Bab 3: Ceremony of Attunement
Due to the village's proximity to the fire vein, the name it was bestowed was Firestone and while the village was not very large, being situated right next to one of the bigger roads, most of the villagers were rather wealthy.
Myra did her best to learn all she could about this world and it seemed rather obvious that she was totally lost on her own. Usually even a five year old child would at least know some of the basics of society, but Myra was lacking all of it.
It did not take long for the mother Yvonne, who seemed to love children a lot, to decide that until Myra finds out more about her biological family that she would live with them, effectively adopting the little girl.
Myra appeared just too pitiful and Yvonne did not want for the little girl to have to wander around without a place to belong to.
"We still have to let her go through the ceremony of attunement at some point. Maybe she can find out some more about her heritage" Ethan remarked happily and the others agreed, as they were also rather curious of the outcome.
"Ceremony of Attunement? What's that?" Myra asked, rather confused as she had no idea what they were talking about.
"It's a test about your aptitude for magic and it will look through your bloodline and things like that."
Myra just nodded, not sure what the outcome of such an assessment would be. True, most of her memories before she woke up and travelled the universe were clouded and would take time to return, but she still remembered her journey through the galaxy and still remembered creating this body with pure energy.
'Will this test see through my deception right away? What will they do if they learn about the truth?' Myra's thoughts quickly turned from simple questions to a deep seated worry and fear.
Telling her family about the truth though, scared her quite a bit. What if they would reject her? Myra didn't want to lose her new family already and thus kept the truth from them.
She didn't exactly lie, but it still felt like hiding something and made her feel slightly guilty.
"What happens if the results of this test end up strange?" she wondered about this the most, but how would she ask her family about it?
"Don't worry darling, no matter the outcome it will be fine. Even if you have no affinity for magic at all, no one will worry about it. Actually most people here have no affinity for magic."
Yvonne gave her a hug before picking her up completely. "Lynn, Ethan, why don't you help cleaning the dishes, while I clean up the old storage room so Myra has her own room as well?"
"Sure Mom." Lynn quickly agreed, while Ethan also joined her, with an unhappy face.
"Why do I have to do the dishes all the time?" She heard him mumbling quietly, but it didn't look like he would be really upset, more as if it was a common ritual to whine about doing the dishes.
--
The next days passed by quickly, with Myra getting used to a villager's life in Firestone. She got to know the people, helped her new parents with small tasks and even tried playing with the other children.
It quickly became obvious that she was a lot more mature than one would expect of a child of her age, or at least more mature than her apparent age.
Every attempt at measuring her age failed horribly, to the point where Myra even felt a little bit guilty.
"I give up." One of the village elders responsible for the measurement had no more ideas how to make this work. "It just shows me some strange numbers. This stupid tool must be broken! It seriously wants to tell me that you're not even two weeks old!"
Myra had a rough idea why all their attempts to find out how old she was would fail, but she could hardly tell them that she created this body on her own just recently.
'I'm sorry for your trouble.' she said in her mind and just gave the elder a friendly smile. She just couldn't tell them the truth.
As such, it was decided that Myra became 5 years old the day they found her. Not that she was really born on this date 5 years ago, but as no one could tell her real age or date of birth, it was still better than some other random date.
It was no surprise, to her family at least, that her ceremony of attunement would yield even more unexpected results.
--
There were several children of various ages gathered together, most of them were rather young and were accompanied by their parents or other family members. Myra was no exception there, as her whole family was sitting close by, waiting for her results.
The place of the ceremony was located a little bit outside of the village and it had several structures built just for the purpose of the ceremony. A ring of different colored stones, a little pavilion with a strange magical aura and others.
"Welcome to this season's ceremony of attunement!" one of the elderly people who supervised the gathering started a short speech.
"As most of you know, finding a suitable profession is not always easy. While it would not be hard to simply learn from your parents and follow in their footsteps, time has showed us again and again, that not only would we miss out on a lot of talents this way, but it might actually lead us to stagnation and people who are unhappy with what they are doing."
The elder looked at the kids one by one, pausing in his speech for a moment before looking at the parents and guardians. He then continued explaining the process and the reasons for this ceremony, mostly for the parents' sake, as the children could barely understand any of it.
"Let's go and have you take the first test. This is about your magical affinity."
"While your magic can be trained, once you reach a limit it will become a lot harder. It is still possible to improve beyond that point, but someone with a higher affinity will be able to reach a higher realm of power."
"Go stand in the middle of the circle and depending on your affinity the stones will respond to you in some way. If they don't you usually have no affinity for magic."
He then went on to explain more about the different levels of strength one could find. Usually one's magical power could be trained somewhat quickly up to their limit of their affinity and at this point it would be very hard to increase it by more than a single rank.
There were a total of ten ranks in the system used throughout the empire, also called realms or power grades, depending on who was talking about it, each had a color corresponding to it.
It started with white, then yellow, orange, red and violet as the well-known colors. Beyond that higher ranked colors were rarely seen and it went on with blue, green, earthly, grey and black.
For this ceremony, they only had measuring stones up to the violet realm though.
One by one the kids stepped into the circle. For the most part, the stones did not react to them at all.
The few kids who caused a reaction, would either have what they called a white or in some cases a yellow affinity. As a young boy entered and managed to get the orange stone to resonate, everyone was rather excited.
"We have another genius mage!" someone shouted and it took quite a while for people to calm down again.
Several kids had the white and yellow stones resonate, like a girl with yellow affinity, who was also highly praised.
Ethan sitting at the side could only huff in annoyance. As a future mage himself, he knew better than others that affinity alone would not make someone a mage, it would also require magical talent and training.
Calling someone a genius just because of some orange grade affinity seemed like a bad joke to him, especially as he himself had come close to a red affinity.
When it was Myra's turn, people were still fawning over the kids with orange and yellow affinities and tried to get in touch with their parents. Except for her family, not all that many people seemed to take notice.
It did not take long however for an eerie silence to take hold of the place, as more and more people became aware that something was wrong in the stone circle. Not one or two stones were starting to resonate and tremble.
Every single stone began to make a humming noise as power rushed into them. It took just a moment for all of the stones showing a slight tremor and then soon began shaking and trembling even more, causing the whole area to shake slightly.
When Myra noticed the first few little cracks becoming visible on these already overloaded affinity stones, she quickly decided to step out of the circle.
"Oh!" she mumbled and hoped she didn't completely ruin the stones with flexing a little bit of her power.
'Am I not supposed to use any power here? Maybe the stones are just designed to passively collect information on one's aura?'
There seemed to be chaos all around her with everyone shouting and discussing the result. "Can this really be true? Is the circle damaged? How can someone have such a high affinity?"
"Is this a genius seen once in a thousand years?"
"How could this be real, obviously there's something wrong with the stones, don't be a fool! Look they even show cracks."
Many did not believe in the results being accurate, even the supervising elder himself was a little bit doubtful, but decided to continue with the test anyways.
"Calm down everyone! The results are what they are, now stop disrupting the ceremony ... next!"
The remaining kids continued with their own tests, but no one really seemed to notice their results anymore. Even when another girl was found to possess an orange affinity, people quickly turned their attention back to Myra and her family.
Status Power Mingguan
-- Peringkat
Power 
-- Power
stone