Book 3, Chapter 3

As far as surprised went, they’d certainly pulled this one off. Of all the things I’d thought might be going on, a birthday surprise was not on the list, mostly because my birthday wasn’t for another three months.

“Uh…”

As my mind whirled with calculations, trying to figure out what season we were in specifically on the off-chance that I’d gotten things wrong, my parents approached with smiles on their faces. “I know we’re a week early, but it seemed like the best way to surprise you,” Mother said.

What were they – oh, of course. It was Gravin’s birthday. I mentally tallied up the years and realized my body was supposed to be around eight now. I was actually closer to thirteen or fourteen, thanks to my heavy abuse of alchemy. I’d given myself quite a few health issues with my rapid aging and had been forced to use magic to maintain my body until I could get everything sorted out for a solid four months last year, but it had been worth it.

I was five and a half feet tall now and could look my mother in the eye. Father still had a few inches on me, but thanks in large part to my own magical manipulations, I knew I’d easily break the six-foot mark before I finished growing. The difference in mana core size was negligible for normal adults, but advancing stages would multiply that small gap into something that could grant me enough mana for a few extra spells.

In this culture, birthdays weren’t normally celebrated yearly. Perhaps it was simply because the village was so poor, but only they generally only celebrated two milestones, the eighth and sixteenth birthdays, those events that signified moving onto new stages of life. I was now officially at the age where I’d normally be expected to start wrapping up my formal education and help support the family.

“Thanks,” I said. “You pulled off the surprise. I had no idea. Is this why Senica was so insistent on me taking on her a lap around the valley today?”

“The sacrifices I make for my baby brother,” Senica said with a haughty sniff. Her voice went back to normal and she said to our mother, “You wouldn’t believe what we found in one of the caves, and this guy just let me hit it with a fire blast, knowing it was going to make a huge mess.”

Father started laughing. “Maybe he was trying to teach you that the answer to your problems isn’t always to set them on fire.”

Mother swept me away from the conversation with a hand on my shoulder. She steered me into the crowd gathered for the party. I recognized most of the people by face if not by name, but we had a lot of turn over here and outside of the occasional lessons I gave, I didn’t interact much with people on a daily basis. This resulted in a few introductions and banal pleasantries as I worked my way across the room.

“Don’t look eight to me,” a gruff voice said from behind me after I came out the other side. I turned to see Tetrin leaning against the wall. “Don’t much think about it when I see you all the time, but this puts it in perspective.”

“Hello, Tetrin.”

“Keiran,” he said.

“Gravin,” I corrected.

He snorted. “Sure, whatever you say. Nice party.”

“Thanks. I’m actually not sure who set everything up, but they put a lot of work into it.”

“Would be rude not to enjoy it then,” Tetrin said. “Left a gift on the back table for you. Come find me in the workshop later when you’re done. I’ve got the last collar ready for fitting.”

“Already? I thought you said it’d be another week.”

“Had some scraps left from the other ones I recycled instead of having to transmute new steel. Saved a lot of mana.”

“Ah. Hrmm. Well, that’s good. I’ll come over and do the enchanting on it later.”

My mother appeared out of the crowd and approached. “Hey, no work talk,” she said. “It’s your party. Take the rest of the day off and enjoy yourself.”

“Fine, fine,” I conceded with a smile. “I’ll head over tomorrow, Tetrin.”

“Sure, Kei – Gravin. No rush.”

I let my mother sweep me away from the crafter toward a buffet laid out across a central table. The street crew was gathered around nearby, eagerly stuffing their faces as only growing kids could. The youngest among them was six now, but the average age was closer to ten or eleven with two of them near fourteen. Juby was still running their gang, though at this point most of them had ignited cores and were capable of pivoting between jobs to fill in as needed.

Their numbers had grown a bit as new children with nowhere else to go had arrived in the valley and shrunk as some of them found new homes elsewhere. The difference had balanced out in our favor and every year, it seemed like there were a few more kids running around.

I filled a plate and slid into an open space across the table from Juby. “What’s up?” he said through a mouth full of food.

“Nothing. Taking a break from work, having a birthday. That sort of thing,” I told him. “How’re things with you guys?”

“Good. We’ve been working with Hyago and that monster hunter who showed up a few months ago lately. What was his name?”

“Dailin,” the kid sitting next to him supplied.

“Right, him,” Juby agreed. “Doesn’t say much, that guy. But he’s good at his job. When we get out into the woods, you can’t even tell he’s there. The only person I’ve ever met who’s better at hiding his mana is you.”

“Dailin,” I said, trying to think. “Tall guy, thick beard? Had the weird hat?”

“That’s him, yeah.”

I vaguely remembered him coming back with one of our trade expeditions that had gone to some of the small towns and villages littering the island we all lived on. He’d gotten priority placement in the ignition queue due both to his already-excellent mana manipulation skills and his agreement to train some of our people in monster hunting. I hadn’t realized the people he was training were a bunch of children.

The sanctuary was growing too large for me to keep track of every little thing anymore. I took a moment to consider whether that mattered to me, then decided I didn’t actually care. My primary concerns were my own family, and while I hadn’t always agreed with the decisions others had made, I’d known when we first arrived that we wouldn’t be living out the rest of our lives in isolation here. In fact, I’d been the first to bring new people home with me.

“As long as you guys are staying safe,” I said. “Let me know if there are any problems.”

Juby just rolled his eyes and stuffed more food in his mouth. “Happy birthday,” he mumbled as he chewed.

The orphan crew starting in on the food served as a signal for everyone else to attack the buffet table as well, and soon the noise of conversation was replaced with the sounds of a few dozen people enjoying a meal. I finished my plate quickly, went back for refills, and relocated to sit with my family.

“—and then there was black gunk everywhere, except on Gravin, of course,” Senica was telling Father as I sat down.

“You’re still complaining about that?” I asked. “I told you not to burn it when we first found it.”

“Burning things is what I’m good at,” she said, as if that defended her decision.

“We both know you have thirty other spells you can cast. You had plenty of other options.”

Mother cleared her throat, cutting Senica off before she could retort. “Let’s not argue while we eat,” was all she said.

I had an ulterior motive for joining my family for my second helping. They were sitting closer to a table near the back that had a sheet thrown over it. I was curious what they could possibly have come up with as a present for me, especially considering I was the one who made nearly everything here. From the enchantments to the plates we were eating off of to the buildings we lived in, my magic had created it all.

Transmutation as a discipline had one major weakness: it wasn’t good at affecting living things. I knew several spells that could alter people or plants, but they were exorbitantly expensive to cast for what little they did, so I usually left any sort of woodworking projects to people who had the skills to do that kind of stuff by hand. Maybe it was things like that, though I had a hard time imagining what I could use that I hadn’t already seen to acquiring.

Then again, there’d been a lot of trade with other communities and I had paid almost no attention to that, so really, anything could be under that sheet. I couldn’t deny being curious about what those lumps meant, and I doubted they were things a normal eight-year-old child would enjoy.

“Oh, before I forget, could you take a look at the teleportation platform?” Father asked.

“What’s going on with it?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Ayaka was talking about doing maintenance on the emitters and finding one of them cracked. We have some spares, but she said it was weird and doesn’t want anyone using the platform until you have a chance to check it out.”

“Ah, that’s probably my fault,” I said. “I thought I replaced all the broken ones, but I must have missed one.”

I was sure I even knew which emitter we were talking about. I’d noted a hairline crack in one, not bad enough to scrap the part, but Ayaka was cautious and I should have expected her to find it and want it addressed.

“How’d they break?” Senica asked.

“Trying to use the platform as a scrying amplifier last week,” I said. “I overloaded the whole thing and blew half the emitters before I gave up. There’s no way around it. I’m going to have to spend a month building a mirror room if I want the kind of range I need.”

Once upon a time, the scry signal could have propagated itself through the ambient mana in the air and reached another country without an issue, but that had been in my old life. With the world’s mana core broken, I’d had to reinvent a few spells to function without ambient mana, and anymore, it was hard to get more than a few hundred miles out of a general scry. Even with a beacon, a thousand or so miles was about the limit.

“What’d I say about work talk?” Mother chided me.

“He started it,” I said, pointing my spoon at Father.

“Both of you, stop it,” Mother said.

“Yes, Mother.”

“Hey, when do we get to see the presents?” Senica asked.

“Not yet,” Father told her.

I glanced over at the table again, then back to Senica. “I’m surprised you don’t already know. I knew what all your presents were on your eighth birthday.”

Senica scowled. “They wouldn’t tell me what anyone else got.”

“That’s because you can’t keep a secret to save your life.”

“I can too!”

We both turned to look at our parents. Father pretended to be fascinated by his meal, and Mother cast her eyes up at the ceiling. “Well,” she said slowly. “How about we finish eating and then we can get to the presents a bit early?”

Father laughed quietly, earning him an elbow dug into his side from Mother. “Er, yes, of course. That’s a fantastic idea,” he said.

Senica cleared her plate in record time, but I kept to a sedate pace. It was my birthday, after all, and what present could possibly be better than annoying my sister?