The seasons turned, marked by the deepening chill in the manor's stones and the slow, deliberate hardening of my body. I was three, then four. The infant fat melted away, replaced by lean, wiry muscle that seemed to grow with unnatural purpose. Every scrap of food I consumed was metabolized with terrifying efficiency, fueled by the silent engine of Legacy's Embrace.
My mother, Elara, watched my growth with a mixture of joy and quiet concern. I was never sick. I never stumbled. My coordination was… uncanny. I could catch a dropped spoon before it hit the floor. I could walk the entire length of the dusty banquet hall on the narrow stone border of the hearth without a wobble. To her, I was her miracle, her bright, serious boy.
To my father, Alistair, I was a project. An investment. A weapon being slowly unsheathed.
The incident with the watering can had been a declaration. He never spoke of it directly, but the day after my fourth birthday, the nature of our interactions changed.
He found me in the overgrown courtyard behind the manor, a space once meant for genteel gatherings, now a tangle of hardy weeds and crumbling statuary. I was practicing. Not playing. My movements were a silent, precise kata—a fusion of Tai Chi's flowing balance and the sharp, angular preparatory stances of Karate. To an outsider, it might look like a child's slow dance. To anyone who knew combat, it was foundational geometry.
He watched from the arched doorway for ten full minutes, his arms crossed. Finally, he spoke, his voice cutting through the still air.
"That form. It's not from the Imperial Combat Curriculum. It's not from the Northern Marches."
I didn't stop. I flowed into a low, rooted horse stance, my tiny arms extended. "No," I said simply. My vocabulary was advanced, deliberately so. Hiding my intellect was more suspicious than revealing a fraction of it.
"Where did you learn it?"
"I just… know it." It was the truth, wrapped in a child's apparent simplicity. "It feels right."
He grunted, a sound of acknowledgment, not dismissal. "Feeling isn't enough. Form without application is decoration. Application without understanding is brutality."
He strode into the courtyard. He wore simple, rugged training clothes, not his usual lordly attire. He stopped a few feet from me. "Show me your punch. The one that moved the can."
I straightened. This was a test. Not of strength—that was impossible—but of principle. I settled into the stance, rotated my hips and shoulders in perfect unison, and snapped my fist forward in a straight line. It stopped a hair's breadth from his waiting, open palm.
The air popped.
It was a tiny sound, the result of breaking the air with proper acceleration and form. My arm was perfectly aligned, wrist straight, knuckles leading.
His eyes widened a fraction. He hadn't expected the technique to be that clean. He closed his hand, not around my fist, but gently around my wrist, feeling the alignment of the bones.
"Kinetic chain is intact," he muttered, more to himself. "Power generation is conceptual, not physical. Fascinating." He released me. "You understand the idea of force. But do you understand targets?"
He pointed to a weathered stone statue of a forgotten Vance ancestor, its nose long since chipped away. "Strike the center of its chest."
I did. My knuckles smacked against the cold stone. It hurt. A jolt shot up my arm. I didn't flinch.
"Pain is data," my father said, his voice a low drill instructor's monotone. "What does it tell you?"
"Stone is harder than fist," I replied, shaking out my hand.
"A child's answer. Look closer."
I activated my Cognitive Array, studying the point of impact. There was a faint, almost imperceptible smudge of grey on my reddening knuckles. Not just dust. A different consistency.
"The stone is weathered. It has a shell. The surface is harder than the layer beneath."
A ghost of something—approval?—flickered in his eyes. "Correct. Now. Where on a man is he like this weathered stone? Where is he soft beneath?"
My mind immediately accessed anatomical knowledge from my past life. The solar plexus. The floating ribs. The kidneys. The temple.
But I was four. I pointed to my own stomach. "Here. The armor stops."
"For a man in full plate, yes. For a beastkin with dense abdominal muscle, no. For an elf with reinforced bone structure from mana infusion, perhaps." He knelt, bringing his face level with mine. His breath smelled of strong tea and iron. "Combat is identification. You must see the system of your opponent—his armor, his biology, his magic—and find the flaw in the code. The weak point. The… bug."
My heart hammered against my ribs. Bug. He used the word. Coincidence? Or did he know more than he let on?
"Your… exercises," he continued, standing. "They are a good base. But they are silent. A warrior must also master the voice."
He placed a heavy hand on my shoulder. "The world runs on a System, Kaelen. You will not see yours until your twelfth year. But it is always there, listening. Your will, your intent, your commands—they must be sharp. Unambiguous. A poorly worded Skill activation can kill you as surely as a sword."
He spent the next hour not teaching me to fight, but teaching me to speak. To enunciate. To project. To imbue my words with absolute, unwavering intent. He made me recite old marching songs, not for the melody, but for the breath control and diction.
"The hill is stone, the wind is cold," I chanted, my voice clear and steady in the empty yard.
"Louder. The wind cannot hear your whisper."
"THE HILL IS STONE, THE WIND IS COLD!"
"Better. Now say it as if you are commanding the hill to shatter and the wind to still."
I took a breath, drawing not just on my lungs, but on the core of focus my past life knew. I visualized it. I willed it.
"THE HILL. IS. STONE. THE WIND. IS. COLD."
My voice didn't just get louder. It changed. It gained a resonant, almost metallic quality. It echoed off the manor walls.
For the first time, my father smiled. It was a thin, sharp thing, like a knife wound. "Good. That is the voice that speaks to the System. Remember it."
From that day forward, he was my tutor. Our sessions were sporadic, dictated by his mood and his mysterious duties, but they were intense. He taught me not specific techniques, but concepts: leverage, momentum, terrain, fear. He would tell me stories of battles not as glorious tales, but as tactical post-mortems.
"The Battle of Crying Gorge was lost because the General valued honor over high ground. He was a fool. Never be a fool."
I absorbed it all. My Cognitive Array filed every lesson, every offhand comment about monster behavior or racial physiology, into a growing database.
The shadows still came. I saw them more often now—a deeper darkness under an archway, a fleeting shape at the edge of my vision in the long hall. They never approached when my father was near. And sometimes, in the dead of night, I would hear a faint, rasping whisper that seemed to come from the walls themselves. It wasn't language. It was… static. It made the Void-Tether in my soul pulse with a faint, sympathetic chill.
One afternoon, deep in winter when I was nearly five, my father led me not to the courtyard, but to the manor's single, rarely used library. It was a tomb of dust and forgotten ambitions. He went to a specific shelf, removed a hollowed-out book, and pulled from it a small, cloth-wrapped bundle.
He laid it on the heavy oak table and unwrapped it. Inside was a knife. But not a soldier's dagger. It was a tool. About six inches long, with a simple, rugged handle and a blade of dark, well-kept steel. It was a hunter's skinning knife, or a woodsman's utility blade.
"This," he said, his voice solemn, "is your first truth. Steel does not care about your rank. It does not care about your System Rank. It is sharp, or it is not. It cuts, or it does not. All the magic in the world cannot change that fundamental fact."
He placed it in my hand. It was heavy. Real. The cold of the metal seeped into my palm.
"Your training begins in earnest now. You will learn to care for this blade before you learn to use it. A dull blade is a dead man's regret."
For the next month, my lessons were on honing stones, oiling leather, and the angles of a sharp edge. My Cognitive Array cataloged the microscopic striations on the steel. My Legacy's Embrace gave me an innate understanding of the blade's balance, its point of percussion.
Then, one evening, as a fierce gale rattled the shutters, he took me to the cellar. It was cold, dark, and smelled of earth and old wine. In the center of a clear space, he had set up a simple straw dummy, hung from a beam.
"Show me," he said, his face in shadow. "Not a punch. A cut. A single, efficient cut."
I held the knife. I wasn't thinking of a child's play. I was thinking of the anatomical diagrams in my mind. The carotid artery. The femoral. The brachial. I approached the dummy, not with a child's hesitation, but with a predator's measured stalk.
I saw the "system" of the dummy—the sack representing the torso, the rope representing the neck. The flaw in the code.
In one fluid motion, I stepped in, drew the blade across the rope at a precise angle, and stepped back.
The dummy's head, a burlap sack stuffed with straw, tumbled to the dirt floor with a soft thump.
The cut was clean. Surgical.
The cellar was silent save for the howling wind above. My father didn't speak for a long time. He walked over, picked up the dummy's head, and examined the cut.
When he looked at me, his expression was unreadable in the gloom. But his voice, when it came, was softer than I'd ever heard it.
"Your Awakening is in seven years," he said. "The world will judge you by the color of the light that shines from your chest. They will call you Common, or Rare, or maybe even Epic. They will give you a Class and tell you what you are."
He dropped the dummy's head and placed his heavy hand on my shoulder.
"Remember this moment, Kaelen. Remember the feel of the steel. The System gives you tools. It does not give you skill. It does not give you will. That…" he gestured to the cleanly severed rope, "…that is yours alone. No Rank can take it from you. And no Rank can ever truly measure it."
He blew out the lantern, plunging us into absolute darkness. But I wasn't afraid. In the blackness, I could still feel the perfect balance of the knife in my hand, and the cold, silent potential of the six spins waiting in my soul.
My father's final words hung in the dark, a truth more solid than the stones around us.
"Let them see the light you are given. But you… you must always be the shadow behind the blade."
[System Status: Unawakened. Body Development: 22%. Foundational Skills: [Blade Familiarity - Novice], [Combat Logic - Foundational], [Intent Projection - Basic]. Spins Available: 6.]
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A/N: The foundation solidifies. Lord Vance emerges as a far deeper character than just a grim lord—a practical, almost philosophical tutor. Kaelen's skills grow not through magic, but through relentless, applied principle. The mystery of the shadows and the Void-Tether simmers in the background. The stage is slowly being set for the wider world. Thank you for reading! Your comments and support are the real "System" powering this story. Please consider adding it to your library!