"Ah! Aereon and Paela, I've been waiting for you and your darling daughter of yours, it's nice to see you both after such a long time. Especially you Aereon, you hardly ever visit the family anymore!"

 

The family of three had reached their destination and had met with a kindly old doctor who had long brown rabbit ears and a small build. It was obvious to Astraea the doctor was related to her father Aereon and his family and bloodline after seeing their familiarity with each other together with what he just said.

 

"Uncle Statho... thank you for coming to the hospital on such short notice, I didn't know if you had something going on or were unavailable so I'm glad we won't need to delay Astraea's affinity assessment," Aereon said as a small smile graced his face.

 

"I wouldn't want to delay such an important thing since I'm one of the few people you're able to trust with this and since it's family policy. I just needed to push back a few appointments is all."

 

"That's sure to annoy some of the family..." Aereon stated worriedly.

 

"It's nothing important, those entitled parents always take up so much of my time asking for unreasonable things. One recently asked if they could transfer their child's affinity from one attribute to another! It's obvious they're not asking out of care for the child's future but more of how to increase their prestige in the family!"

 

The conversation was very interesting to Astraea as she could already guess that her father's family and bloodline are no small thing, wondering how prestigious Aereons' family actually was.

 

"I'm just worried about your status uncle..."

 

"That's Doctor Statho to you right now, while I'm your uncle I am now also little Astraea's Paediatrician, so I'll make sure to be professional and advise you both as necessary. Stop worrying about my status too, I never cared for it and the family dares not shun me too greatly as they know of my importance to the youths of the family." He stated firmly.

 

"Now let me take a good look at my new niece." He said as he bent down towards Astraea, a smile upon his face.

 

Astraea was more curious about his long brown ears and fascinated by their existence as an actual functional body part rather than a hair accessory, it was also a bit strange to see no ears on the side of the doctor's head and was just skin.

 

She had seen all of the common races in this world already just from inside the hospital, from several different species of beastmen to a beautiful lime skinned orc nurse and a family of dwarves as well. She had even seen an elf and orc couple, though instead of a female elf and male orc, it was a buff jock looking male elf and a cutesy and shy looking female orc, with the female orc very obviously pregnant.

 

It was exciting seeing all of these fantasy races though a bit off-putting seeing them wearing modern clothing and using high tech gadgets more advanced than modern smartphones.

 

"She's a beauty, I'm sure she'll grow up to become a beautiful and strong-willed woman," Statho said.

 

"My baby girl will be nothing less, I'll make sure of it," Paela said strongly, her eyes narrowed as she smirked confidently.

 

"I'm sure of it, now let's not delay and start with the assessment."

 

It was a common practice to record and test the magic affinity of a child many times over a four year time period as this was the time their magic affinity changes the most and is extremely malleable.

 

As previously mentioned, what determines someone's affinity included multiple factors like location, interaction with certain things, and even things like mentality and upbringing. The study of magic affinity and how it's determined is something that is still very esoteric and hard to understand and study.

 

There are a lot of superstitions, rituals and strange methods still existing to this day that is said to help develop certain attributes only because proper research into affinity manipulation is not very popular for the general populace due to the effect being very subtle unless large amounts of resources and funds were used.

 

This was the reason it was only popular with the wealthy who had the resources and funds to help influence their children's affinity by doing things like having them be born on a boat to increase their chances to have good water affinity, or having their room infused with fire attributed mana to raise their affinity for fire magic.

 

Doctor Statho gave a general explanation to the two parents just as a refresher as this was common knowledge, Astraea found out that since Alcavia was the richest and most developed in the world, affinity manipulation is common for every family and they try to positively influence their child's affinities in some ways. Alcavia had a very high mana density which also positively influenced a child's affinity just by living there, one of the many reasons wealthy families would want to live in Alcavia.

 

It was common for hospitals to even infuse a room with attributed mana during childbirth to simulate an environment that would influence the newborn's affinities at birth. Doctor Statho had revealed that the room Astraea was birthed was extremely dense in mana, if mana was visible, you wouldn't be able to see anything in the room.

 

The mana in the room was not attuned to any specific attribute which was common amongst parents who didn't want to influence their children's talents in a specific way but still wanted them to be more talented as unattuned mana did not influence a specific attribute and would improve the child's affinities as a whole.

 

Astraea was glad that the doctor explained all of these in a professional tone even though she could tell from her parent's reactions that they already knew the majority of what they were being told, it allowed her to have a bit more understanding of how this new world worked.

 

She also found out from his explanation that humans were the only race in the world to have at least a bit of affinity for all magic attributes, there was not one they had zero affinity in, though the amount of affinity they had for most of them was negligible enough to be useless and be considered as having no affinity in the attribute at all.

 

This would make her Neutral magic affinity high since all her affinities had been condensed into it.

 

"Let's proceed to the actual assessment shall we?"

 

The family of three had been led into a deeper room for the test, the interior was sparse and had no window, only containing a huge piece of equipment similar to diagnostic imaging equipment, with a baby-sized opening.

 

"Just lay dear Astraea on the seat over there and I'll start up the equipment." Doctor Statho said as he used the interface built into the side of the machine, probably setting it up for her assessment.

 

Paela nodded and gently laid her down into the protruding seat that was meant to go inside the machine. Astraea looked curiously at the machine in front of her, there was some anticipation within her despite knowing the outcome of the assessment, A sudden rush of fatigue hit her suddenly without warning and in the next second, she was taking her first nap in her new world.

 

"I activated the inbuilt sleep spell and put little Astraea to sleep, she'll awake in around half an hour. It's not surprising that a lot of newborns find entering a strange, cramp machine to be quite scary especially so soon after birth, the spell helps with that." Statho explained helpfully.

 

The two parents nodded in understanding, though it was the first time they'd heard of it, it was a reasonable explanation and they trusted Doctor Statho completely.

 

After a few minutes of setting up the machine, Doctor Statho finally activated it, and the protruding seat holding Astraea slowly retracted into the machine, the entrancing closing shut when Astraea had fully entered.

 

Doctor Statho activated the main function of the machine, testing the magic affinities of babies and newborns. The machine did its work with a quiet hum while the two parents waited patiently, staring at the closed opening of the machine.

 

Aereon was visibly anxious with furrowed eyebrows and crossed fingers while Paela had a neutral expression on her face with her arms crossed, though internally she was as anxious as Aereon. They were not worried about the safety of their child within the machine but instead of the results the test as it would determine the potential future of their daughter.

 

They did not worry about Astraea being talentless or having a low magic talent in general as they were both confident in Aereon's family bloodline, but it was a parents' job to worry about their children even if it is unfounded.

 

The first results of the test started to appear on the screens of the interface Doctor Statho was monitoring, starting from the common four elements and slowly revealing more attributes on the screen.

 

"The first few results have come in, would you like to wait until the assessment has been completed or would you like me to read them as they come?" Statho asked the couple, eyes still focused on the data that was showing up on the screen.

 

"I'm a bit impatient at the moment, so please read them as they come, Doctor," Aereon answered, using his uncle's official title. He did not want to wait for another second for the potential future of his daughter.

 

Paela nodded in agreement and the Doctor hummed in reply before reading out the data displayed before him.

 

"I think it's better to rip off the bandage on these first few, Fire, Water, Earth and Air Magic, zero affinity."

 

Aereon visibly twitched and had very mixed emotions inside, he had always dreamed of passing on his high affinity for Water magic and more specifically, Ice Magic, to his children and directly guide them with the methods he had learned over his lifetime, though he knew it was a distant wish due to how his family bloodline worked. He still held onto that sliver of hope that it would have come true.

 

Over the long history of Vanteria, the inhabitants had slowly discovered and proven that people could have an affinity for a very specific aspect of an attribute which were termed sub-attributes. In the olden times, those who had a low affinity for an attribute were considered talentless in it and thus would either choose another attribute to focus on or spend very little effort developing their skills in it due to the low returns.

 

Among those with such low affinities were people who actually had a high affinity in a specific aspect and would be awful at the rest of the aspects. One could be talented in ice-based spells within Water Magic but weak in vapour or liquid-based Water Magic spells.

 

This kind of talent is not only found in those with low affinities but within everyone and was just a more accurate assessment of their talents, those with similar affinities for an attribute may have different sets of skills and abilities depending on their affinities for certain aspects, like two fire mages who specialize in Heat Magic and Explosion Magic respectively.

 

This allowed those who were once deemed talentless in an attribute to be seen as prodigies in the current age as long as you had a high affinity in a single sub-attribute.

 

Of course, your affinity for any sub-attribute is directly linked to your affinity with the main attribute, and having zero affinity for Water Magic meant that Astraea also had zero affinity for Ice Magic. 

 

Aereon himself had a very high affinity for Ice Magic that put him in the top 10% of the world, with his affinity for Water Magic being decently high as well as his main attribute, still surpassing a great percentage of people talented in Water Magic.

 

"Having zero affinity in the four elements also means having zero affinity in all of their sub-attributes, but worry not, there is still plenty of other attributes to go through, trust in our bloodline to give Astraea a good set of affinities." Doctor Statho said as he attempted to clear the mixed expressions on the two parent's faces.

___

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