“Kiro. Kiro! Wake up!”

He turned over to a new patch of grass, groaning. He was used to rising before the sun — what rational, red-blooded man would wake up before him? As it turned out, it wasn't a man.

“Kirooo. Come on. Aer made breakfast.”

He opened his eyes, squinting. Seira was standing over him, face only a couple inches away. He pushed her away with a finger.

“Alright, I’m up. What time is it?”

The sun hadn’t risen yet, but there was a small bright moon on the horizon, which provided enough light to see.

“It’s dawn!”

He frowned. That was the sun? How did the plants here even get enough mana to grow? Maybe that explained the lack of trees.

Aer floated over to them, plates overflowing with eggs and biscuits trailing behind her.

“Morning, Kiro! Feeling tired?”

“A bit, honored Saint.”

The Saint stopped and wagged a finger, letting the plates make their way over to them.

“What did I say about that ‘honored Saint’ business?”

“Right. I apologise, honored — err, Aer.”

She smiled.

“Well, you should be feeling a bit tired. Every time that you advance, your body is going to be drained for the next day or two. It’s a good thing you ate that bread I gave you, or else you’d be a lot worse off. Your first purification is always one of the worst.”

“Wait, was that not normal bread?”

“Nope,” she winked. “It was infused with a bunch of fire mana. You probably couldn’t sense it because of how smoothly it was integrated into it, like with these eggs.”

He squinted at the plate levitating next to him, and still couldn’t see anything other than the passive heat of cooked food.

“Don’t worry, it takes you a while to develop your mana sight. Your body is always the easiest to sense.”

He hesitantly forked an egg, and Aer nodded approvingly.

“Yep. Eat up, all of that is for you. Your body needs to replenish the nutrients it used up in advancement.”

Seira nodded to him, already digging in.

“It’s so good!” she managed to say through a mouth full of food.

That settled it. He took his first bite, and his mouth exploded with flavor. The still-runny yolk gushed into his mouth, and the perfectly balanced salt and pepper expertly complemented the slight savory flavor of the white. He dipped a biscuit into the leftover yolk, and was amazed to taste onions and flared amaranth baked into the fluffy interior. It wasn’t just the cooking, though. The ingredients themselves felt right, as if all other biscuits and eggs were just pale imitations of this true dish.

“Oh! This is your first time tasting mana-enhanced food!” Seira waved a fork into the air, still furiously chewing. “Isn’t it the best?”

He looked at her, incredulous.

“You ate this every day?”

She shook her head, not bothering to stop eating.

“Well, it was never prepared this good!”

He just sighed, turning back to his own plate. He was too hungry to care.

***

"They say that it takes a lifetime to master a skill."

Aer kicked off the ground, doing countless flips in the air before landing on a single extended finger. She balanced there, before retracting it and simply floating in the air.

"To immortals, that means little."

She flipped back upright, her hair whipping gracefully behind her as she returned to her original position.

"Yes, it might take even a Saint's life to master how to do that if you had the strength of a mortal, but I have, well, the strength of a Saint. I also have an aspect that synergizes very well with acrobatics, making my job even easier. Whatever skill you learn, to someone of a high enough stage, it's as easy as extending a finger. And, to someone of a low enough stage, even your simple jumps and kicks might seem impossible. Because of this, it's very important to choose which skills you'll learn now, when they're the hardest, and which you'll learn later, when they become trivial."

Kiro frowned, scribbling notes onto a piece of scavenged bark. The small, insignificant sun had risen to glory, shining down upon them with a light not so different from Paradise's. They were gathered around the same firepit as last night, but the wood had long since burnt to ash.

"There are certain skills, like mana manipulation, that anyone with enough sense will pick up first. I like to call these 'scalable skills', because they scale better with your cultivation level. In other words, they're just as easy or hard to learn no matter how strong you are, roughly speaking."

"Some others are tactics, alchemy," she winked at Kiro, "and swordplay, to an extent. On this world, we're going to focus on those skills, as well as getting you guys up to the Second Circle. And even though it might take an eternity to master these skills, you have to start somewhere. And that's today. Today, you take the first step in a journey of a lifetime. Today is your day zero."