Chapter 2

Chapter 2

Before I set a course of action for the future, there was something I needed to confirm.

The condition of my body as it is now. They said that if you knew yourself and knew your enemy, you could win a hundred battles. As for the enemy, I knew quite a lot from having read the original work. Which meant the only thing left was to know myself.

I needed to understand not Raphael Isaac’s superficial character profile, but his actual abilities.

The Isaac family valued martial prowess. You could tell as much from the fact that they considered skill with a blade to be the foremost virtue a lord could possess.

So of course there was a large training ground within the household. I went out there, stretched, and started moving my body lightly.

“Brother, what are you doing?”

The one who appeared then was my brat of a younger brother. More precisely, Raphael’s younger brother. His name was Jericho, and like Raphael, his surname was Isaac. Jericho resembled Raphael, but his features were rougher. If Raphael had the face of a thug, Jericho had the face of a gangster.

He took pains with his appearance in order to look even more manly, even stronger, and building up muscle was part of that.

With his massive frame and carelessly grown-out hair, he looked less like a nobleman and more like the captain of some mercenary band.

“What does it look like? I came to work out.”

“You, Brother? Ha.”

“Yes. I am the lord, so I ought to train from time to time.”

“Now, of all times? I do not think it will mean much. Why not just quit?”

Jericho was strong. After falling for the third child’s suggestion that he could take the lordship if he defeated Raphael, he had spent every waking hour swinging a sword.

His skill was, even by rough estimate, far above that of an ordinary knight. It was hard to sharply rebuke him even when he casually spoke down to me and looked down on me like this.

If he hit me, it would hurt. For now, it was better to be cautious.

Jericho looked me up and down, then jerked his chin.

“Well, whatever. It is not my place to meddle. Do your best.”

He must already have finished one round of training, because sweat had gathered on his brow. Wiping it away with his sleeve, he left the training ground. Only after I confirmed he was gone did I let out the breath I had been holding.

“Haa...”

Why did he have to look so vicious?

If things went badly, I might have to fight that bastard for the lordship.

Ah. I really was going to have to work hard.

First, I checked the condition of my body. I lifted the iron weights in the training yard and ran a few laps. I tested simple things like muscle strength, muscular endurance, and lung capacity.

“Huff! Huff!”

I tilted my chin toward the sky and gasped for air. Breathing itself was difficult.

Raphael’s body was a disaster.

There had been a setting that he had trained diligently in childhood, so I had held on to a little hope, but it was enough to bring tears to my eyes. He was no different from an ordinary person.

Even with weights that were not all that heavy, it felt as though my grip would give out, and though I had barely run at all, it felt as though my lungs were going to burst.

“Even so, I have to start in advance.”

Once I got to the Academy, I would be able to achieve explosive growth in many ways.

But there was one exception.

Stamina.

That improved only according to the amount of time invested in it, according to the number of days one trained and sweated for it. Whether I worked hard here or at the Academy, the efficiency would be roughly the same.

So I had to get started early.

The time I would spend at the Academy was more valuable than the time here.

I endured the pain and kept going.

There was all kinds of advice people gave when someone first started exercising. The most common was to take it slow. You had to give your neuromuscular system time to adapt, and in the beginning there was severe soreness and all sorts of sound reasons behind that advice.

“Haaah! Haaah!”

I pushed myself too hard from the very first day. I clenched my teeth and endured the pain. I might end up having to fight that bastard from earlier. If I lost, I would lose the lordship. In that case, how could I afford to take it easy?

My belly felt swollen with air like a balloon, and I worried that if this kept up, I might burst. Sweat dripped from me. The sensation of my soaked clothes clinging to my skin was revolting.

I wanted to throw it all away and stop, but I endured. If I suffered now, I would suffer less later. Only after running for a long while did I finally stop. This was the limit. Seeing Jericho’s face had stirred up a sense of crisis, and I had overdone it.

I would have to run again tomorrow in exactly the same way. If I pushed further here, it would interfere with that. Better to stop abusing my body for the day.

That was it for physical ability.

The next thing I had to check was how this body could develop mana.

I washed off my sweat and asked Koromang to bring me a few mana stones with a low capacity.

She brought me several mana stones that were used like batteries to supply mana to the magical tools in the manor.

I had to learn mana. No matter what I did at the Academy, mana would be useful.

Talent for mana was divided into three categories.

Innate mana capacity.

Perception of mana.

Control over the mana one possessed.

A mana user’s path changed according to which natural talents they were born with, but among those, what mattered for manifesting mana was perception.

In truth, mana capacity always increased as long as one diligently refined mana, and control was much the same. It was proportional to the time spent training mana.

But perception was different.

What mattered there was what one was born with, in other words, talent. It was an area that effort could do little to change.

Usually, people judged whether someone had talent for mana based on whether they had been born with perception. That was the reason most often given for giving up on learning mana. If you were not born with it, that was the end.

“Though with this body, it feels as though I should not be able to do anything.”

Unfortunately, my sister had never mentioned Raphael’s perception of mana in the novel.

Which meant it was safest to assume this body of Raphael’s did not even have talent for magic.

Still, because I had a rough grasp of this novel’s setting, I knew a way to develop perception.

Tap, tap, tap!

With my eyes closed, I tossed the mana stones in my hand into the air as though I were playing jacks.

The mana stones, each about the size of a finger joint, scattered in every direction. Then I stood still and waited for five seconds.

Inhale, exhale. Inhale, exhale.

Only after confirming that the sound of my breathing filled the room did I begin the training.

With my eyes closed, I felt along the floor, trying to detect the faintest vibrations coming from the mana stones.

Mana flowed throughout the body, but the fingertips were the most sensitive of all. If I held my breath and placed my fingertips quietly against the ground, I could feel the vibrations emitted by the mana stones.

Slowly, like a crawling snail, I moved along the floor.

This was not simply a matter of closing my eyes, groping along the ground, and finding the stones. The point was to sense the mana stones and move in their direction.

There was no reason to be pleased just because I had found the stones with my eyes shut. What mattered was the process of sensing them.

I shifted my fingers very slowly. The next instant, something touched my fingertips. When I opened my eyes, a mana stone was already in my hand.

“Huh?”

I had gone into my first attempt prepared to spend at least thirty minutes. I had thought I might even fumble around for over two hours. I had steeled myself not to be disappointed even if I could not sense the mana stones at all and failed before truly beginning.

And yet, for some reason, I caught one in less than three minutes.

At first I thought perhaps I had accidentally thrown it nearby, but again I found one in under three minutes.

This was strange. It was not something a novice who could not even manifest mana should have been able to do.

“So this... actually works?”

In my previous life, I had never learned magic, let alone handled mana.

Of course not. I had lived in the modern world.

Then I died, opened my eyes, and found myself in Raphael’s body. So I had assumed everyone else would be at roughly this level, but that was not the case.

Raphael’s body already held a respectable amount of mana.

More than that, the fact that I had found the mana stones immediately meant he had been born with perception as well.

There was no chance this bastard had ever diligently practiced mana refinement, so it had to be pure natural talent.

Even if only faintly, I could see a path ahead.

---

Jericho Isaac was the second child of the family. And that meant he would inherit nothing from the head of the house.

If his father had at least left a will behind, he might have received a share of the property, but his father had died suddenly at the hands of a dark mage.

Nothing had been left in Jericho’s hands.

He was simply penniless.

Then his younger sister, Evelyn Isaac, had said this:

“If you fight Raphael and win, everything can become yours. I will help you. Let us take it all.”

To Jericho, Evelyn was a clever but lazy child. She was the sort who would not even stretch out an arm toward a tree if the fruit upon it could not be reached. The fact that she was saying this meant it was worth trying.

They agreed that Jericho would take the position of head of the house, while Evelyn would hold the real power.

It was only possible because they each wanted something different. They promised to divide the family’s power between them, and together they began swallowing the house from within. Jericho had talent with the sword in his own way, and Evelyn was close with the family’s people.

Jericho sharpened his swordsmanship.

A large portion of the family supported Evelyn.

Now, even if Jericho were to join hands with Evelyn and challenge Raphael to a duel for the position of head of the house, there would likely be no great backlash.

“But now of all times, what does he think he is trying to do?”

That morning, Jericho had run into Raphael at the training yard.

It was the first time since their childhood that he had seen Raphael there.

Back then, both he and Raphael had trained hard. Their father had moderated the training so that it never became unbearable.

But as time passed, a moment had come when pain had to be endured in order to grow further. They had to do it even if they hated it, and they had to bear it even if it was hard. At that point, Raphael had run away, while Jericho had remained to the end.

The seed sown then had grown into a tree.

At best, Raphael was third-rate. No, if one judged by swordsmanship alone, he would not even qualify as that anymore. In contrast, Jericho could now honestly be called a knight.

If they were to fight that very moment, Jericho was confident he could finish it in less than five minutes. The only reason he remained quiet and held himself back was because Evelyn had stopped him.

She had said they should make their move only after pulling all the vassals to their side. Until then, she had told him to wait just a little longer.

How much time was left now? Even allowing for generosity, it could not be more than a year.

“Has he figured something out?”

Jericho realized the plan might have leaked, but he merely scoffed. What could that idiot Raphael possibly do? The only reason it unsettled him was because it had been unexpected.

Raphael lacked patience to such an extent that it was almost as though he had none at all.

At the slightest hardship, he threw down his sword. At the slightest discomfort, he kicked off the ground and stormed out of the training yard. A man like that had changed in a single day. Even when it was hard, even when it was painful, he trained his body.

“No, there is no need to worry. He will quit before long.”

Even if he had truly resolved to change, it was too late. There was nothing Raphael could do.