When Alari heard footsteps, he realized his investigation of the system had taken hours. The thrill of discovery and optimization had staved off his exhaustion, but it was catching up to him. With no other option but to push through, he went downstairs.

  Mina was the only one awake, preparing the usual millet stew breakfast when he walked into the kitchen. “So, how did things go? Get anything interesting?” she asked with a mix of trepidation and excitement as he started helping by chopping the vegetables.

  “I got a decent option that I decided to go with,” Alari said, trying to be coy. He must have failed to hide his excitement because Mina broke out into a wide grin and embraced him when he set the knife down.

  “So what is it? What were the total points it gave?”

  “What do you mean by total points? Like, how many points did I have to spend?” Alari asked.

  “No, how many points would it have been to purchase all the talents that came with your Class. It isn’t everything, but it’s a reasonable gauge for how powerful a Class is. Most Classes have a few Attributes and a couple of Skills, putting them in the seven- to eight-point range, and are typically referred to as common Classes. Uncommon Classes are similar but have a Feat, making them usually worth 10 to 12 points. Anything beyond that is considered rare, but I don’t know much about them, since I haven’t met anyone with one.”

  Alari quickly calculated how many points his Class was worth. When he was done, he did it again, just to be sure. The answer was twenty-three, almost twice the threshold for rare. Maybe there was a classification above that, but it wasn’t widely known? Regardless, he almost certainly had more points than anyone in his family.

  Mina understood immediately, her gleeful grin morphing to a slack-jawed expression; she was either really good at reading people, or he was terrible at hiding it. He suspected it was both.

  “You didn’t?!”

  “You can now say you have met a person with a rare Class,” he said, still trying to pass it off as nonchalant as possible, but a stupid grin spoiled that.

  “How many points?!”

  Alari hesitated. He didn’t want to lie, but he also didn’t want to come across as gloating. “I’d rather not say, but it's more than thirteen,” he admitted.

  “More than thirteen, and the way you said it makes it sound like it isn’t close to that number. What kind of Class did you unlock?!”

  Alari did his best to describe the Artificer Class, though he kept things at a high level. When he was done, Mina just shook her head. “How did you manage to unlock that?”

  “My past life seemed to count for the classes I got to choose,” Alari explained.

  “You really are a reincarnate being from another world,” she said in shock.

  “I told you I was. When you didn’t believe me, and everyone looked at me strangely, I just let it go. It wasn’t like I was hiding it, and you could clearly tell I wasn’t a typical child,” Alari pointed out.

  “Kids say all sorts of crazy things; even the smart ones,” she countered.

  Alari supposed it made sense. Instead of belaboring the point, he asked another question, “Is it typical to gain prodigy levels right after awakening?”

  “Usually, people don’t gain any, but it isn’t uncommon to get one, and in rare cases, two,” she said.

  “How rapidly do people gain Talent Points? How long does it take to gain ten points?” Alari asked.

  “Ten points? I doubt I’ll ever reach that; most people don’t. Sure, it might seem doable, the first few levels come quickly, but then it takes longer after each. Your father and I are both at level six,” she explained, looking at him with a piercing gaze.

  At this point, Jurgen and the older siblings made their way down, and Alari and Mina joined them in the dining area, with Alari carrying the heavy pot. They looked at Alari but didn’t say a word.

  “I should get going, I’ve got a long journey ahead of me,” Alari excused himself, hoping to escape before his leaving became an ordeal.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  Mina put her hands on her hips and glared at him. “I know you aren’t close with everyone, but I will not tolerate that on your last day here. At the very least, you will sit and eat with us,” she demanded.

  Despite having two lives of experience, he still couldn’t help but acquiesce to her demands with sheepish, “Yes, ma’am.”

  Before long, all of them were sitting around a table, eating the same thing they did every day. Alari noted he had been given a slightly larger-than-normal portion. As was typical, few words were exchanged, and everyone ate hurriedly. He was starting to think he would get away without this turning into a big ordeal when he noticed Mina glaring at him.

  “Alari, dear, why don’t you tell everyone about your Class?” Mina said in a sweet tone that was anything but.

  Alari cleared his throat. “Yeah, I got a good Class. It doesn’t have anything to do with farming, so I’m headed for Lanika.”

  Jurgen grunted. “You made the right decision; you never were any good at farming.” The look Mina gave them was as if she were conjuring a divine punishment. Jurgen hurriedly added, “Congratulations, I know that was what you were hoping for. I wish you the best in your travels.”

  “So, you really are going to be an adventurer,” one of his siblings added.

  Alari made a so-so gesture, “I haven’t quite worked out all the details yet.”

  He was expecting an admonishment from Mina, which was her rote response to anything that even hinted at adventurers, but, to his surprise, none came. However, when one of his siblings decided she was now accepting of the idea, she quickly shut it down.

  It wasn’t the most emotional of partings, but it was better than he expected. With breakfast done, he set out. He had nothing but the clothes on his back and a small sack with enough food for a couple of days.

  His goal for the day was simple: get to the small village where they had occasionally sold their excess produce. Since he was only going one way and wasn’t carrying extra goods, it wasn’t an ambitious goal. Still, with the mental and physical fatigue starting to catch up with him, it was likely all he could manage. The sedate pace also gave him a chance to consider the information crammed into his head.

  His two ranks in Arcana had given him a basic understanding of how spellcasting worked and a rudimentary understanding of the principles behind it. The properties of mana were more like those of a biological organism, yet it also shared features of energy. The best comparison to mana was stem cells; mana had the potential to be transformed into any type that his body could produce. The feats he had gained were essentially a blueprint for that spell construct, allowing him to shape his mana into the spell. He needed to visualize exactly what he wanted the spell to do, then direct his mana into it. There were no incantations, fancy rituals, or exacting movements required, but the mental image of the spell needed to be precise and unwavering. Failure to do so, or to provide inadequate mana, and the spell would unravel, potentially to catastrophic results.

  Identify was a versatile spell with nearly infinite possibilities, so he wanted to figure out its limits. With the potential consequences severe, he started simple, using the spell to measure obvious things with low precision. Using it on himself, he got an accurate reading of his height and weight, with the precision of commonly used metric units. The spell put the information in his mind, telling him he was 159 cm tall and weighed 49 kg. This was significantly lower in height and weight than he had been in his previous life, likely the result of chronic malnourishment. While he obviously had less muscle mass and height, he also wondered how much it was affecting his mental faculties.

  Fortunately, the spell itself was less disappointing than the results. While the system didn’t give precise units of measurement for the mana consumed, relative to his total mana pool, only a small percentage had been expended. He repeated the test, this time isolating the precision variable by increasing it by a factor of 10. As expected, it used more mana, but it wasn’t proportional to the precision. This meant there was likely an additive factor, such as a base cost, or costs scaled nonlinearly. Both seemed possible, so additional testing was needed.

  Next, he picked up a rock and repeated the test. There was a slight, almost negligible, decrease in the mana cost, even with the same precision, and he theorized it was because the smaller value was easier to measure. He wondered if there was a threshold where objects decreasing in size would increase the mana cost. The subsequent variable he experimented with was the distance between himself and the rock. He was about to lament the lack of precision in his testing, but he realized he could use the very spell he was testing to solve that. After all, location was a property. It worked just as he had hoped, and he spaced the rock at precise intervals to achieve accurate results. After completing the test, he concluded the distance factor also scaled nonlinearly, as the changes produced negligible differences in mana cost.

  While none of the costs had been significant, the repeated tests had started to take a toll on his mana. He didn’t want all his mana to be spent testing his first spell, but he had one more experiment to conduct. The idea came from the imbuement, where the number of properties that could be added was infinite, implying the number of properties that could be identified was infinite as well. Given that, he suspected that properties weren’t strictly limited to physical characteristics, but also included more esoteric properties such as name and value. It was also possible that the spell could extrapolate specific relational data; it had already given him distance data, which required two objects. However, he suspected divining these properties would be much more costly if he weren’t one of the objects.

  To confirm his hypothesis, he used Identify on a common rock, with a very low level of precision. The spell took a minimal amount of mana and returned the value ‘rock’. Casting Identify again, this time with more precision, returned ‘granite’. Unfortunately, the increase in precision came with a steep increase in mana cost.

  Alari smiled, incredibly pleased with the spell. It appeared that the only limitation in what he could intuit was his ingenuity and mana Capacity.