Three years had gone by.
Ash could walk now. He could speak. Both abilities were sufficient for the people inside the Vulkan mansion to stop considering him like a normal three year old and start calling him a genius whenever they thought he was out of earshot. He wasn't out of earshot. His hearing was fine.
He never corrected them either.
In reality, the explanation for his behavior was simpler but much harder to comprehend than genius.
He had the intelligence of a sixteen year old boy in the body of a three year old child. Books came easily because their language wasn't that hard.
Speaking did not take him long because he already had experience of logical reasoning. Good behavior was natural for him because he had sixteen years of knowing the consequences for being mischievous.
None of that was a sign of exceptional talent – it was all about knowledge stored in a small frame.
At least, people could go ahead and call him a genius.
Most of the time he spent in the library.
Not that he adored books, though it was something that everyone else failed to understand. All they saw was the three year old child surrounded by dozens of books, and thought it was utterly adorable.
Maids would gather at the door and murmur about how cute he looked while trying to pretend that he could read. Rose had done it twice already, actually mentioning how cute he looked.
He was reading every book and every page in it.
It bored him. It had always bored him in this lifetime and in his previous lifetime too. He preferred being outdoors, discovering new places and feeling the air in his lungs.
The act of sitting quietly and studying a book was the complete opposite of what he needed to do.
However, Rose would not let him go out.
He had tried to escape several times but never succeeded. Whenever he came close to the gate, footsteps behind him would warn him that someone was following him.
He had no idea whether his mom used magic to monitor his actions or she was capable of perceiving his intentions without any magical means.
Either way, her efforts had proven to be extremely efficient and highly irritating.
So, the library was his place to be.
And there were answers in books.
The first answer was quite a surprising one. He had thought that everything would be much easier – magic, kings, adventures in dungeons… In books, it was far more complex and chaotic than he had expected.
No adventurers lived here. There was no guild of adventurers posting quests on a blackboard and taking off in groups of four. Instead, there were Raiders.
The task that they fulfilled was quite similar but with minor variations: Raiders entered dangerous territories and defeated all kinds of creatures there. Sometimes, they did not manage to do it and perished in their attempts.
The dangerous locations were called Fractures.
Ash studied the information provided in the books carefully and reread those pages where he had not been clear before. Fractures were portals to another dimension.
They appeared randomly and opened somewhere near one point in the world. In those fractures, there was terrain which resembled nothing outside and contained different creatures.
The raiders had to enter these fractures, kill creatures and find the Seed of the fracture and destroy it too. After destroying it, the fracture closed. It was their duty.
There were regions that hosted such fractures frequently and others in which they appeared rarely or even never. The cause was unknown.
The second thing that he found out was related to the races of people inhabiting this world.
Elves.
Dwarfs.
Demihumans.
They were all described by the authors, with varying precision depending on the level of the author's knowledge in the subject.
Magic books were particularly intriguing to Ash.
After having studied three of them thoroughly and tried various techniques at night in his room, he concluded that he was a magician.
This point was quite obvious for him, as he was capable of producing fire. Quite a simple flame, nothing impressive.
His brother Flamir could do something similar with his tutor guiding him, probably better than Ash could do alone.
That was fine. He could work with fire.
Unfortunately, none of the other elements answered to his calls and attempts. Not water, not wind, not earth or any other.
He could not feel any of those powers, just a flame resting in his palm.
Now he examined that flame with a look of disappointment on his face.
He thought about all the stories he had read in his previous life. The main characters who tested their affinity and discovered they had six.
The ones who seemed ordinary until a hidden power revealed itself at exactly the right moment.
The ones who started weak and became unstoppable through some combination of talent and luck and the story needing them to succeed.
He looked at his one small flame.
He let out a slow breath.
He was disappointed in silence and stared at the little flame.
"I guess, I'm not one of those overpowered main characters," he whispered.
Flickering a bit, it continued to burn.
It kept burning, small and steady, completely indifferent to his disappointment.