Chapter 2: Chapter 2 - Are we the same?
[Arthur Leywin POV]
This whole week has been quite hectic, first of all, my life is more than I would have expected compared to my previous one. Since I came into this world, things have always been outside of my expectations, of what would be common at least.
Here there were other self-aware races, magic and affinities, while in my old world there was Ki and technology. Unlike my previous life, where I was an orphan who managed to become a king, here I am the son of ex-adventurers, with my mother being an extremely affectionate healer of sorts, while my father was shown to be a goof, but at the same time protective and loyal.
A few months ago, I was able to understand that mana has a characteristic in common with Ki, which is the way in which both flow through the body. At the beginning of this week, with the help of basic books on the fundamentals of magic, I was able to create my mana core. This was something that humans, with certain characteristics, could achieve , with ultra luck, at age 8, but I did it while I'm only 3 years old.
After these incredible things that happened to me, I now had a visitor at home, a boy who, from what I heard, had an accident near my house. I couldn't imagine how was this accident, just that he had arrived here, smeared with blood, and my mother left saying that she is going to report to the guards.
"Uhn..nice room, huh?.." The boy, who previously had said to be called Luz, looked into my bedroom, while I was sitting on my bed. I still felt bad about having destroyed part of this place by my awakening.
"It wasn't quite like that before... it's just that... KABOOM!" I tried to talk things a little childishly, after all for others I was a 3 year old baby.
"I see..." He said with his eyes in my direction, but his gaze seemed vacant.
"How old are you? I'm 3 years old" It said showing 3 fingers of my hand.
"I'm... 5 years old" He said this in a slow way.
"Oh. you're 2 years older, so.. what happened there? We heard a explosion" I asked, still having to keep up the acting of a curious 3-year-old
"Explosion? well what I know is that... my parents and I were attacked by bandits. I woke up to them bleeding next to me." He still said with a vacant look.
"Damn! I shouldn't have even asked. My god he's an orphan then?!? Sometimes I hate to pretend silly curiosity!" I thought as my eyes widened in shock at the information.
"They were lying down, at first I thought they were passed out, but when your parents arrived to help, that's when I understood... they were dead." He finished speaking.
"S-sorry for making you say that. It's really hard to be alone..." I said, watching the floor.
With my speech finished, I looked towards him, his blank gaze now seemed to be confused, but why? That's when I realized, not only did I say that as if I already had losses in my life like his, maybe I also used a more serious tone than my age allowed.
"I mean, it must be hard being alone, I don't know what I would feel if Mom or Dad disappeared." I tried to fix my acting mistake by saying that.
He continued to look confused at me, walking over and approaching my bed, which was where I was sitting. He looked me up and down as I was having a cold sweat at this, but then he stops, putting his hand on my shoulder and getting a look of astonishment.
"You are like me?" He asked still with that look.
"Um, what do you mean?" I said, now being the confused one of in this conversation.
"Your aura, it looks like mine, but it's not very bright." He said that while touching my arms, shoulders and head.
"Aura...? What are you talking about?" I was really trying to understand, but then a thought came, an idea of what he meant by that, but I didn't want to believe it.
"Aura in the sense of essence, the thing that makes us who we are." He answered me now by sitting next to me.
"And well, yours seems stronger than usual, like you're more experienced than a child." The moment he said that, I froze, trying to gather my thoughts.
"Essence... is my essence more mature than my body? And he said he is like this too. Does that mean he suspects I had a reborn? And if that's the case, is he in the same case?" These questions popped into my mind making my eyes open wider, watching the boy next to me.
We just didn't speak for seconds, we were just staring at each other. Those seconds seemed long and intense, the feeling it gave me was as if I saw a person appearing out of nowhere, and being able to fight on an equal footing against my past self.
"So? Are you going to answer me or keep silent? Your way of acting and choice of words clearly gave you away to me" Luz said with a light laugh.
"You know... it's not every day you meet another person who's been reborn. Anyway, really, what make you see this?" I said giving up that, but still not believing in that conversation we were having.
"As I said, your aura gave you away from the start, I just didn't want to show that I noticed it at first glance. But you spoke without pronunciation mistakes and even walked more steadily than a 3 year old, it was as if the universe was teasing me to talk about it." He smirked.
"Wow, I understood the last two things, but how were you so sure when you saw that aura? I still don't understand that part." I gave a sigh.
"Well, it's just that it's something specific that only I can feel, as far as I know, and I've seen someone else have the same thing." When he said that, my eyes widened in surprise again.
"Are there more people like us around?!?" I said almost without thinking.
"It wasn't in this life.... In this world, you're the first I know."
I was silent for a few more seconds, looking at the wall behind the boy. He had just said that he had seen others reincarnated, but that I was the first in this world he had ever met. Did that mean this wasn't even his second life? Or in his first life he had already met someone like that? It was so confusing. I decide not to ask about it and just accept.
"Yo! Anyway, I've been curious about something. What would this be?" He returned my attention as he poked close to my belly.
"Oh..??" I looked where he was pointing, soon realizing what he might be asking. "Are you talking about the mana core? Well, it's something in this world that allows a person to use mana. You must not even had it in the place you came, to ask like that either."
"No. Where I come from, there is mana, but we don't have something like a core for that. It was something more general throughout the body." He got up and started moving to exemplify. "The mana from where I came from was in every bit of skin and muscle, the amount of mana was represented by the density of it inside a body."
"So the more mana one could contain, the denser it was in the body?" I asked, with him simply nodding his head.
"Hm...well, from what I've read so far, here to represent the amount and efficiency in mana that someone has, it depends more on the color of the core, which goes from dark colors to lighter colors." I kept saying.
"Interesting. And even simpler... my world's mana density difference was pretty tricky to categorize." Luz said with a bored face.
"I can feel how much trouble this method of your world could cause... But that's not all, the core category also demonstrates our effinity in elements." I said getting up from the bed.
I was taking him out of my room and leaving him back in the study room, I look around and see that my parents still hadn't returned. I took the few books that had survived my awakening to give to him.
"Hmm... , did you talk about elemental affinity, there in the room, right?" Luz looked at me with a slightly confused face.
"Yes. Why? Weren't there elemental magic where you came from?" I asked as I handed him some books.
"Well, there is, but there's no such thing as affinity..... Any mage could use any element, just needed to cast the spell. At most what I could compare to an affinity... is when a person is blessed by a god, to do specific spells without reciting them."
I tried to keep quiet but ended up blurting out something without thinking. "By a GOD?" I looked at him very seriously, I was lucky my parents hadn't arrived yet..
"Um...yeah. The gods of my world were very interactive with people, you just had to at least be part of one of their churchs. Then, depending on your level of honest faith and willpower, you were blessed. " The boy said while looking at the books I gave him, starting to leaf through them.
After a few leafing through the book, he immediately looked at me with a muggle face. "You only have 4 elements and the rest is not only for mastery, but also luck?!?" he went back to leafing through other pages and continued to say ".... and it's super rare someone with 2 elements....!?" From the way he said it, it sounded like he was thinking of this world as being inferior.
Frankly, from what he's told me so far, his world's form of magic was much more advanced and accessible. But soon he sighed and went back to leafing through one of the books, he was going through the pages very fast, this left me in doubt if he was really reading or just seeing the pictures and keywords.
After he had apparently read all of the books, he would sit on the floor in a meditation position. And that made me wide-eyed, reminding me of the event not even a week ago.
"Hey! What do you think you're doing?!?" I yelled.
"Hm...just starting to form this core of mana, or whatever do you call here. And anyway...do you need to scream?" He watched me confused, stopping his meditation.
"The KABOOM I mentioned before. It was because of my awakening! It's going to blow everything up!!!" When I said this to him, he gave a deadpan look, standing up and letting out a long sigh.
"Okay, Sherlock! So where do I do this? From my experience with mana, even though it's another type, I'd better create a core!" I was surprised at the mention of that name.
"Did Sherlock Holmes exist in his world as a person? or just as a story like in mine...?" I thought, but soon returning to his situation. "Well, we'd better do it outside, the backyard here is big. I mean, it's going to be your first time trying it, so it can't even happen all at once."
"Okay. but you don't know if the fact that I've had mana before will make my core formation instant or delayed. By the way, how long did it take you?"
"For me? Well, since I started walking, I was already reading the books, and only a few months ago I started to meditate for real." I replied to Luz, while he just shook his head, accepting the possibility.
I took advantage that my parents would probably take a while to come back, and I took him to the backyard now, to see how this idea would come about. I still can't believe, that I know someone with I could talk normally without acting as a 3 years old child.
Weekly Power Status
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