28 Preparation Edited

Feeling more confident now that she could weave spells, Jayde left the small room and found Isha waiting for her.

"Congratulations on your breakthrough," Isha said with a broad smile on his face.

Jayde smiled slightly in response.

"Isha, now that I have broken through, this ring of the old man, can I now contract it?" she asked pointing to the ring on her thumb. Ever since Isha has told her about spatial rings, she had been eaten up with curiosity about the ring on her thumb.

"Hmm, there should be no problem now with contracting the ring, just drop a single drop of your blood onto the stone of the ring, and then inject your magic into the ring, this will form a contract the ring. The old man's imprint would have faded after he died."

"How do I form a contract with the ring?"

"It will automatically form once you inject your magic into the ring."

"It's that simple? Does that mean that anyone can just form a contract with a spatial ring?" Jayde asked appalled, the method that Isha described seemed really insecure.

"No, while a mage is still alive no one else can form a contract with an artifact that has been bound. It is only once a mage is dead, that their magic that bounds the artifact slowly fades and the artifact is once free to form a new contract."

"Oh! Okay, that makes more sense." Jayde said.

Bidding Isha farewell Jayde left the Pavilion and returned to her cave.

Upon returning to her cave, the first thing Jayde did was prick her finger with her dagger, and drop a drop of her blood on the amber stone on the ring. Then injecting her magic into the ring, she formed a contract with it.

Once the ring was infused with her magic, she was able to enter her continuousness into the ring. The space storage wasn't that big, but Jayde was delighted to find out that the ring she had inherited was one of the rare spatial rings available in Doha, and she could store living items in it.

While the old man's ring wasn't filled with treasures, it did have quite a few rare plants in clay pots, as well as dozens of other essential herbs, spirit stones, and metal ores. The ring had about fifteen cubic meters of storage space available, and Jayde was overjoyed to find another satchel filled with elven wafer bread.

She was really curious how the old man had acquired so much elven wafer bread, she was starting to suspect that he wasn't from the Lower Realm but was someone from one of the noble families from the Mid Realm.

After seeing the metal ores, Jayde was reminded of the comment Isha made about maybe there was dwarven dark gold in the old man things.Removing all the metal ores from the ring and placing them with the pile of ores in the cave, she contacted Isha to see if he could identify if there was any dwarven dark gold in the ore pile.

Unfortunately, there was no dwarven dark gold, but Isha did point out some valuable metal ores such as storm iron, humming titanium, enchanted dust, and doom copper. Placing these precious ores back in her spatial ring for safe keeping, Jayde pulled out the basic fire spell scroll and started to teach herself some basic fire spells.

After a week of practicing her fire spells, Jayde was satisfied with her firebolt, fireball and fire shield spell, she could also infuse her dagger and arrows with fire attributes so that her blade and bow now had fire damage. With these spells, her offensive abilities had increased quite substantially, and Jayde was now confident she could handle whatever the Dark Forest could throw at her.

Jayde decided to port to the Pavilion to inform Isha of her decision to enter the Dark Forest. Hearing that Jayde intended to enter the Dark Forest shortly, Isha cautioned her that she would need to be careful and not be overconfident about her fire magic.

"Isha, I am pretty sure that I will be fine. I did pass White's assessment, and I am sure that whatever beasts are in the perimeter is nothing compared to what he threw at me."

Isha gazed at Jayde, opening his mouth as though to say something, he then closed it, he paused as though he was collecting his thoughts.

"Um Jayde, you should be aware that the creatures you faced during your assessment had no magic. That test was based purely on your physical skills." Isha said his tone serious.

Jayde's eyebrows furrowed, she wasn't quite sure what Isha was trying to say.

"Yes and how is that relevant?" she asked cautiously.

Isha sighed, it was as he suspected, Jayde didn't realize the difference between normal creatures and spirit beasts.

"Even a level one spirit beast is stronger than the beasts you faced during your test. They are tougher, faster, have greater strength and agility, and most of them can weave spells," he explained.

Isha explanation brought to mind the previous soul's experience with her uncle in the small glade, and how his fist had shattered her cheek. Jayde realized that she had been overconfident, she had underestimated just how different this world was. Thank the gods, I spoke to Isha before entering the forest, she thought.

It had just been over a month since Jayde had arrived on Doha, and all she had done since arriving is practice, but she knew that she needed actual combat experience. Jayde decided to follow through her original plan and enter the Dark Forest, but she would only stick to the perimeter and besides if anything really went wrong she could always teleport directly to the Pavilion.

***

Waking up early the next morning Jayde decided to prepare to enter the Dark Forest the following day. Jayde spent the morning preparing her weapons, food, and water. She also packed some extra clothing, healing potions and pills as well as some firewood and her flint.

While rummaging through the goods stored in her "inherited" spatial ring she had found ward stones, glow stones, an old tent and sleeping bag that the old man must have used while adventuring in the Dark Forest.

Confident that she was prepared for every eventuality, Jayde spent the afternoon going through the old man's notes and reading up on his experiences in the Dark Forest.

His notes were detailed, giving Jayde a good understanding of what sort of spirit beast she could encounter even going so far as to list the beast's weakness and strengths. Jayde took special note of each beasts description as well as their strengths and weakness.

He must have been a scholar at one time in his life, she thought, after reading the vast amount of data contained in his diaries.

It was just before sunset when Jayde came across something strange in the diary that she was reading. Noticing that the page she was reading was a lot thicker than the rest, Jayde looked at it carefully and saw that it seemed like the pages were glued together.

Taking her dagger out, she carefully inserted the blade in-between the two pages stuck together and separated the pages. It took some time, but after reading what the pages contained Jayde was delighted that she had taken the time to separate the glued pages.

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