“Tovar!” Torra called after me, waddling unsteadily as she tried to keep up. “Waaaait for meeee!”

  I rolled my eyes, but slowed down. Ever since our newest brother, Toldan, had been born, Torra had been left in my care. I supposed I had made myself a bit too reliable.

  It seemed like children in a family were given names with a similar first syllable, at least in this region. My father was from a different village so I didn’t know his extended family, and my mother was the only surviving child from her family in Redding. There had been a plague when she was a child, apparently.

  I didn’t spend too much time getting to know my parents in this life. If I was going to be repeatedly reincarnated, I would have scores of parents eventually, and there was no point in building emotional ties with all of them. I may have also been a bit jealous that Toldan was granted part of my father’s name, when I wasn’t. He had been born with the same dark hair and eyes Hildan had, and they had bonded instantly.

  Torra, on the other hand, was hard not to bond with. She was light-haired like my mother and had our shared light eyes, but as a child without the burdens of a hard life, her hair and bearing was wild where Berrel’s was stern, her eyes filled with sparkling joy instead of my mother’s ofttimes somewhat frigid cold.

  It was still annoying when she slowed me down, though.

  “Hurry up, Torra,” I grumbled as she staggered down the road behind me. While I waited for her to catch up, I checked my System.

  In the last couple of years, I had managed to gain a Body stat point and a second Mind stat point. It was hard to say whether or not I felt any change as a result of the stat point increase, or if the stat point increase simply reflected the changes I had gained from my training and from growing up.

  With no ability to use mana, Will remained stuck in place. I had initially assumed Mind would be my laggard stat, but this was simply outside of my control. I had grown incredibly frustrated, and so I had begun working towards the only thing I could think which would advance Will no matter what: gaining a level.

  Since no one in this world seemed even aware of levels, there was no information I could gather about this. Instead, I was simply trying everything I could.

  I felt a small hand grab my shirt, and glanced down at my little sister. “Where we going?” she asked, tilting her head to the side.

  “We’re going to the carpenter’s shop,” I explained. For the second time. “Are you sure you don’t want to stay at home?”

  “I wan’ go wif Tovar!”

  I sighed, but placed my hand on her head and rubbed her hair fondly. “Then keep up, shorty.”

  “Oh, if it isn’t Tovar and Torra,” the carpenter, Mishel, said when we entered his shop. “Come to sweep the floors again?”

  “Yes sir,” I answered, to the older man’s soft smile. I had been looking for any work I could find in the village, anything I could do to try and level up, and Mishel had allowed me to come by and sweep his shop floor of the sawdust and wood chips his work created. I could handle a broom and it spared the older man the extra hardship. Plus, he often gave me a snack for the work, which was nothing to sneer at; life wasn’t easy in the village and extra food was always a good thing, especially as I was working out to try and grow my Body stat.

  “Torra, go sit over there,” I said, pointing to the area we had agreed on.

  “Blocks!” she cried, waddling over to the play space Mishel had made for her when she started joining me. He had kindly made a set of wooden blocks for her to play with while I worked. I would glance over every so often while sweeping to see if she was behaving and check what she was building, but she was young and her block towers still didn’t amount to much.

  After an hour or so, I had all the sawdust collected in the bin and the floor was looking clean.

  “All done?” Mishel asked with a smile.

  I nodded. “Yes sir. Do you have time today?”

  “I do,” he said, standing up and stretching his back. “Go on, then, grab the practice swords.”

  Mishel was a carpenter in his old age, but in his prime, he had been a soldier. Part of our agreement was that the man had crafted us some practice swords and was drilling me on the basics. I ran over to get them and stepped out into his shop’s yard, and he followed with Torra in tow, who he sat down under the shade of a nearby tree.

  Together we did a quick warm up then worked through the forms he had taught me, and he corrected my elbow position and foot placement a few times as needed.

  “Good,” he said. “Now you’ve just got to build up your raw strength. I have to get back to work, but you stay here and do practice swings. Put the sword back when you’re done.”

  “Thank you, sir!” I said, already starting to do my reps. Mishel chuckled and wandered back into his shop. Torra had fallen asleep in the shade of the tree, and I knew from past experience that I would only have until she woke up to practice.

  I wasn’t that interested in swordplay, aside from as a means to gain more stat points and possibly a skill. I also still wasn’t sure if getting stats and skills would, itself, get me closer to getting a level, or if it was the other way around. In that case, I figured combat was the fastest way to gain a level, and for that, I would need combat skills. I aspired to be a mage, ultimately, but first I needed the stats and skills to advance and use my Will. It was a bit weird trying to become a swordsman in order to ultimately become a mage, but there were no mages in the village to learn from. This was all I could do.

  When Torra woke up, grumpy and hungry, I returned the practice sword to Mishel. He gave us a small snack to eat, which I used to refuel after the exercise, before we said our goodbyes for the day and headed home. I would return in a couple of days to clean and hopefully train some more, once my arms had recovered from the day’s exertion.

  * * *

  There were a few other jobs I took around the village. No one would turn down free labor, so long as I was at least somewhat competent and didn’t get in their way. I mucked some stables, cleaned up chicken coops, raked leaves, swept, carried buckets of water, and more. Of course, during planting and harvest season, I had to contribute to the farming, and in the summer I often had to spend sweltering days under the sun weeding, but I saw it all as training that would hopefully help me reach my goals.

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  When there was no work to do, I worked on improving my overall stamina. I ran, did some calisthenics, and continued training my Mind with meditation, memorization, and focus exercises.

  Another year passed like this, and then another. Soon I was eight, and Torra was five. My mother started teaching Torra to sew and embroider, which Torra hated compared to running around with me, but it gave me some moments alone to pursue my own training which was difficult with her in tow.

  At least that would have been the case, if not for Toldan, who had grown to be about the same age Torra was when she started following me around.

  “Tovar!” Toldan called after me, waddling unsteadily as he tried to keep up. “Waaaait for meeee!”

  I sighed, and slowed down, thinking about how Berrel was already pregnant with her fourth child and that this scene would likely play out again in a few years.

  In Mishel’s shop, with Toldan playing with his hand-me-down blocks, I swept up the floors. It took a fraction of the time it did when I was six, in part because my body had grown quite a bit and I could handle the broom a lot better.

  It didn’t hurt that I had continued to grow in the stat department, either.

  At some point, my Body stat had caught up with my Mind stat, which wasn’t a surprise. It was really hard to find anything to stimulate my brain in this village, and I could meditate for hours already without my thoughts wavering at all. In fact, had I not mastered meditation, I might have already gone crazy with boredom, given all the extra time I would have needed to fill each day.

  On the other hand, my physical body was growing every year which allowed me to push my physical training harder and harder. It was a bit frustrating, because at this rate, I was going to make an excellent warrior, but an absolutely pitiful mage.

  Maybe in my next life, I thought with a sigh.

  Mishel and I made our way to the yard, with Toldan waddling in tow. He had wanted to learn as well, but Mishel was still putting him off, telling him to wait until he was older. A few training sessions had been canceled when Toldan cried to the point where I had to take him home, much to my chagrin, but he had mostly given up and played with the grass under the tree where Torra used to nap.

  After our forms, I turned to Mishel.

  “Can we spar today?”

  Unfortunately, in this regard, I was getting the same response Toldan got.

  “Maybe when you’re older.”

  I frowned. In all this time, we had never crossed our practice swords. Our training was all forms and drills. I knew it had something to do with his own children. I tried not to pry, but I had gleaned that his sons had followed in his footsteps and became soldiers, but had not survived the soldier life, which was why Mishel had walked away from it.

  Except, he had been willing to train me this far. Admittedly, it was more like exercise than combat training, but it wasn’t like he was afraid to put a practice sword in my hand at all. I looked up at him, debating with myself how much I should show my hand.

  “...Is it because of the [Swordsmanship] skill?”

  Mishel narrowed his eyes at me, then sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. “You are too clever for your own good, you know that?”

  “I’ve been told.”

  Mishel didn’t answer right away, looking away and getting lost in thought.

  I had wondered, over the years, why I had never got the skill with all my training. At first I figured it was my Body stat that was too low, and it was still possible that was true, but now I was leaning towards my other hypothesis. If the skill acquisition prerequisite was actual combat, just waving a wooden stick around wouldn’t get me there.

  But a spar might do the trick.

  “Is it so bad if I get the skill?” I asked.

  Mishel turned back to me. “It’s… not bad, exactly. It’s just that a child’s first skill guides their life’s path. If the Guardians grant you [Swordsmanship], then your future is sure to change.”

  That would make Mishel responsible for whatever was to come, and surely, in his mind, the only future that came from my acquisition of [Swordsmanship] would involve becoming a soldier. Maybe he was even right; if I was found to have a skill, I might even get conscripted.

  Deferring to authority was not my forte. I was able to politely offer up “sir” to Mishel because I was choosing this for myself, but in any other scenario, it would rankle me. That had got me into trouble in my past life, as well. The army life was not for me.

  “I understand,” I said with a nod. “...but we can spar after I get a different skill?”

  Mishel chuckled. “If you can prove it. It’s not so easy to get your first skill, you know?”

  I spread my hands out, turning my practice sword outward with a small flourish. “And yet, you won’t spar with me.”

  The older man grunted at me, and I shut my mouth. No point making him angry.

  We said our goodbyes and I started herding Toldan home. I only gave my brother my partial attention while I went over what I had learned about skills in recent years.

  People were quite superstitious about skills, and attributed some element of divinity to them. As such, they saw them as relatively absolute. I gathered there weren’t too many people out there who gained skills and then didn’t use them, particularly when they got them young and when they had limited skills or only a single one. Surely Mishel had acquired skills in his older age for his carpentry work, unrelated to his [Swordsmanship] skill which he no longer used.

  I muttered to myself about the retired man’s ability to ignore his own skills and choose something else for himself while holding me to mine, but I was already quite familiar with how people could be like that. Rules for thee and not for me. Shaking my head, I tried to avoid being too bitter. I knew that in this case he was trying to look out for my best interests, not being a hypocrite for his own benefit.

  Despite taking skills so seriously, people couldn’t look at other people’s System information. Surely some people lie about skills? Or maybe not, for religious reasons. But if so, that suggests there might be some kind of means out there to see if people had a skill or not. A tool, perhaps? It might not exist in my small village, but that doesn’t mean it’s absent in the entire world.

  It could be that it was simply obvious when someone had a skill, in practice. Had I seen any skill use so far? There were no mages in the village, which would have been the most obvious use of skills. Mishel wouldn’t show me [Swordsmanship].

  I already knew that common activities didn’t have skills attached to them. I didn’t get a skill for walking, for example, nor sweeping, cleaning, or babysitting my siblings. It could be that the only skills in this world were combat skills, but that seemed wrong too, based on how eventually it seemed like most people did acquire a skill, usually while still young enough for it to guide their life.

  Given what I knew about [Swordsmanship], and making assumptions about magic, it seemed like skills were mostly things that had to be taught, but not really something that could necessarily be self-taught. You can swing a sword around for years but never improve as a swordsman, because there’s no feedback. You needed some education to be a passable swordsman. Perhaps you could stumble your way towards barely acceptable swordplay through sufficient solo practice, but ultimately, you would need to spar or engage in actual combat to find out. Experience would be the teacher, then, but that would still come in part from one’s opponent.

  That line of thinking could have been flawed as well. Perhaps I was locked out of getting skills for things I learned in my first life. Maybe I couldn’t get a skill until I reached Level 2, or only got skills upon leveling up. Maybe my stats were just much too low and I was overestimating my growth so far. It was a bit taboo to talk about it freely in the village, after all, so I had next to no idea what was considered average.

  In the end, I wasn’t able to come to any firm conclusions. And so, time continued to pass. I started visiting Mishel less and less, as I had already memorized the forms and I couldn’t make much progress without sparring. Instead, I found a decently shaped tree branch which I further shaped with some crude woodworking, and I used it to keep practicing on my own at home. I was old enough now that I was getting more responsibility for the farm work, which was needed as our family had grown and we had to expand the fields. My father also wanted to spend more time hunting to feed the family, which meant I was all the more essential working in the fields.

  Weeks turned to months and then years. I turned ten, settling into the uninteresting life of a farmer.

  It was the year that my second life changed entirely.