NOVEL NEXT Chapter 5
“I have arrived!” I shout out as I enter the door to Grandpa’s lab. I giggled quietly to myself afterwards as no one here but me would get the reference but it was only for my entertainment anyways.
“Ah Frost, Gary! What a pleasure it is for both of you to visit my lab. Is there anything I can help you with?” Grandpa looks up from his desk and smiles warmly at us, not minding our intrusion.
“Well Grandpa, I wish to take some online courses to learn some skills, but they are rather expensive. I was wondering if you would be willing to pay for them…” I ask sheepishly, I know he is well off but I still feel bad because of the amount of money I am asking for.
“What courses do you wish to take?” He raises his eyebrow while asking. I don’t blame him, it’s the first time I have ever asked for anything like this.
“You see, because I want to become a trainer, I figured I should get some training on skills I might need. If I can be prepared for any situation that arrives I would be a better trainer. So, I want to take a martial arts course, a course on survival skills, first aid and if I can find one, maybe one on tactics.” I figured I could learn to cook myself from the Pokenet and pokemon care is something I would learn by working with Grandpa while raising Vulpix.
“Hmm, you bring up a good point. Being a trainer can be dangerous and if you become a league trainer you are essentially a military member.” He nodded his head at my words causing me to feel lighter, as if a weight was no longer on my shoulders. “Alright then, how much are the courses?”
I hesitate a little, trying to not look Grandpa in the eye. “From what I found most of the courses are only fifty to a hundred Poke each session, none of which cost over five hundred Poke total. The issue is with the martial arts…” I trail off, still hesitating.
“Those are quite reasonably priced. So young lady, how much is this martial arts course?”
“Five thousand Poke for the first year…”
Grandpa stares at me for a while before replying. “What type of martial art costs that much? I hope you didn’t find a scam.”
“It’s a obscure martial art from Snowpoint City in Sinnoh. From what I could tell, the cost is because most people don’t continue after a few sessions. If I wanted to take just a few sessions to try it out they were five hundred Poke each.”
“What’s wrong with doing a more common martial art? Surely there must be reason you want this one.”
I started to play with my ponytail as I attempted to justify what I wanted. “Well, it just kind of called to me. I tried looking into others but they just didn’t seem to click. It’s like its association with snow and ice was meant for me.” I blush at my flimsy attempt, hoping it was enough. The following silence spoke volumes about the situation. I glance at Grandpa just to see him smile warmly at me.
“Alright. I will pay for your courses. Just make sure that you study hard and don’t let my money go to waste.”
I give Grandpa a big smile before giving him a tight hug. “Thank you so much Grandpa! I will email you the details. I need to get back so I can start everything else as well!” With that I rush back out the door into the heat once again forgetting about Gary in my excitement.
*~*~*~*
A few days have passed since I asked Grandpa about my courses and I have officially started my courses on how not to die in the pokemon world. The first aid courses were provided by the Joy clan and they only took a day of training. A day might seem short, but this wasn’t knowledge on how to do surgery in the middle of the woods, it was about how to treat cuts, how to splint broken bones and how to deal with poisons and other minor issues that can cause issues while traveling before you can get yourself to a Pokecenter for professional care. People might not take these issues seriously, but a bad cut or infection can cause long lasting damage if not taken care of properly. I would much rather stay pretty instead of covered in nasty scars because I didn’t treat an issue properly.
The survival courses would take four months of weekly courses. The information in the course is going to cover firecraft, bushcraft, how to treat water and other skills needed to live outside civilization. I signed up for the professional course that covers everything for beginner, intermediate and expert level wilderness survival in different climates. This will be helpful if I run out of food or get lost in the woods or a cave. You never know when you might run across a random ghost looking to play a prank and it teleports you to somewhere you don’t know. The instructor tells different anecdotes about people that have had that happen and once they returned to a city they promptly signed up for a survival course.
I shiver at the possibility of what could have happened if I didn’t have the knowledge from webnovels about how murphy’s law is a universal truth and it is always best to be prepared. The tactics and strategy course was probably the course that I will loath to the end of time. The instructor has this monotone voice that makes the Clear Eyes guy sound empathic. The worst part is that this course is going to take six months of weekly classes and it is on monday mornings of all things. It’s like this course was made to intentionally infuriate people so they would drop it. Unfortunately, I don’t like to give up so I will power through this course the best I can, even if it requires me to wake up early on Monday.
The course I was most excited for was my martial arts classes. They were every Saturday and Sunday. Saturdays were instructional days. These classes were meant to teach the techniques step by step until you could complete the kata provided. Sunday was body conditioning where they gave a workout you were to follow for the next week. The last hour of each day was a guided meditation where the instructor would walk you through on how to meditate and how to calm your mind. The guided meditation was a godsend as I was almost able to meditate by the end of the first weekend. I continued to practice my meditation every day after my prescribed workout which seemed to offer the best results.
I also started to cook every day by going to the Pokenet and getting a new recipe for each meal. My first few attempts were not quite a disaster, but from the time that Gary took in the bathroom after dinner the first night I realized I needed to start simpler. So I started with meals that were easy to make and hard to mess up. Gradually my repertoire and skills grew to where I could now make normal home cooked meals without any issues. I hope that by the time I am on the road that I have gotten to restaurant quality.
Besides my online classes, I started to visit Grandpa’s lab every day to learn more about caring for pokemon. For the first few days he allowed me to play with the friendlier pokemon on the ranch. I loved these first few days as I was able to hug and cuddle with different kinds of fluff around me. Fluff is justice after all. Once Grandpa saw me getting comfortable with the friendlier types, he had me start making the meals for different pokemon. This allowed me to learn about their diets and eating habits. Lastly he taught me how to properly groom the pokemon on his ranch so they were comfortable.
Gradually, I was able to get into a routine and without realizing it, a year passed by in a blink of an eye.
*~*~*~*
I had just gotten back from my workout and kata practice and took my standard cold shower(still felt warm though), and sat on the floor without bothering to get dressed. The room was my little sanctuary where I didn’t have to bother with putting on clothes and had fans running full speed to try and keep the room as cool as possible for me. While I would have loved to get an air conditioner to chill the room further, I couldn’t justify getting on to Grandpa without having to answer some awkward questions so I’ve had to deal with it the best that I could. I positioned myself into a lotus position and began my meditation. Over the past year, I have progressed greatly in my meditation but I don’t feel any aura or any changes except for being able to think things through in a calmer manner.
During my meditations I have come to a sort of peace about my new situation and the fact that I had died and was reborn(?) into this world. I still miss my parents from Earth but I hope that they either were able to move on, or if they passed away as well, they were enjoying their new life. It will still take me time to fully move on, but for now, everything was okay.
I took a deep breath before I started to breathe in the slow and steady rhythmic breaths of the Snow Pearl meditation. Once the rhythm was started I began the visualization process. In my mind I imagined a tiny clear blue hexagonal crystal in a black space. While concentrating on the crystal I began to feed my thoughts to the crystal which began to grow in fractal patterns. Each branch that grew out was a frozen thought, a frozen distraction, which eventually took the shape of a snowflake. Once the snowflake was formed, I willed it to slowly pass through my body attempting to find where it liked to settle.
For the past year, I have been trying different locations in my body but nothing felt right. If I tried near where cultivation novels described the dantian, my snowflake would disappear like it evaporated. It took me months to realize I couldn’t try there as I guessed that was my inner flame. It was slow going as every place took multiple tries to verify nothing was being collected in the location I was trying. Just last month I tried the center of my heart and finally had a response. Today makes thirty days of placing a snowflake in the center of my heart and today it felt different. When I gently placed the snowflake on the tiny pile in my heart I felt as if I heard a lock open and the pile of snowflakes suddenly began to multiply and turned into a flurry. This flurry of snowflakes traveled throughout and covered what seemed to be every cell in my body before gathering back in my heart and forming a crystalline orb.
The orb was icy blue in color and seemed to freeze everything around it. I watched as the orb began to spin and pulsate at regular intervals like a heartbeat. Each pulse seemed to cause my body to get colder and colder until eventually I no longer felt like I was standing in the hot sun. The room now felt like it was just slightly above room temperature and I sighed in relief. I had been dealing with the heat for the past year and even though I had learned to ignore it, no longer needing to ignore the heat was a blessing and I felt my mind relax slightly.
[Congratulations host, Aura has been successfully unlocked. Due to unlocking Aura without outside assistance you have been granted one gacha spin.]
The sudden sound of the system which has been silent for the past year started me. I had actually almost forgotten that I had it due to not being able to interact with it.
“Hm? I can use the gacha now? I wonder how I earn gacha points. I guess I will eventually find out, not like this system tells me anything. Status.”
[Status:
Name: Frost Oak
Age: 15
Bloodline: Heavenly Glacial Ice Phoenix (active)
Aura: Active
Pokemon: 1 Egg
Harem: 0
Gacha Spins available: 1]
I focus on the active portion of the Aura to see if I get any information. It seems like it is my lucky day as I get a brief message stating that my Aura can generate additional Ice elemental power through exposed skin. When I see the part about exposed skin I blanch slightly.
“This damn system is trying to make me an exhibitionist!” I complain out loud before sighing. I will need to see just how much I can wear before it gets uncomfortable again. For now at least, my little sanctuary will be much more comfortable for me. Well, not like I can do anything about it now, it’s part of me so I will just need to adjust to it. It is amazing what humans can get used to after all.
With that thought I figure I might as well try to gacha as well. You never know, I might get some amazing item. I mentally command the gacha to spin and before me a wheel appears with a bunch of different items, each one too small for me to read what it is before it starts to spin rapidly into a blurry of muddy colors. Eventually the wheel begins to slow down before finally falling on an option. Before the wheel disappears I notice that the option disappeared from the gacha as well. Does that mean I can only get an option once, or did I win something special with a one time win?
Once the wheel disappeared a dark blue book that seemed to cause the air to condense around it appeared before me. I reached out and grabbed the book, which felt cool and comfortable to the touch. It didn’t feel like any paper I have touched before, it felt silky soft almost like a feather. I glanced down at the cover and read the name before freezing slightly. I had to read the name a few more times to make sure I read it correctly. I sighed in defeat as I realized who could have named this book and the implications of it.
[Congratulations, host has received the Ancient Ice Phoenix Forbidden Divine Blue Ice Lotus Code cultivation technique.]
Only Yuna could have come up with this sort of name for a cultivation technique. I sighed again before opening the book to read what it is about but once I tried to read it, the words made no sense. It was almost like someone wrote something in one language before sending it through a machine translator thirty times to different languages before going back to the base language. I looked through the whole book and everything was the same. I shook my head in defeat and just looked off into space for a little while.
While my brain was rebooting I suddenly heard the sound of cracking coming from my desk and I looked over. The egg of my Alolan Vulpix was shaking and cracking like it was about to hatch. I quickly tried to stand up but ended up face planting as my legs were tangled and slightly asleep from sitting in the lotus position for too long. Once I could properly get up, the sound of cracking was getting louder and more frequent. I rushed over to the egg and picked it up before running out the door of my room. I made it to the stairs before remembering I was naked and flushed cherry red before dashing back into my room and throwing on a loose T-shirt and a pair of short denim shorts that have come to wear almost daily.
Now that I was dressed I resumed to rush as I ran towards Grandpa’s lab as quickly as I could. Thanks to my training and my now unlocked Aura, I practically flew across the ground leaving behind a few snowflakes in my wake that quickly dissipated in the early summer heat. It only took about two minutes to make it to Grandpa’s lab, normally it is a fifteen minute walk but I didn’t realize how quickly I was running. I threw open the door and rushed in seeing Grandpa sitting at a computer working on something.
“Grandpa! My egg! My egg is hatching!” I yelled out as soon as I saw Grandpa. I was practically vibrating with excitement. It was at this moment that the egg decided that it was time and began to glow brightly. A few seconds later a small white fox with a single white tail appeared in my arms. I looked down at it as it looked back up at me. From what I knew about Alolan Vulpix, they were pure white with ice blue eyes and blue inner ears and blue feet. My Vulpix was almost the same except the white fur seemed to gleam brightly and its inner ears were such a deep blue that it seemed purple. Its eyes were a deep purple as well.
It was a shiny Alolan Vulpix.
