Mystery solved

The Sun was already setting by the time Lilly stepped outside the healer's house with Zora in tow. She had to make haste and get home before the path completely vanishes in the dark.

Her steps were now heavier with the dreadful news that she was bearing. She had no idea how to explain this to the rest of the family. Obviously there was only one way to do it, she barely knew more than nothing, but she was still fearful. And that feeling was foreign to her.

She was always willful and determined. She always knew what she wanted, her goals were free of overambition, so she never had to face disappointment, but whatever she set her mind to, she was not giving an inch of that.

But now she felt hesitation and anxiety.

No matter, she thought, there is no way to get out of this situation, she will have to endure it together with her husband and children.

From that point on everyone took extra care around Zora. They had one sickly kid already, they had to make sure the family's finances are not burdened too much by this.

Zora himself on the other hand would not find out what happened there and then for years. Not like it was impossible to guess. But for a long while after the visit to the healer he had no idea if he had years or days left to live. He was as anxious as one can be for a few weeks. He had no way to ask, really. He was barely half a year old, so he just had to wait and see. But even all that couldn't stop him from working towards his goals.

And regarding that, something was of great interest to him. The unknown sphere in peoples' chests.

After some thinking he narrowed down the possibilities by quite a bit, and was left with many options and one very likely possibility. Not wanting to waste too much time, he started experimenting right away.

He wanted to backtrack his tendrils of mana to their source. He wanted to see where they come from exactly. He was sure that this clue will be the key to solve the mystery. Usually when he emits mana out of his body it comes out as a huge mass of energy from a good portion of his middle section.

But if he focused the angle of emission well enough, he was able to trace back the energy to the sphere of void, just as he predicted.

This also made everything clear. That sphere was most likely a mana core for humans to store magical energies internally, so they don't have to rely on the ambiant mana around them.

That made a lot of sense and Zora has also seen it before once on another world. But this is an advantage only animals and monsters tend to have. He had seen many more places where humans harvested animals for their cores while they themselved didn't have one.

Even in his previous one, magicians had to rely on the world energies around them, and everything depended on how well they can exploit the magic in the air.

Now Zora had to learn how to use magic with an internal energy source. The list of knowledge he had to acquire just keeps growing bigger.

After a few weeks of trial and error he managed to understand that cores were somehow subject to change, mostly during adolescence, and also if he forcibly expanded the capacity by compressing the already present mana in his core, then filling the empty space with the ambient mana around him.

This requires extremely fine control, because everything had to happen at once. He had to forcibly compress the sphere of mana from every angle perfectly, while also reaching out, grabbing the world mana then layering it atop of the compressed sphere evenly.

If he slips up at any of those steps or do them sloppily, then the resulting pain can knock him out for a whole day, and that comes with a load of consequences. He had to experience it a few times.

By the time he was able to consistently expand his mana reserves without fail, he was already 2 years old. He was progressing well with his magical studies, but there were side-projects he had to finish too.

He was already talking gibberish to his parents with the occasional 'mama' and 'dada', and a few basic sentences he pretended to have barely enough brainpower to properly pronounce.

He was steadily extending his vocabulary all the time. He also wanted to learn how to read and write, not to mention the numbers and calculations.

The huge problem was that his parents were peasants. Neither of them knew how to write, not even the numbers. They had the ability to calculate within the first few hunderds, a basic skill one needs to not get ripped off at the first sale they want to make on their products.

So once again Zora was forced to wait. He never forgot what happened at the healer, firstly because that was the only time he has seen magic in this world, also he wanted Olak to teach him, but he was also unable to forget, because ever since that day, he was painfully reminded almost every day of how the best of luck one can have must always be tainted with at least a tinge of gray no matter what.

And this one seemed to be a bit worse than a tinge.