It had been a few months now since Fred had chatted with the family about the lightning affinity, and through the continuation of his studies of the rat’s nervous system. His skills in neuroscience series were high enough now that he could start mapping out the first layer of the rat’s brain. This took him another month to complete and through the process increased his affinity 5%, Fred noticed the temperature was starting to fall, ‘it must be coming to autumn, the thundershowers will be starting soon’ he decided to have a break and head to the library, there he found a book, or more precisely an encyclopaedia of the local wildlife found in the south of Albion. At this point Jessica came in with a tray of drinks for them both, at first, she was insistent on just serving him drinks, even after he tried to say it was ok for her to join, so Fred decided to twist his intentions by pointing out that she was making him look like a selfish entitled master who didn’t value his underlings. This soon got her to change her stance. “Hey Jessica, have you gone through your Ascension yet?”

“No young master Fred.”

“How come?”

Jessica started getting nervous,

“Is it something embarrassing, I promise not to judge you for it, I just wanted to know if there was, well something I was doing wrong, to be honest, I’ve just reached level ten, and my current trajectory puts me at capping out exp near my fourth birthday.”

“Well, it’s not something you’re doing wrong, it’s on me.”

“?”

“The fastest way to gain normal exp is to level up moderate skills or higher,”

“Yeah, I’ve noticed that.”

“Well, the easiest skills to level up require access to education, something I’ve only just started receiving when I came to the castle.”

Fred was shocked that he was so ignorant of this fact, Nobility and to an extent, wealthy merchants had access to education, he thought the only resource he had for helping him gain skills was mana crystals, but they were quite common, he doubted as to how the nobility kept power when the common man can gain superhuman strength. But he completely forgot his access to education, this in and of itself has been the biggest boost to his skill growth and just took it for granted, but education, which was controlled by the nobility gave them a head start over everyone else.

“if you want Jess, I can help you through your education to help gain, exp faster.”

Jessica just thought it was a kind gesture and thought nothing of it, but Fred had spent many years as a Drill sergeant and could bet his bottom dollar that he knew far more advanced training and educational regimes than this current era.

Fred got lost in thought, about using this talent to derive a better standing army for his land but dismissed it at the moment as it would cause too many issues. “Ok well the offer still stands; I might be able to find some techniques you can use to gain exp faster.”

She thanked him again but then went quiet while drinking her tea, seeing this, Fred decided to go back to his book, he flipped through the pages a few times while skimming it when something caught his attention, each section started with an index of similar species and then the next few pages would go into more details for each one, and the page he found was an index for leeches.

As he read through each page it would tell him about the recorded properties of each leech and what he noticed was a lot of them were used in medicine, whether it was due to some superstitious bull crap like his previous world or had real and tangible effects in this world he didn’t care, but what he did know was that he could probably get more answers from Doctor Johan.

Fred added a piece of paper to bookmark the page before closing and got up stirring Jessica, “are we leaving Young master Fred?”

“I’m going to speak to Johan about something that you might find gross, you can come if you want but I won’t force you.”

Fred usually presumed people had a high tolerance for grossness so him warning her must mean it’s bad. Jess thought “I’ll prepare some snacks for when you are finished Young master Fred.”

Fred just smiled at her answer, he wasn’t going to call her bluff.

___

*Knock, Knock, Knock*

“Come in,”

Fred heard Johan’s voice through the door and walked in.

“Ah, young master Fred, what brings you here today,” Johan commented while tapping the chair next to him for Fred to sit.

Once Fred sat, he opened the book, he was sitting side to side with Johan, so the doctor saw the page as soon as he opened up. “Leeches, how fascinating, what piqued your interest with them?”

“I was just skimming through the book when they caught my eye. I’ve been experimenting with rats too much, and I fear I might associate all living things with them if I don’t study some variety.”

“Well, you can call them ‘variety’ Fred, I don’t have any on hand. I don’t really like the buggers myself, but if you’re after some, I have a few connections who can procure them.”

Fred flipped to one of the pages of a particular leech, “would you be able to get me some of these,”

“Brain Leeches?... O yes, you told me about studying the brain, you even came up with the term for how the brain works, what was it again.”

“Neuroscience”

“Yes, yes that’s the word, I read the paper that you gave me, it was quite fascinating what you discovered.” Fred had written all of his findings during his studies and shared them with Johan as he seemed curious about it too.

“Nasty little buggers the ones you picked, I’ve even had a few patients come in, they had buried into the skull of each patient and would always connect themselves to the brain stem, they always die when we remove them, but they usually always take their patient with them, Id says I’ve only had two survivors from these incidents. Makes me shiver just remembering it. But I would be very curious of what it does when it connects the brain,”, “How about Fred, I can get you a few of them, but would you do me a favour, write down your findings in a similar style to this paper for me to read and try to see if you can find a more effective treatment for them.”

“Sure, Johan” he was planning to experiment with them on the rats anyway to see if they match the ones from his world.

---

2 weeks later, Johan came down to the Dungeon to meet Fred, he was carrying a ‘stained’ glass box with a few holes at the top when Fred focused on the contents of the box, He saw 6 leeches with details matching the ones from old earth. “Wow, you got them, Johan?”

“Of course, I did kid, who do you think I am,” Johan said smugly.

Then Fred noticed a boy about the age of 8 behind him,

“Ah this is Matthew, he is my apprentice and nephew,” Johan turned to Matthew “don’t be shy, come and say hello.”

“Hello… um… Fred”

“Hello Matt,” Fred could tell he was nervous and to not make a scene about Mathew addressing him informally, decided to reciprocate the gesture. Since Fred didn’t seem to mind Johan wouldn’t say anything now but would probably chat with Matthew later.

“Now, Fred, you haven’t been the most careful person, especially with the wine incident or the water crystal incident.”

“But I’ve acted a lot safer since, Johan,”

“Indeed, you have, Fred, but these critters in this box are no joke. If I let you have them, I want you to promise me that you will only take them outside of the box when he is here, should anything happen, time would be of the essence”

“Ok, I promise”

After getting a promise from Fred, Johan placed the box on the table and left the two kids to it.

Fred pulled up another stool at the workbench, “come over and sit Matt,” Fred thought that it wouldn’t cause any issue to have him here, and Fred could do with an assistant.

Matt sat down “what are you going to do with them,”

“Do you have mana sense, and mana manipulation”

“Yes, I Ascended half a year ago,”

Fred noticed Jessica, who was of to the side lower her head, ‘maybe it’s hard on her to be around people with better privileges,’ Fred thought, I need to find a way to help her, I’d hate for her to struggle to keep up,’ Fred didn’t want her to feel like a burden in the future.

“Great do you know what happens when you use the skill while holding a crystal of an element?”

Yeah, you see stuff that is more inclined with the element.”

“Well yeah, that’s putting it mildly. Do you have an affinity?”

“Just the one at the moment, life”

“That’s good, I have lightning myself.”

“you’ve ascended?”

“No, I accidentally caused a mana reaction with a wine I was making, and well, we both ended up with mana sense” Fred pointed to Jessica as well. “I managed to force myself at the moment to awaken mana manipulation in the heat of the moment, then we managed to replicate the conditions, albeit in a much safer way for Jessica to get Mana manipulation. And a Fire affinity.”

“Wow, you managed to do that.”

“Yeah,”

Jess seemed a lot happier when Fred brought up this as if remembering a joyous moment, and he notices a hint of red in her cheeks, although Fred couldn’t understand why.

“Right so anyway, I am currently studying the brain functions of animals, using with the help of the lightning crystal and mana sense I am about to map out the nervous system of the body and have managed to map out 2 layers of the brain.”

“Wait what? What’s a nervous system?”

“O, right, well let’s start at the beginning, when I first found out you can change to mana sense mode with Crystals, I first noticed it with the Fire crystal, I could see the temperature of the rat,”

“Yes, I’ve done that as well, uncle showed it to me.”

“Ah good, have you tried it with the water crystal.”

“Yes, Uncle said I was looking at the blood flow of the creature when I did it.”

“Precisely, now have you tried it with the lightning Crystal”

“No”

Fred handed him over a Crystal, “try it and have a look at the rat on the table.”

Matt complied, “o yeah, they look similar to blood vessels,”

“Similar yes but take a look at where they concentrate,”

“In the brain.”

“Yes”

“So do we have lightning running through our body?”

“Well, no, you’ll be dead if real lightning ran through your body, but if it makes you understand it better, you can think of it as a very weak version of lightning.”

“O ok, but what does it do?”

‘Here goes my bullshitting skills’ Fred thought “well I have discovered, through my research that little sparks of lightning travel through pathways that can reach almost every part of the body, but these sparks seem to carry something like commands.”

“Commands?”

“Yes let me show you, I’ve managed to discover, what I call signals of different patterns each one doing a different instruction, Watch I’ll make him scratch his ear” Fred got another Lightning crystal and put it in his teeth, then picked up his probes, he touched the Rat and sent a very small mana jolt through the probe onto the rat’s body, it then sunk onto its nervous system and travelled up to his arm, and just as Fred Said the rat gave himself a single scratch on his ear.

“O wow, that was amazing”

“See what I mean, with this, I was able to figure out that this nervous system sends messages from the brain, instructing the body to perform tasks.”

Fred gave Matthew a station in the dungeon to practice with life Crystals, Matthew was hooked on the possibilities of what he could discover, only Fred forgot a phenomenon that had happened to him twice already and Matthew spent 5 days in bed with a fever. Johan didn’t seem to mind, thank God, and was of the opinion that the fever was worth the skills. But this meant Fred had to keep to his promise of not experimenting on the leeches.

So, he decided to help Jessica, he started with asking her what she wanted to achieve in the future or what she aspired to be, but all he got was “I want to continue serving you as your maid”, so he went to his mother for a guide to help Jessica be a fire mage as well. She was not a fan of this, stating why does a maid need to learn combat. So he applied twisted logic again by stating “I want to give my enemies a nasty surprise when they show up, and it will act as another layer of security for me.” As soon as he put it that way she was completely on board and wrote a step-by-step guide on cheats and shortcuts with annotations of what Isabella experienced through her progression.

---

A few months went by and over time Fred had experimented on the leeches, he found that if he held the nature Crystal and life Crystal, he could perform the operations to transfer the chemical factories located in the plants over to the leech, however, he found a crude way of holding the crystals without it being too near his mana pool, which was to put them in his pants, using the stretchy fabric to hold them in place.

He was also very proficient in brain mapping at this point and was able to rewrite parts of the leeches brain. It was a simple creature with a simple command script. He found out that if he removed the top layer, it would become enslaved to another brain when attached, but this made it dormant, as the brain it attached to didn’t know what to do with it so just left it alone.

But Fred got the idea from computer hardware, he could script a driver into the remaining leech’s brain, this would teach the master brain how to communicate and operate it. However, this would require a 2-way connection which at its current state the leech could only send signals. ‘Since there are a lot of Nerves in the pincers, I could use them.’

---

Months went by and it was now June, Fred was 4 and had maxed out his exp for level 10

*Congratulations* you have maxed out your exp on level 10, ascension is required for further growth, you have unlocked 2 quests, complete one to ascend to the next stage.

Quest one: complete the preliminary phase of the super-soldier program and initiate the metamorphosis process to become a super-soldier

Quest two: complete the preliminary phase for the Esper program and initiate the metamorphosis process to become an Esper.

‘The Esper program is out of the question for now, but the super-soldier program, I have only just achieved my first success with Rattacus, I failed the other 3 times leading to the deaths of the first 2 rats and the death of all 3 leeches. I only have two prepped leeches left and they are currently being sustained on makeshift life support using the dead rats and life crystals.’ He was deep in thought as he headed to the lounge to tell his mother that he capped.

Fred didn’t notice how eerily quiet the room was when he walked in as he was lost in thought

“what’s the matter, Fred.” George had asked him

“O its, well, I’ve got the ascension quests,” Fred offhandedly told him

“That’s good,”

“congratulations”

He heard the people cheer

“Well, the issue is I didn’t receive the basic one, I’ve only got two and the easiest one is to complete is my experiment, but I need the Frost cry berry to complete it.” He needed this berry with the Fire tear, these would act as temperature regulators inside the leech, as part of being a super soldier, it is needed of them to be able to operate in all weather environments, he found these two fruits were more efficient than the chemicals they made in his previous world to solve the same problem.

“Well, that’s quite fascinating” the doctor chimed in “what was your experiment anyway”

“it’s a bit complicated to explain” Fred didn’t know how to explain it to them, even if they knew where he got the information, there is a lot of heavy concepts that this world didn’t have the education for.

“We will listen” George responded in a very strict manner,

Fred was taken aback and looked over to them, Isabella seemed resigned as to what was about to happen, Fred suddenly got a bad premonition.