er 3
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Three days passed in the blink of an eye. By the end of the third day, Linda had successfully stepped into the first tier of the Mana Stoking stage.
“Yeah, took a little longer than I hoped,” she said quietly, flexing her fingers. “But hey, I can still train. That’s what matters.”
She had no idea how absurd that sentence actually was. For someone born with five elemental affinities, breaking through from complete unsealing to Mana Stoking Tier One in just three days was beyond rare.
That kind of speed was terrifying.
And yet, Linda felt no sense of accomplishment.
Fivefold affinities were infamous for one thing: painfully slow growth over time.
Early progress meant nothing if she stalled later. If she wanted to keep pace with the others at Azure Spire, let alone surpass them, she would have to work harder than anyone else.
So she did more than just cycle energy and breathe it in every day. She gave herself a new discipline. Each day, she deliberately opened her senses to the world around her, tuning herself to the five primal forces woven into nature itself. Heat, flow, weight, growth, and resistance.
When it came to training manuals, she made a clean break. She refused to use anything provided by Azure Spire.
Instead, she relied on a barebones guide she had bought long ago out in the wider world, a starter text known as Weaver’s Breath. Cheap, practical, and unremarkable.
It had cost her a single Luster Shard.
That had been a deliberate choice. ‘If I’m cutting ties,‘ she thought, ‘then I’m cutting all of them. Even the way I grow
stronger.’
After she finished her training that afternoon, her eyes drifted toward the Apothecary Garden nearby. It was in terrible shape.
A memory surfaced. Her mind wandered back to Rayford’s words.
“This is a copy of Verdant Liturgy, along with some spirit herb seeds,” Rayford had said back then, his voice gentle but strained. “Even if you can’t train right now… if you manage to return to Mana Stoking, you could still survive as a Botanical Magus.
“It’s not glorious, but it’s a path. Don’t give up, kid.”
She could still remember the warmth of his hands as he placed the book and seeds into hers. The hope in his eyes had been quiet, almost fragile.
Linda looked down at the Verdant Liturgy now, then at the seeds resting in her palm. Without another word, she stood and walked into the garden.
Once the seeds were planted, she followed the instructions recorded in the book and invoked the Precipitation Incantation.
Among supernatural disciplines, Verdant Liturgy was considered harmless and beginner friendly. Soft magic. Practical magic.
But buried within its pages was the most fundamental Nimbus–Binding Incantation there was, the art of gathering moisture
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and calling it down.
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She failed the first few times. Then she adjusted her focus and tried again and again. Until finally, the air shifted.
A gentle rain fell over the garden, infused with faint mana. Under its touch, the soil darkened, roots spread, and green shoots broke through the earth.
In less than half a day, the garden had transformed from dead ground into thriving life.
Linda didn’t stop there. She assembled a crude scarecrow and pressed an Automaton Charm into its chest. The construct stirred slightly, then went still, standing watch to keep birds from stealing the harvest.
Satisfied, she returned to the courtyard and sat down to train once more.
Talismans covered the surrounding walls and posts.
They were Mana–Drawing Arrays.
They thickened the ambient energy inside and around the log cabin, saturating the space and making it far easier to cultivate.
Time slipped by. A full month passed.
By then, Linda’s fire affinity had surged from Tier One all the way to Tier Twelve of Mana Stoking. Her other affinities followed at different paces.
Her wood affinity reached Tier Six. Water stabilized at Tier Five. Earth matched it at Tier Five. Metal lagged behind at Tier Three.
If she had not deliberately suppressed her fire affinity, it would have already pushed past the threshold into the Foundation
stage.
“So this is how it goes,” she muttered. “The higher you climb, the slower it gets. And the gap just keeps stretching.”
She let out a quiet breath. “Yeah,” she muttered. “Figures.”
Her hand tightened into a fist. “But still,” she added, a faint smile creeping onto her face, “this isn’t bad.”
It wasn’t as fast as before, but there was progress.
She hadn’t expected that practicing Verdant Liturgy every day would not only boost her Wood affinity, but also her Earth and Water affinities. That was a nice surprise.
Something lurking in the Apothecary Garden pricked up its ears at the commotion.
“To hit Twelfth Tier in just a month? That’s seriously impressive,‘ it thought.
The sound of chewing reached her ears.
The tortoise kept eating, unbothered.
Linda turned her head to see a black–shelled tortoise. “Where the hell did this tortoise come from?” she muttered.
The tortoise didn’t even look up, too absorbed in its meal.
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Chapter 3
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Linda raised an eyebrow. “So that’s why my Arcane Flora keep disappearing… You’ve been sneaking snacks, huh?”
The tortoise didn’t respond, still chewing away.
Linda shook her head, a little exasperated, then turned her attention back to the sky.
The sunlight warmed her face, and she muttered to herself, “So much left to do.”
Her daily routine had become second nature by now. She woke up early and meditated for an hour, practicing the Mana- Stoking technique.
At dawn, she’d start the Verdant Liturgy, working on her Wood, Water and Earth affinities.
By mid–morning, she’d be in the backyard, refining her Telluric Might, then heading off to the Thicket of Barbed Blades to work on her Resonance of Ore.
Afternoons were for meals and rest.
Afterward, she’d train her body and practice swordplay.
In the evenings, she’d return to drawing runes and setting up formations.
Before bed, she’d review her progress, adjusting her methods for the next day.
She followed this routine without fail.
The five elemental affinities were handled separately, but more often than not, progress in one caused subtle improvements in the others.
After everything had been torn apart in her previous life, she had spent years obsessing over why things failed. This time, she applied every lesson she had learned.
Three months passed. Her fire affinity pushed cleanly to the thirteenth tier, hitting its absolute limit.
Wood, water, earth, and metal followed closely behind, all settling at the twelfth.
Then she hit a wall. Three full days passed without any movement at all. Linda stopped forcing it.
One afternoon, she carried a bucket into the garden, preparing to water the plants the old–fashioned way.
Halfway through, she hesitated. “Should I switch techniques? Call in artificial rainfall instead?”
The tortoise answered by chewing louder.
Linda frowned. “What if my approach is wrong? What if handling fivefold affinities just doesn’t work?”
The tortoise kept eating, unbothered.
Her jaw tightened. “Should I lock some of them away again?”
Just the quiet persistence of jaws working through food.
That did it. She flung the water scoop aside. It slammed into something with a sharp metallic clang.
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The tortoise barely reacted, taking another bite like nothing had happened. If anything, its shell looked even shinier than before, smooth and reflective, as if it had been polished by hand.
Linda stared at it, then shook her head slowly. “No. Sealing them again isn’t an option. If I give that up, I’ll never go any further.”
Linda looked down at her hands, deep in thought. “So what’s the answer?”
Memories surfaced uninvited.
In her old life, she had wandered for years, asking every scholar, mercenary, and awakened being she could find.
Every so–called method failed. Nobody ever made it past the Astral Sovereign Form.
History in Atrufset offered no success stories.
But Linda wasn’t interested in history.
“Then I’ll be the first,‘ she thought.
The tortoise finally stopped chewing and looked up at her. Its small eyes gleamed with a sharp, knowing light, and for once, it slowed down.
Linda let out a quiet breath. ‘I don’t have the answer yet. Fine. Then I’ll brute–force my way there!‘
She threw herself into the same routines she had drilled relentlessly over the past three months, repeating them until the motions sank deep into her bones and nerves.
She never slacked off, not even for a single day.
A month later, the pressure that had held her trapped at the edge of the Mana Stoking stage was finally loosening, like ice cracking beneath slow, steady heat.
Mana Stoking was divided into thirteen levels. Only after completing all thirteen could someone step into Foundation.
Yet inside Linda, the five clusters of power were still unbound, drifting in loose formation instead of fusing into something
permanent.
Foundation wasn’t real until those energies hardened into a stable core.
For now, five streams of mana moved through her body. They were identical in size, evenly spaced, and unusually calm, as if waiting for the same silent signal.
Linda drew a slow breath and let the noise in her mind fade. She opened herself to the mana saturating the world around her, the invisible currents running through soil, air, and stone.
At her side, the Obsidian Tortoise sat motionless, its eyes flashing with quiet awareness.
The ambient mana responded. It condensed, thinned, scattered, then curled back in on itself. It drifted toward Linda, broke apart, and re–formed again, orbiting her like something half–alive.
As her focus deepened, her awareness sank inward, settling at the core of her being.
The five streams followed, tightening their paths, stabilizing as they converged.
Then it happened. At the center of each stream, a spinning focal point emerged, a dense knot of power pulling everything
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inward.
Foundation was achieved.
And without hesitation or backlash, Linda stepped cleanly into the early stage of Foundation.
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She opened her eyes. The heavy mana around her dissolved into the air, fading like fog under sunlight. Her gaze shifted to the herb fields nearby.
With a casual motion of her hand, Verdant Liturgy answered instantly.
The plants reacted as if struck by lightning. Leaves broadened, stalks thickened, and the entire field surged with explosive growth, vibrant and alive.
It was deeply satisfying. “About three times faster,” Linda muttered. “Yeah, I’ll take it.”
The Obsidian Tortoise stared at the field of premium–Arcane Flora.
What Linda didn’t notice was that the Mystic Silver–Leaf she cultivated carried something extra, a deeper vitality that set it apart from anything grown by others.
The Obsidian Tortoise took a bite. A rush of life force flooded through him, rich and overwhelming. Without a second thought, it lowered its head, fully absorbed, chewing in blissful silence.
“Just give me time,” Linda muttered. “I’ll climb back to get the Gilded Core. I know I can.”
Time slipped past without ceremony.
In what felt like the blink of an eye, a full year passed after Linda sealed herself away.
Then, one day, footsteps broke the stillness. Matthew had arrived with Toney.
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Sara Lili is a daring romance writer who turns icy landscapes into scenes of fiery passion. She loves crafting hot love stories while embracing the chill of Iceland’s breathtaking cold.
