Six years passed like water through cupped hands — always moving, never quite graspable, gone before the fact of their passing fully registered.
Under Gareth Thorne's guidance, Draven learned to walk before he had properly steadied at crawling, to grip a wooden sword before his fingers had found their full coordination. His infant mind issued instructions that his toddler body executed imperfectly and then, week by week, less imperfectly, until the gap between intention and action narrowed to something manageable. The training yard became his primary world: dawn sessions in which Gareth corrected his stance with the quiet authority of a man who had survived enough to know exactly what mattered.
By his seventh birthday, Draven's body had developed with a speed that Gareth watched carefully and said nothing about. Lean, precise, stronger than any seven-year-old's body had a reasonable explanation for being. His mind — his mind was a different problem entirely. Twenty-eight years of knowledge and experience compressed into a child's skull, burning constantly against the constraints of what this body could yet express.
He closed his eyes and called the window.
[Name: Draven Whitlock]
[Class: Unknown][Title: "Reborner"]
[Level: 12]
[Strength: 32][Agility: 35][Vitality: 28 (+14)][Magic Power: 19][Sense: 26]
[ACTIVE ABILITIES]
Thorne's Blade Dance [Rank: E] — A flowing defensive technique built around redirection rather than direct opposition. Mastery: 34%
Iron Body Conditioning [Rank: D] — Systematic physical hardening through controlled stress and recovery. Mastery: 41%
Mana Sense [Rank: E] — Passive detection and perception of magical energy in the surrounding environment. Mastery: 28%
Whitlock's Sword Techniques (1→4) [Rank: Unclassified] — Mastery: 100%
[PASSIVE TRAITS]
Prodigy's Mind — Learning speed increased by 300%
Blessing of God — Immune to all magical attacks lower than S grade. Immune to all curses, diseases, and harmful effects. Angel Shield applies +50% Vitality.
Eleven levels in six years. The numbers were honest about what the work had produced — Agility and Strength climbing steadily under Gareth's relentless blade work, both far beyond what a seven-year-old's body should carry. Magic Power remained the persistent problem: low, undertrained, stubbornly dormant. Sense had developed through necessity — the desperate, practical need to perceive threats before they materialized — rather than through any formal cultivation.
He dismissed the window.
Twenty-eight more years, he thought. Twenty-eight years before the demons come. Before it all happens again.
The weight of that number had changed over six years. When he had first understood where — when — he was, it had felt like suffocation. Now it felt like a deadline. There was a difference.
His daily routine cycled with the precision of a war machine. Before sunrise, footwork drills in the stone courtyard — three hundred repetitions until his legs moved without thought. Midmorning brought sword forms: the Whitlock techniques first, carved so deeply into his previous life's muscle memory that his seven-year-old arms performed them with a fluency that had made Gareth stop correcting them months ago. He simply watched, now, with the expression of a man who was quietly revising his assumptions about what a child could be.
Afternoons were for letters, numbers, history, and clan politics. He absorbed it all at a speed that required deliberate suppression — he had learned early to hesitate at the right moments, to furrow his brow at problems he'd resolved before the question finished leaving Gareth's mouth. The last thing he needed was to appear as something unnatural before he was strong enough to defend that perception.
Evenings he spent alone in his room, working on the one thing that didn't respond to effort the way everything else did.
Magic had always been his weakness. Even in his future life, his mana reserves had never matched his swordsmanship, and he had compensated with technique and cunning — the crystal trick in the valley was proof enough of that. But cunning alone would not stop what was coming. He needed more.
He sat cross-legged on the cold stone floor and reached inward.
Mana was not like strength. Strength responded to demand — push the body, break it, let it rebuild harder. Mana moved like underground water, finding its own paths through the body's hidden channels, and forcing it only caused those channels to collapse. You couldn't conquer mana. You had to convince it.
Flow, he thought, the way Gareth had taught him. Don't pull. Invite.
A thin warmth stirred in his chest. He coaxed it outward — through his shoulders, down his arms, into the tips of his fingers. It flickered, wavered, and then settled into a faint, steady current.
Better than last week. Still nowhere near enough.
He opened his eyes and exhaled slowly into the dark room, and the stone floor was cold beneath him, and somewhere beyond the clan walls the world was moving steadily toward a catastrophe that only he could see coming, and he had twenty-eight years to be ready for it.
He closed his eyes again and went back to work.