After taking a few moments to process the ominous System message, hovering in my vision, I rubbed my forehead in frustration, before I shivered. The cold here was really bad. Just how ridiculous was the cold in this dimension? It felt like someone was cutting into every inch of my flesh. I took a closer look at myself, and realized my father had bundled me up as if we were in the middle of a blizzard - and we were indoors. Even more absurd, it just wasn't doing enough. How did regular children survive in these conditions? I shivered again, and took a look around to see if I could find a warmer place to huddle up.

It appeared that my father and I lived together in a large hut. The sides of the building were made of a type of stone I had never seen before. It faintly resembled caked ash that had somehow solidified itself into stone. The floor, walls, and ceiling were all made of the same substance. Our hut wasn't very large. I could see one bedroom in it, with two beds and a small sheet of wood dividing the room into two smaller rooms. There was also a kitchen, the main room that I was currently standing in, and a fourth room that had a closed door. I also noticed that there was a merry fire crackling in a fireplace in the main room - not that it was doing a great job of keeping the cold away.

I could see tools made of stone and crude iron, and I didn't see any of the tiny gadgets I associated with a proper industrial era of technology. If I had to guess, we were probably living in a late iron-age society, or perhaps we were right at the birth of more advanced metallurgy such as steel. Of course, it was also possible that either the local laws of physics or the impact of magic had distorted the progression of metallurgy somewhat - I would need more time to tell.

My father was still in the kitchen, just as I had observed earlier. He was cooking a pot of soup on a stove - but I realized that, unlike what I had thought earlier, the stove itself wasn't powered by manifestation essence. Instead, my father was using manifestation essence to funnel heat through the stove - almost as if the stove had been designed to work only with magic. Assuming my father and I were relatively normal people, I could probably assume that magic was commonplace in this society, for my father to be blatantly using it for something as mundane as cooking.

The soup he was cooking smelled surprisingly good. I could spell several different spices, two types of meat, and something that looked and smelled kind of like potatoes mixed into the stew. It definitely smelled kind of spicy, which wasn't exactly my favorite, but I didn't hate spicy food - I just hoped it wasn't too spicy.

"Oh? Miria? Looks like you're awake. I think you dozed off for a while - you were leaning against the wall and not moving." My father chuckled. "It didn't look like the most comfortable sleeping position, but your mother used to find all sorts of weird positions to sleep in." A trace of pain flickered across my father's features, and I tried not to wince. My father had mentioned that my mother used to have find all sorts of weird sleeping positions. Combined with the vague sense of loss I remembered feeling when I was younger, and my mother's total lack of presence in the hut, it was painfully obvious that my mother was probably dead.

My father left the pot of stew behind as he moved over to me, before he planted a kiss on my forehead and retreated back into the kitchen. I blinked in surprise. Not because of the display of familial affection - I was mor than happy if my parents were kind and affectionate. I was shocked by how fast my father had moved.

The way he moved reminded me of Sallia when she had turned on all of her temporary boost spells and was burning a bit of her absorption essence, all to enhance her physical abilities. My father's speed was fast enough that Anise might have had a hard time even tracking him with her eyes. Even more absurd, it didn't seem like my father was putting any real effort into enhancing his own speed - it looked like he was just walking normally, at least from his perspective.

As I tried to process my father's ridiculous physical abilities, he laughed and stirred the stew again.

"The stew isn't ready yet, Mir. It should be done in a few more minutes, but if we don't let the lyeberian and gruddleberries cook a little longer, the flavor won't seep into the meat properly. Then the entire soup will just taste yucky."

I had no idea what lyeberian and gruddleberries were, but I nodded anyway. While I was hungry, I was more interested in figuring out what kind of world we had landed in this time. However, I couldn't find a good way to broach the topic, so I observed our surroundings. My father didn't seem to think anything was odd about my silence - he kept cooking happily. IN a few minutes, he gave the soup another experimental sip, before his eyes lit up.

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"It should be done now. Let's get that cold out of your body and warm you up." I blinked in surprise. Was food somehow related to the terrible chill I constantly felt? If that was the case, I had a better idea how regular children survived in this world - they must constantly need small meals to keep their temperature up.

My father ladled out a generous serving of soup for me, more than I thought my two and a half year old body could plausibly absorb at once, and then ladled out another generous bowl of soup for himself before he pulled me over to a table.

"Sit down and eat, Mir. If you stand up while you eat you might spill," he said, before he ate a spoonful of soup.

I ate it, and tried not to wince. It was definitely spicier than I liked. Not unbearable - but too hot for someone who wasn't even three yet.

However, as I ate, I felt a surge of warmth flow through my body. It was almost as if I had literally ingested a small sun. The horrible cold started to dissipate, and I breathed a sigh of relief as it disappeared. I inspected the bowl of soup more closely, and this time, I could detect an incredibly faint trace of essence in one of the ingredients - one of the bright red berries near the bottom of the soup was definitely magical, and through his cooking, my father had somehow redistributed this essence to the other ingredients in the soup.

I relaxed as the awful cold finally disappeared, and smiled at my father. Without another word, I dug into my soup.

After I finished eating, my father gently patted my head, before he smiled. "Now that you're warm, do you want to go outside? You're looking a lot livelier than last week, so we could go to the temple and get the priest to assess how close you are to absorbing your first spark. If you're lucky, maybe you can also start levelling up soon. I also need to head there anyway, to see when we'll be stopping. The ember has been moving for a while now, but the ember usually stops every couple weeks for at least a few days."

My ears perked up. I had no clue what my father had meant by 'ready to absorb my first spark' or 'the ember,' but it was clear they were important terms to the locals. My father had also directly referenced levelling up, meaning that it wasn't taboo to talk about the System with young kids or anything like that. The System was clearly a well known and integral part of day to day life here. I could probably ask questions about it freely.

"When do you think I will be able to absorb my first spark?" I asked. I tried to make my tone as plaintive and whiny as I could, just like a real child who had seen something they wanted but couldn't have it.

My father laughed. "Soon, sweetheart. Most kids are ready by the time they turn four or five years old, and the priest has already said that your stats seem to be way ahead of the curve for kids your age. We'll need to wait for the spark minder to give you the green light, though. If you absorb a spark too early you can hurt yourself. You should also start thinking about what you want your first spark to be. The first one doesn't matter too much, since you get your second slot pretty fast, but you should still choose something you like."

I nodded eagerly. "Let's go see the… the priest then. Let's see what he says!" It wasn't hard to feign eagerness - now that the awful cold wasn't burrowing into my bones anymore, I was very interested in seeing what lay outside of our hut. My father smiled and held my hand as he walked towards the door.

My first step outside of the hut treated me to the sight of a winter wonderland. Snow and cold constantly drifted in from the sky - not in bursts of howling wind, but like a gentle blanket of frost, enshrouding the land in eternal winter. Despite the snow falling from the sky, I could see a bright, orange sun clearly in the sky - somehow, snow was falling despite there being zero clouds in the area.

Nearby, I could see massive trees, like tower pillars that supported the heavens. The smallest ones I could see were at least a hundred meters tall - and some of the other trees were four or five times that height. Despite the snow, the trees didn't seem very impacted - they had bright green leaves. The rest of our surroundings was also covered in thick foliage - we were travelling through a jungle that didn't seem to be very heavily impacted by the cold.

And we were, indeed, travelling. This was because I could see that we were on the back of a giant land beast. The creature we were travelling on top of looked like a mixture between a yak and a train - it had dozens of legs, white, soft fur, and a massive, oddly flat back. There were plenty of other buildings on the creature's back, too - I could see that we were situated right in the middle of a fairly large town. There were at least a thousand houses on the back of our train-yak creature, and I could see six other similarly sized creatures travelling right alongside us. We were a wandering town in the truest sense of the word.

Right in front of the massive beast we were riding was a giant, golden-yellow core of fire, floating in the air. It was at least four hundred meters wide, and it looked almost like a second, much smaller sun had descended to the earth. It emitted waves of heat that I could feel, even though it was quite far away from me. It was practically a boiling ball of essence - the amount of magic radiating off of the ball far surpassed anything I had seen in previous worlds.

I had seen the world we landed in for the first time, and it was both wondrous and terrifying.

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