Chương 14: Fifteen Days and a Lifetime of Change

It's been fifteen days since we started training. I've gained a lot, stats, mostly, thanks to the constant drills, better food, and a lifestyle far more active than anything I've known. The food, while mostly bland, is filling and nutritious. We're given meat three times a day and allowed to eat as much as we like. Food had never been a problem for me, at least, not until my father fell ill. Those final months were hard, and I'd lost most of my weight from stress and hunger.

At first, I thought gaining stats would make training easier. It didn't. If anything, the drills just got harder. The instructors became stricter. Most of the training now feels like torture. Extra laps, digging latrine pits, cleaning toilets, it's all punishment now. We've dug the same pit multiple times, only to fill it and dig it again. I've probably run more as punishment than as part of actual training.

Anything could get you punished, arriving thirty seconds late, a speck of dust on your boots, a minor break in formation. Sometimes the punishment is individual; sometimes, the whole group suffers. Since I'm still one of the weaker recruits, I end up with more than my fair share of solo punishments. Most of the time, it's because I can't keep up with the physical drills. Still, I've started gaining muscle. My frame is finally beginning to catch up.

STATUS: Name: Edward Class: Unawakened Affinity: N/A HP: 80 / 80 HP Regen: 5/day MP: N/A Attributes: Find this and other great novels on the author's preferred platform. Support original creators! Constitution: 8. 0 Strength: 7. 5 Agility: 6. 5 General Skills: Writing (17) Reading (15) Math (25) Running (10) Meditation (10) Marching (5) I've also gained 5 levels in Reading and 2 in Writing, mostly because I'm one of the few recruits who already knows how to read and write.

A lot of my chores involve copying records for the quartermaster. Running has gained 3 levels, Meditation 5, and Marching 4. Over the past two weeks, I've gained 1 point each in Strength and Constitution. My Agility is still lagging behind, our training doesn't really focus on it, but I don't want it to fall too far back. On break days, I squeeze in an hour or two of agility exercises. The rest of the day, I spend in the library.

It is not a massive library like the ones I had seen in my old memories, but it is functional. For my goals, it is more than enough. The first thing I dove into was the section on attributes. I already knew the basics, the physical ones. Strength was raw power: lifting, striking, overpowering. Constitution meant endurance and health, the ability to keep going when others dropped. And Agility was all about speed, reflexes, coordination, the difference between dodging a blow and eating it. Those, I understood.

I'd been training those every day since enlistment. But what I hadn't grasped before were the spiritual attributes, the ones that didn't awaken until age sixteen. The ones that determined whether someone was just a soldier… or something more. Intelligence governed how much mana you could store and how complex your spells could be. A high Intelligence stat meant your mana pool ran deep, and your brain could handle the intricacies of advanced casting.

Wisdom was about ability to sense mana around you, to move it efficiently, to waste nothing. It also gave you resistance, to illusions, to manipulation, to the kind of mental fog that got mages killed. And then there was Willpower. The backbone of any serious caster. It controlled how stable your spells were, how long you could maintain them, and whether you could keep your mind together under pressure. The more I learned, the more I began to understand the bigger picture.