"I want to give it a try," she grabbed Alex's hand.
"But...I still don't know what will happ..." Alex wanted to warn her again. But before he finished, she interrupted him.
"I still want to try. It hurts me when I see you try too hard to get stronger while I can't do anything," she said with strong determination to get as strong as Alex.
"Alicia..." his heart ached to see her acting like that to the point where he unconsciously called her by her name.
When Alicia heard this, her eyes brightened, "You call me Alicia just now?" she smiled happily.
"I...You must have heard it wrong, Princess," Alex embarrassed.
"Hehe, I will make you admit it and call me Alicia for sure," she smiled again and her smile was full of joy.
"We...Better start practicing now," Alex said as he tried to change the topic.
"Fine... What do I need to start it?"
"Try to sit first on the sofa," Alex said and Alicia followed his word. She sat on the sofa while Alex continued his explanation, "Princess, can you try to feel the Mana around you?"
"Yes, I can feel them now," she felt the Mana in the air easily.
"Then, can you use your Mana to force the Mana on the air so it goes inside your body?"
"Alex, is this the practice you are talking about? People have tried this before but they failed," she said.
Alex ignored her and he continued, "Try to refine them to become your own Mana. Starting from the head to your heart. From your heart to the whole body. Like blood that flows from your heart to your whole body. Then, continue to refine them while moving them through your body."
She followed Alex's words and she tried to do what he said. After a few minutes, she succeeded.
"It's a success, I could do it," joy surged in her heart. But she was a bit disappointed, "But, the amount that can be refined was too little. If I do this a few hours a day for one year I can have a Mana reserve like a rank 1 mage, two years more for rank 2 mage, 4 years for rank 3 mage Mana reserve. As for the rest, I don't know. I only have a rank 3 Mana reserve for now. So I can't speculate about the higher rank."
"It's still useful, Princess," Alex said.
"But this is too little. I can't catch your back if it's like this," she sighed.
"It's alright, I guess it's okay for now," Alex assured her.
"But..." she recalled if this technique worked like that. This was very useful for others. She became a bit guilty because of her greediness. She disregarded Alex's effort and she tried to explain, "It's okay...I'm satis..."
"Princess," Alex put his finger on her mouth and he continued, "Do you forget what my occupation is?" he took out his Qi gathering pill and body foundation pill.
Alicia's eyes brightened and Alex continued to explain about his pills, "This pill is called Qi gathering pill and it can improve your absorption rate. And this is a body foundation pill, it can help your body and it also increases your absorption rate.
You should take this body foundation pill first. It will improve your body qualities, then take this Qi gathering pill. As for how they are used, this body foundation pill limit is ten times. Each time you use them, you mix them with the bathwater and you should bathe in it. As for this Qi gathering pill, the effect is 2 hours after you eat this pill."
"Thank you," Alicia's heart was warm to hear his explanation, she sincerely thanked Alex.
"What is this thank you for, Princess?" Alex smiled gently at her.
Alicia didn't say anything more, she just smiled back at him.
They practiced together for a few hours, but suddenly he noticed that Alicia was dozing off. Alex realized the time was almost midnight, and Alicia usually went to bed at this time.
He shook his head and carried her to the bed. After that, he continued to cultivate again.
In the morning, Alicia woke up feeling embarrassed. She didn't know when she fell asleep. Alex just pretended nothing had happened last night.
In the class, Firia already purged the impurities in her body and she transformed to be a more beautiful girl just like Alicia.
Today was the day for Alex to learn about harmonizing. As usual, he went to his teacher right after his class was over.
"Alex, today I'm going to teach you about Harmonizing. In a normal forging, a few metals have to be mixed and they will achieve harmony if the composition is right. If not, they will become unbalanced and the product will become weaker than a normal one. But when we forge magic weapons, we need a metal that contains or can contain Mana.
The Mana in each metal will have its own characteristic. Thus, we need to make the Mana in each metal harmonize with each other. As for how to do it, we will use our flame. The process was almost the same with alchemy, we melt each energy from the metals to fuse them together like when we melt each herb to liquid and fuse them together.
Since you are already familiar with this process, this shouldn't take you too long. As long as you take the characteristic with the metal, you can easily fuse them. Many call this affinity with metal and the one who has a natural affinity like this is a demi-human, dwarf race. Alright, let's try it. Try to fuse the energy of these two metals.
These two are called Zingi Metal and Lore Metal, this Zingi Metal has torrential energy while the latter has hard energy. You should use a gentle approach for them. First, you have to try to control the torrential energy and smooth it, then you need to soften the hard energy of this Lore Metal and try to fuse them."
"..." Alex still didn't do anything, he just stared at the metal solemnly.
"You are not going to try?" the dean asked.
Alex shook his head, "I don't know how to do it. When I liquefy the herb, I only burn them enough with my flame. But what is this gentle approach?"
"...." the dean was speechless to hear his students' answer, he forgot about this. Originally he never taught anything to Alex, they always were always busy with making pills. "Gentle approach is a flame control technique. You already know that when we make a flame, we can make it hotter as long as we infuse Mana in it, right?"
To this question, Alex nodded and the dean continued.
"Actually, it is the same principle. But the limit to how much you can make the flame temperature corresponds directly to your strength or your rank. That means the higher your rank the hotter your flame would be. But this gentle approach is different, we use our flame to burn it at a low temperature, and slowly melt and refine the energy.
As for the softening approach is the same as the gentle approach, the difference is how hot the flame you use. You should know that we need a higher temperature when we use a softening approach. But we shouldn't immediately use high-temperature flames, but we need to make a low-temperature flame first and slowly raise the temperature.
When facing a metal with torrential energy, you need to use a gentle approach. But when facing hard energy metal, you use a softening approach. Well since I've gone this far, might as well I teach you all the basic approaches for the flame in forging. There are four types of treatment and they are gentle, softening, bursting, and scorching approaches. Gentle and softening are like what I said earlier.
As for the bursting approach, it is almost the same as the softening approach, the difference is when we use the bursting approach. We don't slowly raise the temperature but we immediately raise the temperature. The time we raise it would be the moment when the energy starts to refine, at that time we will raise the temperature suddenly and make the energy become disordered.
We use this technique to deal with metal that has overbearing energy. The last one is the scorching approach which is the simplest one. We use it on metal that has a gentle energy. The energy from the metal won't fight other metal energy, so we just burned that metal along with its energy. But, if this type of metal is one of the ingredients then this should be the last to be refined."
"Teacher, what is this energy about? I can vaguely recognize that the energy between the two of them is different. But I can't tell what the difference is," Alex pointed to the two metals.
The dean didn't answer him immediately, but he went to his table and grabbed another two metals. He gestured to Alex to get closer, "Try to touch each of them with your Mana."
As Alex tried to touch the Zingi Metal with Mana, he felt the energy come approaching his hand. Then, the dean explained further, "This is torrential energy, when you use Mana to touch it, the energy from metal will try to approach you. That's why we need a gentle approach, we slowly fuse and harmonize the energy. Try to touch the second one."
Alex now touched the second metal called Lore Metal that has hard energy, but this time he was perplexed. There was no reaction to this energy, Alex looked at the dean confusedly.
Looking at Alex, he didn't hurriedly answer, "Now, try to disturb the energy with your Mana."
Alex did what he said, but this time the energy also didn't have any reaction. But the dean continued, "Try to disturb the energy from Zingi Metal."
This time Alex approached the Zingi Metal and disturbed its energy flow. Now, the energy became disrupted and the energy from before seemed to be scared of Alex and it tried to move away.
"When you disturbed torrential energy, it will become scared of your Mana and move away (Paper Tiger?). That's why we use a gentle approach for this. As for the hard energy, even if you try to disturb it, it will only ignore you and stay still. That's why we use this softening approach to slowly refine the energy. Hmm... many people call this technique a retreat to advance approach...or maybe not. Well whatever, it's just a name. It doesn't really matter what people call it."
"..." Alex pondered over what he just learned.
The dean continued the forging lesson by giving Alex the third metal, "This is called Gend Metal, this metal has overbearing energy. Try to touch it."
Alex touched the third metal with his hand. What the dean said was true, as soon as he touched it, the Gend Metal energy immediately fought with his Mana. Alex was surprised by this.
"Do you feel the energy fighting back? That's why we name it overbearing energy. We use this bursting approach so that when the energy starts to be refined by our flame, we burst the flame's temperature, making the energy contained in the metal become a disorder. This way, refining this type of metal becomes easier. And this is the last metal."
He gave the last metal to Alex and he tried to touch it, but the energy immediately went away. Unlike the first metal, this metal was already scared before Alex disturb the energy flow.
"Haha...Even the metal didn't like you," the dean laughed to see what just happened.
"...." Alex was speechless once again.
"Sorry, Alex...My teacher teased me like this too when I learned it from him. I didn't know anything about metal energy back then, just like you are now, so I felt sad when my teacher said that to me as well," he laughed happily for a while.
After a while, the dean calmed down a bit and started to explain, "This is the last type of metal's energy. It is like a paranoid, so you just have to forcefully refine them and merge with the other."
Alex nodded, he understood what his teacher just said.
"What do you think with all of this approach?"
Alex pondered a bit and gave an unexpected answer with a flat expression, "It's like the approach to love."
"..." This time, the dean was the one who got speechless.