7 - Chapter 6 - Day 380

Time passed for Adya as she worked on forming her core. The sheer amount of focus required to try and consolidate almost 9 million mana in both her physical body and soul simultaneously was beyond challenging.

After almost 8 months of trying, she was approaching being able to manage close to 1 million mana. This was already beyond what her previous core had reached after 5 millennia of cultivation, so the fact that she had managed to reach this point after 8 months was a speed of cultivation bordering on the absurd.

Adya had also started to be able to walk. She was also speaking a few words. Those around her were astounded by her speed of progress, while it felt glacially slow to Adya.

Adya had taken to wandering around her house and now met her father and older brothers. Her older brother was 11 and already far too serious for his age. Her middle brother was 4 and at the stage of trying to annoy his siblings, pushing and shoving and hair pulling. She wasn't allowed to wander unsupervised so she was still limited in being able to start to gather real knowledge, but she had learned a lot about her family in the intervening months.

Her family were a reputable merchant family, whilst not nobility, their wealth was substantial, even compared to the minor nobles. Her family were considered on the border of the merchant and nobility. That gave them prestige, but also left them in a kind of no man's land. They were considered too good for the merchants, but not good enough for the nobility.

Her father had contracts with a lot of the noble houses and even with high nobility. He spent most of his time travelling between cities conducting trade deals. Her family purchased and transported goods across the empire. Her older brother was spending time at the royal academy, whilst the younger was tutored at home until he could enrol at the age of 6.

Her family had picked up on some of the habits of the nobility due to both proximity and necessity. Hence the family had its own guard force, almost like a private army, to both protect the family and trade caravans.

Once the Mai personality had come back online, Adya had taken to watching the guards train to give Mai additional information on this world's military capabilities. She had also taken to wandering into the kitchen, the library and the gardens to see what else she could learn.

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One of the things she had noticed was there were 2 currency systems in use in this world. One was based on bronze, silver, gold and platinum coins. Each was a multiple of 100. So 100 bronze was 1 silver, 100 silvers 1 gold and 100 golds 1 platinum. The second currency was based on mana stones. All mana stones that she had noticed were based on 100 mana, but the ranks differed. She hadn't managed to understand the conversion between different ranks of Mana stones yet, but it was on her todo list to figure out. What she had noticed was that the metals coins were used for anything mundane and mana stones for anything that contained or used mana. a rank 1 mana stone seemed to have similar value to 10 silver and a rank 2 mana stone seemed to be worth around 10 gold but again she was unsure of the exact conversions.

One of the other things Adya had noticed was that whilst the general quality of food was good, it was also lacking in the areas that required specialist yeast. Given her family status she expected the family to have access to the best of food from across the empire. However she found the bread, cheese and alcohol that she had noticed in the kitchens weren't that great compared to what she remembered from her memories. This was again something she would have to investigate to see if there was any potential in introducing such foods in this world at the right time.

Finally as the Sai personality came online, she set it to compare and contrast everything she could identify around her to start building a comparison from her technological world to see if she could start to work out how this world differed from her past worlds. The first thing she had confirmed was that this was truly a different universe as the night sky was totally different from either of her previous worlds. There was not even a single point of commonality between the 3. The second was when she asked Sai to estimate the size of this world, it turned out that even with the best estimates this world was at least 100 times larger than the technological world she remembered. How that worked with gravity wasn't something she had managed to test thoroughly yet, either magic was messing with gravity, or by being born on to this world she just didn't notice the increase. Again parts of her were curious to start figuring out how the fundamentals of this world differed from what she remembered.

Adya continued to work on her meditation and cultivation whilst continuing to assimilate as much knowledge about her family and her world as she could from her observations. After the shock of having lost all passive skill slots, Adya hadn't attempted to create any more new skills until she understood this world better. She didn’t think there was any point to rushing these things and potentially leaving herself significantly weakened in the short term. The custom skills were running in the background and Adya was amassing a substantial number of stones of all 3 types in her inventory as the time progressed.

Adya couldn't wait until she could get unrestricted access to the library to really start to learn about this world.