Published at 24th of February 2024 10:31 am

Chapter 7

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It took me a few months after I first awakened to internalize something important. Intellectually, I understood reincarnation, and if everything had gone according to plan, I would have sidestepped the issue quite neatly. Since it hadn’t, Gravin was a real person instead of a mask I was wearing. For about two and a half years, he’d been a normal child who loved his parents and felt mild affection and tolerance toward his sister, who’d been largely ambivalent toward him until he’d started walking and talking. I’d come in before there’d been enough time for any sort of real sibling relationship to grow.

But the thing was, Gravin still existed. I hadn’t taken him over or replaced him. I was now both Keiran and Gravin, and if it seemed otherwise, well, that was bound to happen considering how few years the Gravin part of me had lived compared to the Keiran part. Gravin didn’t give me too many life skills, which was hardly his fault. But he did have connections to his family.

He loved them, and that meant I loved them.

It had taken until just now for that to really hit me, now that my parents were actually in danger. A monster was moving towards our village, and they were holding a line to stall it until someone with real power could show up and destroy it. Maybe my parents wouldn’t end up getting close to it and they’d be safe. Or maybe they’d be the first farmers to swing a hoe at it and end up dead before anyone else could interfere.

I was afraid for them, but the only thing I could do was sit here and do my best to comfort my sister. I’d gotten used to a certain amount of helplessness over the last eight months of my new life, but this was on a whole different level. It had been a thousand years since I’d felt so powerless in the face of danger.

Something dense in mana moved into the village, coming from the east. That must be the governor moving in to intercept the threat. He had an ignited core, one that was several times the size of mine. That wasn’t surprising; cores grew naturally as a person aged. Most adults had similarly sized cores, though none of them produced more than a fraction of the mana the governor’s did.

The governor was moving fast, but not more than a man running might. With the limits in size and regeneration a stage one core had, he’d be smart to save his mana for the fight itself. Even if he had the skills of a master mage, there were only so many spells he could cast before he ran dry. Then again, getting there before the monster killed anyone was also important.

I doubted he was a master mage, not with a stage one core. Maybe at stage three, but not stage one. He’d struggle to hold enough mana to even cast a single one of the kinds of spells masters used. Hopefully, whatever spells he did know would be enough to put down the monster.

The governor’s presence passed through the range of my mana sense quickly. It was a good thing he didn’t live down in the village proper, or I’d have to worry about him noticing me in return now that I could generate mana fast enough to actually fill my core. Good thing mine was currently only about as full as anyone else’s would be after a full day between appointments with the Collectors.

A few minutes later, there was a concussive boom and the roar of rising flames, close enough to hurt my ears and make Senica cry out. A cheer went up from the villagers with that, and people started trickling back in from the fields about the same time I sensed the governor entering the village again. His mana core was far, far emptier now, almost completely dry. If a simple fire blast spell tapped him out that bad, he was even less impressive than my initial estimate.

That was not to say he wasn’t still stronger than me. He absolutely was. But I was three, and he was an adult. There wasn’t a dull in the village who didn’t have a bigger mana core than me. My advantages were my knowledge, skills, and mana generation speed. Over the next few weeks, I would need to construct a proper crystal to hold mana, with proper shielding to hide it from prying eyes. It was a project that would have taken the me of yesterday at least a year to put together, but I ought to be able to finish it in a few weeks now.

The only question was where I could keep it for easy access. Now that I was making mana like a true apprentice, a once-a-day dump into a junky storage crystal was out of the question. I’d be shedding half of my mana into the air around me if I tried to keep using that, never mind that I’d fill it up in a matter of days now.

A staff would be ideal, but there were a few problems with that. Making one up to my standards would require a lot of time, material, and mana that I just didn’t have, not to mention a workshop full of tools with free rein to use them. Then I’d have to carry it around in order for it to be of any use, which would draw all sorts of undue attention. Also, I was a bit too small to be handling a full-sized staff at the moment. No, the whole idea wasn’t practical at all.

It was also extremely unnecessary at this stage in my development. There was a reason apprentices were traditionally gifted wands by their masters. I was a long, long ways away from needing the sort of force multiplier a staff represented, and there were easier, more subtle methods of storing mana. That was the important part right now anyway. Without any ambient mana to fuel my growth, my priority had to be on making sure not to waste any of what my own core generated.

As Gravin, I spent a lot of time in the garden. That was where Mother worked, after all. She gave her energy to the mundane tasks of trying to keep the plants growing in what was one step away from a barren wasteland, and used her mana to encourage growth. Since she spent all day there, working over one thing or another, and I wasn’t enrolled in school like Senica yet, that’s where I went too. So I’d build my superior mana crystal there, something that I was properly attuned to and with a hundred times the capacity of my broken storage crystal.

Physical size was a limitation, of course. Even if I made the crystal stationary, which had its own drawbacks, it couldn’t be something too big or I wouldn’t be able to wrap the spells all the way around it. Building a proper mana crystal with shielding to keep it hidden was a bit like weaving a basket to hold mana, except that each piece of wicker was made out of the mana I could produce in my core. There was an upper limit to how long a piece I could make, simply by virtue of there being an upper limit to my core size.

My musing was interrupted by Senica disentangling herself from me and running for the entryway as Mother pushed the curtain aside. She took a step forward and ducked down to one knee to grab Senica in a tight hug. “There’s my girl,” she said. “Were you brave? Did you protect your brother?”

“Is Dad okay?” Senica asked, ignoring Mother’s questions.

“He’s fine. He had to go back to work after Lord Noctra took care of the monster. You’ll see him tonight, I promise.”

Now that Mother had returned, Senica lost whatever willpower she had that held her together. Maybe she’d been doing it for my sake, or maybe she was just destined to be one of those people who kept up appearances until the crisis was over, then fell to pieces immediately after. Either way, she started crying and sobbing while clutching at our mother’s shirt.

Mother did her best to calm her down, mostly with head pats and hugs and whispered assurances, and it took another few minutes before she thought to look over at me. “Gravin, are you okay?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Really? Do you want a hug too?”

“I’m okay.”

Mother would probably have made a bigger deal out of it if not for the fact that Senica was practically clinging to her, still quietly crying into Mother’s shirt. Instead, I just got a pensive look and a sigh. Belatedly, it occurred to me that this was another one of those moments where I was doing a bad job of acting like a three-year-old. If I was lucky, they’d just take it as me not being old enough to understand what kind of danger my parents had been in.

On the off-chance that I wasn’t that lucky, maybe it was time to start thinking about exactly how much I should tell my parents and what I’d do if they took the news that their baby boy’s previous incarnation had reawakened and had no plans on living the mundane life of a dirt farmer in the back end of a mana desert.

They probably wouldn’t take that well. It would be best if I didn’t tell them right away.

***

That evening, a woman showed up to visit us. People in the village didn’t have doors, so it was customary to just announce their presence outside the privacy curtain and wait to be acknowledged.

“Sellis? Xilaya? It’s Ayaka,” she said from outside our home.

My parents exchanged concerned glances, and Father got up from his seat at the table to pull the curtain aside. “Collector,” he said. “We weren’t expecting you for another few days.”

“Don’t look so worried, Sellis. I’m not here for the Testing. Do you mind if I come in?”

Father stepped to the side and held the curtain back to let in a woman in her late twenties, about the same age as my parents, actually. She was tall, with short, dark brown hair and a wedge-shaped scar above one eye that cut into the eyebrow. She was also wearing a pin on her shirt that depicted a stylized rock with a bunch of lines bisecting it at the center. It was a rather poor depiction of a draw stone in my opinion, but it served its purpose.

Why exactly Collectors needed identification in a village that didn’t even have two hundred people wasn’t clear to me. Probably it was more about pomp and ceremony, a way to make the Collectors feel superior and elite, to grant them a measure of authority. Nobody seemed to hate the Collectors, but the simple fact of the matter was that they were glorified tax men, and I’d never been to any place where they were glorified except here. The village folk seemed to regard mana tithing with an almost religious reverence, and the Collectors were the preachers of that religion.

“Thank you,” Ayaka said as she took Mother’s customary chair. “I just wanted to stop by for a few minutes to let you know we’re pushing back your Testing by another four days. This business with the monster…”

“Why would that matter?” Mother asked.

“It was a mana sniffer,” the Collector explained. “As soon as Lord Noctra saw it, he demanded that we go over every single draw stone to make sure none of them are leaking. Every Collector in the village is going to be pulling double shifts to examine them over the next few days.”

“Ah, I see,” Father said. “And you don’t have time to do Testings right now.”

“Exactly that. I’m sorry if this throws things off for you, but I thought you had a right to know. I’ve actually got three more homes to visit to let them know about the revised schedule. We wanted to give you as much lead in time as possible so you can make any arrangements you need to.”

“That’s much appreciated,” Father said. “Four days. Hmm. I’ll have to get someone to swap with me. That would normally be my day to do the irrigation on the north field.”

Ayaka nodded. “I’m glad I took the time to come let you know then.”

“Thanks,” Father said. “It would have been a mess if I had to find someone to swap at the last minute.”

The adults idly chatted for a few minutes, then the Collector said her goodbyes and left. We continued our evening per our usual routine, but I noticed every now and then I’d get a strange look from Father when he thought I wasn’t paying attention.

Whatever he was thinking, I probably wasn’t going to like it.

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