New Start

The first few years of my new life were an interesting experience. Although I retained my memories and intellect, I couldn't control my body as I wanted to. In the beginning, if I tried to talk unintelligible gibberish came out, if I tried to control my bowel movements I failed, and I had an unsatisfiable urge to chew on anything in sight.

It felt like I was drunk controlling a puppet, trying my best to humiliate myself. As I grew older, my sense of sobriety returned, and on the day of my fifth birthday, I felt like a person again.

My name was Rorik, the first son of the first wife of Duke Pendle. My mother Alva was a lady, who had brown hair and blue eyes, she made sure I had no problems growing up. My father - whose first name I never learned - had black hair and brown eyes. While he rarely showed up he treated me well whenever he saw me. I myself inherited my mother's brown hair and my father's brown eyes.

From what I could tell, my mother and father had a marriage for political reasons rather than love. She never complained about his lack of visits, nor became happy when he visited. When he did visit, their only conversation was about making me the successor of the house. From my mother's conversations with her maid, my father spent most of his time with his third wife.

While I was the only child of my mother, I had 5 half-siblings: 2 older brothers, 1 younger brother, and 1 older sister, and 1 younger sister. My siblings generally didn't like me but that was a result of my own mistakes. When I was younger, the humiliation of being unable to control myself well caused me to stay in my room most of the time. As a result, my siblings regarded me as a "weird person" who stayed in his room all the time. By the time I realized and tried to fix my first impression, it was too late.

Based on my surroundings, the world I was in was a strange mix of medieval and modern society sustained by magic. For example, instead of a sewage system attached to the toilet, the toilet somehow made everything disappear. When I asked my mother about it she smiled and told me it was a type of magic I would learn when I grew older.

Speaking about magic, today - two weeks after my fifth birthday- was the day I was going to get my capabilities as a magician tested. Based on what my mother said, a magician's potential depended on two things, the ability to gather and store mana, and the ability to understand and execute incantations. While the latter was important, the only thing tested as a child was the former. After all, even if one could execute the most complicated incantations, it didn't matter if one doesn't have the mana capacity to use it. Interestingly, the type of mana affinity also affected one's mana gathering potential.

There were 7 mana types and 6 mana affinities, and of the 7, Light and Dark types could store more mana than Fire, Earth, Water, and Wind types, there was no No Type affinity because anyone can use magic under that type. It didn't mean that people with a Light or Dark affinity would always gather more mana than others, rather, it meant if two people who were exactly the same, except one had a Light affinity while the other had a Earth affinity, the Light affinity user could gather mana faster than the Earth affinity user could. One could also posses multiple affinities, which impacted their mana gathering potential, but it wasn't a 1+1=2 relation, it was more of a 1+1=1.3 relation.

My mother wasn't very worried though, the Pendle family was known to have members with large mana pools and my mother had a large mana pool herself. The current belief in this world is that the size of a mana pool is a genetic trait, therefore she believed there was no way I wouldn't have a large mana pool.

As I stepped off the carriage and followed my parents into the mage headquarters, I got excited as I realized this was going to be my first time feeling mana in this fantasy world.