JACK DEMOSTHENES KINGSCROWN.

My regular expeditions to the library enlightened me upon a lot of things including how "crippled" I am now. For some reason, my mana pool was very small. It was large enough only to hold mana that I needed to go about my regular activities but not large enough to make me into a mage if I ever decided to become a practitioner of magic. When I also tried the methods to expand my mana pool from the books I read, I was never successful. The mana I tried to inject into my body from the surroundings always ended up leaking out again rather than expanding my mana holding capacity.

For the following seven months, I just studied to devise new methods I could use to expand my mana pool. Eventually, I devised my own method to get around it. It was farfetched but, I had to other choice but to try it. Never in history has anyone ever possessed two mana pools but here I was planning to make the impossible possible. The mana pool was basically a cluster of magic power that we held withing our abdomen. From there we channeled mana throughout our body. So, my theory was that, if I could form another cluster separate from the already existing one, I could expand that pool, and link it to my original pool, essentially expanding my mana holding capacity since it is an artificial pool. The problem was that mana that is not kept in a vessel is eventually expelled from the body after some time. 

To overcome this problem, I could get a beast heart, or I could use one of my organs as the vessel. A beast heart is not easy to come by so I decided on the latter, by using my lungs as the vessel since that would be the easiest. I would essentially be circulating mana through my body every time. Utilizing some breathing methods I studied for meditation, controlling the mana would be easy when I'm injecting the mana into my body. In battle, using other breathing methods, I will be able to do same.

In my first attempt, it felt as if my lungs were burning from the inside, but I had to endure because the benefit I would reap was worth the effort. After hours of meditation, I finally managed to make my lungs into a vessel and all I had to do was to constantly inject mana every day to make sure it expands just like you would for a regular mana pool and when the pool was large enough, I would link it to my original pool, so I can utilize both effectively.

During those seven months, a lot of other things happened such as my naming ceremony, my visit to the Kingscrown main household, and me finally learning how to walk. When I was a year old and could walk, we visited the main household again, this time to meet the patriarch. He was quite the intimidating. On that day, the patriarch acknowledged me as a child of the Kingscrown family, and my name, "Jack Demosthenes Kingscown" was officially made known to the whole family.

A year quickly passes, and I am now two years of age. The method I had devised brought me amazing growth speed and in just a year since my visit to the main household, I can handle second tier magic even though just barely. I had come to accept that beginner second tier was my limit for now. So, I just focused on mastering as many tier one and tier two spells as I could. 

There were six primary elements, fire, water, earth, wind, light, and darkness. Of these base elements, I had a strong affinity for wind, fire, and earth magic. I mastered a lot of spells for the elements I had a strong affinity for quickly, but for the remaining, it was really difficult. It was to be expected though since having an affinity for all magic elements is something that happens once in a few centuries. I study almost all the spells in the spell books for tier one and two magic I could find in the library and even develop a few of my own. I also discovered several methods of utilizing as little mana as possible to accomplish astounding effects.

The concept of the word was simple, there are those who use mana like me and those who use what we call aura. Thus, they devised a simple battle strategy where the aura users were up in the front lines, whereas mages supported from the back along with archers and slingers. The aura users inculcate the aura generated by their body into their martial art. Whereas mages create spells and channel their mana into it, which compensates for their lack of physical strength that is granted to aura users. They are blessed with large pools of mana which as a result, they are able to wipe out armies single handedly with their spells if they're strong enough. This made mages see no need to practice martial arts because they could solve anything with spells. Whereas aura users had no option but to learn a martial art because the aura was like an extension of their bodies.

People have always wondered which of the two factions was stronger but have never gotten an answer simply because, most mages were weak in close combat, and most aura users were also weak in long distance combat excluding the very few aura users whose aura was specialized for long distance weapons like a bow and arrow. Aura users who had gotten to the level of commander and above could go toe to toe with an archmage and the ranks above it. People also focused on one field because, it was almost impossible to switch between magic cores and aura cores as one would have to destroy their core to rebuild it. Very few outstanding people in history were able to make it to the ranks of both Grand Cross and Archmage in the respective fields. They were termed as "Pankratos" or "Arknights". They were people who held both aura cores and mana cores which was very rare. 

Over the years, there have been people who thought that mastering both fields would make them invincible regardless of how difficult it was to master them. They eventually failed to hold two cores of distinct energies within their bodies because, trying to artificially inculcate dual cores into oneself was basically going the natural order where everyone is born with one of the two cores, and they would just fade out of the system. This made the Pankratos profession less popular among the people. Those who pursued the arknight's profession where those who were naturally born with dual cores. They were termed as those who were blessed by the world and were destined to attain great achievements.

Over the past three years, I tried out the basics of each of these professions to know which one was meant for me. After trying out all the professions, I came to a conclusion and that was that the method Pankratoi in the past used was just inefficient. They looked at both sides as completely different areas, forgetting magic was the base for all of the professions. So, tweaking the training methods for all the professions with my knowledge from paradise, I could easily merge them all into one, creating the first true arknight training method. So, at the age of five, I was on my way to become the strongest pankratos in all of history by doing what people had tried and failed over several centuries.

My mother and her knights made sure I had the best training in all fields just as I had requested, so I will be able to successfully create an aura core. Then my sixth birthday came around. I had succeeded in becoming a dual core holder using a similar method to the one I used to create my second mana pool. They held a grand celebration, inviting other family members and friends. My childhood friend and best friend, a second-class fire mage, Addelaide Redstorm was the first to arrive in the manor to wish me a happy birthday along with her parents.

The whole manor was lively till the very end of the party. That evening, my mother called me to her study where she handed me my birthday gift. It was blue Damascus patterned Akrafena. According to her, it was given to me by the king to commemorate my birth. I was mesmerized by the sheer beauty of the blade to the extent that I could not utter a word till my mother called my name. that night, she had a long talk with me about incidents that happened the first few months of my birth, and why she has given me the sword I held. 

I found out that I was in no way crippled but rather, most of my mana pool had been sealed off because of how large and powerful my magic was. When I Was two months old, I started to fall sick because my body couldn't keep up with the amount of mana I possessed. So, together with her knights, they sealed about 90 percent of my mana pool with that sword. She also made me know that, with my rapid growth, the seal had been weakened and was on the verge of breaking which meant that my body was almost at a point where I could handle the sealed mana.

She congratulated me, and informed me that, from the following day onwards, I will be taking personal lessons from her to learn how to handle the power. She gave me a hug and said, I"...I will get you to the 5th circle in the next seven years so you can wield the sword and your power in order to make it into the Grimoire Academy..."