NOVEL NEXT Chapter 60: Mind over matter
“Mind over matter represents the triumph of will over physical hindrance. Our thoughts are our weapon against the world.”
David Adam
I had been here before. Sat in my mind watching the world go by outside without being able to interact. I had coped then I would cope now. In fact, built on the foundations of that time most of my skills were either mental or magical in one form or another. Sense Mana didn’t need my eyes to function. Echolocation used my ears but I had already managed to get them to function. Those two skills were all I needed to perceive the world around me much like I had in the womb and I had only gotten better since then.
Indeed, my latest trait gave me so much more time to do so as my brain zipped along at speeds that made the world seem as if it was standing still. The counterbalance to this was the steady speed at which my stamina slowly dropped. If my family could have noticed my stamina dropping they would surely have been aware that significantly more was going on in here than they feared. Or worried about.
I was going to start by cataloging my skills, working out which ones were related to which stat, work out which ones I could still practice within the confines of my mind, when I realised, I was no longer trapped within my mother, there was no reason I couldn’t use my magic, to let them know I was not a complete invalid.
How to do that without completely freaking them out though, that was the question. I could set things on fire, melt them, freeze them or boil them but none of those seemed to be the right way to go surprisingly enough. That left me with Gale or Material Manipulation and while I was tempted to blow air in people’s faces, I doubted that was going to do much to convey anything more than annoyance to my family. Material manipulation it was.
Luckily, as I had already worked out I could still sense the world around me through the use of my skills if not so much my eyes and ears. I could also spend the subjective time to manipulate a material carefully and slowly at least to them rather than brute forcing it as I had always done. Slowly, I used mana manipulation and material manipulation to use my clothes to point forwards. Fluttering up and off my body to point towards my mothers workstation.
Slowing my mind down once more, I listened to my family’s shocked gasps. The conversation and the agonisingly slow realisation that I wanted them to take me in the direction my clothes were pointing. I admit maybe it wasn’t immediately obvious but it was the best I could do with the resources I had at hand. Resources I hoped to improve if they took me to where I wanted them to.
Painfully slowly, from my perspective, I was carried to the bin where mother kept her wool. Finally, I had something better to work with than my clothes. Using the wool, I was able to manipulate it into the word for ‘hello’. This was then followed by the short sentence ‘I can hear.’ Another round of surprise worked its way around the family. Now they knew I was still there, I could still hear even if I couldn’t move myself round.
First things first. They all had a question to ask and piled in on top of one another asking them.
“Are you okay?” Mother asked my recumbent form clearly concerned with my welfare.
While Aleera was less diplomatic about it. “Are you just messing with us?” Not quite yet ready to forgive the scare I had put them through this morning.
Father didn’t have a question to ask just a statement, “We’ve got you. Don’t worry it’ll be okay.” I wasn’t completely convinced that he knew what he was talking about but it was nice to know that he was optimistic about my situation.
Grandfather, on the other hand, was less concerned about my wellbeing, knew I wasn’t messing around and less optimistic about my predicament. He cut straight to the heart of my secrets, “Can you see your status? Have you always been able to see your status?” he demanded.
Um. I spelled out the words Yes, No, Thanks and . . . Yes and . . .Yes to answer their questions. There wasn’t really any point in hiding it from them any longer. They had outlined my situation more or less accurately when discussing my current disability. Perhaps if I had been more honest about my status I would have been warned about the pitfalls of developing an imbalance and wouldn’t be in my current quandary. Although to be fair they still didn’t know about my traits yet, or the number of skills I had, or their levels, or the fact that I was a soul from another world and remembered a different life. Okay I was still keeping a lot from them. Would I always only confirm what they already knew or would I offer more.
“And why didn’t you tell us you could see them?” Grandfather quizzed.
While mother defended me, “He’s just a child. Leave him alone.”
“He is just a baby not even a child but has he ever behaved like one?” Unwilling to give up on his line of questioning.
While I hesitated to do so getting Aleera to answer this question was easier than writing out complicated answers. ‘Ask Aleera’ I left the answer laid out for them on the table in my mother’s wool.
They all turned to Aleera expectantly. “Well he asked before, but I said we don’t talk about our status and our stats. Less we be eaten up.” She quietly replied.
“Eaten up?” Kaius asked confused.
“Are you still going on about that stupid fable?” Mother turned to Grandfather unimpressed.
“If it stops children talking about their stats before they know what’s important in life it is effective and works. And if it works it’s not stupid” He argued back.
“Well maybe that is just one of the reasons Kai hasn’t spoken about his status then isn’t it.” She responded sarcastically back.
“Well there’s no reason you couldn’t have mentioned your suspicions either.” He said pointedly still unforgiving for having been left out of the loop.
“And if I had? What would you have done?” she was almost shouting at grandfather. “I remember my time growing up! I saw what you put Aleera through! And although I never dreamed you would do something similar with a baby we now we know what you put Kai through too. What would you have done if you had known he could see his status?” She had passed me to Father to advance on my Grandfather. It was difficult to tell whether her anger was for herself my sister or for me as it was all wrapped up together and thrown at him.
“It was all to keep you safe. The strong will always rule the weak. No one can hurt you if you are stronger than them.” He tiredly explained as if this was a repetition of an argument often held where he knew neither one would be able to convince the other.
“We are safe. No one rules here and you are strong enough to protect us all. What are you so afraid of?” she seemed exhausted by her anger and repeating an argument she had clearly had many a time already with him. I wondered if realised she had also redirected the conversation away from questioning either me or Aleera.
“We have been safe because we have kept ourselves hidden. We weren’t ruled, because no one was interested in a small island, at the edge of the known world. Finally, just because I am strong compared to the humans here, that does not make me strong enough to protect you. Not from the denizens of the deep, the creatures that crawl through the earth, the spirits of death that soar through the sky, or the men of the compass kingdoms who can sometimes be more monster than man.” He argued, angry that he could not convince my mother of a danger she had never faced. I on the other hand had a large imagination and if the Goblin Shark was anything to go from then things on the world came in larger sizes and that was even before they became magical or mythical. Was my mother still refusing to listen simply because he was her father. Father finally stepped in to calm their ire and refocus them on the problem at hand namely me and my inability to move.
“Will knowing Kai’s stats help us work out the imbalance?” he asked as he wrapped his arms around his wife and holding her close to his chest.
“Yes.” He begrudgingly answered letting go of an argument older than I was to focus on the problem at hand.
“Well Kai,” father asked, “How strong is my little champion sailor?”
This was the moment of truth for me. How much to reveal. How much to disclose. I had lied by omission and that had led me here. But they still hadn’t told me what theirs were and I was hesitant to open this particular can of worms. Once they started asking how far down the rabbit hole that was my soul were they going to want to go. Honesty is the best policy at least I wouldn’t have to remember any lies moving forward.
Slowly for me but quickly for them I spelled out 28 on the table to a collective inhale of breath. Was that good or bad. Good I would have thought seeing as Aleera had strongly implied that 5 year olds awakened their status sheet with a set of stats filled at 10.
“That’s my boy.” Father seemed excited at my strength, while Aleera looked suspicious, and mother outright concerned. I had answered all their questions so far. What about them answering mine. Before they could ask me another question or quiz me about the rest of my stats. I quickly spelled out, ‘Normal?’ on the table.
Grandfather laughed, “Nothing about you has ever been normal. But if you are asking what most children start with, then the average child will awaken their stats around the age of 5 and they usually start with 10 in strength. Now with training they can add their starting amount to it most years throughout their childhood up to the age of 20. Although we don’t talk about it. Aleera should be sitting on a strength of at least 50. So, no Kai, not normal. You are roughly 6 years ahead in terms of your stat gains and have the strength stat of a 7 year old.”
I was over half as strong as Aleera. That hardly felt right. She regularly carried me and moved me around. There was no way I could have stopped or halted her from moving me around at all. Something didn’t add up here. “I strong as 7?” I might have been able to spell it out quickly on the table but there was only so much wool that I had managed to get my hands on so far.
“No darling.” Mother picked me up once more to cuddle me. “You are only a third of their size so even if you had the same strength stat your vessel your body being limited still in size would only be able to apply a third of it. In time you will grow into your stats just as you grow into your body.”
“He’s still as strong as a 5 year old though.” Crowed father still happy with what I had revealed. And I suppose if the average 5 year old started with a stat strength of 10 and were 3 times my size while I with a stat strength of nearly 30 whilst being a third of their size we should average out equally.
Suspicious Aleera asked the follow up question, “What about your endurance and dexterity?”
“28 and 34.” I replied cautiously in my head at least. There wasn’t anything cautious about it when it was laid out on the table in what felt like lead rather than wool.
“You’ll make a great sailor.” Proudly boasted raising a glass to toast my outstanding attributes. Father still seemed a little fixated on what my potential stats might mean for a career on a boat. Aleera seemed happy to be confirming what she had already believed that I was a little monster. Mother and Grandfather though seemed to be thinking through the consequences of my statements and questioning why if those were my attributes for brawn why then was I currently presenting as a cripple.
“And your vitality?” Mother quietly whispered. Father picking up on the changing mood of the room quietened down, sipping his beer quietly while he waited for my answer.
This was the big one. Well it wasn’t the biggest one, but it was the first of my more outrageous attributes. If they had been struck speechless by the impossibility of me being able to have stats in the first place, they had slowly grown to accept that I did. Even been proud of my strong start in life. But how would they respond when I laid this one out.
“1 . . . 1 . . . 8.”
“Eleven seems a little low in com . . .” Aleera started to say, before halting, to the sound of my father spraying his beer out across the table. I’d let the cat out of the bag, it was time to face the consequences, but at least it wouldn’t become the skeleton in the closet. There was something freeing in finally letting them know.