Chapter 1 - Magic and Life

Ben Stone, as he was just named, wondered how he ended up in the arms of a black hared woman with a large man peering over from the side looking at him. With his mind going back a few moments ago, he remembered how his weekend before the first day of school, his mother had died and passed away. His family had always been one of struggle and poverty but she tried her best to provide for him after his father ran out on their life.

On her last dying breath, she had told him to live life to it's fullest and never regret anything he did as that emotion was heavy. She knew of her son's situation at school and knew that after her death, her son would live with her brother in a different city. Another school would mean the beginning of a new life where he could start over. Ben promised to live a life fully without any regret and so he held her as she passed on.

While Ben felt sad, he also felt happy as she would finally be able to rest and stop struggling just to protect him. She had used up all of her youth to raise him until her health deteriorated. He wouldn't waste what she had given him, so did exactly what she wanted. He became more social and made friends while he kept his grades above 4.0 and became healthy, joining a sport.

Then one day after leaving back home from a sports game, he saw a bright light and blaring horns before feeling pain. It was like nothing he had ever experienced before, making his exercises his coach made him run feel like paradise. With warmth in his body being replaced by the cold touch of death, Ben couldn't help but try to struggle to live.

He still had so much to do, so much to experience and regret was filling him. Remembering his promise to live a life without regrets, he cried as he had failed her. Taking his last breath, Ben awoke to a woman naming him inside of a small home.

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Days passed since Ben's rebirth into this world and he had found that this world was still in the medieval period. Their home was made of stone and wood with some airflow escaping and the cold coming in but it was better than nothing. His father was a blacksmith of the little village and his mother was a nurse. These two professions were needed so they made enough money to survive and raise a child.

The language of the world seemed to be english, same with the writing but there was one thing that was different about this world compared to his past life. Ben learned of this when he watched his mother heal wounded farmers and hunters. She spoke some type of incantation that sounded like a prayer to a holy god and light was emitted from her hands. The cuts would stop bleeding while the bruises would fade a little.

Ben didn't know if this was good or bad compared to others but what he did know was that he wanted to learn magic. While he was more of a sci-fi kind of nerd, he had also read many novels and knew about magic as well as reincarnation. So like any other protagonist, he finally found something to do while his body and motor skills developed.

Ben spent the majority of the day trying to sense mana inside of himself. He didn't know if it was because he was talented or if it was because his old world didn't have magic, but he could feel some kind of warmth. The sensation was like a mist roaming free within his body, randomly and without control.

With his boredom finally relieved, Ben spend the next few days trying to manipulate the mana with much advancement. After he had noticed that mana seemed to flow easier and faster when following the blood pumping through his body, Ben began to try and control all of his mana to do the same. A month after this little experiment and he felt like his body was constantly energized and it was easier to control his mana. It had been hard to get all of his mana to flow alongside his blood but after it was done, it was naturally flowing without any help from Ben. Not only that but his mana capacity had grown larger than before by about four times.

Ben didn't know if it his was due to his growth or his training but he decided to try and find out by seeing if he could sense other peoples mana.

A few days were spent trying to figure out a way to do this before he decided to try and use mana as a wave like echolocation. The control needed to do this was hard and sometimes Ben would release too much mana and cause some plates to break but no one suspected him. Each time he would run out of mana, Ben would feel like fainting, akin to running a marathon but without water.

Thankfully this activity brought upon some good news as Ben's mana reserves were increasing tremendously after each time he recovered. Not knowing if this effect would keep on happening or would stop at a certain age, Ben trained as hard as he could. Then finally he had completed his Mana Wave, only it had come out more differently than he had thought.

It not only allowed him to detect the amount and power of mana from others, but it also gave him a three hundred sixty degree vision. It's range was dependent on how much mana Ben used and just using a fraction of his total mana reserves made the range about ten meters. After some more days practicing with his control, Ben began to try and learn magic by studying his mother's spell.

Using his Mana Wave technique, Ben could sense his mother's mana reserves were about five times larger than his father's. What shocked him the most though was the fact that his own reserves of mana was about ten times that of his mother. Ben couldn't help but smile and grin at this as he knew his path as a mage would be great, at least he hoped.

As for learning healing magic, after studying the incantation and mana manipulation used by his mother, Ben became confused. The mana within his mother was wild just like his original reserves of mana before controlling it to flow alongside his blood. This should have meant that controlling mana would have been hard but after saying the incantation, her mana flow stabilized a little. His mother then controlled the stabilized mana to enter the wound before the wound began to heal.

The problem from this though was that the unstable mana was also brought out but not used during the healing, wasting about twenty to thirty percent. Thinking about the spell and how it functioned, Ben came to the only conclusion he could. Magic was based on intent and was only limited by the mana within an individual. He came up with this answer from many novels as well as what he saw as the words for the incantation was literally what she wanted done.

"With the power of the holy goddess, Lux, heal this mortal of his injuries and relieve him of pain and suffering. Lesser Heal!"

These words were what his mother said each time and if his guess was correct, then he wondered if he could also use it without actually speaking it. looking at a sharp edge on his crib, Ben looked at his hands and sighed as he remembered a saying in his old life.

No pain, no gain.

Cutting his hand, Ben frowned and then watched as the blood began to leak out. Sitting upright, he spoke the words within his mind and noticed how his mana stabilized slightly but was barely noticeable as it was already flowing nicely. Using his mana control, Ben moved a little mana towards the injury and noticed how the wound began to itch and stop bleeding slowly. Not only this but thanks to Ben's sensitivity to mana, he also felt and understood what it was actually doing.

The mana was seemingly stimulating the healing process of homeostasis and since Ben knew how healing worked, he wondered if he could use his knowledge to accelerate the healing even faster. Stopping the flow of mana towards the cut, focusing despite the pain of once again cutting himself, he began to think about the process of healing. Stopping his mana flow and allowing his mana to stabilize normally, Ben controlled his mana to focus on the once more bleeding cut and soon steam began to rise out of the wound.

The cut stopped bleeding and a scab didn't even form at all as the cut began to close up. Leaving not a single scar not sign that he had been hurt, well, except for the residual blood. Ben was ecstatic about this and noticed how he had used even less mana when he understood the process. It was like understanding the little processes of what a person wanted would make it easier to happen. As if a person who could use magic was manipulating reality.

Ben felt both afraid and excited at this thought as he wanted to try a lot of different experiments using mana. The days passed and Ben learned that he could indeed create matter from just mana but it took a lot of energy. Knowing the atomic makeup of said substance made it easier but it was still a lot. Controlling existing matter was easier and so Bens curiosity over magic was quelled slightly, he began to wonder about the world.

From the stories his mother would read to him, Ben knew that the world was called Gaia and was separated into three continents. The continent Ben was currently in was called Terron and many different races lived here. Humans, Elves, Dwarves, Beastmen, and other intelligent lifeforms. Then there was the continent of Satal, a land of demons where the last hero hundreds of years ago sealed them after the war. Not much was learned about them except that they possessed terrifying destructive magic and had the featured of the devil. Horns, wings, and tail, all black with some being different in shapes and sizes.

Finally, there was the continent of Apolca, a land of monsters and the largest landmass of all of the continents. Even combined together, the continent of Terron and Satal wasn't even close to being one tenth of it's size. This was debatable by many as adventurers didn't have still yet to find the end of the continent. Luckily there were spatial teleporters at cities made from adventurers to rest.

With this knowledge, Ben vowed to train even harder so that he could go to the continent of monsters. While he couldn't live life to it's fullest in his past life, he would do it in this one and to do that, he would need power. Luckily he had time and a lot of science on his side to become stronger.

Ben's deadline, to become an adventurer by the age of sixteen.