carved, wooden sword, I hugged both my parents, thanking them for the present and the cake.
This surprised me because my parents hadn't bothered celebrating my past two birthdays, so I assumed this world didn't really celebrate such an occasion. I later found out that birthdays are celebrated starting at the age of 3 because of a tradition from a long time ago when babies were more susceptible to death before the age of three.
How medieval.
Another thing I took an interest in noticing.
Seeing children, as well as teens working on farms with their families and on forges as apprentice blacksmiths made me realize there was no mandatory form of a structured education system. Any sort of rudimentary education was provided by their families (just basics like reading and writing).
As soon as I turned three, my mother began giving me lessons for a set time, teaching me how to read and write. Playing the role of a genius son, I pretended to learn quickly, to her delight, so I could read harder books in the library without drawing suspicion.
These last couple of weeks passed by in a flash. After awakening, my father taught me the basics of mana manipulation and how to start training in it as best as he could. He tried to simplify it as much as possible so that a toddler could understand, I guess. But if it weren't for my adult-level comprehensive abilities, I don't think I would've retained much.
The basics are as follows:
An easy way to measure your strength lies in the color of your mana core. Starting off, the mana core would be black, due to the body's blood and other impurities mixing with the mana particles as they formed into a mana core. As the mana inside the person's body becomes purer and the impurities get filtered out over time, it'll change into a dark red color. From there, the color of the mana core would get lighter; from dark red to a red, and then to a lighter red.
The order goes as follows: black, red, orange, yellow, silver, and then white.
From the red mana core to the yellow mana core, the colors split into three shades (Dark Orange, Solid Orange, and Light Orange. Rule of thumb, the lighter the mana core's color, the purer one's mana core was and the more power they would have access to.
While the lessons with my father proved useful, I was getting impatient at the pace we were moving at. I asked my mother a couple of days later, "Mom, can I get books on magic?"
Since my mother still had some connections in the Guild Hall (Adventurer Guild), she managed to acquire a pretty wide collection of books on basic mana manipulation, as well as fighting with different weapons. Some of them were just books with only simple words and mostly pictures of the basics on how mana was condensed, but I ignored those. My mother gave me a strange look because the books that I'd been looking at were on a higher level. She assumed I wouldn't even be able to understand most of the words in there and tried to cajole me into reading some of the simpler books, saying that it would be easier to understand, but eventually, she relented.
A typical day would involve taking reading and writing lessons from my mother and augmenting training with my father. After he covered the basic theory and application of augmenting, we started physical training. Seeing how my body was too small to start sparring, we opted with running, and body workouts. I think seeing my three-year-old body trying to do a pushup would be the funniest thing, but my father did a good job holding in his laughter.
When I'm not taking either of these lessons, I usually stay cooped up in the newly improved library, reading and meditating to further condense and purify my mana core.
As the year passed by with not much happening outside of my typical schedule, my father spoke up while we were having dinner one night.
"Honey, I think it's time we get Art a proper mentor."
~~
A/N: Well this is it for the first chapter if you have any doubts or suggestions please comment down below. Also if you are thinking Arthur will op and fights would be one-sided then, No, wait and see the new journey of Arthur with a base similar to the original with things being more interesting and a bit of complexity.