The next morning, I wake up feeling refreshed and hop out of bed. The wood floor is a little cold for my bare feet, but I am used to it by now. I quickly check the time on my alarm clock and I see in satisfaction that it is five fifty seven, three minutes before my alarm goes off. My new body is surprisingly good at waking up however so this is a really normal event, and by this point the days where I don't wake up before my alarm are more abnormal than when I do.
Well, pondering about my energetic new body aside, it is time for my morning stretches and exercise now. I will just shut my alarm off when it goes off. I take a step and calmly strip down from my PJ’s and put on my workout outfit for the day, just a loose T-shirt and thin shorts that are a little more breathable than my other clothes. I then start to do my stretches in preparation for my morning warm up.
My stretching routine is mostly based on what little experiences I had in my tenth and eleventh grade yoga classes, just a little arm movements, tree pose, my version of a split, the normal stuff and a hundred other things that I don't even remember the name of. My alarm goes off somewhere during my stretching, but I just reach an arm over and hit the general area of the off button until it stops beeping at me. My whole stretching routine isn't that long, only half an hour or so, but what it lacks in time it makes up for in quality and my vigor in stretching every muscle in my body.
When I finish my stretching routine, sweating all over my body and wiping myself off with a white towel that I took from the bathroom, I start my warm up. Like my stretching, my morning warm up is quite vigorous and usually takes me over an hour to do.
I took inspiration for my warm up from all the P.E. classes I have ever been a part of and a little from the at home workouts I did occasionally, ending up with a slow progression from a few pushups and jumping jacks, all the way to my proud thirty to forty burpees that I had worked to after all my diligence in exercising myself to the bone over the month I had been in the orphanage and the rings I had enchanted. Sadly, I think that my two experiences in enchanting did my previously puny muscles more good than my diligence.
I am by no means well muscled now, but no one would call my guns tiny for my age. I don't really know how they would fare against a monster in a fight though. Maybe I could try and pick a fight with something to get some experience in a few days?
As I finish up my warm up exercising, I am sweating buckets from every pore and am gasping for breath and I can feel the fire in my muscles that was reignited from the last hour of training. I look up at my alarm clock from my position on the ground where I was lying in exhaustion and see that the time is now almost eight o'clock. Time for my second round of stretching.
Half an hour later, I wiped myself down with the towel to remove the sheen of sweat rolling down my body from the intense strain and I changed again, into another set of clothes that aren't as wet. Thank the gods that my sweat doesn't stink that bad yet… Though, I suspect that ‘it’ might hit sooner than I would wish…
As soon as I had changed I could hear the caretaker shouting up the stairs “Breakfast is ready!” to wake up the majority of the little sleeping children to come and eat. Perfect timing as always. I walk over to the door and open it quickly, running down the stairs as quietly as I can to try to finish eating before the other children come down to eat too.
I want to get a head start for studying mostly because I am almost done reading the grade four textbooks and I want to make a test from random parts of the textbooks. But the main reason I want to hurry is not to do the test as soon as possible, but because I am making the test I want to make it as fair as possible.
So of course, because I made the test, I want to try and forget the exact questions, so I will take the test the next day, which will hopefully be tomorrow, and I will have a little free time which I can use to get my blacksmithing set up to get more time to practice after lunch. Yes I know, Despite having a passive ability that prevents me from forgetting anything, I still make my own tests and write the answer sheet. It’s not my best idea, but I don't have access to the internet for online tests or worksheets that I could have easily found in my old life.
In fact, my “Studying and research time” have pretty much just been spent reading and making little tests for myself. Math is way easier for tests as the textbook I found has small unit tests in the back pages, but science along with history are a pain to try to make tests and do them fairly. Self study is hard, but with my knowledge from going through school all the way to halfway through twelfth grade is a good boost and it was really just relearning or refreshing my memory of easy topics I learned years ago.
When I had gone down the stairs and into the dining hall, I found out that I was correct in the assumption that no one would be eating yet because the room was absolutely deserted. Not even the caretaker was present. I grin, the first pick of food goes to me! I walk over to the buffet style table and take a plate, silverware, a cup and a napkin and proceed to select my food in copious amounts that fill my plate and then some. Pancakes drowning in syrup, fried eggs on top of the pancakes swimming in even more syrup and fruit of every kind waiting for their time to be thrown in my cavernous mouth.
I then proceed to the end of the nearest table and start to gorge upon the piles of food on my plate until finally it is wiped clean by my tongue after I had devoured its previous contents.
I look at the room around me and notice happily that it is still completely empty, besides me of course. I then look up at the clock above the buffet table and I see in surprise that I was actually really fast in eating my breakfast, because it is eight forty five. It took me ten minutes to eat my breakfast from the time I got dished up. “Huh.” I said, impressed with myself. Then I stood up and put my dishes in the dirty dish bin at the far end of the buffet table then walked back to my room to get a start on my reading.
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Later that day, at ten thirty in the morning, I was sitting back in my desk chair looking between two papers with my hand writing all over them. One of those papers had the title of “End of 4th grade science exam” written on it, while the other had the words “Answer key for End of 4th year science exam” at the top of the page. I had just finished writing the science exam and was double checking my answer key, with help from the text book on my lap.
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On my desk, the history and math tests were sitting on my desk in a pile, with their respective answer keys. The science exam was the last one I had written, and there was only one mistake in the answer key, which I easily corrected with the help of the textbook.
I set down the two papers with relief as soon as I had went over them for the third time and found nothing wrong with them. I also placed the textbook on top of the other two books that were in the corner of my desk.
“Finally, I can move onto some funner things! Into the Soul Forge I go!” I say happily as I summoned the gateway to my realm with the flow of my Spirit Energy and stepped into the entrance hall of my personal two floor mansion. Now, I actually finished quite a bit sooner than I expected and lunch is at twelve and it is now ten, so what do I want to do now?
I stood thinking in the entrance hall for a few seconds, trying to decide what to do. My indecision was not from lack of things that I could do, but the exact opposite actually. I could start blacksmithing practice now and forge something, maybe I could make a short sword? Or I could start building my arena? Spend some time training with my daggers trying to unlock a dagger skill maybe?
After thinking for a few seconds I decided to get a head start on building my arena. My reasoning is that, because my soul is almost fully recovered, there is only a few days to a week until my soul has recovered enough to enchant another ring, which would drag my Spirit Energy levels way down, so I think my Spirit Energy emission rate is high enough now that if I start working soon I could get the arena built by the end of the day if I am lucky and fast enough, and I could possibly wipe the mark out tomorrow or the day after.
Now that I have decided on what to do, I walk to the storage room to collect my material sample rings. I walk down the hallway and into the room on the left side of the hallway, where my rack full of my materials are. I recall the materials that I had decided on and started to grab one section of a ring for each material. “Gold, marble, red velvet, polyester and.. What else? Oh steel! Right, I think that is everything.” I say, checking off my mental list as I go through and select a sample of each material.
I end up with five materials, but that is fine for now as I just need gold, marble and steel for the stadium portion and then I can change my samples for the floor and seats when I get to them. I take off the MD ring and start putting on the attachments one by one, first the steel, then the gold and polyester last. I place the MD ring back on my finger and adjust it a little before walking out of the storage room and back into the entrance hall, up the ramp and out into the second floor.
On the second floor I started walking to the far end of the room and then I started making a rough area plan on the ground with the MD ring and then I paused for a second thinking. “You know what? The MD ring just doesn't sound that great, or really show what you can do with it… Let's rename it… The Ring of the Creator? No… how about The ring of Creation? That actually sounds way better… Ok, it is decided The MD ring is now The Ring of Creation.” I said, thinking out loud.
Now that was sorted out, I continued making my floor plan, sending my Spirit Energy through the steel attachment and positioning it into the floor in the shape that I want my arena’s stands to be in.
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Half an hour later, I finished my floor plan. I was sticking with my first idea of a Greek theater shape, but I decided to change the architecture a little to lean into something resembling a roman coliseum. Now the time consuming part begins. I started channeling my Spirit Energy through the marble attachment but I also made a stream of it go through the gold attachment.
You see, I had figured out what I could do for my gold inlay pattern on marble. And it was surprisingly difficult to figure out, and yet so simple that I should have thought of it immediately. What I found difficult at first, was rooted in my first method, which was that I would create a section of marble with random cracks and then materialize the gold inside it, but that method had several problems.
The first problem is that the result was always uneven on every side with the bumps and cracks being there still, even after the gold was added, and it causes small crevices in the material that no matter how hard I try, I can't fill exactly flush with the surface. And the second problem is that when I materialize the gold, the marble’s original strength is drastically weakened and it breaks much easier than normal and I can't even reinforce it by materializing steel inside, because it already had a material materialized inside once and it would disintegrate.
So I thought and did testing, looking for a solution, until I thought of my new method, which I am now using. The new method is really simple, it is to just push my Spirit Energy through marble and send some through gold at the same time, and then mix the gold and marble energy’s into marble energy with random streaks of gold marked energy throughout the shape I want it to take. It is a little harder than normal shaping of the Spirit Energy, but not by much.
So using this technique, I started forming the stands. First I started with the general shape of the raised rows of where I am going to put the seats, making them raised up a little from where the fight would happen so no one would be hurting the audience. Then I started with the stairs to get to the seats and the arena. And after that is where I was going to start sprucing it up a bit, with pillars and outcropping patterns to decorate it a bit, but when I walked out of the Soul Forge to check the time, I found that my time was almost up because it was eleven forty five, fifteen minutes before lunch.
I was slightly disappointed that I didn't have time to finish the stands, but I almost completed them and it took much shorter than I thought, so I was pretty ok with leaving them until I was done blacksmithing practice at three in the afternoon.
But I still have fifteen minutes… That is not enough time to make a lot of progress on the arena, and I really don't want to accidentally miss being called down for lunch. So, what should I do? I sat down in my desk chair and started thinking. “Hum… Well, I am doing blacksmithing next, so what can I do to prepare for that?” I said to the empty room, thinking aloud.
I was planning to work on making detailed and intricately patterned rings today, so I wasn't sure what I wanted to do ahead of time. “I could make some blank rough rings from gold to work on, to skip the step of shaping the metal into the rough shape of a ring and just get to work on the quality and the carvings I want.” I decided after realizing that I still have my material sample attachments on.
As soon as I had reached my decision, I started running my Spirit Energy through The Ring of Creation and then through the gold attachment sample, marking it. I then started concentrating on shaping the Spirit Energy, I wanted to try and make as good a ring as possible. As I was shaping the Spirit Energy, constraining the wild energy back into the shape of a ring that should fit on my finger, I realized that this might be a bit easier than I thought it would be. “Materialize!” I commanded, causing the ring that I had been forming out of Spirit Energy to turn into solid gold and fall onto the hard wooden desk top in front of me.
I pick it up and inspect it, not only with my eyes but with my ‘Inspect’ ability which told me the rank was Common Low, which looked accurate. The metal was really warped in some places, but in general it looked and felt really smooth and was mostly even, but that could be fixed in the forge later. All in all, I consider this a great success.
Now, I still have a few minutes so let's get to work!