27 Returning Home Edited

After Jayde materialized in her cave, she looked around nostalgically, even though Isha assured her she had only been gone for two days, Jayde left like it had been a lifetime ago since she had been forcibly ported to the Proteus Pavillion.

Just then a strange growl rumbled through the air. Startled Jayde looked around before she realized that it was her stomach growling. After realizing that she had not eaten for two days, it was no wonder that she was starved.

Jayde walked over to her stored supplies and pulled out the small satchel that contained the elven wafer bread. Opening the bag, Jayde removed one of the leaf covered wafers. Removing the leaf, Jayde quickly polished off a whole wafer bread.

Wiping crumbs off her face, she looked about for her water gourd. Finally seeing it amongst her bedding, she took a long drink of the stale water.

Once her stomach was happy, Jayde sat down on her bed and pulled out the two scrolls Isha had given her. Opening up the cultivation scroll, Jayde was startled to note that the scroll was not made out of parchment, but out of some strange metallic substance.

Surprising the cultivation method was called {Celestial Phoenix Cultivation}. While reading the scroll, the words automatically scrolled across the external surface. The technique given was very detailed and explained the Celestial Phoenix Cultivation method in a way that was easy to understand.

After reading through the scroll a couple of times, and ensuring that she had memorized everything, Jayde decided to give the method a test.

Shifting herself into the described lotus position, Jayde rested her hands on her knees, palms facing up.

She then began to run the exercises detailed in the scroll, to open up her magic senses so that she could sense the Qi around her. Unfortunately for Jayde, this wasn't some sort of fantasy story, where the female protagonist was some overpowered superhero that could instantly sense the Qi, this was the real world, and it took her three full days of repeatedly running the exercises before she could finally sense the Qi around her.

Once her magic senses opened, the world around Jayde changed. The air felt thicker, and there was a faint fragrance that she could pick up, it took Jayde a while to identify the scent she was smelling, it was lavender.

Opening her eyes, Jayde could faintly make out that the air around her had a soft silver glow, and within it, faint particles were floating around, they were different colors — red, blue, green, indigo, brown, yellow, orange, and black.

Jayde's eyes softened ever so slightly, the sight before her was beautiful. Looking up she saw that the dingbats flying to and fro seemed to be surrounded by a slightly green tinge. From what she had read that green tint indicated that the dingbats had a wood affinity.

Jayde debated with herself, should she now try to absorb the Qi, or go to the Dark Forest. She really wanted to collect the herbs and plants that she needed for Isha to repair her dantian as well as for the inter-dimensional market, and if she was honest with herself, she wanted to see the world with this new vision of hers.

But ... on the other hand, she really needed to start cultivating Qi, it was only once she had stored Qi in her dantian that she could officially start learning fire magic.

After arguing with herself for a while, Jayde finally decided that learning magic was more critical. Since it had taken so long just to open up her magic senses, she was worried about how much time it would take for her to increase in rank.

It was a well-known fact that people with only a single elemental affinity upgraded slower than those with more than one, and with the rest of her elements being locked away, Jayde could only rely upon her fire magic. The other distressing fact was that Jayde was already ten years behind everyone else her own age.

Children in Doha began to actively cultivate when they were three years old, just after they have had their Reading Day, training was arranged to ensure that children were given the opportunity to reach their full potential.

With these thoughts running through Jayde head, she closed her eyes, regulated her breathing and entered a meditative state. Then deep within her mind, she opened her magic perception. Concentrating on the red glowing specks, she tried to pull them towards her just like how the Celestial Phoenix Cultivation scroll explained, but no matter how much she tried to attract them, they stubbornly stayed floating the same place.

After hours of failure, Jayde was feeling frustrated. Jayde pulled out the Celestial Phoenix Cultivation scroll, and re-read it, to see if there was something she had missed.

Getting to the passage that covered the absorption of Qi, Jayde was slightly confused, the scroll said to absorb the Qi specks around you, but it didn't mention anything about only absorbing the Qi specks that you had an affinity too.

What Jayde didn't know was that she was unique, there had never been a case like hers in the history of Doha, people could only see the Qi energy that they had an affinity to, so while Jayde just had access to her fire abilities, she did have the affinity to all the elements.

Pondering over her dilemma, Jayde decided to try again, but this time instead of just concentrating on the fire specks, she tried to absorb all the particulars. This time she succeeded, all the different color specks moved towards Jayde.

Very surprised at this outcome, Jayde quickly started to run the exercises stated in the Celestial Phoenix Cultivation scroll to purify and convert the Qi specks to Qi energy. According to the scroll she had to absorb the Qi energy, then slowly move it through her meridians, and direct it to her dantian.

It was the first time that Jayde had seen her dantian, and she was surprised at how it looked, it was small in size about the size of a tiny child fist, the edges of it looked like a raisin, dried and shriveled only it was grey like dead flesh. Just by looking at it, you could see that her dantian was severely damaged — Isha was right it did seemed starved, thought Jayde.

Viewing all of this in her mind, Jayde noticed that once the pure Qi energy reached her dantian, it converted into a golden liquid, and slowly a drop formed at the top of her dantian and dripped down.

As the first drop landed, it set off quite a reaction within Jayde's body. Heat flooded her dantian, and her belly started cramping, while it wasn't painful, it was very uncomfortable. Watching her dantian Jayde noticed that the small drop of gold substance had disappeared, this carried on for quite some time, each time the purified Qi entered her dantian it would disappear.

Jayde was starting to worry that something was seriously wrong, as according to the scroll, this liquid was supposed to pool in her dantian, it mentioned nothing about it disappearing. She was about to stop absorbing the Qi around her and contact Isha to find out what was wrong when she noticed the uncomfortable heat and cramps she had been experiencing were fading away. Re-examining her dantian, she observed that her dantian didn't look as shriveled as it had before and that horrible dead fish grey color had faded somewhat.

Still worried that she might be doing something wrong, Jayde contacted Isha. After explaining the whole situation, Isha examined Jayde dantian and confirmed that her dantian was being slowly repaired.

The current repairs happening to her dantian wouldn't be enough to upgrade her dantian, but Isha speculated that this rebuilding of her dantian would be extremely beneficially to Jayde in the long run. As the healing that her dantian was currently undergoing, was making her dantian more supple, giving it extra elasticity and strengthen the walls.

This would only benefit her in the future, no mage in Doha had ever been given a chance to rebuild their dantian like Jayde. She would still need to collect the items for Isha to create the required potions to upgrade her Qi pool, which would increase the size of her dantian, but Isha predicated that her dantian would be larger than normal due to the reconstruction of her dantian.

Pleased and reassured to know that everything was okay, Jayde continued to absorb the Qi energy in her cave.

After spending four days mediating and running the Celestial Phoenix Cultivation exercises, Jayde's Qi pool was finally full, and she could feel that no matter how much she tried to absorb the Qi energy around her, she just couldn't absorb any more power.

According to the Celestial Phoenix Cultivation method, this indicated that Jayde was ready to break through to the next class.

Advancing in class was risky as a mage could not be disturbed during this process, interrupting a breakthrough could have severe repercussions and could lead to the scrapping of one's cultivation, and it was known to even destroy a mages' dantian, preventing them from ever using magic again.

Most people would set up protection wards, or have their family set them up to protect them during their breakthroughs. Unfortunately, Jayde had no magic yet, so she had no way to set up a ward. She was just about to break through for the first time — and it was only after this initial breakthrough that she would have access to her magic.

Jayde contacted Isha for suggestions, after listening to Jayde's concerns, Isha suggested that Jayde transfer to the Proteus Pavilion to attempt her breakthrough there.

After teleporting to the Pavilion, Isha opened a small room for Jayde to begin her breakthrough.

After six hours of trying to punch through the invisible barrier, Jayde finally smashed the boundary, as soon as the barrier broke a massive amount of Qi energy rushed towards Jayde forming a vortex around her. Using the Qi around her, Jayde used this energy to promote to level one, during her promotion a soft golden glow surrounded her body.

Finally, I am a magician, thought Jayde, no longer was she a freak who had no magic.

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