Back to the present.
I still didn't really know how mana worked though. I could only sense that my father had a lot of mana and my mother even more so while my elder sister had a little bit. Meanwhile only a few guards I had seen while occasionally wandering, or more often being dragged around the state, had any mana at all.
The next gift I got, which was from my fourth birthday, was the accelerate skill, which seemed to make use of my time attribute and appeared to just increase my body's movement through time so that I seemed faster while everything else seemed slower. It used a LOT of mana though. Just ten seconds cost me a hundred energy units from my core.
My fifth birthday gift from the system was upgrading the [Physical enhancement] skill to [Physical enhancement+] it seemed like a minor change but was actually huge. While the skill usually just multiplied my strength, stamina and resistance stats by a percentage. The plus version added another few extra points to each attribute. It was completely broken in my opinion, though I noticed the energy usage had increased by about half.
Either way due to playing my cards wrong, I hadn't received another birthday reward since my fifth birthday as when I turned six I started to get forced to do stuff outside of meals. I then tried to escape and utilised mana for physical enhancement and acceleration to run away around the estate.
It was a big mistake since A. Rather than my father who I was worried about, my mother caught me in the end. This was despite my strength reaching 6.6 with the strength enhancement at the time. A small test had shown me that 1-2 strength was a normal full grown human so I was effectively running away 3 times faster than an average grown man PLUS I was using accelerate, which effectively made me 3 times faster than even that, making my NINE TIMES faster than a fully grown average man. Yet my mother still caught me. It was a great time to learn she was once the captain of the palace guard that guarded the royal palace in the empire's capital, Commander Sadaria of the royal palace.
Safe to say after a short celebration that I was a one in a thousand genius who had activated my core before I was ten and by myself... I got beaten the sh#t out of by my own mother as she started training me in swordsmanship along with my elder sister. Realizing my mistake in showing my talent I did my best over the next four years to correct the mistake so I could go back to sleep.
In the last four years I have had varying levels of success in being as lazy as possible.
After holding back in sword fighting as much as possible, unable to beat my sister or make visible improvements. I had finally gotten my mother to give up turning me into a genius swordmaster like she was. As such the hours she dragged me out had reduced to just one a day.
Meanwhile I had made my etiquette tutor my father hired give up in despair, getting me out of those. Lastly I was just left with finances and basic math, both of which were only up to the general highschool level. I aced everything and chased my tutors away, clearing that obstacle.
My father did try to get more advanced tutors for me, however I bribed the tutors I chased out to spread the word that I'm a terrible and lazy student who was rude to their tutors and wasn't worth teaching. The tutors were surprised to say the least. I got various degrees of success as it more or less became a joke among the teacher circles about how a genius student bribed his teachers to leave him alone.
At least that was what I gathered after my father summoned me to his office, laughed at me for a while and then beat me up for trying to ruin his hard work finding me tutors. They evidently weren't cheap. Either way though, I didn't get any more advanced tutors, so I saw this as an absolute win.
As such, I got to spend up to 20 hours a day sleeping, taking out meal times, the hour of sword training and some miscellaneous things. Or, I should have…
Bang!
My room door was kicked open as my tomboy of an elder sister strode in.
"Little brother. Let's spar!" She yelled as I was woken from my slumber, pointing a wooden sword at me.
"Please. You just want to beat me again." I said back.
In actuality I had constantly been using physical enhancement while sleeping since I had found it would improve after being constantly utilized.
Thus I found out the systems rankings which went Basic, Intermediate, Advanced and Specialty with possibly more on the way. If I had to compare these ranks to real life though, my sister seemed about intermediate rank in the imperial swordsmanship style our mother taught while I guessed our mother to maybe be a rank above specialty.
As for the normal guards around the mansion. I was appalled to see my elder sister beating them even in small groups as she utilized basic physical enhancement combined with her swordplay. These fully grown men were actually losing to a child. I sighed in my heart at the quality of our mansion's guards.
Either way, the point was that I had trained my physical enhancement to Specialty rank which increased my strength, stamina and resistance by 500% while also adding 16 to each attribute. This brought me to a grand total of 23.8 points in strength and resistance and 26.8 for stamina. Combined with advanced acceleration which I also practiced with using mana, I would effectively be 24 times stronger than any ordinary man while moving an additional 8 times faster. It was impossible for my older sister to win, even if she had the ridiculous strength to beat full grown men in arm wrestles without using mana.
Either way, I let her win since I found she came less often if I lost. Though I could also match her in swordplay and technique I absolutely had to make sure to maintain my status of unable to improve in my mothers heart lest she force me to continue the brutal training she made my sister undergo. And I would bet my soul Alex would instantly tell our mother if she noticed any kind of improvement in my sword technique before convincing her to drag me into the hellish training as well. I wanted no part in such a thing no matter how much my sister tried to convince me.
"Hmpf! It's only because you don't try! Now come on little brother you can't sleep all day!" My older sister urged.
"Ugh.. Find someone else… I can sleep all day and I will…" I complained, burrowing deeper into the army of pillows I had.
"I can't! Mother and father beat me easily and I beat everyone else easily. You're the only one I can fight well with!" She argued, grabbing the back of my clothes collar from under the pillows before pulling me out and dragging me behind her as she dragged me, quite literally, to the mansion's training yard.