Sleep is for the Weak

‘Silent as the night.’

It was one of those phrases that Scarlet had always laughed at.

The night was not silent at all. People just assume that, because they are not awake to hear it, that means the sound doesn’t exist.

The night was full of noise. Thousands upon thousands of insects, birds, and other small creatures were out and about, now that the hated sun was gone and many predators would find it more difficult to detect them without the benefits of sight. It was a world far more full of ambient noise than the day time. Noise that most people would never appreciate... or learn to get annoyed at.

‘Fucking toads.’ Scarlet grumbled to herself as she tried her best to block out the sound of toads’ mating calls outside of her window. Did her family have a pond, or a nearby stream or something?

She was a year old now, but had still never ventured far from the house. Not that she really cared to yet. There was still plenty that she could do inside already.

“1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 440. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6… 7… 8…” Scarlet tried to push herself further to do that last set of ten pushups, but in the end, she just collapsed onto her bed with her sore arms. After a few moments, she finished the last two pushups for the set and then called it quits.

While 450 pushups seems like a lot for a baby, her stats were high and her body weight was really low, so they weren’t that tough.

Still, it didn’t look like she was going to be reaching the next level of [Strength Training] that night. Maybe she would do some more later. After all, the night was long and she had a lot to do before the adults woke up.

By this time, they were likely all fast asleep, meaning that Scarlet had the run of the house.

Taking her pillows and blanket, she tossed them out of the crib to form a pile on the floor below, before climbing up the side and falling out onto the pile with a soft thud.

After that was her first and last real obstacle, the bedroom door.

She grabbed a stool that her mother would sit on when she did her sewing in Scarlet’s room and moved it up in front of the door.

The wooden stool must have weighed around five pounds, but thanks to Scarlet’s [Strength Training] and some level’s she had grown, as well as the stats that people naturally gained as they grew up, Scarlet’s strength was enough to lift it with ease.

As well as gaining stats from leveling and her skills, Scarlet had gained +1 in all of her stats every 5 or so weeks since she was born, for a current total of +10, as she had just recently had her first birthday.

She assumed that these were just her getting naturally stronger as she grew up and that it would continue until she reached full maturity. 

If that was indeed the case, then with a strength of 140, she was as strong as a level 1 14-year-old child, while she was only 1-year-old. So something like lifting up and moving a wooden stool was easy, once she got her balance right. The thing was more awkward than heavy, and her baby legs still weren’t proportioned for easy walking.

Doing her best to not cause undue noise, Scarlet put the stool down in front of the door before climbing up on top of it and trying to turn the doorknob. 

“Wock again.” Scarlet pouted. After she had been caught sneaking around at night a few times, the maid started to lock the door at night so that she wouldn’t wander around the house.

Not that it had taken her long to overcome that obstacle. She was, after all, very stubborn.

Climbing down from her stool, Scarlet ran off to find the knitting needle that she had hid behind the dressing before returning to the locked door.

Placing her palm against the lock, Scarlet took a deep breath and carefully took a small portion of her magical power and used what is a trademark skill in just about any fantasy story, [Magic Appraisal].

It was a skill that Scarlet had discovered completely by accident, when she was trying to train her [Mana Control]. She had problems with the fact that when she released magic energy outside of her body, she quickly ended up losing it, resulting in her training being cut short as she had to wait for her Mana to slowly regenerate, as she only regained 1% of her maximum mana every 15 minutes.

In an attempt to solve this problem, Scarlet tried putting her mana into objects instead of just throwing it into the air, hoping she would be able to retrieve the mana afterwards. Not only did this succeed, but it seemed that when she retrieved the mana, it carried a blueprint of the item along with it.

At first, this blueprint wasn’t very clear, but as the [Magic Appraisal] skill leveled up, the picture became clearer and clearer. Now she had a good understanding of whatever material she could get close enough to touch and had a mental picture of its shape.

It was also a good way to train both her [Mana Sense] and [Mana Control] as well as being relatively cheap to do, so it was killing 3 birds with 1 stone.

She didn’t really need to use it on the lock, since she’d already done this a dozen times before, but it didn’t hurt to take another look. 

Satisfied with what she found, Scarlet jammed her tool into the hole and started to twist it about in order to get it up against the latch.

Since it was a privacy lock, rather than a lock that was genuinely meant to stop people, it was simple in design that could have been opened by even the fat and clumsy needle, and didn’t take long for Scarlet to get it open.

After opening the door, she returned the knitting needle and the stool to their old places before moving out into the hallway.

She moved as silently as possible, less because of the fear of being caught than in order to practice her [Sneak] skill. She often moved as if she was sneaking about even during the middle of the day, just to practice. But with how light her baby body was she hardly made a sound even when stepping on a squeaky floorboard. The chances of her waking someone was slim to none.

She knew more than anyone how oblivious to their surroundings people were when asleep, how vulnerable they were.

Moving as silently as possible, Scarlet made her way to the large living room area which housed most of her mother’s various tools, as well as a bookshelf, containing all of the books in the house.

It would have been lovely if there were books on magic, or with detailed explanations of the world’s culture and the system mechanics. Sadly, that is a pipe dream, as Scarlet wasn’t going to be as lucky as some people in reincarnation stories, as neither of her parents practiced magic. No baby’s instruction to the world books here either. There weren’t even any children’s books, so she had to start learning this world’s written language in the deep end of the pool.

Most of the books were either the kind of old fashioned stories that ‘people of culture’ would read in order to sit at book club meetings and try to show off how ‘cultured’ they are, or books of more… adult themes. Both of these kinds of books had been pushed aside the moment Scarlet figured out what she was looking at, with a small blush on her face in the case of the latter. But there were a few books that held something practical. Books that definitely belonged to her mother.

They were books on the art of working with fabrics. Books on weaving, knitting, braiding, tanning, fabric felting, fabric bonding, stitching, embroidery, dress making, tailoring and more.

While all of these activities had similar themes, they all had separate skills related to them. It was just like how sketching, painting and sculpting would all be classified as ‘art’ but all required vastly different techniques. But since they are related, gaining levels in one should help to gain levels in the others too. Just like how [Mana Sense] and [Mana Control] work off of each other.

In the future, if Scarlet could learn all of these skills, it should give her a sizable boost to her finesse and artistry stats, which in turn would help her with her next major goal, enchanting.

Any MMO player would tell you that the difference between a mere high level player and a top tier player is their equipment. The bonuses on your equipment could easily outway any of the stats and skills you had built. And even for lower level players, a super rare drop could give them something that they use for a long long time and can carry them through many challenges.

One of the biggest drawbacks that Scarlet was currently facing was the massive amount of time that it took to regain her mana, but if she could enchant all of her clothes to help increase the speed at which she could gain mana, it would make her future training a lot quicker. Not only that, enchanted equipment is worth good money, which should also help her down the road.

Yes! Enchanting is definitely the most important goal at the moment!

Luckily, some of the books did contain brief details on the requirements and methods of enchanting, and Scarlet would read them all.

It took a little while to find the book she had left off on last time, but when she found it, the girl quickly opened it up to the page she had left on and got to work.

Of course, it was pitch black in the room, with the window’s blinds closed and not nearly enough moon or starlight to read by anyways. But that didn’t stop Scarlet.

Putting her finger to the page, Scarlet began to use [Magic Appraisal] in order to see what was directly underneath her finger. She moved her finger along the page, as if reading braille, taking note of the letters one at a time and stringing them together into words.

At first, she tried to appraise the entire book at once, but she couldn’t get the details down well enough or memorize much before the mental image faded. Creating a ball of mana to use as a light source worked alright, but it consumed a lot of focus and a giant amount of mana, leaving her dry after just two minutes, where as she could keep up with using [Magic Appraisal] for several hours before her mana became too low to continue.

It was slow reading, but that was okay. She wasn’t prepared to read quickly anyways. She did have to spend time and energy decoding the characters and translating what she saw into something she could understand.

While the spoken language of the world was hard for Scarlet to understand, the written language was the same as the ‘fake’ language in the video game, a language that Scarlet herself had worked to decode as part of a give away contest, back when she was fifteen. It had been fun, figuring out what the root words were and slowly expanding what she could translate.

She had ended up writing the wiki page on it.

While many of the words were new to her, she was again able to expand her horizons and learn more and more about this world’s language.

Scarlet slowly read the book for two hours before taking a break. While she still had a bit of mana left, she didn’t want to get too low, as she still needed enough in the tank to continue to circulate the mana for her [Mana Control] training. Plus, using mana was actually kind of tiring, putting strain on her body and mind. So she went into another one of her meditation sessions in order to recover.

Meanwhile, she kept her hands busy with some knitting.

Her mother had an entire treasure trove of yarn and knitting needles in a basket nearby, and wouldn’t miss any. So Scarlet put some of what she learned to use and started to knit a sock. She’d already started it on a previous night, though only for a little bit.

The task was pretty repetitive, so she didn’t have much of a problem continuing it while relaxing the rest of her body and mind. She’d let her arms recover from the chore later.

[General Skill: Knitting has reached level 3 | Rewards: +1 Finesse, +1 Artistry, +3 EXP]

[161 EXP to next level]

[General Skill: Knitting has reached level 4 | Rewards: +1 Finesse, +1 Artistry, +4 EXP]

[157 EXP to next level]

[General Skill: Knitting has reached level 5 | Rewards: +1 Finesse, +1 Artistry, +5 EXP]

[152 EXP to next level]

Scarlet’s [Knitting] levels climbed quickly and after an hour she had grown 3 whole levels in it.

It was likely because of her ‘Hereditary Bonus’ that she got from her mother.

It seems that when a child was born, they gained bonuses to their own skill growth based upon what kind of ‘Class’ their parents had. And with her mother having a 4th tier weaving related class, the bonuses to Scarlet’s growth in this field weren’t anything to laugh at.

Scarlet continued her work in a near trance-like state until the sound of movement in the halls reached her ears.

Scarlet immediately dropped what she was doing and dove into the shadows behind the large weaving loom in the corner of the room, as quickly and quietly as she could. She held her breath as the footsteps approached along with the light of a flickering candle.

Scarlet felt cold, as she worried about who it might be, but her fears vanished as she heard her voice.

“Scarlet? Are you there?” Scarlet’s mother called out to her with a whisper.

She’d woken up in the night and had wanted to go and get some air when she noticed that Scarlet’s door was slightly open and that her baby was nowhere to be found. So she decided to explore the house in order to find her.

Scarlet peeked through the threads of the weaving loom to see that it was indeed her mother standing there in her silk nightgown, the bright pink, cat-sized spider that was her spirit bond at her side.

“Mama.” Scarlet replied as she came crawling out of her hiding place, pretending as though she wasn’t very good at walking yet as she stumbled towards the woman with her arms stretched out.

“There you are.” Maria Wright said with a sigh of relief as she saw her daughter. Kneeling down and putting her candle aside in order to embrace her child. “Honestly, you really need to stop wandering around at night like this.”

But it was while she was holding onto Scarlet that she noticed the things that the baby had left on the floor in her attempts to hide. 

“What’s this?” She said as she looked over at the book and the beginnings of what would be a sock. The baby sized sock was only two thirds of the way done, but Maria instantly recognized the rough pattern of it. “Did… did you make this?”

Scarlet hesitated for a moment, but realized she had been caught red handed. Might as well confess. “Wes…”

Rather than the disbelief she was expecting, she was greeted with a girly squeal of delight. “Oh dear! My baby’s first sock!” Maria cried, squeezing Scarlet into an even tighter hug. “I’m so proud of you! And it is turning out so well too! But really dear, you should have let me help you pick out a better pattern. And this color isn’t right at all for the summer time. Here, let mommy show you what you want to do.”

And so started Scarlet’s formal education into the world of high-class tailoring and the age of one year old. Her mother was too excited to have her daughter already showing interest in her line of work to question anything.

...Well, this worked out to her advantage anyways.

DyslexicWriter

Changing my mind a little about what the MC's bond should be. Now I think either a sort of tiger or a panda. People joking about the shadows under her eyes making them look alike. Also because having a lethargic creature around who just sleeps all day would be a funny juxtaposition to the MC.