School of Life

The next day, he arrived at the school and was greeted by his mother as she told him.

"Now that you're 5 years old ,you have unlocked another vital room, the school of life. For now you should head down first and go through the initiation and then go to the arena for the last three hours. From tomorrow onwards you will come here then go to the school of life and lastly the arena for 3 hours each and then end the day with 5 hours of energy cultivation. "

Lucius nodded and left the room travelling through the corridor, further than he ever went before. After 5 minutes of travel past the room of creation he found the room labelled the 'School of Life'. He opened the door and walked in noticing that the room was actually as big as the Arena but also that there was a black door on the right side of the hall that was currently closed. He noticed that the room he walked into was filled completely with dirt and nothing else.

His mother appeared in front of him and began to explain what the school of life was and what he would be doing.

"Welcome to the school of life Lucius, here you will learn to cook, farm and study botany. Once you turn 7 you will become an alchemist and start refining pills but to do that you will need an understanding of the medicinal herbs you will be using and also you will need to grow those herbs in the first place. Also to survive in the wild and for personal comfort you will learn how to cook too. Furthermore, cooking will help you learn how to control temperature and how to mix ingredients properly which will be the baseline for your alchemy studies in the future. To start with you will be growing what we call mortal food or tier zero food. Food, like pills and artefacts, also have layers depending on the quality of the energy that the foods give you. Since once you have broken through the second boundary you can use qi to satiate your hunger instead of food, people that still enjoyed food and all the pleasure establishments began making higher tier foods so they could get benefits from still eating otherwise it would be pointless for a top tier expert to waste their time eating food that wouldn't help them at all right? So then, to begin today you will be filling this entire space with various plants that you will be growing and then we will cook those foods at the end of the session. We will be growing various plants and since they are all in the mortal tier they will grow many times faster because of the ambient qi and formations that are in this room that accelerate plant growth."

Acacia gave Lucius simple tools like a plough, sickle and a three pronged cultivator. She then presented him with a platter of seeds of various shapes, sizes and colours. Lucius was then taught about the various plants and the conditions for their growth and then began exploring the room and realised that the room went from hot to cold. The side near the entrance was the cold side and as he moved towards the wall opposite the entrance it got hotter and hotter. He began to plan out which crops would go where and divided up the hall of agriculture, as his mother had called it, into sections of various crops. Towards the entrance were crops like potatoes, carrots, broccoli and cabbages. In the middle were various fruit trees like apple, plum, peach and pear. Towards the hot end were bananas, bamboo and a special section for rice that he would fill with water later. He began to sift through the seeds, selecting higher quality seeds and began to plough the land and plant the seeds. Although the farmland was 90 metres wide by 45 metres long it only took him a few hours as his body was now far beyond the scope of a humans. He was powerful, fast and with the guidance from his mother he got used to the planting before long and easily filled the hall with seeds. Overall it had taken him around 3 and a half hours. He then watered the plants with spirit water since because the Garden had such a high ambient qi density all normal water became spirit water after only an hour of being there. After 2 hours of waiting, that he spent reading books about herbs his mother gave him, after the 30 mins he spent watering, the plants had already all grown to completion and became ripe. Lucius then spent another half an hour collecting the ripe plants and in the end he had filled 3 baskets with ingredients. His mother then guided him to the room he saw on the right side of the farm that he saw at the beginning.

He read the sign on the top and saw that this was the kitchen. He entered after his mother with the baskets in tow and put them down on a big table in the centre of the room. His mother first told him to process the ingredients, washing them, removing the inedible parts like the roots or ends ( for the rice he had to process it from the beginning, using his qi and the spirit water to speed up the process) which took him 20 minutes because of the quantity and it was his first time. His mother then brought out a set of spotless and stylish knifes, laying them out on the flawless marble table and began to explain the use each knife and then picked up a chefs knife and showed Lucius how to hold it and simple cutting techniques. They spent 30 minutes cutting and chopping away, turning the 3 baskets of produce into finely chopped and sliced pieces of vegetables and fruit. Lucius had spent a year training his dexterity while knitting and also could control his body and qi really well so something as simple as knife skills was a piece of cake for him. They put all the fruit into a bowl and filled it with spirit water, making a fruit salad first and letting the flavours mix and permeate through the water. They used the vegetables in a stir fry and boiled the rice. They sat down and Lucius ate it all pretty easily as he had just spent the day toiling in the fields and although the food had a lot more energy in it then normal tier zero food, it wasn't as much as the food Lucius had been eating up until now from the feeding bot. Subsequently the taste also wasn't as great but it had its own charm since he had grown and made this food from scratch. Lucius began to look forward to the delicacies he would make in the future from produce he had grown himself.

In the Arena he had begun to be taught the sword by his father for the last 3 hours before he trained qi and went to bed. Orion taught him how to hold the sword properly and simple moves like stabbing, slashing and cutting. He didn't teach him some fancy technique labelled the dragons sword path or some random bellicose name but just how to wield the sword properly. Orion would be teaching him how to wield weapons and through sparring he would be learning how to fight. This was to build a foundation so that Lucius could create his own technique that suited him the best instead of following what some old fogey had created for themselves. Cultivation was truly personal and it was only when the technique suited the user properly would its greatest potential be achieved. Although he would train in techniques in the future, those were simply there for reference and to understand the various ways energy and the body could be used in conjunction and thus he would begin to develop his own techniques and style in the future.