The house felt significantly lighter after Rudeus's departure. The constant, low-level anxiety of being scrutinized by a fellow reincarnator had lifted. I didn't have to worry about my eyes lingering too long on a map or my movements being too coordinated for a toddler. I could finally breathe.
The next two to three months were dedicated to the necessary, agonizing process of learning to speak. My adult brain knew the words, but my infant mouth and vocal cords were useless, turning complex language into garbled nonsense. It was frustrating, but I spent every waking moment listening to the adults, dissecting the phonetics of this new world's common tongue.
One normal morning, the house was mostly quiet. Paul was at the village hall for work, and Lilia had gone to the market for supplies. It was just me, my twin Aisha, and our little sister, Norn, with Zenith supervising.
We were playing—or rather, Aisha and I were investigating the texture of a wooden toy while Norn wobbled around clumsily. Suddenly, Norn tripped over the rug and landed with a loud, distressed cry. Her knee scraped the wooden floor.
Zenith was there instantly. She cradled Norn, shushing her frantic sobs. Then, with a gentle, soothing tone, Zenith began to chant.
"O' spirits of the earth, who watch over all life, gather now and mend this small tear..."
It was a standard, elementary-level Healing Magic incantation. As a former adult with knowledge of the Mushoku Tensei world, I knew the words, but hearing the actual cadence, the way the mana was drawn in and molded by the sound, was a completely different experience.
My body reacted before my mind could calculate the risk. Driven by the recent weeks of listening and mimicking, and by the sheer familiarity of the mana flow, I instinctively reproduced the sound. I mimicked Zenith's tone and rhythm, turning to Aisha, who was sitting next to me.
I whispered the exact incantation that Zenith was currently using on Norn, focusing the intent towards my sister.
A small, faint green glow enveloped Aisha's knee.
The light disappeared instantly, but the sound of my childish garbling drew Zenith's attention. She finished her own spell on Norn, looked down at her successfully healed daughter, and then snapped her gaze to me.
Her bright yellow eyes were wide with complete astonishment.
She immediately put down the now-calm Norn and rushed over, kneeling between Aisha and me. She picked me up instantly, holding me in a tight embrace, looking at me like I was some rare, priceless artifact. Aisha and Norn watched from the floor, confused by the sudden shift in atmosphere.
"Kaelen? Did... did you just say something?" Zenith whispered, her voice tight with disbelief. "Did you cast a spell?"
I looked back at her with the most convincing look of one-year-old confusion I could muster.
Zenith tried again. She asked me to repeat what I had just said. I panicked. I couldn't risk replicating the exact chant again; the lack of a chant was my biggest secret, and she would realize I wasn't just a mimic.
"Mama heal... like, heal screw... heal," I babbled, a random assortment of newly learned words and infant noises.
Seeing my confusion, Zenith, with the patient logic of a seasoned mage, put me down and set Norn in front of her. She then dramatically performed the simple healing spell again, watching me intently.
I understood what she wanted. I focused, attempting to reproduce the feeling of the mana flow, trying to say the words again toward Aisha. I tried two, maybe three times, pushing the familiar energy. Nothing happened. The pressure of the moment, the intense observation, had broken the natural flow.
As a normal toddler would, I got confused and uninterested. My magical curiosity was eclipsed by my desire for a shiny object. I tried to crawl away to find a wooden block.
Zenith tried to stop me, but I started to get irritated and cried a little. I didn't want to sit still. She resigned herself, seeing that Aisha and Norn were also trying to wriggle free from the impromptu magic lesson. Zenith let me go and returned to her housework, but the look on her face confirmed that the seed of belief had been planted: Kaelen possesses latent, perhaps spontaneous, magic.
When Lilia returned from the market, Zenith immediately cornered her, excitedly recounting the entire incident. I watched Lilia as she listened. When she looked at me, her eyes were filled with the expected astonishment and happiness, but for a fleeting moment—a breath in time—I saw something else. A flicker of calculated observance, a momentary return to the sharp, scrutinizing gaze of a former personal guard. It passed instantly, returning to the proud, loving mother. But I felt it.
Lilia came to me, praised me profusely, encouraged me, and then the day continued normally.
That night, everyone was asleep. The house was completely silent.
I woke myself up, crawled out of the crib, and sat on the cold floor. I closed my eyes and focused on the residual memory of the mana flowing through my body earlier that day. I didn't dare say the words out loud, but I silently recited the full chant, focusing the intent onto my tiny left hand.
A soft, verdant light bloomed. A perfect, chantless Healing Magic spell.
It was amazing and refreshing. The feeling of the mana flowing, the command being given and executed, was exhilarating. I repeated the spell once more. On the second attempt, a profound sense of exhaustion washed over me, a physical drain that was impossible to fight.
Well, that's my current mana limit, I thought, collapsing back onto the floor before managing to crawl back into the crib. I fell instantly asleep.
The next morning, Lilia began a structured campaign to teach Aisha and me how to pronounce words properly. This soon expanded to reading simple glyphs and letters. I was an adult, so my progress was rapid, and Aisha, driven by her twin competitiveness, kept up.
But I noticed something about Norn. She was significantly slower to grasp the concepts, often struggling to form the words that came easily to us. Lilia, usually strict and disciplined, was noticeably softer and less demanding with Norn. She allowed the little girl grace and patience that she rarely showed me or Aisha.
For the next year and a half, this pattern continued. By the time I was two and a half, Aisha and I could speak and read well enough to hold proper conversations. Every single night, I diligently practiced my Healing Magic chant silently, casting only once or twice until the physical exhaustion forced me to sleep, slowly increasing my mana capacity without drawing attention.
Time was accelerating now. It was already two months before Rudeus's tenth birthday, the milestone that would mark his final departure and the countdown to the greatest catastrophe of our lives.