Chapter 6 - The broken girl is called
Thus began my magic training. I went at it with all my will, often passing out from using up all my mana. But every time it happened, I felt that the mana capacity of my body increased, so I pushed hard to reach that limit at least once per day.
As what I did were mostly harmless and hard-to-detect illusions (they wouldn’t be useful if they were easy to detect), I did it right after going to bed at night, so my mother never noticed that I was doing it, and just thought that I had a very deep sleep.
The years passed, and my dominion over illusions grew more refined and precise. I developed a taste for doing pranks with the girls to lighten the mood when they were distressed.
It looks like I overdid it a couple of times, to the point that the fox beastkin women started calling me an ’honorary kitsune’. I still don’t know if that’s a good thing or not, but being called one by actual foxladies makes my heart flutter, so it should be a good thing, right?
The overseers don’t interact much with us, only coming to bring the food, which we would then serve between ourselves, and to bring a woman in or take a woman out.
They are always professional, despite the nature of the services the adult women provided. Guess they’re afraid of an unforgiving boss, or maybe they’re just not fond of damaging the goods they’re going to sell, but they’ve never physically abused us.
Which was a relief, as being slaves and forced to do... those kinds of services... was bad enough already. Every time I pause to think about the future that awaits me as soon as I reach puberty, it makes my stomach revolt.
In any case, the lack of meddling by the overseers played in my favour. They never paid any attention to me when they came to the room, as I’m just a child, so it was easy for me to train to my heart’s content. It’s not like I had anything else to do anyway.
There weren’t any books to read, and though I’m a child in the biological sense, my 40 and something mind wouldn’t find little kids’ toys interesting, and we didn’t have them anyway.
So I just listened to the stories of my mother and the other adult women, and trained and trained.
So it was to my absolute surprise that one day, right after my seventh birthday, the overseer called my name.