What the singing his mother did as she cradled him in her arms and fed him meant, Damion had no idea, but he paid careful attention to all the words everyone said looking for clues in their actions and demeanors for what the words they spoke meant.
The day after Damion was born an older woman came and looked at him. Examining Damion all over and using strange instruments to do some type of tests on Damion. There was no way for Damion to know for sure if this was just a normal thing for this world, checking to make sure a newborn is healthy. Or if this doctor, as Damion suspected, was there examining his damaged mana pathways.
The worried looks on his parents’ faces told Damion it was the later.
Since Damion had an abundance of free time, he spent most of it asking the Magic System questions, trying to piece together as much about his new world as he could. The first thing he learned was that the Magic System was not really at fault for his damaged pathways. Looking at the full description of the skill instead of the summary told Damion where he had gone wrong. Even if he did not fully understand all the parts of the description, he would have been a lot more cautious.
[Mana Absorption - Passive - (F Rank Absorbs 5 Mana P/S) Absorbs mana from ambient mana in the atmosphere. Can absorb a greater amount of mana by touch, depending on mana in object touched]
The skill absorbed 5 Mana a second, which meant that after just two seconds his magic core was full, and the excess mana was stuck in his mana pathways while more was being pulled in. The result of course was damaging his mana pathways.
There was a slight silver lining, Since he had over saturated his body with mana, his magic core had managed to grow. He now had a mana capacity of 25. Damion had also learned that he had been extremely lucky to have shut off the skill as fast as he had. If he had not shut it off his core would most certainly have been destroyed. From the Magic System he learned that if a person’s magic core was damaged or destroyed, there was no repairing it, they would go the rest of their lives without being able to properly use mana, if they even survived.
The Magic System also explained the different attributes, even though they were mostly self-explanatory, it was good to know for sure what they meant. Strength, was of course how strong a person was, the system equated 1 point of strength to being able to lift 1 pound with one arm. Dexterity was how agile and flexible his body was, but also a measure of his hand to eye coordination. Vitality was essentially his life expectancy, each point equating to one year. While Intelligence was his IQ.
The most important thing Damion learned from the system was that unlike his video games from Earth, he could not just level up and put points in the different attributes to increase them. They would increase and decrease based on his condition. If he lifted weights and grew stronger, his Strength would increase. If he broke an arm or a leg, his Dexterity would drop. And since he nearly killed himself by over absorbing mana, his Vitality had dropped to 85, burning away some of his life force.
A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
As he grew older and his body naturally grew, his body would naturally heal and recover the Vitality he had lost, unless he injured himself further, according the Magic System. The system also told him the 5% chance to heal on full system activation was only if his condition did not naturally improve. This meant to Damion, that since he was a baby and his mana pathways had not properly formed yet, there was a chance that as he grew the damaged he caused just after being born would be repaired in time.
What surprised Damion the most was that he was not the one that would level up. It was the Magic System. As the Magic System leveled up, it would apparently grant him more quests and skills and even shop items, though he still had to wait for the system to unlock when he turned 18. Damion was not thrilled with having to wait that long, but he figured he did already have one quest, and he hoped he would be able to get more as he grew up. Secretly, Damion was hoping he would be able to even gain a few levels for the Magic System before he turned 18 and have a massive amount of things unlocked in the system as his eighteenth birthday present.
As the days began to pass, Damion learned a great deal about the new world he was living in. Nerotath was the name of this planet, but what truly surprised Damion, was that this was not just some world somewhere out in the cosmos. When he was reborn, he was reborn in a completely different reality. The system, being the Magic System, could not exist in a universe without magic, so it brought Damion’s soul to a suitable universe to be reborn in.
Damion’s original universe and this one were not all that different. From what Damion could tell from when his mother took him out for walks, the worlds were very similar, even sharing the same hours in a day and calendar from what the system told him, though they just numbered the months, not bothering to name them individually.
Despite Nerotath having magic, the world was not some medieval or fantasy themed world like he had first imagined. The architecture was similar, there were even cars driving around. If Damion did not know better, he would have thought he was still on Earth. Although, the first time he went outside and saw the night sky he would have known he was not on Earth. Nerotath has three moons.
One thing that Damion had not learned from the Magic System, though he would find out eventually, was that Nerotath was considerably larger than Earth and that the smallest of the moons in the sky was the size of his former world.
Damion spent a considerable amount of time interacting with the Magic System in his first few days, not just because he was eager to learn about his new world, but also because he could understand it. Despite having the quest to learn the language of his parents, Damion had not made any progress.
Unfortunately, Damion’s focus on the Magic System had led his mother to believe he was a very odd baby. He rarely cried or did anything remotely baby-like. Mostly Damion just lay there with a vacant look on his face as he interacted with the Magic System in his mind. This led his mother to fear that the mana that invaded her baby’s body right after birth had done damage to his brain as well as his body.
This fear led his mother to begin to fuss over Damion even more, hardly ever setting him down, as if she was afraid that as soon as she left baby Damion alone something terrible would happen.
After about a week of learning from the Magic System, not that he had learned a great deal since even though he had the soul of a man, his body was still that of an infant, so he slept a lot, Damion began to realize that his mother was acting overly protective of him. With that thought in mind, Damion began to try to act more like a baby, though he was not sure what that really entailed.
A few days after Damion began acting like a baby, his mother began to relax, happy that her baby was now behaving normally. With Damion now paying attention to his parents, he began to get subtle hints at what they were trying to say. Especially during feedings or when they were showing him off to people.
When Damion was about a month old he got an unexpected notification from the Magic System and he could suddenly understand his mother.
*Ding*
[Quest: Learn a new language – Status: Complete – Reward: 100 Experience, 1 Store Credits]