The draft.

The process of undergoing herbal baptism is split into two parts, the draft of herbal baptism, and stringent meditation. before the ingestion of the draft, meditation only helps with mentality and psyche, but after the draft, the path of the warrior begins with body refinement. After a Warrior can start body refinement, they become capable of refining Qi, an energy that is similar to mana. The difference being that mana allows the change of the world around you, Qi is the energy that allows for changes to be made internally.

Jez, who is standing in front of a bubbling mass of black liquid that sat in a metal tube that had a heat source placed underneath it. "A real witches cauldron", chuckled a voice in the back of his head, it wasn't his. He was getting used to the probing thoughts of the foreign entity, as strange as it may sound, it seemed slightly familiar to him. He decided to bury those thoughts in the back of his mind, he didn't need the distractions. After psyching himself up, he plunged feet first into the tub and felt what he assumed to be the pain one would feel when dying.

The pain was on a magnitude that he could not have imagined, he would have screamed if he hadn't bit his tongue already. He took breathes to calm himself down, after he felt he was calm enough he started to meditate. Imagining that there were streames of white light that screamed from 361 little points all over his body, they formed streames and rivers that flowed throughout his body and gathered at a central point in his torso that seemed to gather more and more until it started to compress in on its self. All of a sudden it made a massive jerk and compressed into a singular point to form a milky white pearl. He had successfully made a core, the starting point in which all body cultivation was born.

As he was celebrating still in the tube, he was struck by a burning sensation, in his mind's eye red veins started to bud out of the freshly made core, they wrapped themselves around his core until it was no longer visible, it then started to breech out through his Qi pathways and he could feel things shifting around in his body. Jez cracked an eye open only to see pulsing red veins worm their way through his body. The pain was building up to a crescendo and he was fully aware of the veins that were approaching his head, he felt them crawling up his neck and around his chin, he watched them as they bleach his vision red once they reached his eyes, he saw them push into the mana pool in his head, and taint the mana he held. this was when the pain reached the point where he could no longer bear it and Jez entered the sweet embrace of unconsciousness.

As Jez woke up, the first thing he felt was the intense cold, he was in his private quarters and he was given a rest day from the guard captain, accordingly, no one had recovered him from the bath and the fire underneath the tube had long burned out. The chill had set into his body and he wasted no time cleaning the filth off of his body. After he had dried off and slipped on a pair of shorts, not even bothering to put on a shirt, he sat on his bed in a meditative position. He peaked at his core which was still covered in red veins that pulsed systematically, he then put his mind's eye into his mana pool and received a shock from that too, his once blue mana pool became a scarlet red lace of mana and he saw one of the veins formed in the pool, it pumped a never-ending stream of blood-red mana into his pool. "you and I need to have a little conversation, as this has been overdue for a while", the same familiar voice sounded, and in response to this, Jez was rendered unconscious for a second time in recent events.