Chereads / Silver: The Birth of a Legend / Chapter 2 - The First Questions

Chapter 2 - The First Questions

By the time Silver turned five, it was nearly impossible to keep him away from books, scrolls, and anything that contained words, diagrams, or obscure knowledge. Marlen had once treasured his small shelf of carpentry manuals and simple histories, but Silver devoured them so quickly that Marlen had to borrow new reading material from travelers passing through Lumeria. Elena watched him flip through the pages as though he could absorb every sentence at a single glance.

His endless questions began to tackle subjects far outside the usual scope for a child. He asked about the sky, about the wind, about how birds flew and why water always found its way downhill. He seemed to hunger for a unifying answer that could make sense of every phenomenon he encountered. When nobody could give him that unifying theory, he decided he would find it himself.

One morning, he trotted into Marlen's workshop, his hair shimmering in a shaft of sun, and asked, "Father, if a bird's bones are hollow, is that why it can fly?" Marlen, caught in the middle of sawing a plank, nearly cut crooked. He set his tools aside, kneeling down to Silver's height.

"That's a part of it," he said carefully. "Birds are light, and their wings push against the air. It's complicated. But yes, hollow bones help."

Silver tilted his head. "Then could we build something hollow that flaps like wings?"

Marlen chuckled, not unkindly. "We're people, son. We weren't made to flap around. Still, I bet a clever mind could figure out gliding. Maybe large cloth wings strapped to the arms. Some people in big cities experiment with contraptions that mimic birds."

Silver's eyes gleamed. "We could try it here."

Marlen pictured the village's reaction if he and his five-year-old launched themselves from a barn roof. He ruffled Silver's hair and gently steered him toward the door. "Let's focus on safer projects for now, alright?"

Safer projects ended up being small mechanical toys. Silver discovered gears and pulleys the way other children discovered marbles and hopscotch. He hammered bits of wood together, rigged up string and crude gears, creating little machines that turned under their own weight or used a balance of levers to shift toy blocks from one side of the workshop to the other. Though they usually fell apart within a day, his parents were floored by the creativity behind them.

At six, Silver started noticing something else: the gap between how quickly he learned something and how fast he forgot it. He'd memorize a set of facts about simple chemistry—like how mixing certain liquids produced heat—only to find that a week later, he couldn't recall the exact proportions or conditions. It gnawed at him. He felt like his mind was a sieve, letting precious grains of knowledge slip away.

One afternoon, he sat at a rickety table in the workshop, scribbling down notes in a ragged notebook. His brow furrowed, and he muttered in frustration. Elena found him there, slumped over as if the weight of every question in the world had landed on his small shoulders. She placed a comforting hand on his back and asked what was wrong.

He explained in halting words that when he first read something, it stayed fresh in his mind, but it disappeared too quickly. He feared he might never manage to keep up with all the knowledge he wanted. Elena's expression softened. She told him that everyone forgets things, but Silver wasn't convinced. He sensed that other kids didn't have the same furious hunger to learn, nor the same panic when that knowledge threatened to slip away.

At night, he tossed restlessly in bed, dreaming of books with fading words and contraptions rusting away in the back of his mind. Sometimes, he woke with tears clinging to his lashes. Marlen tried to help by suggesting Silver write everything down. Silver already did that, but it didn't feel like enough. He wanted a permanent place in his head for everything he learned, something that could store entire libraries of fact and theory.

Around this time, a traveling merchant came through the village, displaying wares that included not just spices and odd trinkets but also a few books. Silver persuaded Marlen to let him buy a tattered volume on mental discipline and "mindful living." It was an odd text, half philosophical musings and half practical exercises designed to bring order to scattered thoughts. The merchant, a wiry man named Ostin, warned that the book's theories were untested, but Silver's eyes shone at the mere promise of a solution.

For the next several weeks, he pored over that text. Whenever he could, he would practice its slow-breathing techniques and focus exercises, attempting to visualize a peaceful lake or a stable tower inside his mind. At first, it felt silly. He fell asleep once, nearly dozing off mid-meditation. But gradually, he sensed a small but definite improvement. Certain facts started to stick a bit longer, as if pinned in place by his effort.

Still, it wasn't enough. The text spoke of something called "Mind Balance," the idea that if you harmonize your thoughts, you create a stillness that allows memory to take root. Silver found that concept helpful, yet he kept thinking bigger. Why settle for balance when you could build something colossal?

He started sneaking out to a quiet meadow near the edge of the forest, where tall grass and wildflowers reached up to his knees. Lying on his back, he'd stare at the sky, letting his mind wander. The caws of distant crows and the rustle of wind through the pines became a sort of lullaby that allowed his imagination to roam. He pictured not a calm lake or a tidy library, but a living, pulsating planet within his own consciousness. He saw it in his head: a sphere of swirling colors and infinite rooms, each storing a topic—like a massive world geography of knowledge.

When he tried this new visualization, something electrifying happened. His entire body felt warm, as if a gentle current of energy was flowing from head to toe. In his mind, he wandered through these imaginary landscapes, each one representing a body of knowledge. He named it Planet Mind, the grandest version of mental discipline he could conceive. If his brain was going to remember everything, it needed not just balance but an entire world to hold it all.

Back in the village, Elena began to notice that Silver's memory problems improved. He recalled details from old scrolls with ease. He could recite passages almost word for word, even those he'd only read once. Marlen was both amazed and slightly uneasy. He watched his son skipping around the workshop, rattling off facts about leverage, friction, and angles, his golden eyes bright with triumph. It was a transformation that felt almost too sudden.

In quiet moments, Silver would lie in bed and keep building out his Planet Mind. He'd add new continents as he learned about geometry or biology, new oceans to represent entire subject areas. Each time he learned a practical skill—like how certain herbs reacted to heat—he imagined an entire region within his mind shaping itself to hold that information. And the strangest part was the rush of power he felt, a sense that knowing something didn't just fill him mentally, it also strengthened him physically and emotionally. His body felt more vital, his thoughts clearer. If the standard Mind Balance was a candle, Planet Mind was a blazing torch.

He soon realized that this might be an entirely new kind of power, one that grew as knowledge piled up. He didn't talk about it openly, except with Marlen and Elena, who struggled to wrap their heads around it. They had never heard of a skill that made you physically stronger just by learning more facts, and they certainly didn't know how the rest of the world would react to it. To them, it sounded like a blessing—something that could help Silver become an inventor or a scholar of renown.

Yet something else was happening in tandem with Silver's deepening mental universe. A subtle ripple seemed to pass through the environment whenever he achieved a new breakthrough. The day he fully fleshed out the idea of Planet Mind, the skies above Lumeria turned an oddly intense shade of pink at dusk, prompting townsfolk to murmur about unusual weather. That night, far away, in places no villager had ever heard of, ancient forces stirred. A faint tremor in the magical currents of the world alerted entities—some benevolent, some malevolent—to the emergence of a new power. They didn't know who or what had awakened this force, only that the threads of destiny had been tugged.

Silver remained blissfully unaware of any cosmic reaction. He was focused on leveraging the Planet Mind to make small inventions that could help his family. At seven years old, he built a toy-sized windmill that used simple gears to lift water from a shallow basin. It was a rough model, but Marlen recognized the brilliance behind it and adapted a larger version to make small tasks easier in his carpentry work. Elena proudly displayed the toy windmill on a high shelf in their kitchen.

Most people in the village appreciated these small wonders. Some enjoyed having a child who seemed to solve everyday problems—like a broken cart wheel or a leaky well pump—without much trouble. But there were those who whispered that unnatural gifts came at a price. They didn't say it to Silver's face, but Marlen heard their muttering at the inn, where men gathered to share a drink and gossip. He tried to shrug it off, thinking it was just the typical wariness of small towns toward anything new.

Silver didn't notice much hostility at first. He spent his days happily studying the flight of insects or the growth of plants, scribbling in his notebooks and expanding the imaginary continents within his Planet Mind. He also discovered something extraordinary: by applying knowledge in real life—helping neighbors or improving the village—he felt an even stronger surge in that internal power. It was as if the Planet Mind fed off both learning and action, making his entire being buzz with potential. He wondered what would happen if he kept going, kept learning, and kept inventing. Could his Planet Mind become the size of a galaxy one day? The thought thrilled him.

Without understanding the weight of his own prophecy, Silver went on gathering knowledge, building contraptions, and—perhaps most importantly—drawing both admiration and dread from those around him. In a small town like Lumeria, even mild eccentricity could make people uneasy. What would happen when something as monumental as an overpowered mental system collided with gossip, superstition, and religious dogma?

For now, though, Silver was just a boy who couldn't stop asking questions. He wanted to push the boundaries of what was possible, convinced that learning was a force strong enough to change the world. Little did he realize that change could be frightening, even dangerous, in the eyes of people who'd lived the same way for generations. But that day of reckoning was still on the horizon. All he felt at the moment was the excitement of uncovering life's secrets and storing them in a mental planet of his own design, one that seemed infinite.

He never guessed that, somewhere beyond the safe haven of Lumeria, eyes older than any mortal's were opening, sensing the stirring of a young mind that could reshape the fabric of magic itself. He never dreamed of how far those distant ripples would spread or how power-hungry some might become once they sensed the universe shifting around a silver-haired child. The future was unwritten, and Silver was ready to fill its pages with every discovery he made, unburdened by the shadows that were just beginning to form.