Another two years have passed and I made some major steps in becoming the ultimate MC. I finally learnt how to read, after a few months of ‘games’ with mom, she finally gave up on ‘NORMALIZING’ me. She even, surprisingly, taught me how to read. After that I finally got my hands on the grimoire and let me just tell you, the manga and anime make learning magic seem easy. I couldn't make any sense out of it. Sigh all those days of chasing the book around, gone to waste. Nowadays mom has the idea of taking me out to make friends. It's not as if I want to be a shut–in or anything like that, but it's kind of difficult to make friends with people who are still at the stage of eating sand, picking their noses and being generally dumb. I know they are ordinary kids unlike me, but I can feel my IQ become smaller just by talking to them. So, yeah, I'll wait a few years more for them to mature before thinking of making friends. Another thing I discovered is that I am not a white elf. My mom said something about evolving to look like white elves to avoid extinction. We are actually a race called the Mimos. After many years, we basically became relatives to the white elves and are very difficult to tell apart. The only difference between us is the energy affinity. This leads me to talk about the different forms of mystical energy that govern the world. Mana, which we call the energy of nature. Numen, the energy of creation, and Hex, the energy of erosion. We, as Mimos, have ten percent affinity for Hex. Twenty percent affinity for numen and seventy for mana. As for elves they have a more balanced affinity ratio. However, I became an irregularity. It all started on one day, the day I was finally able to decode a part of the grimoire, I read about something called a Mana gathering ritual. It was basically a way to prepare the body for casting magic with Mana. On this particular day, mom had decided to go out with some of her friends and leave me home alone. It wasn't the first time she had done this. Because I was more mature than most kids my age she was comfortable with leaving me home alone for short periods of time. After she left I quickly got down to business. The first step was to connect my internal mana with world Mana. To do this I had to breathe in world Mana and make my body subconsciously absorb it to sustain my body. This is where things started heading south. Most people, as I learnt later, did this ritual at the age of five. This was due to the fragility of energy channels at ages before this. At the age of five, these energy channels would finally become strong enough to support energy. At this time I was three years old so my energy channels were very fragile. Due to the immature state of my mana channels, they collapsed. When this happened I fainted.“groan…” I rubbed my eyes as I woke up. I found myself in bed with mom at the side with a worried expression. As I moved I noticed the area of my abdomen, where my energy core was to be located, had a burning sensation, as if it would catch fire at any time. When mom noticed I was awake, she rushed and slapped me, with tears in her eyes. “W-what were you thinking?! Doing the ritual when you know nothing!" I looked down and apologized. This was the first time mom ever raised a finger against me, so I could tell that things were pretty bad. After some time passed in awkward silence, “You should forget about being a mage.”, I looked at her, confused. “I mean that you will not be able to cast magic because you cannot interact with the world's Mana without your core. So you can't cast magic.” It was finally my turn to shed tears. I spent the rest of the day sobbing, while mom tried to comfort me.