As time passed, we began preparing for the journey to the Forest of Sanni. My training became increasingly rigorous; I was practicing on a balance beam while holding a heavy book, with Mother and Olford standing nearby discussing the upcoming journey but ready to catch me if I fell. With my recent "upgrade," maintaining my balance had become surprisingly easy.
While I trained, they discussed the finances for our trip. My mother, ever the pragmatic strategist, decided to convert our liquid assets into Royal Platinum Notes, a decision with which the steward agreed. She was ruthless in her efficiency, ordering the sale of every non-essential luxury. Since we were to remain in the wild for forty years, it made no sense to keep our belongings here. Finally, she arranged to rent the estate out in our absence.
She also commanded Olford to reallocate the funds originally reserved for Sir Cane toward our travel expenses. He hesitated, pleading with her to reconsider. "My Lady, I know the ritual is fickle. It only works seventy percent of the time, and even when it does, only thirty percent of those results are true. But is a thirty percent chance of knowing the boy's future not worth the gold? Even a fragment of the truth is better than walking into the Sanni Forest blind." He spoke at length, detailing the advantages of early elemental alignment, but Mother remained immovable. Her decision was final; the gold would be spent on the caravan and reserve fund. Only I knew the true reason.
All this talk of money brought back the memories of managing my late father's failing business toward the end. It pained me deeply to grasp the true scale of his sacrifice finally—how much he had suffered in silence, carrying the heavy weight of his responsibility toward us entirely on his own. Driven by that memory, I decided to insert myself into their decision-making and also to fulfill my commitment. I had to secure a seat at the High Table.
But the task was not an easy one. To join the high table, I began throwing tantrums and outbursts that were calculated, which left my parents bewildered and worried. It was Olford, who eventually bridged the gap. Through his own lens of logic, he convinced them I was simply acting out due to the trauma of the ceremony; he believed I simply couldn't bear to be separated from them. His misinterpretation became my perfect camouflage.
Once I was in the room, however, their expertise was intimidating. They weren't just veterans; they were Frontier Architects. Mother, acting as the Chief Auditor, handled market analysis and capital raising. She even held a competition between three apprentice runic inscribers. She tasked them with drawing Weight-Reduction Arrays on our wagons and carts.
It gave me a chance to study the runes. To a casual observer, the three sets of runes looked identical. To my eyes, the winner's work possessed a five-percent deviation in geometric precision—yet that tiny margin resulted in a staggering ten-percent increase in efficiency. Mother rewarded the victor with ten extra gold coins, noting, 'Anyone can draw a rune, but it takes a lifetime of labor to truly understand them.'
I tried to sense the mana within the ink, but I felt nothing. Whether inside or outside my body, my mana remained a big zero. It seemed that I was still not ready for magic yet. According to the world's standards, I wouldn't typically awaken until age eight or twelve. But I was determined to unlock it before I turned eight.
I remained a silent observer of my father—the Master of Procurement and Drill. He constantly moved between the capital and the surrounding regions for supply procurement. Food stockpile consisted of high-calorie items like dried beast meat and grains, alongside alchemical solutions for preservation.
The alchemical inventory was just as vital, a range of potions was procured with the properties of healing, pain relief, and even those designed to trigger explosions.
To ensure the caravan remained safe and held up, he made frequent rounds to the blacksmiths, placing bulk orders for fresh blades, reinforced shields, and fitted plate armor.
Mobile toolkits containing spare parts like extra wheels, leather for harness repair, and basic hand tools for minor fixes were also inspected by him while I was in his arms.
I was surprised by his haggling skill as he brought the supplies from pharmacist guild representatives for non-alchemy first aid kits with bandages, antiseptic creams, and specific medications for common travel ailments like fever or infection.
A wide range of magic items were brought up from the basement like mana lamps which used mana stones, spatial storage boxes as well as portable water-purifying tools to utilize natural sources found along the path.
His meticulous nature as purchaser and quality inspector ensured that every spear-tip, axle, and grain-sack was of a quality that could withstand the "Hell" of Sanni.
He had formed a veteran unit of 30 soldiers who were directly under us as the baron's personal guards and we also had a seasoned squad of 40 men. These were our most trusted men.
Alongside them were 20 long-range specialists and 50 experts from various other fields such as blacksmiths, medical staff, cooks, and scouts/pathfinders, completing our technical division. In total, our caravan numbered 170 people.
When dad wasn't overseeing logistics, he was at the manor's training courtyard, obsessively practicing squad formations and honing his individual combat skills alongside his men.
The scale of our preparation was enough to leave my mouth agape. It reminded me of Stalingrad Resource Fetus who occasionally used to spam my comment section with, "Logistics is the wind pipe of any army."
In the middle of all this, I also made my preparations. My earlier powers had also improved following the upgrade, and I decided it was time to give them proper names. If something deserved to exist, it deserved a name.
The most notable advancement was the enhancement of my nighttime processing ability, which I named Overclock.
It was not something I could simply switch on at will — it only activated once my body entered genuine deep sleep. But once it did? My consciousness effectively hijacked my own biology, forcing my brain to operate at a speed it was never designed to sustain during rest.
Under normal sleep, my brain clears roughly seventy-five percent of neural waste—a decent job by any standard. Overclock pushed that figure to eighty-five percent.
While my body was completely still, my mind was working overtime, compressing and indexing everything I had absorbed during the day. The faint skip in someone's heartbeat. A scent carried on the wind that I had filed away without thinking. Visual details, fragments of overheard conversations, half-noticed patterns in the runes. By the time I woke up, that messy pile of raw data had been sorted and archived into something I could actually search and use.
It also functioned as a kind of simulation room—time felt compressed inside it, a few minutes of sleep that somehow contained hours of structured replay and analysis. A short nap that felt considerably longer than it had any right to.
The window was narrow though. Twenty-five to thirty minutes was the sweet spot. Push past that and the twenty-hour cooldown became a hard biological wall I had already learned not to test.
I knew exactly what waited on the other side—my body seizing while my consciousness watched helplessly, followed by a twenty-four-hour migraine that dragged my neural clearing rate down to sixty-five percent and left everything filtered through fog.
Overclock also burned through calories faster than the other five abilities combined. Run it on an empty reserve and it simply refused to start. Push it further than that and the cost stopped being mental entirely — my own cells began to break down to cover the deficit.
The remaining abilities or skills were refined versions of what I had already been developing, each earning its name through the work it had done.
I named my visual ability Optic skill. It had sharpened to the point where I could see with genuine clarity up to fifteen metres. Beyond that, the world started to blur.
I named my taste ability Geusia skill. It had become precise enough to differentiate chemical compounds on contact with my tongue. If someone tried to poison my food, I was confident I would catch the anomaly before swallowing. I had quietly tested it on several things I had no business putting in my mouth.
My ability corresponding to my sense of touch was perhaps the strangest and most mentally demanding of the set. By increasing my skin's sensitivity to feel the subtle shifts in air pressure, I could feel the displacement of space when someone entered a room or moved quickly behind me. It gave me something close to a full sphere of spatial awareness. I named this ability Haptic skill.
My hearing ability, which I named Audial skill, had shown the most dramatic improvement since the upgrade. I could now effectively mute the ambient noise of a crowded room and isolate a specific voice or conversation from up to twenty metres away and further depending on the quality and distance of the voice or sound. It had proven its usefulness before.
Finally, I named my ability to smell the Olfact skill. Over the weeks of preparation, I had quietly built a scent profile for every individual in our one-hundred-and-seventy-person caravan. Each person carried a layered signature — their own base scent combined with whatever they had touched, eaten, or encountered that day. Given enough time, I believed I could track any one of them blindfolded through an unfamiliar forest.
Six abilities. One body that was barely a year old. I thought that was a reasonable start.
---
Two days before the end of the Month of Ace, the King's official order for the Forest of Sanni arrived. We waited in the courtyard alongside thirty veteran units, all clad in their new armour and clutching fresh spears.
The King's Envoy arrived in a royal carriage, escorted by a hundred soldiers on horseback. They carried the banners of the Royal House: a Pentacle with a golden central pentagon, featuring a dark eagle with spread wings soaring toward the sky. The royal soldiers were equipped with gear far superior to our own.
A man stepped from the carriage and introduced himself as Fabio Ans. He produced a scroll and read the decree aloud:
ROYAL DECREE: THE MANDATE OF THE SOUTHWEST
By the Will of His Majesty, King Vitoris II, Sovereign of Enameia
and Protector of the People, do hereby proclaim this Royal Decree:
To: Baron Sama Hatar, 'Iron Grunt's Witness'
I. ELEVATION: For your courage in the Shattered Mountain Range (North) and for earning the deep respect of your fellow soldiers, the Crown grants House Hatar Blood Nobility in Perpetuity.
II. THE OATH: You have chosen the path of the bold. You are hereby bound to the Forty-Year Mana Oath.
III. DUTY: Effective 1st of Nas, you are deployed to the Southwestern Forest of Sanni.
The Mandate: According to the law, carve a fiefdom from the wilds. You are a Star of Enameia and bearer of the light into the darkness of the wilds.
The Clause: Due to instability in the other regions, no Royal reinforcements or supplies will be sent to the Southwest for five years. Only monetary assistance can be provided as stated in the law. You are self-reliant.
IV. THE HEIR: Zaemon Hatar remains "Unbound." On his 35th birthday, he may claim 30% of the conquered land in any province of his choosing.
V. FINAL WORD: The North remembers your blade and blood. Now, the Southwest requires your blood and service.
[SEALED: THE GOLDEN PENTAGON, PENTACLE ]
After the reading, a soldier presented an exotic longsword that pulsed with visible power—a Royal artifact with a Pentacle-shaped pommel. Fabio Ans performed the knightly investiture ceremony.
As the envoy finished, the hundred royal soldiers saluted and shouted in unison: "Glory to the Pentacle! Glory to Enameia!" The Envoy wished us luck and departed. My father turned to us, his face a mask of iron resolve.
"We leave on the first day of Nas," he commanded. "Go. Prepare for departure."
-*-*-*-*