Second Life as a Soldier Chapter 14: Fifteen Days and a Lifetime of Change

It’s been fifteen days since we started training.

I’ve gained a lot, stats, mostly, thanks to the constant drills, better food, and a lifestyle far more active than anything I’ve known. The food, while mostly bland, is filling and nutritious. We’re given at three tis a day and allowed to eat as much as we like. Food had never been a problem for , at least, not until my father fell ill. Those final months were hard, and I’d lost most of my weight from stress and hunger.

At first, I thought gaining stats would make training easier. It didn’t. If anything, the drills just got harder. The instructors beca stricter. Most of the training now feels like torture. Extra laps, digging latrine pits, cleaning toilets, it’s all punishnt now, not just chores. We've dug the sa pit multiple tis, only to fill it and dig it again. I’ve probably run more as punishnt than as part of actual training.

Anything could get you punished, arriving thirty seconds late, a speck of dust on your boots, a minor break in formation. Sotis the punishnt is individual; sotis, the whole group suffers. Since I’m still one of the weaker recruits, I end up with more than my fair share of solo punishnts. Most of the ti, it’s because I can't keep up with the physical drills. Still, I’ve started gaining muscle. My fra is finally beginning to catch up.

STATUS:

Na: Edward

Class: Unawakened

Affinity: N/A

HP: 80 / 80

HP Regen: 5/day

MP: N/A

Attributes:

Constitution: 8.0Strength: 7.5Agility: 6.5

General Skills:

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there. Thɪs chapter is updatᴇd by N0v3l.Fiɾe

Writing (17)Reading (15)Math (25)Running (10)ditation (10)Marching (5)

I’ve also gained 5 levels in Reading and 2 in Writing, mostly because I’m one of the few recruits who already knows how to read and write. A lot of my chores involve copying records for the quartermaster. Running has gained 3 levels, ditation 5, and Marching 4. Over the past two weeks, I’ve gained 1 point each in Strength and Constitution. My Agility is still lagging behind, our training doesn’t really focus on it, but I don’t want it to fall too far back. On break days, I squeeze in an hour or two of agility exercises. The rest of the day, I spend in the library.

It’s not a massive library like the ones I’d seen in my old world, but it’s functional. For my goals, it's more than enough.

The first thing I dove into was the section on attributes. I already knew the basics, the physical ones. Strength was raw power: lifting, striking, overpowering. Constitution ant endurance and health, the ability to keep going when others dropped. And Agility was all about speed, reflexes, coordination, the difference between dodging a blow and eating it. Those, I understood. I'd been training those every day since enlistnt.

But what I hadn’t grasped before were the spiritual attributes, the ones that didn’t awaken until age sixteen. The ones that determined whether soone was just a soldier… or sothing more.

Intelligence governed how much mana you could store and how complex your spells could be. A high Intelligence stat didn’t just an you were smart, it ant your mana pool ran deep, and your brain could handle the intricacies of advanced casting.

Wisdom was about perception. Flow. The quiet ability to sense mana around you, to move it efficiently, to waste nothing. It also gave you resistance, to illusions, to manipulation, to the kind of ntal fog that got mages killed.

And then there was Willpower. The backbone of any serious caster. It controlled how stable your spells were, how long you could maintain them, and whether you could keep your mind together under pressure.

The more I learned, the more I began to understand the bigger picture.