The morning I decided what to do with my second life, the house smelled like cinnamon.
It wasn't a sign. Mum had finally beaten the bun recipe she'd been losing to for three weeks, and the whole building found out the way the whole village found out about most things, through the nose first. I lay in my crib-turned-toddler-bed and watched dust turn over in the band of light on the ceiling, and let myself do the thing I'd been ducking for days.
I thought about it properly, with two lifetimes leaning on the thought.
In my old life I made decisions the way most people do, by not making them.
You don't decide to fall out of touch with your family. You let eleven weekends fill with errands.
You don't decide to be lonely. You keep promising yourself next month will be quieter.
The man in the alley hadn't taken much from me in the end. The ambulance did the taking.
The years before that I'd given away on my own, one unreturned call at a time.
So I wasn't going to drift into this one.
[Quest: Between Shadows and Hearths]
[Objective: choose a life path.]
[Pursue the ninja path. (0/1)]
[Pursue the civilian life. (0/1)]
[??? (0/1)]
The window had hung over my blanket for two nights, unchanging. The third line had unlocked the evening Grandma told me about Grandfather, the man who refused to be just one thing, and when I'd reached for it, the description had opened on its own: forge a path that is not a path.
Balance the blade against the work of feeding minds and bodies.
Feeding minds. That phrase had been bouncing around my skull all night, because it was the closest thing in this world to the only useful skill I'd carried through dying.
Back home I'd spent every Tuesday and Thursday in a community centre with bad lighting, sitting across from people whose problems I could not fix. That was the first rule they taught us. You are not here to solve. You are here to sit with. It took me months to feel the difference and years to get decent at it, and of everything that survived the alley and the void and a flashbang I'm still not over, that was the thing this world needed most and had almost none of.
Because here was what kept me up now that I knew where I was. This village was about to spend a generation of children like loose coins. I knew some of their names.
A boy who would watch the village he saved take his father apart.
A boy under a boulder.
A girl in the mist.
A woman with a fox sealed in her belly and no one in the chair across from her at dinner.
The story I'd once read for fun was, from the inside, a long line of untreated grief wearing forehead protectors.
No jutsu fixed that. I'd checked. There were techniques for invading a mind, breaking one, reading and editing and wiping one. A whole clan built around the plumbing of the head. There was almost nothing for sitting with a person in the dark until they found the door themselves.
'Both,' I thought, and then said it out loud, to the ceiling and the window and whoever else was awake at the bottom of the world. "All of it. The blade so I can reach people. The bakery so they have somewhere to come back to. And the listening, because nobody else here seems to do it."
[??? (1/1)]
[Quest complete: Between Shadows and Hearths.]
[Third path unlocked: The Adventurer's Road.]
[Reward: 500 EXP. Title acquired: Pathfinder.]
A short fanfare, and then the count kept going.
[Level up.]
[Level up.]
[Level 10 reached.]
[Tutorial phase complete. Status removed: Re-Life Player. The 10x EXP multiplier has ended.]
"Oh no," I whispered. Two years of being a glorious experience piñata, gone in a line of grey text. Every chore, every wobbling step, every folded sock had paid ten times its weight, and I had always known the multiplier ended at Level 10, and I had still let myself believe the maths might lose track of me. It hadn't. The window reported the loss the way it reported everything, flat, with no funeral attached, and somehow that made it worse, because there was nobody on the other side of the screen to be sad with.
[Concealed statuses unlocked.]
That shut me up. The two question marks that had squatted on my status screen since the day I was born, the ones I'd poked at for two years like a loose tooth, finally opened.
[Cherished (Passive): +3 VIT & +1 LUK per Level]
[Description: Granted by being genuinely loved. Cannot be trained, purchased, or stolen. The effect is lost when all grantors are considered dead.
Current grantors: Yuriko Hoshizora, Daichi Hoshizora, Sachi Hoshizora, Miyu Tamura.]
I read it twice, then a third time, because my eyes had gone wet and a two-year-old crying alone at six in the morning raises questions I didn't want to answer.
Every level I had ever gained, some of my strength had come from being loved. It had been wired into me since the day Mum first held me, and I'd spent two years assuming the question marks hid a clever cheat. They did. Just not the kind I'd pictured. The window stated it the way it stated chakra reserves, with the maths attached and no opinion, and the no-opinion made it land harder, because it meant the love was not the system's idea. The system had only counted it.
"The other one," I said, thick.
[Heart-Mender's Aura (Passive): +2 CHA per Level & increased likeability with the wounded]
[Description: The hurt recognise something in you. They will keep finding you.]
Eight hundred hours in a room with bad lighting, weighed and stamped and sewn into me on the way through. I sat with that for a moment.
Then it showed me one more thing. At the bottom of my skill list, under Basic Culinary Arts and its proud Level 1, sat a greyed line. No rank. No description I could open. A name made of three question marks.
[Skill: ??? (Locked)][Unlock conditions not met.]
I poked it, mentally, the way you poke a bruise to check it's still there. It didn't open. It sat there like a stone on a riverbed, and the cinnamon downstairs went briefly far away.
Breakfast was a war, in the good way.
"Both," Dad repeated. He had a bun in one hand and his flak jacket half-buckled, and his face was running pride and fear in alternating shifts, like kids taking turns on a swing. "You want both."
"Both," I confirmed, with the weight of a daimyo signing a treaty. I was on two cushions to reach the table, which thinned the weight out a little.
"The ninja arts and the bakery."
"And other things. Grandpa did lots of things." I'd learned the single most important fact about negotiating with adults in this house: invoke the dead, win the point. Grandma's eyebrow moved in a way that said she knew exactly what I was doing and was awarding marks for execution.
"He's two," Dad said to the table, not for the first time in our shared history.
"He's two the same way the Hokage Monument is a nice piece of masonry," Grandma said, and drank her tea. "Daichi. You watched him learn to read in a month. Did you think he'd grow ordinary if we all held our breath?"
"I thought," Dad started, and stopped. He set the bun down, which in this family was a man laying his sword on the table, and looked at me. Really looked, the tiredness pulling tight at the corners of his eyes. "Kaito. The work is not what the stories sell. Most days it's boring. The days it isn't, you'll wish it was boring. I have carried friends home. Do you understand what I'm telling you?"
The room went still. Mum's hands stopped over the teapot.
Here was the part I couldn't say. Yes, Dad. Better than you. I've read the casualty lists of the next fifteen years. I know what's coming, for you, for your friends, for the silver-haired man I haven't met and the loud boy who will never get to be Hokage. I know exactly what I'm walking into. That's the reason I can't stay out of it.
What I said was also true, just smaller.
"I know people get hurt," I said. "That's why I want to learn. Not to hurt people back. To be there. When it happens. Mum says it, remember? Think of the people waiting for you. I want to be good enough that more people get to come home to the ones waiting."
Quiet. Dad's eyes had gone bright. Mum had abandoned the teapot.
"And also," I added, because someone was about to cry at breakfast and the moment needed ruining, "if I'm strong, nobody can stop me from eating cookie dough."
"There he is," Mum said, laughing and wiping her eyes at once. "There's my son. For a second I thought the Sage of Six Paths had sat down at my table."
"The Sage of Six Paths doesn't get your cinnamon buns," I said. "I win."
Dad laughed. It cracked down the middle, but it was real, and he reached over and flattened my hair with one large hand. "Both, then," he said. "On terms. You train properly or not at all, and Ma decides what properly means, Sage help you. No real blade until she says. And the day this stops being what you want, you say so. No shame in it. That's the one that matters, Kaito. More than the rest."
"I promise," I said, and meant it all the way down, and the system, which did not keep a ledger of promises and never had, let the moment stay between me and my father where it belonged.
Grandma's idea of a first lesson started at the dojo door, which she did not open.
"Stand there," she said, and pointed at a flagstone in the courtyard. The morning was cool and the sun was still working itself loose from the rooftops. She set a single leaf, broad and green, freshly stripped from the tree that leaned over our wall, flat on my forehead. "Hold it there until lunch." Then she walked to the engawa and began running forms, flowing stance to stance like water that remembered being a waterfall, in the manner of a woman who expected to look up in an hour and find a leaf on the ground and a sulking child under it.
The leaf exercise. The real, academy-standard, day-one leaf exercise, and I knew the theory cold. Stick the leaf with chakra, hold the output even, build fine control. My Chakra Control had been sitting at Level 10 since before I could walk, fed by two years of conditioning I'd done in a crib while everyone thought I was teething.
The leaf stuck the instant I fed it chakra, flat and steady, and stayed. It would have stayed if I'd fallen asleep. A skill at level does what it does.
A minute went by. Grandma glanced over, the way you check a pot you don't expect to have boiled. The leaf was where she'd left it. Her forms did not pause, but her eyes came back to me a second time, which from Sachi Hoshizora standards was the equivalent of a person dropping a teacup.
"Hm," she said.
She crossed the courtyard, plucked a second leaf off the tree, and set it beside the first. Then, after a moment, one on the back of each hand. I held all four without trouble, because the variable was chakra control and the variable was maxed, and I watched my grandmother's face do a thing I had seen perhaps twice in two years: recalculate.
"How long have you been able to do this," she said. Not a question so much as an audit.
"Since before the leaf, I think." I kept my voice innocent and my eyes wide, the cheapest armour a small body owns. "It feels like holding your breath. Easy. Boring."
"Boring," she repeated, and there was something underneath the word that might, in a less fearsome woman, have been delight. She balanced a fifth leaf on the tip of my nose, where it sat like an accusation, and stepped back, and the leaf stayed, and Sachi Hoshizora looked at her two-year-old grandson wearing five leaves in the morning light and revised, visibly, every plan she'd had for the season.
"Then we are not going to spend a year on adhesion," she said. "Good. We will spend it on the part of you that is not boring at all. Sit." She folded down to the flagstone with two knees that had outlived two wars, and tapped the air over my sternum. "The chakra is finished. It will hold those leaves all day and you'll think about lunch the whole time. I am going to teach you to put your mind in one place and keep it there, because a person who can do that with a sword in his hand is worth ten who cannot, and a person who can do it across a table from someone who is hurting is worth a hundred. Breathe. In. Out. When your attention wanders off, and it will, you fetch it back, without scolding it. That's all. That's the whole drill."
It was the only thing she said that morning that was a lesson, and she said it once, and then we just breathed, an old woman and a small boy on a flagstone with five leaves between them and the forms put away. By lunch my legs had filed for asylum and my nose itched past all reason, and somewhere in the long quiet a window I hadn't asked for opened.
[Skill acquired: Meditation (E) (Passive/Active) Lv 1.]
[Description: Steadies the mind. Increases CP recovery and the resilience of the heart.]
[Unlocking Meditation has awarded the player WIS +2.]
When she called lunch, the leaves were still on me. She peeled them off one at a time, studying me with those unreadable eyes.
"Tomorrow," she said, "we keep the leaves and lose the courtyard. You'll do it on the dojo beam." A pause at the door. "You learn fast, Kaito. Faster than is comfortable for an old woman to watch. So I'll say one thing and then leave you your morning. Speed is a fine horse. It is not a destination. Do not let it carry you somewhere before you've decided to go." She went in. I sat on the flagstone a while longer, and decided she was, as usual, right.
Miyu took the news the way Miyu took all news, as a thing that had happened to her personally.
"You're going to be a ninja and a baker," she said that afternoon, hanging upside down off my bed with her hair sweeping the floor, which she claimed helped her think and which I suspected mostly helped her be upside down. "And an adventurer."
"That's the plan."
"That's three things." She righted herself with a thump, face flushed, eyes narrowing like an auditor who'd found a discrepancy. "You can't have three things. I don't have one thing yet. Mum says I can't pick until I'm older because picking at five is how you end up like Uncle Botan."
"What happened to Uncle Botan?"
"Nobody knows. That's the point." She flopped down across from me, chin in her hands, and her voice dipped, where the empress drained out and the five-year-old looked through. "Are you going to go away? Ninjas go away. The ones at the gate with the packs. They go away and the flower shop makes the white arrangements and Mum does the quiet voice all day."
The white arrangements. I filed it. Miyu, who could read a man's grief in the way he flexed his hand, had grown up watching her mother arrange the village's condolences. Her whole picture of the shinobi world had come in through the funeral orders.
"Someday," I said, because I'd decided long ago never to lie to her unless I had to, and was already dreading how big that had-to might get. "Not for years. And I'll always come back. That's the whole point of me, Miyu. I'm going to be the kind that comes back, and the kind that brings other people's ninjas back too, so your mum has to make fewer white ones."
Miyu weighed this with great seriousness.
"Okay," she ruled, empress restored. "Then I'm the kind too. Whatever kind that is. We'll be it together, and also you have to teach me the chakra thing, for real, not the fake leaf game where you laugh at me."
"The leaf game is real training."
"Your face isn't," she said, with terrible accuracy, and the negotiation that followed cost me two desserts and most of my dignity. The window noted only what it ever noted, a small change in a number it had been keeping since before either of us could walk.
[REP: Miyu Tamura 70/100.]
The Beginner Gift Pack had been sitting in my inventory for over a year, locked until Level 5, then hoarded past Level 10 on what I'd told myself was discipline and was really the dragon-sickness of a man who once finished a game with two hundred and forty-seven unused potions.
That evening I sat cross-legged on my bed and opened it.
[Beginner Gift Pack opened.]
[Item: Skill Book: Henge no Jutsu (Transformation Technique). Locked until age 3.]
[Item: Kazuya's Spare Key]
[Description: An old brass key. It fits no door currently in the player's possession.]
That sobered me. I turned the key over in small hands. Real brass, real weight, cold out of a dead man's pocket by way of an inventory slot. Grandpa's key. The window didn't tell me what it opened, or promise that I'd find out, or hint at a door waiting somewhere in the house. It just named the key and went quiet, which was its own kind of information, because a thing that gets a name and no use is a thing the world is saving for later.
[Item: Cushion of the Eternal Student]
[Description: Grants +10% EXP to skills learned while seated upon it. Inert while carried.]
"Useful," I said, to no one.
[Consumable: Mulligan Token]
[Description: A single token. Its use is still shrouded in mystery.]
I read that one twice. The system knew things. I had no doubt the system knew exactly what a Mulligan Token did, the same way it knew the level it wouldn't print over certain heads, and it had chosen to file the answer under mystery and hand me the box anyway. I set the token in the deepest slot of my inventory, next to the key, two named things with their uses withheld, and did not pretend to myself that I wasn't unsettled.
Downstairs, the bakery bell rang.
It was past closing. Mum kept lazy summer hours now, the kulfi money had bought her that, and the bell after dusk usually meant Miyu had escaped her mother again. I went down anyway, because eavesdropping was a skill I refused to let plateau.
It wasn't Miyu.
A man stood in the doorway with the last of the sunset behind him, and the name that resolved over his head, made every thought in my head sit down at once.
[Sakumo Hatake - The White Fang - LV ???]
The White Fang of Konoha. The man whose name made enemy shinobi pick a different road. The legend I'd met once already in a basement full of cages, and who, in a story I'd read in another life, was going to wear down and step over to the other side while his son spent thirty years paying the bill.
He didn't look like a legend. He looked like a father at the end of a long week. Flour dust hung in the evening air and seemed to settle on him like he was furniture, like he'd already half-faded into the back of his own life. I did the thing I always did when something about a person didn't add up. I focused, and pulled.
[Analyse]
[Sakumo Hatake - The White Fang - LV ???]
[Title: Konoha's Fang]
[Class: Jonin]
[HP: ?? / ??] [CP: ?? / ??]
[Stats:
STR ??
VIT ??
DEX ??
INT ??
WIS ??
CHA ??
LUK ??]
[Description: A legendary jonin of Konohagakure and the father of Kakashi Hatake. His combat prowess is said to surpass even that of the Sannin, earning him wide respect and fear across the shinobi world. Humble, kind, and deeply loyal to his comrades, he places their lives above strict adherence to shinobi rule.
[Currently counting the days since he last slept through a night. Count: 31.]
My chest pulled tight. The stats were a wall of question marks I had no hope of reading, the way you can stand at the foot of a mountain and not see the top, but the small line at the bottom, the one Analyse could always reach no matter how high the rest went, told me the only number that mattered. It's early, I thought. It is so early. The mission that breaks him hasn't happened. It can't have, the village still loves him. And he already isn't sleeping. The story only ever showed me the cliff. Nobody wrote down the long flat walk up to the edge.
"Pardon the hour," Sakumo said, and his voice was exactly as I remembered, quiet, warm at the rim like a cup that's held tea all day. "We were passing. My son tells me this is the source of the cold sweets that made the whole village ridiculous last summer. He has opinions about sweets. I apologise in advance for all of them."
He stepped aside, and I saw the boy.
Small. Silver-haired, the same impossible gravity as his father. A mask over the lower half of his face even now, even at five or six.
[Hatake Kakashi - Academy Student - LV 9]
I pulled his too, because I am not a good person and never claimed to be.
[Analyse]
[Hatake Kakashi - Academy Student - LV 9]
[Class: Academy Student]
[HP: 110/110] [CP: 95/95]
[Stats:
STR 11
VIT 13
DEX 19
INT 21
WIS 15
CHA 8
LUK 7]
[Description: The only son of Sakumo Hatake, the White Fang. A prodigy of rare and unsettling talent, already the equal of students twice his age, who keeps everything behind a mask and a memorised rulebook. Earnest, exacting, and quietly desperate for his father's notice, he treats the rules of the shinobi as a railing to hold in a house gone too quiet.]
[Pretending he did not ask his father to come here.]
Kakashi. Five years old and already Level 9, my level, and I'd had a cheat engine and a multiplier behind me. Five years old, and his surface already curating, already managing the gap between what he wanted and what he could be seen wanting.
I knew this kid. I had read this kid, grieved this kid, watched this kid stand at a memorial stone for thirty years of someone else's lifetime. Here he was, four feet tall, pretending not to want a popsicle.
The hurt recognise something in you, my new status had said. They will keep finding you.
"We have kulfi," I announced, marching for the cold chest with the authority of a toddler on assignment. "Cardamom and mango. Mango's better, but people say cardamom first because it sounds fancier."
"It is fancier," Mum said, coming out of the kitchen, wiping her hands. I watched her clock the visitor, the hair, the white tanto hilt over his shoulder, the entire legend of him, and decide, with the unbothered hospitality of a woman who had already fed half the shinobi forces, that he was another tired father. "Sit, please. The evening batch is nearly out, you'll take some home. Kaito, plates, not your fingers."
"You're the one from the library," Kakashi said.
He was looking at me. Flat grey eyes, cool as riverbed stones, running an assessment that had no business living in a five-year-old's face.
"You're the one from the doorway," I said. "You came in after the scary part. Very heroic timing."
Behind the mask, something moved. Not a smile. The groundwork for a smile, maybe, getting surveyed for a future build.
"Father handled it. I observed." A pause, then, with the unbearable precision of a child reciting policy, "Civilians shouldn't have been on site. It was a breach of protocol."
"Cool," I said. "Cookie while you wait for the kulfi? Chocolate chip. Protocol-free."
Another flicker. He glanced at his father, quick, checking, and Sakumo, already folding himself onto a stool too small for him with the ease of a man who made everything look deliberate, gave one nod that did the work of a whole speech.
Kakashi took the cookie. Lowered his mask with his back half-turned, ate it in three bites of practised misdirection, and re-masked before anyone could have sworn to the existence of his chin.
"Three out of ten," he said.
The bakery went quiet. Mum's head rotated like a turret.
"Three?" she asked.
"The chip distribution is uneven," Kakashi said, unmoved, five years old and signing his own warrant in my mother's kitchen. "Two bites had no chocolate. The crumb is good," he allowed, like an emperor granting a province. "Texture, adequate. Three."
"The crumb." Mum turned to Sakumo, scandalised. "Is he like this at home?"
"He graded my cooking until I stopped cooking," Sakumo said, serene. "He gave my grilled fish a two. I've bought takeout for a year. I call it criticism by attrition. He's very effective.
Most feared man in the village, defeated in his own kitchen by a small food critic."
He laughed. Soft, real, the lines around his eyes folding into use-worn creases. I didn't need Analyse to see it. The whole man lifted for the length of the laugh, the way a field lifts when a cloud slides off it, and then the cloud slid back, and he was a tired father again. But I had seen it move. That was the whole thing, the entire load-bearing fact I'd build the next ten years on. It could move.
"Come back Thursday," I told Kakashi, with what I hoped was master strategy and was probably transparent toddler scheming. "Mum mixes the chip dough Thursdays. Fresh distribution. You could grade it again. For science."
Kakashi looked at me with the flat grey stones. The assessment ran long.
"Data does require multiple samples," he said at last.
"It really does."
"This isn't a friendship," he clarified. "It's quality control."
"Obviously," I said. "Quality control."
[REP: Hatake Kakashi 5/100.]
They left with a box of buns Mum refused payment for and Sakumo paid for anyway, hiding the coins under the napkin dispenser like the deadliest tooth fairy in the Land of Fire. At the door the White Fang looked back, at me, past Mum's goodnights, with something unhurried in his eyes.
"Good instincts," he said, for the second time in our two meetings. "Still."
Then they were gone into the blue dusk, a legend and his son walking home to a too-quiet house with thirty-one days on the clock.
Before bed I finally did the thing I'd been dodging for half a year. I spent stat points.
Fifty-one of them, hoarded with the discipline of a dragon. I'd spent the last week on
I opened the list.
[Stats]
[STR 7: raw physical power. Carries, strikes, the weight you can move.]
[VIT 30: vitality, toughness, how much the body can take before it stops.]
[DEX 8: speed, balance, the precision of the hands.]
[INT 14 (74): knowledge and chakra capacity. Value in parentheses unlocks as the mind matures.]
[WIS 12 (38): perception, judgment, chakra control. Value in parentheses unlocks as the mind matures.]
[CHA 34: presence, the weight your words carry in a room.]
[LUK ???: unresolved.]
The reading I'd done made the picture plain enough. VIT was already high and climbing on its own through Cherished, three a level, no help needed there. CHA was higher still and climbing the same way through the aura, which explained a great deal about why grown shinobi told a toddler their troubles. INT and WIS sat low with enormous numbers waiting in the brackets, brains I'd grow into, and NoodleNet was unanimous that pouring points into a stat that would unlock for free was how children wasted their inheritance. Which left the two stats nobody was going to give me. STR 7 and DEX 8. My eternal shame. Two years of chores and crawling adding up to a baby tank with noodle arms.
The body, then. The part where I was actually a toddler. Every beautiful intention I'd carried through dying would, in this world, eventually need shoulders under it, because compassion at my scale was going to be a contact sport. I split thirty points between STR and DEX and felt the strange warm prickle of my small body recalibrating, growing pains on fast-forward, and held twenty-one back, because the dragon never fully dies.
[STR 7 to 22. DEX 8 to 23.]
[Recalibration in progress. Expect coordination loss for 3 days]
Three days of tripping over nothing. Wonderful.
I went down to the step after, because I heard Mum singing. She sang again now, most nights. The boulder hadn't gone anywhere, but it had grown handholds. I sat in the cooling dark with my knees hugged and looked out over the village, and let the day settle.
A locked skill with no name. A key to a door I hadn't found and might not for years. A token whose only listed property was mystery. A level the window had refused to print over a tired man's head, the first refusal I'd ever seen it make. None of it added up to a plan. All of it added up to a direction.
Out over the monument the first stars were coming up, three stone faces watching the village sleep. Behind me Mum hit the high note wrong, laughed at herself, and tried it again.
I didn't make any speeches to the sky. I'd sat in enough peer circles to know that the people who announce they'll save everyone are usually the first ones who break when they can't. I just watched the lights go out, window by window, and let myself feel small for a while, because small was honest. Then I went up, and before sleep I opened the full ledger of what one decision had made me.
[Name: Kaito Hoshizora]
[Class: The Gamer]
[Level: 10]
[Titles: Re-Life Player, Young Flame of Konoha, Pathfinder]
[HP: 320/320] [CP: 180/180]
[STR: 22]
[VIT: 30]
[DEX: 23]
[INT: 14 (74)]
[WIS: 12 (38)]
[CHA: 34]
[LUK: ???]
[Status: Cherished (Passive); Heart-Mender's Aura (Passive)]
[Skills: Analyse; Skill Share (B); Basic Culinary Arts (F) Lv 1; Chakra Control (E) Lv 10; Meditation (E) Lv 1; Henge no Jutsu (Locked until age 3); ??? (Locked)]
[Inventory: Kazuya's Spare Key; Cushion of the Eternal Student; Mulligan Token x1]
[Stat Points Available: 21]
[Quest: The One Who Listens: 0/100]
I looked at the locked skill at the bottom of the list one more time, three question marks and a line that wouldn't move, and at the two question marks the window had left over a good man's head, and I thought about how a system that knew everything had decided, twice in one evening, to tell me nothing. Then I closed the screen, and somewhere down the hill a too-quiet house held a man who couldn't sleep, and tomorrow he would not know that a two-year-old had already started counting his days too.
[End of Chapter 9]