He began with the mapping.
Shadow explored the forest in the hours when the family was occupied — early morning, late afternoon, deep night. Arthur built a picture of it in the back of his mind. Not a drawing but a feel: where the paths ran through shadow, where territories met, which areas the smaller creatures avoided. He filed the avoidances under: investigate carefully before going near.
He catalogued what was there.
Glimmer Rabbits were common in the eastern thicket, preferring clearing edges where they could watch for threats in multiple directions. Smart enough to notice patterns. He rotated his hunting locations to avoid teaching them to associate a particular stretch of shadow with dying.
Bark Lizards lived under a fallen oak three hundred meters in. Their hides were worth more than the rabbits. They were faster than they looked and rolled into armored balls when threatened, which required a different approach — a wider strike rather than a point. He spent two weeks developing it on non-living targets before he used it on a living one.
Spine Pigs were the hardest. A rooting family near the stream, moving in groups, responding to threats collectively. He watched them for three weeks. When he finally took one he did it from the edge of the group, from the best shadow position he had, and had Shadow moving before the others located the direction of the attack.
His parents could not explain the Spine Pig.
A Glimmer Rabbit on the step was one thing. A series of them stretched the explanation. But a Spine Pig — larger than most dogs, more dangerous than anything the old Martell dog could have touched — was something else entirely. Every farmer in the region knew what it took to bring one down.
He watched his father stand over it at the garden gate for two full minutes without speaking. Watched him look at the gate. At the latch. At the property around him. Watched the expression on his face move through puzzlement and something close to unease before it settled into the look of a man who has decided that some things are outside the scope of what he can address today.
Edric brought the Spine Pig inside without calling Mira. He processed it in the barn, quietly, by himself. He came to dinner with the manner of someone who had made a private decision and intended to keep it.
He did not ask where it had come from.
Arthur watched his father eat and thought: he's relieved. He doesn't know why. He's decided the relief is enough.
◆ ◆ ◆
By his tenth month the clay pot on the mantelpiece held more coin than Arthur had seen in it.
He tracked it the way an anxious person checks the weather — automatically, every time he was carried past. In the early weeks it had held perhaps a week's careful spending. By the third month of the operation it held a month's worth. By the tenth month his mother had counted it twice in the same week, not because she'd forgotten the total but because she needed the physical act of the count to believe it.
Arthur had also increased greatly in strength. His mana control expanded, meaning he could hunt with Shadow further. He had reached this strength in ten months of systematic hunting, absorbing the life-energy of every creature Shadow brought down. And it only felt like a start.
He tried puting his strength in numerical terms and would consider himself 7 times stronger than when he started. He thought, I'd probably be a level 7 if this were a fantasy story - oh wait this is totally a fantasy story.
His pool was seven times what it had been after the first kill. His perception through Shadow had sharpened to something close to a network — not just Shadow's position but every connected shadow within her range, a three-hundred-meter radius of dark awareness that ran continuously. The original spear construct had become four variants. He had begun building things that were not weapons at all: forms that could carry, push, seal, muffle.
He was ten months old. He was Level 7. Shadow had also evolved considerably from the small uncertain thing he had built that first night, and she moved through the forest now like something that had always been there.
He kept all of it inside the space that no one else could reach, and presented to the world the face of a bright infant meeting his milestones ahead of schedule.
This deception was not permanent. He knew that. He was already thinking about what came next — not just the operation, which was running well, but the years ahead, the version of himself that would eventually walk out of this cradle and into a world that had magic in it and did not yet know what he was.
He thought about that and felt the pull of it.
He kept it to himself for a while longer.