Mia took the role of the teacher again.

"You will be able to know the time better in the future when you have your mana circuit complete, like this" She summoned something that I do not recognize on top of her hand, by my experience so far I would say that is made of pure mana, but who knows.

"This can tell you the precise time. Of course you can't do that yet, so, you will be using the most natural and simple method to know the approximate time." she stopped for a second, making eye contact with all of us, then pointed at the sky "that is, by using the sun!" wow… I was actually doing it right this whole time.

She gave a brief explanation on how many hours the day had and to my surprise, it was 26 hours. The sunrise is at 5 while the sunset is at 23, that gives us 10 hours of night time and 16 of daytime. Midday would be around 13. She did not say how many minutes each hour had or any other details like this. I'll assume for now that it is the same as Earth.

She said nothing about weeks or months, I still don't know how that works here. The only thing I heard until now was 'year' and 'cycle' as reference to time. Cycle was not explained to us yet. And about the year, I'm just assuming the year is a long period of time and that's it, I have no way of knowing much more than that for now.

The training sessions usually take places in the middle of the morning, and around sunset. Everyone does this, it's like a rule for this place, but there is no predefined time, the tutor can define that. The rule for the training sessions takes place because this is the time where Mother is least active, making it easier to sync with her for beginners. But once we master it all we can make our own schedule, or something close to this.

After she taught us how the days 'worked' she taught us how to roughly tell the time by the sun's position and what time we should head back home, which was the most important knowledge here. Adel would be super mad with any of us if we are late, I'm sure of it.

Mia also explained that it is very important for us to sleep a lot, since our bodies are rapid developing and growing. Once we were mature we would not need to sleep during the day like now. And again, my predictions were right.

*

At home we cleaned ourselves, all of us together including Adel. It was a good time together, we are all warming up with each other… I say 'we' but of course it's just them… I'm here only looking, though I feel like I belong in this place as well.

After that we had our new prolonged session with new training, we continued to to practice only the connection, nothing else.

"We will increase the difficulty gradually, but be sure to master each step"

Once finished with a long connection training Adel led us through the same easy mana replenishment and cleaning as before.

At this point in time, we were all very versatile with the normal Adel guided session, so… There was no one extremely tired by the training itself, but we were all pretty sleepy, so we slept right after the training ended.

We woke up, ready for the new training, it was not that hard nor it was too much energy consuming. Of course only thinking about 'not being too hard' was a mistake, I clearly activated a flag here because Adel did something to the Seontto.

We started the 'connection training' with an already glowing stone today, and it was crazily difficult, there was an absurd resistance that required all of Dre's mana, energy, concentration, mental power,will power and whatever more power she had. Drei and the children finished today's training beated, and funny enough the guided session was like a refreshing bath that washed away most of the mental fatigue she had at this point, so much different from when we started.

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Now I fully understand the need for 'filtering' the mana that we do on the guided session. After too much usage the feeling of the mana is weird, it's like instead of water we are trying to drink brute petrol or something, it's a terrible feeling of heaviness on the entire body. I also felt something similar to hunger, but different, I'm not sure how to explain it. I know their bodies do not need to ingest food, but the feeling is extremely similar to hunger…

It all vanished after the mana replenishment, Mother is amazing, Seontto is amazing and I love the guided sessions.

We were fresh again, but physically tired, so they all took a good nap, not Adel of course, she went downstairs to the training room again… I'm sure she is addicted to training, there is no other explanation for this behavior.

The sisters all agreed that the first one to wake up would wake the others for they wanted to go outside play again. And that they did.

*

Days passed fast after we made friends with other groups. We would go outside, play chess, talk, explore, make more friends. By now we knew about 14 different groups and everyone was named after German numbers, they all had the same names. It is quite hard for me to get used to it, but they do not seem to care.

14 groups were just a small portion of the groups here. I have absolutely no idea how many children are living in the nest right now, but it's a lot. I'm not sure I had ever seen so many children living 'together' with so little adults to take care of them, and everything is still peaceful.

Before this otherworldly experience I would say it is absolutely IMPOSSIBLE to control so many children.. It seems the Efalem proved me wrong. Of course… They are extremely different in mentality and civilization from what I'm used to, circumstances are different… I still think it is impossible to control so many normal Earth human children.

During the past few days, we have not done anything too different from before. Sleep. Wake up. New training, more difficult every day. Old good training. Nap. Wake up. Go outside. Play. Make friends. Back home. More new training. More old training. Sleep.

But the times we were outside became pretty fun. The girls grew a lot, especially in terms of social interaction! I gained some important information too.

The entire 'nest' was following roughly the same schedule. It was divided in 'phases' and we were at 'phase 2' which consisted in mastering the Seontto without the need of a guide. We were all following the same steps, or close to the same, for the training. Prediction was that EVERYONE would master it by the end of phase 2, which would be in another 4 days.

I also heard that those that did not master it would be 'recycled', but rumor also says that it's been several dozens of years since it last happened, it is usually very easy to master it during the time we were given to train. I believe that, because right now everyone in our household has pretty much mastered it.

Adel even said that we are good enough to no longer need the extra guided session, and from tomorrow onwards she would not do it with us. She is right, we did master it… at least all that was taught to us. I know that mana training and control goes waaaaaay beyond what we experienced so far.

Even if I know that we are only at the beginners level, our progress is still very good and rewarding. We are now capable of feeling mana at all times. The feeling of mana circling in the body is amazing, I feel powerful… I mean, not me me… Drei. Drei's body is a lot more developed by now, she has good control of the mana, during the training and outside it. She did try to manifest mana outside her body, like Adel and the other tutors do, but she could not do it… she also did it hidden in her room, alone, hidden, without any instruction.

No one said it was prohibited to try and manifest mana, but there was no one that said we should either, so… She assumed that it would not be totally ok and did it by herself. I'm not sure I agree with this behaviour. Adel mentioned before, only once, but she did mention that mana could be dangerous and kill its user. Nothing bad happened to Drei back then, she failed expectacuraly and gave up after.

She trusts Zwei a lot, she is probably the number one person in this world for Drei, so… Drei told her about her trying to manifest mana, and, crazy enough, Zwei also tried the same thing. Maybe it is a natural curiosity for them to do this? If it's natural, the adults probably know it would happen and decided that it would not matter for now… maybe it's safe for them to try it? Maybe they need something else to manifest mana, something they do not possess right now, like a new stone or something…

I have a feeling I'm very close to the truth here. Time will tell. We will soon enter phase 3, tho I'm not sure what it is about, I know it also involves mana control, and that it will be the longest phase.

I can't wait to see what we will be doing.