My wish was this, to live an easy life that was full of warmth.

The token that I offered up was my family, so I didn't have to clean up or offer any explanation.

The world went black, I slumped down and passed out in my chair.

When I awoke the first thing I did was look for my father to see if it was all a dream. He was gone, maybe it was all a dream I thought to myself but the coffee mug was still sitting on the table and the chair was pushed out.

I had to be sure I called out to my family, "Is anyone home" but there was no reply. I knew it wasn't a dream at that point because someone was always home.

But it didn't seem like I had an ability. From the way the people in my village had described it you should instinctively know what your ability is just by thinking about it.

I was still weak and I couldn't even be angry because I was too weak. For now, it had to be a bad dream. I walked into the kitchen and started brewing myself a cup of coffee.

If it was a bad dream then I just needed to go to work. I drank coffee and made myself breakfast. When I looked down at the coffee my eyes startled myself.

I wasn't dead yet. And I doubted they would send a second assassin.

But the strangest thing happened as soon as I stepped onto the path to work. I felt warm and comfortable like I was still a child and was being cradled by my mother.

Had I gone insane I wondered to myself? As I continued down the path eventually the feeling floated away from me.

But the weirdest thing happened a 1 appeared on my right forearm. Now I knew it wasn't a bad dream I had gotten an ability. But I couldn't understand why I didn't know what it did.

I had to go figure this out, with a turn I spun around and started heading for home. I would figure out what this ability did. After all that feeling of joy was just too hard to forget. The number ticked up to 2.

I instinctively realized the number represented mana. Then I had an ability related to mana those weren't too rare about half of all abilities were related to mana in some way.

The reason that this was cause for celebration was that mana abilities were easier to grow, but just as strong as normal abilities.

Normal abilities might go along the lines of "your right arm has an infinite amount of muscle tendons to attach train it well". But mana abilities were easier to scale because the ability depended on the amount and application of mana.

By the time these thoughts had cycled through my head I was back at my house. I went inside to get a paper and a pen to record my findings.

I sat down at the table and wrote down my findings the number on my forearm represented the amount of mana stored. I continued to write down my experience for the entire day and the details about how I had come to have this ability.

It was then that the number on my forearm ticked down to 1. That didn't make sense I thought to myself how could the number go down when I didn't even use any mana. I knew it was a charge type ability. Did it require a certain amount of mana to upgrade?

The one thing I was certain of was the ability charged up when I was outside. I couldn't make any sense of this power. If it was even powerful, or if it was just the ability to put numbers on my forearm.

Maybe I was already destined to live a happy life filled with joy so I just got the ability to put numbers on my arm. That would be pretty funny I thought to myself. But regardless having more is always better so I walked outside to where the ability first triggered.

When I got there the number didn't go up for quite a while it seemed like it went up once about every 30 minutes or so. Once the number had reached two again I decided to go sit on the porch in the shade.

After sitting on the porch for a while the number ticked down again.