Back in his room, Lucian took in his surroundings and made mental notes of everything he saw. This was the first time he was seeing his dorm for himself since coming to this place, only taking a brief skim through his inherited memories after leaving the cafeteria to find out exactly where it was.

  He had to say, it fit the whole loner persona he had going on really well. Despite being a Knight’s academy, there was a whole bookshelf stacked with all sorts of novels, instruction books, and other random media. But interestingly, none of them seemed to be about Knight training or the like.

  ‘Looks like this kid wasn’t too happy with the idea of becoming a knight like his father was…’ He noted internally.

  Lucian only affirmed this thought when he found his training gear buried under a bunch of dust and old items, containing both a sword and some basic leather armour. The sword was in a bad state, covered with rust and too blunt to actually penetrate through skin. Though this was probably intentional on the school’s behalf, considering it was just training equipment. As for the armour… well it was just covered in some dust. Leather lasts, as the people in this world liked to say.

  Putting them aside, Lucian lay down on his bed, noting how stiff it was, before a gloomy shadow formed in his eyes.

  ‘Even with my transmigration and AI implant somehow miraculously following me, I am still ridiculously weak in this world.’

  His eyes snapped wide open, turning over as he gazed outside of his window at the bright stars in the night sky, ‘I guess one positive of not having any electricity is the lack of light pollution,’

  Being weak just meant that he had more to accomplish! Lucian wouldn’t be so easily unmotivated by such a small setback. He rolled back over and began to undress himself, taking off his school jacket and trousers and laying them at the edge of his bed, until eventually he was fully naked.

  Attached to his room was a closet sized bathroom, housing a single toilet, sink, and a bathtub — which looked more like a big bucket than a tub. Despite its not-so-satisfying look, this was actually considered a luxury for households in this world.

  For most commoners, baths and toilets were communal places they had to share with either a whole neighbourhood, or town. Thankfully, Lucian came from a Knight family like pretty much every other student in this academy, so with their influence they were able to afford such luxuries. The school would be pretty hard pressed to cheap out and force them to use communal toilets and baths, as the pressure each family could bring down on them was far too much for the administrators to endure.

  Lucian turned the tap and let water flow into the tub, quickly filling it up with steamy hot liquid. On the side, Lucian found a closed container and opened it, finding a mixture of herbs and flowers inside, and poured some of the mixture into the tub. Instantly, his nose was filled with a sweet and pleasant scent, a variety of aromas blessing his senses. It was extremely pleasing to his nose, but it also invoked some nostalgia in him.

  ‘Smells like home…’ He reminisced, sinking into some memories of his past life. The smell of the herbal bath was very similar to some of the products he used on Earth. He couldn’t help but chuckle, realising he was already becoming nostalgic of his previous life despite only being gone for less than a day.

  “My journey in this world has only just started…” Lucian murmured.

  He tilted his head back over the edge of the bathtub and closed his eyes, falling into a daze. After some time, he was out like a light.

  ***

  Some hours later, Lucian awoke, feeling mentally refreshed, but physically like a wet sponge. Falling asleep in the bathtub wasn’t exactly what he had planned for the previous night, and as a consequence his entire body felt wrinkly and dry.

  ‘Well, I guess it beats sleeping on that thing.’ He shrugged and glanced over at the empty bed, remembering how stiff it felt to lie on.

  But he quickly noticed how his body strangely recovered rather quickly from the effects of sitting in water for hours on end. It barely took even 30 seconds before his body was back to normal! Usually it took him around 5 minutes out of the tub before his wrinkles disappeared. Not only did he recover quickly though, he strangely felt even better afterwards!

  Clearly noticing something strange had happened, Lucian consulted the one thing that could possibly give him an answer.

  ‘AI, scan the mixture in the bathtub.’

  Last night, he might not have thought about it or realised it thanks to his drowsiness, but hidden amongst those aromatic scents were some herbs his expertly attuned nose didn’t quite recognise to be from Earth. It didn’t take long for him to get an answer from the AI either.

  [Scan complete!]

  [Discovered unknown herbal mixture. Beginning scan of effects.]

  [Unable to scan individual components, beginning simulation.]

  [Simulation complete!]

  [Name: Unknown herbal mixture. Effects: Stimulates growth of the body, recovery, and vitality.]

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  “Hm?” Lucian muttered aloud, intrigued by the results of the scan.

  ‘This thing is actually a medicinal remedy?’

  He looked over at the unassuming pot containing the remainder of the mixture that he had yet to use up, feeling somewhat glad he didn’t just pour the whole thing in the tub the previous night.

  ‘The scan says it stimulates growth, but specifically mentioned vitality…’

  An idea popped into Lucian’s mind and he asked his AI to pull up his own stats once again.

  [Name: Lucian Verdan. Age: 12. Sex: Male. Vitality: 0.8, Agility: 0.6. Strength: 0.5, Mind: 0.1. Status: Intrigued, refreshed. Body is in recovery.]

  A mental image of his own body once again appeared in his mind, but Lucian ignored that and instead focused on the stats themselves. Immediately, he noticed one very big and obvious change, which also explained why he was feeling so good.

  ‘My vitality has gone up by 0.1?’

  Yesterday, his Vitality was at 0.7, but now it showed 0.8. If he remembered correctly, something like this couldn’t just happen overnight thanks to some mixture of herbs. But he kept an open mind, as this world already made it crystal clear that it was different.

  Lucian couldn’t quite wrap his head around this mysterious phenomenon. Even with the advanced technology of his previous world, they had the ability to artificially increase someone’s vitality by 0.1 like Lucian had just experienced, but it was extremely expensive, required very specialised equipment and it wasn’t just an overnight process. Not to mention some ghastly side effects came with artificially increasing a stat as vital as vitality, such as nausea, frequent vomiting, and consistent unrelenting migraines. However, Lucian had experienced none of those.

  Lucian studied the mixture of herbs in his hand, thinking curiously to himself. This place just kept getting more and more mysterious the more he learned about it and experienced what it had to offer. Even his everyday life provided some surprises just like this one.

  ‘It seems while quite backwards in some areas, this world has managed to advance quite far in certain fields.’ He took note of this, since it could be quite important to know. While he thought this though, his mind also came to other conclusions.

  “Maybe with this, I can catch up to the others with my vitality stat at least, but that would just create an unhealthy imbalance in my stats… What to do? How do I increase my other two stats to the same level? This mixture looks like it might give me another 0.3 or 0.4 vitality points if I use the whole thing up.” He thought aloud.

  His body was far too weak, unable to compare to the other students near his own age! Although he was the youngest student there by far, only being enrolled earlier than normal thanks to his father’s connections, the gap was still far too wide to consider normal.

  ‘This is not adequate…’ He was unconvinced, unsatisfied with what he had been given. His weak stats were not a result of his own negligence, but of his predecessor’s negligence! He wasn’t about to let some random kid with no goals in life ruin his future.

  Lucian soon began to waft through his inherited memories, but he was still not quite fully assimilated with them, so it wasn’t as natural as going through his own memories from his past life. It was hard to describe, but if he only had to rely on his instincts and subconscious to access his own memories, then it would require a manual effort through his conscious mind to access the memories of the previous Lucian this body belonged to. Over time, the two would eventually blend together though, making Lucian’s two separate sets of memories one in the same.

  ‘What is this…?’ Soon, it seemed he found something.

  While sifting through his memories, he came across something quite interesting. Something that intrigued him greatly. The memories he accessed came to him like chapters of a book and he began searching through them like a moth to a flame.

  ‘Every few years, some ‘Mages’ from outside of the Barren Islands on their mysterious, enchanted ships to select a few Prospects for their magic academies. Specifically, they come every three years, and the last time they came over was nearly three years ago… Meaning in the coming weeks they will be coming back!’

  Lucian’s eyebrows perked up when he recalled this, surprised by the great timing of things. It was almost like his death and reincarnation was planned so that he would arrive here in time for this. But he didn’t let it get to his head — he didn’t believe in things like fate, or destiny, or even a higher being that presides over everything in the universe. If anything, the only higher power he believed in was the universe itself. He didn’t believe that his coming here was planned, but was just a set of mere coincidences that caused his soul to cross over into the new Lucian’s body.

  But, as quickly as his intrigue rose, his face fell into a frown.

  ‘These mages come to the different Knight and scholarly academies across the Barren Islands to recruit these Prospects, whatever ‘Prospects’ are exactly my predecessor didn’t seem to know — only the name.’ He frowned in thought.

  This was a big problem to Lucian. Ever since he had heard about Mages and noticed how everyone became fearful and frightened whenever they were mentioned, he was full of a desire to research more about them — only he hadn’t found the time to do so as it had still only been a day since he crossed over.

  He fully intended to be selected by these Mages and whatever organisation they were representing, the only problem right now was that he wasn’t qualified. The Mages only went to the official Knight and Scholar academies, disregarding the idea of going to the preparatory academies entirely. As a student of the Knight academies, Lucian didn’t know exactly what the process of going through the scholarly route was like, but he assumed it was similar to the Knight route.

  A certain threshold had to be met to be enrolled into the official academy. And for the Knight academy, Lucian did not meet this threshold. In fact, he was the student with the lowest prospects of ever meeting this threshold in the entire preparatory academy!

  The requirement to enter the Official Knight academy was to become an Official Knight. Lucian hadn’t done much research on the subject of Knights yet, as he just assumed they were skilled fighters and soldiers much like they were back in his previous world, but after finding out about the abnormality of the stats of the people in this world, as well as the existence of Mages, he knew things couldn’t be that simple.

  And a short search through his memories confirmed it. ‘I see, so becoming an Official Knight means to surpass a certain threshold of stats. This threshold being at minimum 2.0 in all physical stats.’

  “Interesting, so becoming a knight in this world isn’t actually about the skill of the individual, but the stats of the individual… While odd, it does make some sense.”

  Speaking his thoughts aloud again, Lucian realised just how much of a difficult situation he was in if he wanted to be selected by the Mages that were coming over.

  He checked the date on the calendar on his wall, and saw that there were just over three weeks until the Mages arrived from abroad, and they would spend 5 days touring the Barren Islands past that point to look for ‘Prospects’.

  That meant that he had just three weeks to try and become an Official Knight to enter the Official Knight academy, or else he wouldn’t meet the deadline and he’d miss this chance, having to wait another three years to receive the opportunity again. Lucian was a patient person, but he wasn’t willing to delay his plans for an entire three years.