Deep blue shards of light illuminated us as we ran in circles around the glorious tree which sat in the middle of what we called the training room.

“Wait for the two of us, you meanie” Rina was out of breath barely keeping up with my run.

“It's not my fault that the two of you are slowpokes, now hurry up, you can’t already be tired this is only our second lap. We still got twenty-three more to go” I replied to my sister.

Despite my words, I slowed my pace a bit until I was eventually in line with them, something which made both girls give me a little smile.

It had been about three months since our father's visit and we had begun to settle into our new routine.

“What!? We still have twenty-three more to go, that's impossible, I thought we were almost done,” Emma whined with an expression of pure disbelief in an attempt at humor.

At the very least it made Rina let out an adorable chuckle, she wasn't the type to look cute often.

Emma was nowhere near as athletic as Rina due to her lower physical stats, especially in dexterity, nor did she move with the efficiency that my higher-leveled Sprint skill allowed me to move with.

Despite her relaxed and calm attitude, she was probably the one suffering the most during this exercise.

Thick beads of sweat ran down her forehead already and her yellow t-shirt was starting to cling to her body.

For our morning exercises, we would have to wear a physical training uniform which, while being comfortable for the activity also boosted our physical abilities while reducing strain slightly.

It was about five in the morning. The sun wasn't even out yet, but we were expected to get up early to do these laps around the tree room which had a circumference of a little over 100m, by just my eyeball estimations which normally weren't even that accurate anyway.

I found the whole thing monotonous and boring and I was beginning to miss the easy pleasure of video games and ramen from my old world.

We had until about seven to finish our laps but if we failed we would receive penalties throughout the day depending on how much we missed the target.

The penalties weren't that bad individually but our days were already so packed as it was that one penalty tended to snowball into two then ten quickly growing out of hand.

We realized quickly that if we wanted any semblance of rest and free time we would need to be as consistent as possible with our workouts and academic work.

This was why despite not being monitored we took our laps very seriously trying our best not to slack off.

The maids had a way of figuring out exactly how many laps we did and if we cheated any by taking a shorter route.

“Have either of you made any progress with the soul pendant thingy yet?” I asked my exhausted siblings.

“Nope, I can't even see my pendant’s soul at all yet, unlike you two,” Rina said bitterly.

“I've made slight progress in trying to communicate with it” Emma spoke in a soft voice between heavy gasps of breath.

“The soul seems to shift in repose to me but not much else, what about you?” she added.

“Minor improvements,” I said dispassionately.

Rina looked at me with a tinge of jealousy in her dark purple eyes which had always harbored a bearly contained flame.

Her frustration was clearly building and I couldn’t tell if that was a good or a bad thing yet.

Both of my sisters were hyper-competitive and it annoyed me to no end.

Emma was destroying her lungs trying desperately to keep up with us right now and I knew for a fact that Rina spent so much time trying to level up Minor Soul Sense the moment she learned that Emma and I were ahead of her that she became semi-blind in both eyes for an entire day until she recovered.

To be fair I was also very competitive but I was also a grown-ass man. How could I live with myself if I let two little girls outshine me?

I couldn’t let that happen not in a million years but staying at the top was becoming much more of a herculean task than I originally imagined.

In terms of the pendant assignment, I originally thought that our task would have been an easy one since we already had the skills related to the soul necessary to complete it, but that was not the case at all.

I grabbed the chain around my neck, my eyes focusing on the pendant closely.

I felt a kind of gaseous energy flowing from an unknown dimension into my head.

I pulled at it, forcing it the take form and to move through the connection between my brain and eyes. Using the force of my Will alone to accomplish this feat.

My skills only gave me a vague sense that I was moving the energy in the wrong direction or at the wrong speed at any given time.

I needed to change course to get it right moving the energy in a strange mixture of circles, triangles, and quadrilaterals forming intricate patterns within my eyeball.

I was never pushed to form three-dimensional shapes with the energy which was probably due to the simplicity of the skill.

My eyes began to glow black as the silver pendant began to glow spilling forth countless tiny grains of power from its core.

The released sparks flew around the pendent in a circular motion. The grains slowly began to fit themselves together as if trying to form a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle.

Moving the energy within myself became harder and harder as the soul began to take shape in my vision.

I was tired and my head began to pound like a jackhammer on concrete.

My eyes were hot, red hot, they felt as though they would pop out of the sockets at any moment from all the unreleased stress.

I gave in to the pain, but I was almost able to see the figure's entire body, a feat none of us were even close to accomplishing before.

I was also finally able to tell the gender of the soul in my pendant, it was female and her clothes

seemed to be charred black while emitting tiny wisps of smoke.

This was interesting to me as the ability of the pendent was said to be fire-related by the system.

As I released my hold on the strange energy the little I had left in my eye started to dissipate into thin air.

My eyes then began to slowly cool off.

I could have sworn it released a small amount of steam as it did so but I wasn't sure.

A small thick tear rolled down my left eye, when I touched It I realized that it was not made of water but of blood.

My head still hurt tremendously but the pain was slowly subsiding.

Even after the skill was over I could see more sparkles around the pendant than I could have before.

My sisters were close, so I didn’t show my excitement on my face but I was absolutely ecstatic.

This was the furthest I had come so far and was a personal record for me.

Learning abilities and upgrading skills were way more repetition and talent-based than I had originally thought when I first entered this world.

Making the slightest bit of progress, felt like a massive achievement.

“What’s the damage Norman, no luck huh?” Emma asked in a smug tone after seeing my restrained expression. She was probably looking for a minor win to rebuild her self-respect while panting like a dog to keep up with us.

“I think I just broke your record I saw almost her entire body,” I replied back condescendingly.

Emma was lost for words but before she could come up with a response my legs glowed with a barely noticeable black aura as I activated Sprint leaving both of them in the dust. Trying to hammer home my superiority even further.

Sprint was a much simpler skill to use since the energy only had to be moved in lines and not in complex shapes.

What made it difficult was that the energy had to be moved throughout my entire body to work effectively making it much more stamina intensive and ironically requiring a lot more focus.

To put it in the form of an analogy, using Minor Soul Sense was like trying to solve a very complex math problem with multiple parts leading to one final answer while activating Sprint was like doing one hundred basic addition questions simultaneously and continuously as new problems would constantly arrive.

While if you look at the problems question for question the first one was harder but when you looked at it as a whole I actually found Sprint to be overall more tiring, both physically and mentally.

Especially since Sprint required me to move the energy through my body in the exact timing of my real-world movements which was a whole other dimension of stuff that I didn’t have to worry about with the other skill.

The reason I was so much faster than them despite their stats being higher than mine was assumable because the level of their Sprint skill was much lower than mine.

They weren't even able to activate the skill like I was yet.

“Wait! how did you see so much of the soul,” Rina who finally caught up to me asked desperately.

I liked the fact that they didn’t even question if I was telling the truth or not when I stated that I saw almost all of the soul.

“Instead of moving the energy in a straight line like the skill pushes you to do, try to move it in curves which are in line with the natural shape of your eyeball. The skill is much more effective when applied that way.” I replied.

While I liked being ahead it would never be worth crippling my siblings to stay there. I would feel way too guilty about it later.

What was family for if not to love and help each other out, even if you rarely found families who actually did that?

In truth, my sisters were just slamming their heads against a brick wall over and over again until they saw improvement while I was testing out different ways of moving my energy that could cause improvements faster which was why I was always ahead of them.

Everything from taking convoluted paths, trying to map out the shapes, patterns, and sequences the system would force me to use, to ignoring the push of the skill entirely and moving the strange energy in random directions.

At first, this method of learning put me behind my sisters, in who had the best single use of the skill, but now it paid off massively.

The system seemed to love it as not only were my skills levels higher than my sisters but I was rewarded with three more right after my most recent breakthrough.

[Congradulations you have gained exceptional experience with the skill Minor Spirit Sense. The skill has gone from level 3 to Level 6]

I was completely certain that Rina had practiced this skill more than I did or had time to, but I was four entire levels ahead of her.

What made these improvements feel better was that they weren't due to any special skills I learned at birth nor were they due to having more knowledge and experience from my past life than my siblings.

I pulled ahead of my sisters based on my creativity, hard work, and critical thinking skills alone as we all started learning this ability at the exact same time.

As a matter of fact, they should have had an advantage over me due to their increased stats which acted to make the use of skills easier.

The main attributes that helped with our Family-related skills were Will and Charisma which both of my sisters were a fair bit ahead of me in.

…

After our morning run, it was time for breakfast and then some basic lessons.

These lessons included subjects such as; Math, History, Reading and Writing, Nobel Etiquette, Geography, Politics, Physical Education, the basics of the system, and other miscellaneous topics.

You know, anything a child of noble heritage would need to know.

During these classes, we would be wearing clothes that boosted our learning speed and intelligence but also increased how fast we got mentally exhausted.

Our classes would take the structure of 45 minutes of learning with 15 minutes of rest with a larger break for lunch. With multiple instructors coming in for different subjects.

I had a lot of extra work to do over my sisters because apparently the higher your intelligence stat the faster your ability to learn in general, not just with skills.

Since I had the highest Intelligence I was expected to learn more than everyone else.

It was still easy for me at first since I had all my knowledge of these topics from my previous life to build off of and I always did extremely well in school anyway.

There was also the fact I was the type of guy who would research random topics online for fun so I had a lot of general mostly useless knowledge about this or that, which was surprisingly helpful here as well.

Despite this, I eventually regretted being so laid back and flexing on my sisters in the beginning because once our father realized how well I was keeping up with the work he told Kent to just keep on increasing the difficulty further.

The moment I learned to read properly I had to read half a novel a day worth of material in-between classes, a feat that was again surprisingly easy with my added stats and knowledge but still, keeping up with it all was becoming exhausting.

I thought being transported into this world would leave me like a fish out of the water where I would have to struggle to learn a single thing about this world.

While now I probably knew ten times more about the polities, cultures, and geography of this world than the average inhabitant and I practically just got here.

Not that the average person knew much to begin with.

This world was called earth just like the old one but the size and geography were much different than our own.

First of all, in just surface area, it was about ten times what you would expect on earth and the continent that we were currently on “Pangea” was about the size of all the continents on earth combined minus Antarctica.

Despite numerous expeditions being taken by the sapient species to leave this continent none have maintained a consistent presence out of it as of yet.

Mostly due to the high cost of maintenance versus the return on investment, many see it as much more beneficial to go deeper rather than explore the surface anyway.

The academic fields like those to do with S.T.E.M were massively behind that of modern-day which was both exciting and frustrating.

Kent was standing in front of us, with a basic illusions spell to his left which produced a sort of holographic blackboard for us to read information off of and to take notes.

We sat next to the massive tree in the training room while he taught us some history like we normally would after having breakfast

As we sat cross-legged on the comfortable flooring my sisters dutifully took down notes while I was doodling random sketches on my notebook, making the occasional origami toy with paper, and overall not really paying attention to anything he had to say.

“Not much is known about the period of history known as the Rebirth. The earliest account we have of this event comes from the Newly Anointed Church and despite the numerous conflicting accounts, inconsistences and logical impossibilities present in their writings it is the most reliable source currently have on the matter.” Kent stated.

So this story isn’t even legit yet they have us in an entire forty-minute class to discuss it.

I slowly rubbed the ends of the pages of my notebook rolling it back and forth as more of a fidget than anything else to pass the time until the boring lecture ended.

“According to their records and put in brief, after the death of Jacob, a prophet who was supposedly the son of their deity was killed by sinners and non-believers.”

“Their god enraged at his son's murder decided to curse the world with the Updates.”

“This is what lead to the creation of what we now know as the system.”

“Do you understand?” Kent said as he threw a rock or pebble or something from his pocket hitting me in my forehead when I was not expecting it.

*Smack* the pebble hit with a slight bang. He was obviously holding back because I was a child but it felt as though he shot a bullet through my head.

“Hsss! What was that for?” I quickly suppressed my scream from the pain making a weird hissing sound instead. My forehead was pulsing and my eyes were watering.

My teacher simply stood there with a smug grin on his face. My sisters both tried to hold their laughter through their hand-covered grins.

“Can you explain to me what I just taught?” Kent asked me in a smug tone full of condescension.

I was honestly beginning to think that the man hated me not that I blamed him much.

I was always making jokes and not paying attention in his class but could you blame me.

I was either relearning things I already knew about or regurgitating boring lore no one cares about which may or may not even be true.

“So the entire system got created, changing the course of history because some random guy's sky daddy got pissed after he let him die,” I replied showing that I was actually basically listening.

“That's not..” he was about to speak but I cut him off.

“Same difference I simply said it in my own words” I answered quickly before he had a chance to finish his sentence my sister giggled in the corner at that and I was surprised that they didn't enter with their own comments.

“If the people of that church heard you talk about their texts like that you would be stoned” He replied in a warning tone.

“And none of us are a part of it so why should I censor myself so that people who arent around to hurt me for it,” I replied flatly.

Kent looked like he was about to say something back so I quickly changed the topic by asking a question.

There was no way that I was going to get caught again arguing with him over something stupid for him to give me that “ow you ignorant child let me educate you” voice which made my ears bleed and my head numb.

“So how do the updates work exactly you haven't explained them yet”

“Every two hundred years the system and the world itself would be fundamentally changed adding new landmasses creatures and abilities and releasing it into the world.”

“While most consider these events as calamity I and many others see them as an opportunity. Each and every one of them has progressed mankind to new heights with the advent of new technologies, magics, and resources to us and exploit at our leisure” Kent said with a glint in his eyes.

“The first update only really consisted of adding the stats feature which only consisted of two stats physical ability and mental ability and it is theorized that a lot of the ancient magical creatures we know now were born at this time.”

“It's been about 4000 years since then and from what I've heard a lot of the “updates” since then have sent humanity back into multiple dark ages.”

“So when are we going to be doing something that is actually interesting and not just more studying,” I asked in an annoying tone.

“Studying the history of our world is interesting, first of all. Secondly quite soon actually” Kent replied back.

I perked up at the news I actually didn't mind the boring classes too much as I had already grown accustomed to them.

My complaining was more in jest that anything else.

“On Wednesday you will be picking which weapon type you will be specializing in. Shorty after some basic training you will go straight into sparing sessions with me and each other to reinforce what you are learning and to give you practical experience.” Kent continued.

I didn't know what the next couple of weeks would be like but I knew that they would be exciting.