With the harvest over it was time to return to school, and by school I mean my dad beating me up every day. He liked to call it training, I liked to call it my daily torture session. Now don’t think my dad is some kind of abusive monster, because he isn’t. Still though his teaching methods left a lot of be desired. Basically every day at dawn dad would take me outside and show me the basic forms as he called them. It mostly consisted of how to distribute my weight, how to move in order to avoid an attack and how to move in order to press an attack. The attacks themselves consisted primarily of kicks, that it reminded me a lot of Tae kwon do, or at least what anime told me Tae kwon do should look like. It was a lot of spinning kicks. Then we would go over defense, which was a lot like judo mixed with tai chi. The emphasis was on efficient movement and using your opponent’s weight against him.

When I was younger and asked dad why our fighting style didn’t emphasize our speed and strength more, I got a slap to the back of the head. Then he told me, “There are too many people and monsters that are stronger than us, there are also those who are just naturally faster. We do not emphasize our physical superiority because that is a crutch we do not need or want. Our people developed this fighting style so that we would not lose should we meet someone stronger or faster than us. The only way you should ever lose a fight is if someone is more skilled and when I am done with you, there will be no one more skilled.”

It made me proud of my new people, that they would be so humble, then later that year I saw a bear man, he stood eight feet tall and looked to weigh around six hundred pounds. That was when I realized that maybe my people aren’t exactly humble, they were just realistic in their world view.

Anyway, after reviewing the forms and basic stances along with answering any questions I might have about them it was time for the physical fitness portion of the morning. This consisted of Dad starting to run in whichever direction he wanted and I would have to keep up. The first couple of miles were always pretty easy, our people are really good at running, Olympic gold medalists don’t have shit on us. We would be doing close to three minute miles, which is great if you only have to run a couple of miles, but maintaining that pace for at least an hour, more if Dad was feeling particularly spry was a gut wrenching pain. We would normally take a small break after my morning vomit, then jog back home. We only went a measly fifteen miles per hour on the way back.

Our morning runs did have a pleasant side effect though, I now knew much more about the surrounding 10 miles. We were only 2 miles away from a river, it bordered the road for a while then shot into the forest. The forest was an old growth deciduous forest, think of all those old films about Robin Hood and you will have the right image. Lots of tall leafy trees with little to no underbrush. Apparently the forest was relatively safe, no magic monsters or anything like that, just our smaller cousins, known locally as Susikin. I like to think of them as little wolves, they only weigh up to 80 pounds and look a lot like wolves from Earth except for the opposable thumbs of course. They would hunt in packs, but would typically avoid my father and I as we were both bigger and faster. Their only advantage was numbers but they respected my kind too much to press their luck.

To the North where the river meets the road is our nearest neighbor, he is one of the Cow people who are known collectively the Lehma. Tukeva has a nice little family, a wife and two kids, his youngest daughter Alistuva who was a year older than me, and his son Urhea, who was around 3 years my senior. Our families got along fairly well, and we would visit them often during the winter. Tukeva apparently brews a decent ale, along with growing some of the best weed in the district. Yeah yeah, it wasn’t actually weed, but that’s what I am calling it after my Dad smoked some and got high as hell.

A few miles north of Tukeva’s farm is the village of Gladeston, that’s where we do a majority of our trading. To the east is the forest I mentioned earlier and to the west is a lot of open plains. Apparently there are a lot of dangerous herds of Lehmakin and settling in their territory is dangerous. I haven’t seen any personally but apparently they are a couple thousand pounds of mean murderous cow. Think Cape buffalo on steroids. Finally to the south is the town of Meadow Rest, that’s where we sell most of our crops every fall since the prices are better than what we can get in Gladeston.

After our run is when Dad claims is the best time to spar, he likes to say, “If you can’t run to the fight you won’t make it in time, and if you can’t fight after the run then you shouldn’t have shown up in the first place.” After doing a light stretch Dad proceeds to beat the hell out of me. He likes to leave openings in his defense that I can exploit only to counter my attacks and call them too slow. Of course if I don’t attack then he proceeds to wail on me claiming I need to be more aggressive, or that my defense is sloppy. I’m six year old, yet he claims that isn’t an excuse and that I shouldn’t be such a baby. Sometimes I hate my dad.

After sparring we go to collect Gurt, and our lessons begin. Gurt and I are taught reading and writing which you would think I would be really good at. Unfortunately you didn’t count on the fact that we use pictographs. Yeah… so far I have learned around 70, which makes me illiterate, Gurt has like 10 down, so I don’t feel like an idiot. Still though it is fairly depressing, I am going to have to introduce the alphabet to these people. After our reading and writing lesson we are put through a guided meditation and this is the brightest part of my day. I have been meditating for the last 5 years and thus I am way ahead of the curve. Dad wouldn’t start teaching me how to properly meditate until I turned 5, so I still haven’t learned how to use mana yet, but I am way ahead on creating my manna channels.

Apparently everyone is blessed with a manna core in the center of their chest, right around the stomach. When you eat food any ambient mana stored in the food is absorbed into your core. In order to store more mana/actually use any of it you need to build mana channels so that it can be released from your body. The bigger your channels and the more of them there are, the more access you are given to your mana and the more you can store. By starting this process while I was still in diapers my manna channels are fairly large since they grow as you grow.

One of the biggest issues from which my race suffers when it comes to being a mage is that we get close to our adult size by the time we are 8 years old which means that we as a race never really have mana channels the same size as those from other races. Sure we can develop them throughout our lives, and we live a long time, but we tend to miss out on the natural growth that other races enjoy. In fact most races don’t start to teach their children about mana until they are eight or nine years old since a child with magic could be a nightmare.

My people start early at five, and only those who are deemed mature and responsible are taught, meaning if you are a bad kid you are going to suck as an adult magic user. Even starting early generally isn’t enough to become a powerful mage for the Susi suffer from one other important defect, our mana core are smaller than everyone else’s. Thus my people developed small magics, things that didn’t require a lot of mana, the earth wave my dad used drained almost all of his mana.

That’s why I haven’t tried to do any magic yet, I have used every extra scrap of mana to expand my mana channels, putting them everywhere in order to compensate for my smaller core. But no matter how much I train and meditate I will never be able to level mountains with my magic. Gurt on the other hand is going to be a great mage, he is learning early and his people have some of the biggest cores. Which means that I am going to have to be efficient in my use of mana if I want to equal him.

Father guided us through our meditation, “The flame is bright and burns eternal, its’ heat fills you, it traverses your body never stopping always hungry. Feel it flow from your core, the source of your power, feel it as it spreads, follow the channels as they bend and twist throughout your body. Do you feel it boys? Can you feel the network of channels? Now go to the ends of the network, find the places where your channels stop and your flesh begins, and then guide the mana into your flesh. Expand the network as much as you can. Do not let the pain distract you, pain just lets you know that it’s working. Remember boys, don’t use too much of your mana to expand the channels or you could suffer a collapse. Your mana channels are young which means they are flexible and able to expand, but if you use too much mana to expand there will not be enough left in you to keep the channels open. Everything you have worked for will be undone. Be patient, be careful, but do not slack, put as much into the effort as you can.”

My father’s advice guides me as I continue to expand my channels, I empty out my core in the process, while making sure that the actual channels themselves stay filled with my mana. The pain is of course intense, like someone has stuck a burning hot needle into my body and is moving it around. But it’s a pain I have long since gotten used to. Today is a leg day, so I have been focusing on adding more channels to my calves, they have not appreciated it.

Finally our two hour meditation session was over and it was time for us to do our chores. I go into the velocichicken’s cage and gather any unfertilized eggs, of course in order to do that I have to fight off the tiny dinosaurs. I think this in one of the reasons I have been receiving martial arts training without it I would have been scratched to hell.

In order to gather any eggs you have to keep your head on a swivel, the velocichickens will rush you from multiple angles if you’re not careful. When they leap at you, that’s right they can jump around 3 feet in the air, and they are always attempting to disembowel you, you need to sidestep the attack and lightly strike them as they pass. It’s important that you hit them hard enough to remind them who is in charge without doing any serious damage. If you actually hurt one of them badly, they all go into a frenzy and won’t stop trying to attack you for hours.

So after checking for eggs, there weren’t any, I leave the coup/giant cage, and throw in some meat. Yeah no grain for these chickens, they are carnivores. After that’s done I need to help mom and Westra in the vegetable garden. Gurt and I end up weeding the garden while Mom and Westra tend to the plants, ensuring that there are no parasites among our produce. After weeding comes lunch which is a simple affair, homemade bread and a vegetable soup. Then it’s time to hunt.

Frankly after the harvest is over there isn’t a ton of stuff to do, sure we have to prepare the soil for the next crop, and we have to get our produce to the market, but Dad handles those things, especially now that Kurt is there to help him. So at least once every other day or so Dad and I will go into the woods or plains in order to hunt some meat to break up the monotony of vegetables and grains.

I grab my dad’s spear from the barn along with my own, I check my sling to ensure it is still in good condition and check the pouch on my hip to ensure I have plenty of ammo. Then Dad and I proceed to jog to the woods.

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AN: I've been reading slip hero lately, good story, though the MC is a little too passive for my tastes. Anyways after reading it I realized my story would get stuck in the same sort of trap if I wasn't careful. A story about a healer can be interesting but it kind of bogs down if all he does is heal the some wounds over and over again. My MC will not end up being a battlefield doctor, and while he will definitely be a healer when he goes into a war zone it will be to deal death, not save lives. You can also expect the chapters to get longer, I will be shoot for 3k words per chapter, but that may delay the releases a little bit, expect them every two days instead of every day.