Three years seems a lot of time, especially if you are stuck in child's body with an adult mind.
That's what i thought but not if you have magic to play around with,
And with Great Sage's help it became easy and fun to learn all types of magic and oh! boy did I learn different types of magic.
Martha is absolute monster of mage, she basically has command over all five elements , which is really impressive since in Fairy-Tail learning magic other than your innate magic is difficult to learn and very few people were shown to have learned to do something like this .
Unlike Martha, Jason is master of swords & illusions, turns out his innate magic is reinforcement magic, which is pretty basic but the man took it to ridiculous level and with his sword reinforced and his illusions Martha said he is force to be reckoned with on battlefield.
Between the daily training sessions, the simple slice-of-life routine was actually pretty cozy. Every morning started exactly the same way—Martha screaming from the kitchen for me to get my lazy butt out of bed, followed by the heavy scent of fried eggs and drying mountain herbs. Between the chaotic thoughts rattling around in my brain from my past life.
I was actually picking up normal skills. I could skin a mountain rabbit without gagging, I knew which forest mushrooms would kill me on sight, and I had gotten ridiculously good at cleaning Jason out during card games, mostly because Great Sage was silently counting every single card left in the deck for me.
But the actual magic practice was a brutal grind. Martha was an incredibly unforgiving teacher. She didn't want me to just chuck a basic ball of water at a tree; she wanted me to understand how the Ethernano actually moved.
"Stop trying to fight the moisture, brat!" Martha barked one afternoon, slapping the back of my head as my magic circle sputtered and shattered for the twentieth time. "Fire is just raw malice, you want it to burn, you feed it, and it eats. But water doesn't care about your stubbornness. You don't shove it around. You just point to a gap in the dirt and let it run. If you keep forcing the flow like you're trying to smash bedrock, your circle is just going to keep collapsing on you."
She wasn't wrong. I spent hours down by the riverbank, straining to regulate the raw pressure pushing out from my container. With the Eyes of Gilgamesh flaring, I could see the exact truth of the magic—the hidden leaks, the geometric alignment, and the precise frequency needed to lock the Ethernano in place.
The theory was a joke to me; I could read the spell's core structure perfectly just by looking at the river. The real nightmare was getting a ten-year-old container to efficiently control that output. I had to practice anchoring my own internal energy, stopping the micro-vibrations until the magic circle finally stopped flickering and stabilized into a flawless, glowing ring off my palm.
Then came my tenth birthday. Jason and Martha were acting super twitchy all morning. No greetings, no cake, no nothing. Just weird, quiet looks across the breakfast table.
"Merlin, put on your heavy traveling boots," Jason said, his voice dropping low as he adjusted his canvas cloak. "We're going for a hike. A long one."
We hiked up the steep, untouched mountain trails for hours. My leg muscles were burning, and I was just about to ask if we were going to walk until I turned eleven, when Great Sage sharply pinged my consciousness.
[Warning: Dense Ethernano threshold detected ahead. You are crossing into a High-Tier Barrier Zone. The structural matrix is highly advanced. Total analysis of this barrier equation will require a prolonged processing period.]
The shift hit me a second later. Walking past the invisible boundary felt like stepping face-first into a wall of thick, heavy honey. My skin crawled from the sudden static pressure in the air, and the back of my throat tasted like ozone. Jason and Martha suddenly halted in front of a massive, ivy-covered cliff face that looked like an absolute dead end. Martha stepped forward, pressed her palm against a specific, thick vine, and muttered an incantation way too quiet for me to catch.
The solid stone cliff didn't just open; it completely unfolded like a geometric blueprint.
We stepped through the gap, and the ambient air turned warm, smelling like a deep summer forest. Right in the center of the hidden valley sat a massive dragon. He wasn't like the wild, destructive drakes I'd spotted flying over the distant horizons. His scales were a heavy mix of deep forest green and shimmering gold, looking more like an ancient mountain of emeralds than a giant lizard.
But the detail that caught my attention was his face. He didn't have eyes. There were only smooth, pale scales covering the sockets where his eyes should have been.
"Good to see you're still breathing, you old lizard," Jason said, his voice completely relaxed as he stepped forward, offering a familiar, respectful nod.
The giant beast shifted, and the solid ground groaned under his massive weight. He lowered his head until his snout was resting barely a few feet away from my robes. I could see the heavy steam huffing out of his nostrils, and the massive pool of Ethernano radiating off his emerald scales was immense. Back at the training fields, I had to deliberately throttle my output just to avoid accidentally vaporizing the nearby mountain ridges with my five-element mastery. Standing in front of this leviathan, I could finally drop the constant suppression. It was nice to be near something that wouldn't shatter if I let my magic loose.
"You speak as if a few centuries could actually do me in, Jason," Odin rumbled, his voice vibrating directly inside my own ribcage. His sightless head turned slightly toward Martha, then lowered toward me. "So, this is the hatchling you two have been talking about for years. You brought him all the way up the ridge just to show him off?"
"We brought him because we hit a wall, Odin," Martha said, walking up to pat the edge of one giant emerald claw like it was an old pet. She looked back at me, then up at the dragon. "Jason and I have taught him everything we know, but his container is too massive. Even with his five-element mastery, we're just going to hold him back from his actual potential. He needs an educator who actually understands the core of magic."
My Eyes of Gilgamesh flared as I locked eyes with the massive, sightless lizard. My vision cut straight through the physical world, reading his history effortlessly. Jason and Martha knew he was an ancient collector of spells, but they thought he just lost his eyes to an old battlefield injury.
I saw the raw, objective truth right through his scars. Three thousand years ago, this monster had gouged his own eyes out, bartering them directly to the Goddess of Magic to obtain the forbidden language of the primordial runes.
Odin's snout tilted slightly, his head leaning down until his hot breath rustled my white coat. "The boy is reading me. You've got goods pair of eyes hatchling. You see the price I paid to the heavens, don't you?"
"Takes one to know one, old man," I smirked, leaning casually against my wooden training sword.
Odin let out a rocky chuckle that made the dirt beneath my boots rattle. "A brat who masterfully commands five elements before his bones are even formed, and he speaks to a dragon without a single shred of fear. Jason, your wife is right. Caster magic is a basic pipe. If he wants to inherit the primordial runes, his soul is still too fragile to anchor the runes. Tracing them now would violently rupture his container."
The blind dragon tilted his head back, his deep voice carrying a cold, ancient weight. "Before we even discuss runes, Merlin, you are going to learn how this universe actually functions. You are going to learn the ancient Lost Magics that humans have buried and forgotten. I will teach you the mechanics of the Soul, the bending of Space, and the flow of Time itself. If you can master those fundamentals, only then will your container be ready for the language the world was written in."
I adjusted the collar of my white robes, a cocky, arrogant grin crossing my face as I looked up at the giant emerald leviathan.
"Lost magic, space-time, and souls?" I laughed, spinning my training blade out. "Sounds a hell of a lot more entertaining than making water balls. Let's get started, old lizard."