–– Clara POV ––
This year's summer break passed quickly, spent in the companionship of Gabrielle in a fairly balanced lifestyle of fun, cultivation/meditation, discussions, conversations not about potions and work, most of our days still occupied by potions, with the sparse hours here and there, mainly while Gabrielle slept, which I devoted to wards and calculating the next substage for my cultivation technique, making negligible progress on that front.
It was just perfect, both of us knowing which topics to touch and which topics would be better left alone, our friendship blossoming while both of us opened up a bit more with each passing day, starting to trust each other more and more.
It was just freeing to have someone similar and understanding to talk to, to pass the time with. The world getting warmer, better, a desire you never knew you had fulfilled. Restraints, shackles removed from your very being. New emotions and thoughts forming unhindered, previously suppressed by barriers you knew nothing of.
And the flow of time, my perception of time to be exact, sped up, time flowing faster while together with her due to her presence and even if she was not there, I was anticipating her return, hoping for it to come sooner.
The next school year was spent in nearly the same way, Gabrielle only leaving the potions laboratory to sleep, eat and attend her lessons, making great strides in her education, skipping a few years in different subjects.
My own progress was more subtle this year, not making much progress knowledge wise. Some would call it stagnation, but for me it felt more like consolidating my foundation, a very important aspect in all of cultivation. My movements while brewing were more refined, my familiarity with potions behaviour and the herbs interdependence deepening to new degrees, my style of handwriting and carving getting more exquisite, all while my understanding of magic itself deepened minimalistic bits at a time.
The only other real change was my cultivation technique, as I had generalized the technique to common breathing, nearly everyone now able to utilize it, as long as they could meditate and had exceptional senses, the most important one being able to sense mana particles in one way or another. The reason behind this change of mind was Gabrielle, who would be a perfect fit for my technique if she ever came as far, together with my frustration about the next substage of the epic stage, making no progress on that part.
Yes, that was my fifth year at Hogwarts, boring I know, but it was nice, perfect even, no one being any wiser about my birthday. Gabrielle had invited me to France for another summer break, having spent the whole winter break with her family.
Most of this break was nice, similar to the last one, the only real problem, if I can even say so, was, that Gabrielle apparently was a great flier, madam Hooch having unearthed her interest in the subject. She was not interested in quidditch yet, but she was slowly getting there, which meant that she wanted me to fly with her. I could naturally fly, at least somewhat, having learnt it in my first year at Hogwarts, but nowhere near Gabrielle's level, just doing rasant and the most difficult moves in her arsenal for fun, each mistake possibly costing her a visit to a healer, Gabrielle still flying fearlessly dead set in her way, leaving me in the dust the rare few times I flew with her.
The only real advancements I had made were related to the mana filter, now able to make dense, ninety-five percent pure mana, the last five percent a chasm separating myself from my goal,
within my reach, though I sadly still had a long way to go.
The sixth year at Hogwarts followed a similar style, Gabrielle spending even more time in our potions laboratory, having tested out of a few classes ultimately to increase her time spent on potions, her progress spiking, nearly catching up to me.
For me though, potions had been set to the back burner, as I had reached my current goal, now focusing more on wards and cultivation. Wards were an ongoing project still, my mana filter improving by only little margins, but everything else slowly got better. Better detection, protection and first tests with rebound, absorb and attack wards.
Contrary to that stood cultivation. I had cultivated to rare common, having previously achieved uncommon breathing, my mana control spiking to a previously unimaginable level through that achievement.
As I was still stuck with next step of epic entry, I decided to generalize the uncommon stage, continuing on with the rare stage, after I had finished it in record time, still holding course even within the rare stage, as I rapidly finished generalizing it, the biggest part played by my books who explained this process in gruesome detail, though it was still not easy.
But after all that, I had found a new idea for the next substage, thoroughly baffled by its simplicity. Mana was flowing through our body in its natural state, corresponding to what most would associate with liquid. But it was not, it was gaseous. And I stored the mana in a plasma state, now needing to strengthen my pathways till they could handle exactly that. Through that I could skip the step of converting mana back into its natural state, increasing the oneness and fluidity of my mana pathways, cores and mana body.
This was done with changes in the structure used to build the pathways. Currently, it was just a fragile membrane, but I needed something sturdy, not only guiding the mana, but keeping it trapped in them. The design was a bit more complicated, but as long as it fulfilled the requirements it was enough.
I blew it out of proportions. No, seriously! If previously it was fragile, not it would be impenetrable. The mana particles themselves are now combined in a crystalline structure resembling diamonds, though with seven neighbors instead of five, totaling forty nine nodules. These nodules were then rearranged into a cluster with forty nine nodules, all having seven neighbors again. This continued another time, forty nine clusters forming one super cluster, I was running out of names.
The resulting super clusters were formed and interlocked into small strings formed like hollow helixes, before six other helixes were used to screw into each other, forming a solid string.
A total of forty nine of those strings would be combined into a strand, seven of those strands being combined into a super strand, the result still having a diameter less than ten nanometer.
Those were then combined into a checkered mat with a non specific amount of layers, my plan being forty nine, all the layers interlocked with each other.
The resulting „material" was not even a millimeter thick, but billions of time stronger than my previous membrane, eclipsing it in any possible way. The „material" was flexible, durable and hard, every structure having its own mini mana veins which were flooded with mana, repairing any damages and improving their strength by another factor of at least a million.
The huge caveat was, that I currently needed twenty four hours to produce a piece which was one square millimeter big. Anyway, I could not use it yet anyway, but I needed to test it out before calculating the next step.
While strengthening my pathways to handle more mana which was not in its original state, epic advanced would consolidate this foundation, fusing the mana cores, pathways, skin and body together, which would increase any and all aspects I had worked for. This results in a new entity which is called mana core body, though there were precedents for such a thing.
The next step would be a consolidation of epic advanced, epic elite consisting of supercharging the new entity, filling it to the brim with mana, before using that mana to expand the mana core body slowly, forcing it to accommodate increasingly more mana.
Epic peak would use this forceful expansion to heal the mana core body, replacing the current mana skin with the same material which I used for my pathways.
After the whole mana skin was replaced with the new material, I would need to reassemble other parts of my mana core body, namely upgrading the rings still orbiting the cores. Epic changing was used to upgrade them to not only apply to the cores, but the whole entity instead, upgrading their count to forty nine with one central object, which would first send them out, before slowly reabsorbing them in a loop, many new possible intents possible, now applicable to anything inside the mana core body.
For epic breathing I used the most common cultivation technique as an example. It had little difficulties and a high ceiling at common breathing. This cultivation technique was commonly known as mage base template, freely available for anyone to use and used a singular core located at the heart, using color changes of mana to symbolize progress, mimicking a natural phenomenon called tiered mana.
Normal mana on earth was light blue, also called tier zero mana. Technically tier zero mana was blue, all tiers sub divided into light, normal and dark colors. This was followed by purple and red for tier one and two respectively. There were hundreds of confirmed colors, the color spectrum running out at some point, though the highest current achievement in this technique was tier twenty three. Anything above tier zero mana was just exponentially increasing dense mana, fusing the particles together into one new one of the same size.
Back to the last stage of epic, I wanted to make my whole mana core body into this core, which was easily possible as it turns out, though the calculations behind the mage base template were tremendously complicated. Headache inducing really. It was a masterpiece through and through and I could see why. I could just apply it to my new mana core body, which functioned as my original core, all of its contents fused together into this one entity.
The complicated thing of my cultivation technique was the huge amount of mana that was required, resulting in multiple back and forth's, readjusting previously built and used structures to my use. This catapulted the technique into one of the hardest ones to practice, a singular mistake potentially crippling your mana body, in the worst cases even taking your life. This also made it tedious to cultivate.
The legendary newcomer stage was easy to calculate as well, my goal to further fuse my physical and mana body, starting with syncing my heart, mental and mana body core, reaching perfect equilibrium.
I was stuck, again. On legendary entry though, not having a clear path forwards, my aspirations humongous to say the least.
At the end of the sixth school year, another summer break came.