Ch 2-He Fu**ed Up—Part 1

I was rolling around inside my crib while making random noises. It had been a few days since we arrived in Winterfell and I was already bored out of my mind. I was inside a nursery in the Great keep, which had been used by generations of stark babies and most recently my mother and benjen. The room looked like it had been recently cleaned which would make considering it had been left empty for almost 15-16 years.

The room was colored in gray colors with a crib in the center in which I was staying, while two other cribs were thrown haphazardly in the corner, I guess they could be repaired or cleaned if more than one child arrives in the Stark family. There were half a dozen toys strewn around just beside the door which consisted of little wooden swords, a wooden wolf, and a wooden horse on which you could ride.

The door opened and I immediately stopped rolling around. A woman around 25 years old entered the room. She was a bit plain looking with brown hair, pale skin, and brown eyes.

She was from winter town and had been brought in by benjen to feed me as the wetnurse who had arrived here with us all the way from Dorne went back home. Benjen had tried to persuade her to stay and take care of me and she did try to stay for a few days but she couldn't stop her teeth from clattering and her body from shivering constantly, so benjen finally took pity on her and gave her enough money for a trip home and some more, as well as sent a couple of guards to escort her to White harbor from where she could catch a ship to her home.

"How are you today little lord," the wetnurse cooed to me while taking me out of the crib. She always called me little lord even though she knew that I was a bastard and not some lord but I guess to normal villagers, everyone who could live in a castle without being part of the staff is a lord.

Just when I was about to get comfortable about drinking milk from the dornish melons, now I gotta get used to a whole new set of melons. Not that the taste of the new melons is any bad it's just that the taste of her milk was a little different than the milk from the dornish one. The latter was from Dorne so the taste was a little exotic like dark chocolate, while the former is from the north so the taste is like vanilla ice cream. But at the end of the day, all melons are praiseworthy, Amen.

"You are going to grow up to be a big man, little lord," she said while feeding me from her breast, "You are always so eager to drink milk, I wish my little sam back home, could drink as much as you, he always turns his face away from my breasts. But you like my milk, don't you,"

The wet nurse put me back in the crib after I had my fill and went away after thinking that I fell asleep. I don't know about the exact amount of time, but enough time had passed since my birth that I could now stay awake for more hours every day. So at first, I thought that it would be fun being in the legendary castle of Winterfell and exploring it, but my body, unfortunately, disagreed with me as it was not yet strong enough to walk or even crawl yet.

So besides staring around the room and looking at the dull gray walls, all I had to simulate myself was when the wet nurse came to feed me or when benjen could find the time to come entertain me. Benjen would come into the nursery at least once per day to spend some time with me. And he would always try and make faces that were supposed to be funny but were really not, but I liked him so I indulged him with a laugh now and then, and that always seem to make his day.

Anyway, other than that I was pretty much left alone to my devices, and that was slowly but surely driving me up the wall. I was a man who had lived in the 21st century, a man who was online 90% of the time he was awake, and a man who never spent more than a week without reading some kind of novel online (like light novel, web novel, or manga, etc), or watching an anime, or watching some youtube videos. In short, I was a man (like everyone else from my home planet) severely addicted to the internet.

So being cooped up in a room with almost nothing to entertain me, it was only a matter of time before I suffered through some kind of withdrawal symptoms from my internet addiction. I don't know what they would look like but I didn't want to go through them, so I tried to find other things to capture my attention, things that would not require me to use anything other than my mind.

The first thing I could think of was MATH. I know! I know! it's a nerdy thing but I was pretty okay with math when I was in school, nowhere near good enough to go for something like a Ph.D. but good enough that I enjoyed it.

Anyway, there was a video that I saw in my last life about a kid from somewhere in Asia who could do all kinds of complicated calculations in his head and I was told in that very video that it was a good exercise for the mind, and who knows maybe it would help me increase my mind potential or something, and if not, it would at least be useful if I ever wanted to be a merchant in the future.

I started small, by taking any random 2-digit numbers and performing addition and subtraction with them in my head like 93-15 or 27+15, etc. And when I get comfortable enough with those I would make the numbers 3 digits then 4 digits, and so on. And when I eventually get bored with those maybe I could even make it more difficult by doing multiplication, or division and if I was ever comfortable enough with doing the multiplication of 4-digit numbers in my head, then maybe I could even open the box of calculus.

Now, while doing maths did keep me busy for a while, enough not to get bored. But there were times when I would just get sick of seeing numbers after a while and that is when another thing that I saw in an anime (don't remember which) came to my mind. I think it was called something like Image Training, it is where you train yourself against an imaginary opponent inside your mind.

Anyways, when I tried to do that, it turned into a total failure, I could not even make an image of a simple stick or rod in my mind last long enough, let alone create a stable enough image of a person for Image Training. So I backtracked a little and thought that if I ever wanted to do image training in the future, I would need to start small, then maybe I would eventually get better.

So what I would do is I look at any object in my room like say the small wooden wolf hanging above me in my crib and try to remember all of its details, from its exact color to its texture, to where it had been chewed in its leg and to what shape it was, and when I had retained enough details of it, I would then close my eyes and try to recreate the exact replica of that object inside my head.

To be honest, when I had the idea in my mind, I thought it would be very easy, I mean it was from an anime, how hard could it be? Right!

Wrong! It was very hard and It had not been going so well for me. I could never get the image of the object inside my head stable enough, it would always be a little wobbly and its shape kept on changing with its color reverting back to black. It was as if my mind was not under my control at all and would make whatever random shapes it could without listening to my desires at all.

It was all very frustrating for me, but I didn't give up and remembered the mantra PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT, and went right back at it.