New Pets

The caterpillar next to her seemed to have electricity running through it as it wiggled in excitement. A blue shimmering glow encased it as it immediately became enveloped in a chrysalis.

It took only moments for it to come crawling out again. Its wing, the colors were a stunning royal blue, outlined and dotted in black. It rubbed it's antenna on her finger, she could feel it's emotions clearly, thanks to the help of the contract, it was happy and thankful.

Delaina smiled and held it up at eye level, gently bopping it on her nose and said, "I think I'll call you Lily."

The little butterfly seemed ecstatic to hear she had given her a name, and flew around her head before landing on her shoulder.

The little guy seemed to find Delaina's shoulder the safest place in the world as it immediately decided to relax and cultivate.

Now that it had qi in it's dantian, it instinctively knew how to obtain more. But now that it was her pet… She used her qi to guide it through her butterfly's body and into her dantian, using the 7 Elements of Heaven Method.

Although it was not as good as the 10 Elements of Heaven Mantra, the butterfly was unable to cultivate the Mantra anyways because it's intelligence was only that of a two year old child, it couldn't mentally recite a Mantra.

The butterfly seems eager to cultivate the way it's master taught it to, and quickly got to work.

As a matter of fact, the technique that she had taught the cats and dogs was only the basic qi gathering technique; through the fingers, around the heart and into the dantian.

All methods must circle the heart. If what is circulating its qi does not have a heart, it will circle it's soul.

The 7 Elements of Heaven enters the body through the fingertips, circles the heart, then enters the heart and flows through all the blood vessels before returning and circling the soul.

This is the foundation for the Mantra, when circulating qi, you recite the Will of the Heaven, which is the mantra for The 10 Elements of Heaven.

The Will of Heaven can not be spoken casually as many gods will come after you to kill you if they deem you to be undeserving of the technique.

How each god defines 'deserving', though, is usually by if they would be a threat to themselves or not.

People cultivate much faster with the technique, so Delaina was certain that she would reach Realm 20 faster than she did the first time.

Lily the butterfly contentedly cultivated on her shoulder, she had reached the 2nd Realm thanks to the contract.

This was Lily's plan, she would have the animals cultivate first before signing a contract with a human, this would then allow the pet to teach the human how to cultivate using the method she had taught them.

The human would then be using the most basic qi gathering technique. Eventually, she could establish a school for pet training and cultivating, the thing she knew most about.

She could give talented people a better technique than the rest which would allow them to cultivate faster.

This way when the qi influx comes, she could place them at the edge of the forests to protect the common populace.

Of course, she wouldn't just leave people hanging, ready to die.

She was making the powerful people powerful and the vulnerable people protected. Plus she was making money.

It was a win-win-win situation.

Thinking about what to do for a moment, she decided to add another floor to her pet shop. Going to the store, she drove the moving truck she had bought and purchased bird cages, wood, metal chunks, fish tanks, pens, dirt, high-intensity lamps, animal feed, vegetable seeds, gardening tools, heaters and much more.

Driving it back home, she left everything on the first floor except for the wood and metal.

Using wind magic, she flew it onto the roof, but not before utilising a large illusion barrier around the entire building so that it wouldn't be seen by passers-by.

Manipulating it with her elemental qi, she took 3 hours to build a 5th story. Covering the front with a large blue tarp, people were unable to see that it was already finished. She quickly moved all the things in and dragged them up to the fifth floor.

She set everything up, fish tanks the size of 4 shoeboxes wide, and 2 tall were hanging on the wall that was inscribed with multiple strengthening runes. Each fish tank had a strengthening rune and enough space for an element gathering rune to be engraved on the bottom. They lined the walls on 3 different sides with fish tanks, although some were as big as a dresser.

There were more tanks this size in the middle of the floor, but were not filled with water, and were up on a platform.

There were also large pens taking up the entire right side of the room and bird cages hanging from the ceiling of the left side of the room and the floor had a slightly elevated platform, half of it was caved in and filled with water while the other side had dirt and grass seeds were quickly taking root

Happy, she grabbed the foggy orb and put it in her pocket before going to the breeding house.

When she got there, she did the usual thing of touching it with the orb to see what color it would glow and scribbling it onto her notebook to keep track.

She ended up with another 20 dogs and cats, 60 hamsters, 40 bunnies, 4 dozen fish, 10 toads, a large box of crickets, a dozen chickens, 2 roosters, a dozen ducklings and some mealworms.

The only reason why she was able to buy so many animals without raising suspicion is because a couple months ago, she had bought over a pet shop, she let the people who she had bought it from continue to work there as managers and simply took some of the money from them. She just said she was ordering these pets for said pet shop, and nobody suspected a thing.

Driving all of this home, she went through the process of attaching collars to the dogs, cats, bunnies, hamsters, chickens, roosters and ducklings. She simply didn't know how to mark the frogs as she would keep them all in the same place, and didn't think it was a big enough of a deal to worry over, and simply left them unmarked.

She hadn't checked the elements of the fish when she was at the store simply because that would have taken far too much time, so she had to check them now, one by one.

Fish of the water element were the most common, and so she had nearly an entire wall lined with simply water fish.

There were 2 fish per tank and each fish was the size of an adult's hand. She had fish for the corresponding elements: Lightning (2), Wood (6), Water (21), Fire (2), Wind (3), Metal (4), Earth (5), Light (3), Dark (2), mental (1) and, surprising enough, Shadow (1), which means they have an affinity, although small, with light and dark.

Placing the fish in their respective tanks, she carved an element gathering rune for each of their elements on the tanks and then a large barrier rune over each wall and a [keyed contain] rune and linked it up to the key she made for the dogs and cats.

After sorting through the other animals, she put them into their respective areas. The only annoying thing was the frogs because she had to carve 10 element gathering runes the exact same width apart stretching along the area, or else they would cancel eachother out or become useless because the elements wouldn't gather in the cage.

Sighing, Delaina looked up and saw the empty bird cages. She had originally wanted to get a variety of birds but the only breeding house around here didn't have any. Probably because birds were not very common pets.

Walking to her computer, she ordered 20 online and prayed for at least one of every element, although it wasn't very likely.