When Tahir returned home the sun was just beginning to rise. "I guess sleep is out of the question for now." He would normally start his morning routine at this time, but he's freshly washed and fully clean. He wanted to get a head start on the morning meal since he'd could use the extra time to begin learning the information in the jades. He exited his room and walked towards the kitchen only to find Gin and Rin already there.
Gin had a pot going on the stove with a fire that was a little bit too high. However, he hadn't burned down the house, and that was good enough for now. Rin was sitting at the table reading one of the herb books. Tahir greeting the siblings. "Good morning."
Rin looked up from her book with a bright smile on her face. Tahir had never seen her smile so brightly before. He also noticed a gleam in her eye that was never present before. "Good morning sir. How are you? Did you rest well?"
Tahir cringed at the sound of her calling him "sir". "Don't call me sir, and any other title. I am Tahir, and I don't need any other names."
Rin was slightly taken aback by his response. "I was just trying to be respectful since you're our employer."
Tahir shook his head in disagreement. "Exactly. I am your employer. I didn't ask you here to bow your heads to make me feel special. I invited you here to help free my time for other tasks. Have either of you checked on my mother?"
Gin was getting ready to throw some cut vegetables in the pot on the stove, but he paused to respond. "Not yet. Rin was going to check on her after she finished her morning reading. It would give me time to get a meal ready as well."
"Both of you continue, I'll take care of it." Tahir walked into Adria's room to verify if she was awake or still resting. However, he was slightly surprised when he saw her sitting up in the bed and working on some type of stitching.
When she heard the door open, Adria turned her head to see who'd entered. "Good morning…" She stopped in the middle of her statement because she was surprised. Where was the Tahir that was here last night? Although shocked, she was happy with his new appearance because she'd never seen him display any confidence before. He always firmly persevered and struggled. He never stopped trying to find a way to have a better life, but underneath the looks of determination he'd always displayed in the past, there was also a look of hopelessness, as though he knew his toiling would never bear fruit.
Tahir realized that his mother must have been surprised, however, he mistakenly thought it had to do with his clothes rather than his overall demeanor. So, he smoothed down the front of his outer robe and said, "Hehe. I went to the other world last night and my old clothes were damaged. Kali found these for me to wear from the servant's uniforms. You should have seen what he wanted me to wear at first. It was completely over the top."
Adria only nodded her head while making a "mhmm" sound. Tahir surprised her again. These were probably the most words she's ever heard him speak in a single exchange. Her son's demeanor was changing, but she thought the change was a good thing. At first, she was concerned when she heard his goals, but now she understands this is what her son needed as a man. He's still her child at 14 years old, but he's still a man that needs to feel as though he can take care of his loved ones and himself. She placed her sewing project down on her lap and reached her hand out towards Tahir. "Come here."
Tahir walked over next to his mother's bed and kneeled down to her eye level. She placed her hand on the side of his face lovingly and said, "Tahir, I see you're beginning to change. It's not a bad thing, but whatever you do, make sure you're able to make it home safely."
Tahir grabbed Adria's hand and gently placed it down before standing up and turning his back to her because her words touched him to the point of tears. He held them in, but the emotions he held back all these years, all his frustrations, were threatening to break forth and turn him into a sobbing mess. Adria knew that Tahir was trying to preserve his image, so she encouraged him to continue what he was doing, telling him she'd be fine as she would just spend her time working on her stitching.
Tahir nodded his head and quickly left the room. He saw the siblings and quickly told them to continue handling things around the house as he needed to go study in his room. They didn't know what he was studying, but they figured it was his business and didn't need to know anything else.
Gin continued to handle the stove and receive money and items from the orphans. Rin began her work in the garden planting the different herbs according to the guidance offered in the herb books. Meanwhile, Tahir went to his room and closed the door before taking out the wooden box he received from Kali the night before. "No time like the present to learn." However, he couldn't decide on where to start. Now that he started his journey, he felt pressured as he knew it would take a long time to obtain the life he wanted. Tahir finally gave up trying to decide where to start and just grabbed all the jades and placing them in an old sack he found in the storage room. He shuffled the jades inside the bag before pulling out one of the white jades. He did as Kali instructed him and sent a sliver of energy into the jade. He tried to control the flow of information as suggested, but despite his efforts all the information flooded into his head again, but unlike yesterday, there was no discomfort. He digested the information from the jade in a little less than 15 minutes. He was surprised because he remembered Kali told him it would take a few hours. He intended to inquire about this later.
Since it didn't take long for him to absorb the information in one jade. He decided to take in the information from the other jades as well. He picked up each jade one by one to take in the knowledge. He sighed after the third jade. "Why could all learning be like this? I can't imagine the amount of time it would take to read all this in a book. Just the pages alone would take up a whole room." Once he finished absorbing all the jades, he was well versed in over 10,000 basics herbs as well as 100 basic runes.
The basic runes low level runes that were the easiest to practice drawing and required the least amount of spirit energy to engrave, but don't think that means it would be easy to use this knowledge. Crafting runes required exact replications with a precise amount of spirit energy inserted during the drawing process. Just learning to reproduce the rune image exactly as it was detailed would take hours and hours of effort to become proficient in a single rune. This is why mental energy was so important during the rune crafting process used for various talismans, formations, and other items. Also, Tahir would need to be able to reproduce these runes while drawing with a medium, carving it on items, and condensing it with mental energy in order to use this knowledge flexibly to produce results.
After learning the contents of the green jade, Tahir learned about the human body in a level of detail he never imagined could exist. Blood vessels, acupoints, blood flow, inner organs, the skin, the sensory organs, the way the body was controlled by the brain, energy pathways, meridians, all of this and more was included. The green jade also included acupressure, acupuncture, massage, and bone setting techniques he could use to treat mortals and cultivators alike. However, the jade that most excited Tahir was the red jade.
The red jade contained a technique used to condense a spiritual flame. One would need a spiritual flame in order to perform alchemy. These flames are not the same used in the forging process. The forging process used natural flames augmented with spirit energy to create the extreme levels of heat needed to melt some of the metals used by cultivators. The only exception to this process is if someone was able to subdue and refine a natural spirit flame, but that's an explanation for another time.
Tahir once again observed the interior of his body. Like the art instructed. Tahir gathered all the spirit energy he could manage and circulated it through certain pathways before sending it to his dantian. He then compressed this energy to a single point. He kept condensing the energy further and further as much as he could. He didn't know how much energy he needed to compress into this single point, but after a while, the compressed energy started to spin which caused the energy seed to condense even further. Once, it condensed to the size which he could no longer observe with his mental energy, he became concerned because this was never mentioned in the red jade. The red jade said he should condense his spirit energy to the size of a marble before using the hand signs to ignite a flame. However, he could feel that the energy was still there even though he could no longer directly observe it with his mental energy. So, he continued to slowly complete each hand sign so that he wouldn't make a mistake.
Once Tahir completed the first cycle of hand signs, a gray flame sparked in the area between the pool of energy and gray wisp in his dantian. Tahir continued to cycle through the hand signs completing each round faster than the last until he could cycle through all the signs in a little over a second. After working on his spirit flame for 4 hours. Tahir finally finished. He didn't know how long it should have taken, but he never thought it would take 4 hours. Now, he needed to practice summing the flame using the basic flame control technique included in the red jade.
Tahir then began to practice the hand signs used to summon the flame. It took him a little over half an hour to summon the flame and learn to adjust its temperature. Tahir felt relieved when he finally was able to summon and adjust the flame. He didn't know this process would be so time consuming. However, if Kali were present, he'd have been shocked beyond measure. Tahir had no idea that it usually takes a capable cultivator 10 days of practice before condensing a flame and another 10 to 15 days of practice to summon and adjust a flame. There are extremely capable practitioners that were able to complete it all in a day, and never had he seen flame condensation summoning and control finished in half an hour.