They’d rebuild, but it was a war of attrition. Aura may be free to have active, but extended upkeep didn’t come without cost. Even though no Essence was spent, a modicum of focus was necessary to keep the Aura effect in mind if the identity skewing effects were to remain. If Artorian faltered, it reset.
This caused him to flashbang the entire congregation as the Aura rebalanced itself, returning right back to a blinding sunspot. Between all this Essence education, Ember had seen fit to throw Artorian around if he got too distracted by things. Quite literally. If Artorian started getting fussy or out of balance from Essence issues, he was in for one full minute of combat training.
Against Ember. A person who did not believe restraint was necessary. She’d told him the first time, and never again, “Trial by fire.”
The entire event had been nothing but flashbacks to Irene tossing his butt all over that muddy arena. Even just one minute against the Blade of War was what weeks of grueling training did for an ordinary cultivator. The philosopher was a practice dummy for her Mana control, and his task wasn’t to win. It was to stay alive.
If he didn’t keep a healthy stock of fire Essence to repel her flame, he’d be extra crispy by day’s end. When Mana wasn’t on the menu, he’d get tossed a branch, or a training implement, or anything remotely resembling a spear. The Fire Soul would match the weapon provided to him, and school the academic in front of the entire grove.
Wood Elves had learned to dive out of the way when they heard the whistling noises of objects—or persons—*cough* Artorian *cough* flying through the air. Keeper Irene was nothing compared to the force Ember struck with. Irene also wasn’t a Mage, and Ember took advantage of every little weakness the old warrior exposed. He’d never been beaten into shape so quickly in his life.
Artorian’s strengths were nothing more than opportunities for Ember to show him that they weren’t enough. Starlight Aura let him heal, but that factored into Ember’s calculations. All it did was let Ember hit him more to compensate for the fast recovery.
If he attempted a technique that would waste Essence, he was slapped hard enough to only wake up the following morning. By the seventh time this happened, Ember had ripped an Oak out of the ground from sheer frustration, tossing it towards the horizon. She’d demanded that he infuse and rebuild his brain with Essence as soon as he was able.
If she had to deal with many more of those ‘rookie mistakes’ she’d start really hitting him. The girl was already cracking his bones with every touch, and she was going to hit him harder?
Building his Aura was, at worst, time consuming. The constant interactions with his leafy friends had provided him a branching understanding of how they worked with their own. Each of the Wood Elves had a slightly different method, but the baseline was all the same. These differing viewpoints allowed him to alter and refine his own Aura with a great deal of confidence.
Aura knitted and grew as ‘brain connections’, which was a topic so complex he’d felt like an absolute child during the explanations. His mentors had to use diagrams and pictures to get the idea across. For weeks, the topic went over his head completely. ‘Neurons and dendrites’ connecting in patterns meant to ‘self-reinforce’ and learn over time. All by themselves! Still, it at least followed a pattern he could follow. Loop, twist, loop, make a node, repeat.
Beyond what he needed to do with his brain to satisfy Ember, his Aura was still his main focus. When it had been halfway built, the parts that were ‘developed’ became more responsive than his raw Aura had ever been. Easily three times as efficient and speedy. Essence now moved through the built-up Aura near instantly. Unlike the nebulous Aura he had accidently ‘found’, he no longer felt the ‘breathing’ movement of the energy.
Instead, it was an intimate awareness that didn’t require his senses to inform him of success. The Essence was just in his hand when he wanted it to be there, even though it ‘went around the long way’ because of his new hookah cultivation aid.
Things were changing, and changing fast. For instance, the confusion of ‘convincing’ Essence had been cleared up. Mahogany had been able to provide the answer to that particular misunderstanding. It had even caused a chuckle to go around the grove, since it was an elementary explanation.
Young Elven children—untethered to a group-mind—had been brought to the circle and introduced, and Artorian mistook them for human children. Normal skin, normal playful behavior, and you could easily tell who the parents were based on what kind of trouble they got into. The youngsters were gathered up and given the explanation with Artorian, which he felt a small amount of sheepishness over.
With everyone present, the children showcased surprisingly good behavior. Unlike the small gatherings similar to town halls, this was a big meeting, and that caused a big discomfort. Stuck in the middle and at the forefront, anything the children did wrong would be judged by all present.
When Wood Elves were first teaching their saplings, they were taught not to force the energy. Rather, they were taught to befriend it, play with it, grow with it. Once an adult, the sapling established itself as the dominant, stable force in the system. The Essence no longer required convincing to do what the Elf wished. Merely willing it was sufficient, since Essence wanted to conform to the desires of the most stable source in its surroundings.
With a primer on how that mechanism worked, Artorian was frustrated by how long this had taken for him to learn. Even though he had irremovable corruption still lurking in containment circles, he’d reached a point where the Essence would naturally gravitate to his will rather than that of the corruption present. This particular lesson also taught him why corruption removal was paramount.
Removing it quickly was enticing, yet the known methods posed too great a risk. For the safest, newly discovered method, he needed to spend the same amount of time lancing corruption away as he’d done gathering it.
So… fifty years. That was a bitter medicine to swallow. The amount he had managed to remove wasn’t at all large in the grand scheme of things once he’d figured out the proper calculations. His most recent count showed corruption loss was slightly higher than what he gained. Even with his new techniques, he still drew corruption in while cultivating. The good news was that if he lived long enough, it would all be cleared away without threat of injury.
With the damage in his Aura from the weaponization event mended, progress on his Aura was going well, and proceeding in a stable way. If he made a mistake, or created a node in a less than optimal location… his mentors jumped him. The Elves had made something of a game at poking the flaws in his Blooming Presence, since it was something they all excelled at.
Still, this wasn’t a major issue unless they poked at his ‘Bloom’ with their nature Essence. That compound Essence always held the peculiarities of the specific tree trying to annoy him. Almost no Elven group used the same method of binding their Essence to a shape, design, or other technique. The minor differences had actually turned into a popular conversation topic, since they had never really needed to discuss the minutiae with others before.
Artorian’s eyes were of little help. Even if he saw the pattern details, he couldn’t understand them before the inevitable headache struck. When that happened, he was done for the day. Mental clarity was absolutely necessary for progression.
After another season of difficulties, Ember dragged him to a clearing, demanding he infuse his body with power. “You have enough to make this happen correctly and safely. Do it. You need improvement.”
Artorian fussed over the choice. “I’m plenty clever! A few setbacks are normal when learning new things. I’m fi~i~ine.”
The Mage refused to hear a word of it. “Your mind is burdened; you need it free and focused.”
Artorian threw his hands in the air, but relented and laid on his back under a cozy canopy. Apparently, there were going to be some… unpleasant after-effects to deal with. This particular ‘improvement’ was going to drain the living abyss out of his
Essence stores. Granted, rank was irrelevant for his needs, so dropping from the high Ds down to the low Fs was not that important to him. It just made him feel vulnerable, and it wasn’t the first time that had happened.
An ordinary cultivator screamed in defiance at the losses such a drop in rank would bring. Survivability tanked, and his available combat power would be much reduced. He’d have avoided this much longer had it not been for the crowd he was surrounded with. A few hundred Elves were building Oak’s grove into a proper community, and the short-fused Mage made for a convincing support system.
Especially when the support system chased you with fireballs.
Chapter Twenty
‘Infusing’ was an… unpleasant experience. Artorian needed to physically fill the relevant cells with Essence, but rather than healing or restoring them, it was for the purpose of replacing them.
Artorian’s eyes hurt just thinking about it. He peeked around himself for a moment. Ember held a stick in one hand, and the other pressed to her hip. He wasn’t wiggling out of this… or… was he? The stick lit on fire.
Well… maybe no escape this time. Baobab winked at him while he sat in a lotus position. “You can do this, High Human. We’ll be here if something goes awry. Our fiery friend is merely impatient since your mind is hampering your progress. I heard the original plan was to have your Center solidified before any ‘infusing’ was done. But… plans change.”
Artorian grumbled, but hopped into his Center with all the glee of a child sliding down a pole just to cheer himself up. When his imaginary feet hit the proverbial ground, he knew he didn’t want to go through with this today. He wasn’t ready for the pain.
Conveniently, he thought of something clever that would delay the inevitable.
Ember had once said that the three different Aura parts merged into one when becoming an Ascended. This had the philosopher questioning things. Did she mean that these supposed Aura separations weren’t all the same thing in the first place? Were they divided by a physical boundary? Since it was Essence and not meat that he needed to manipulate, he had to see if his initial hypothesis was true. Especially since he was only aware of external Aura.
“I’ve got a question.”
Ember growled at him, “You’re driving me up the tree with all your questions.”
The old philosopher remained calm even as his beard began to singe. “The man who asks a question may be a fool for a minute, but the man who does not ask is a fool for life. I have to infuse anyway, why not tackle this now?”
He could feel the Mage’s glare, as his skin actually heated up where she was staring. “I want to try something.”
Ember held her tongue, knowing this was going to be an awful, awful idea. She was just going to have to sit through this as he went forward with trying to apply another insane theory. “You know what? Fine. It’s fine. Go for it. I’m not mad. It’s not like this is important for actual development.”
The Mage softly smiled with all of her teeth showing. Clearly ‘not mad’.
“Oh good! Don’t mind if I do, then!” Many wise Wood Elves said nothing, though they took several quiet steps away from the oblivious Human dancing on the edge of oblivion.
The hypothesis Artorian wanted to tackle concerned the nature of Aura. He’d explained it to a few Elves, but achieved little aside from giving them a serious headache. Fair turnabout for when they poked his Aura nodes! While his questions made sense to him as an academic, everyone else just looked at him as if he had finally gone senile.
Artorian believed that consistent rules must be at play. When a person is born in an Essence-laden environment, their bodies include that Essence as part of the basis of their makeup. It becomes an inescapable thing that the body then becomes dependent on Essence, as otherwise people would not suffer Essence deprivation.
Had there ever been a person born without Essence? They would likely be incapable of doing anything with Essence, as their makeup did not include it. He held the idea that they would also not be dependent on Essence for survival!
A person without the energy cannot become aware of it, as one needed the space of a Center already present in order to do something with Essence. This premise led to a more… complicated idea.
If Aura connected with the body at a certain point, ‘becoming a Mage’, then it must in some measure be connected beforehand. A kind of network that remained invisible and out of reach until certain conditions were met. This type of discovery was something all cultivators eventually encountered.
Putting his power where his mind was, he decided to test it his hypothesis. Rather than press his external Aura outwards, as Ember tended to do, Artorian instead pulled and shifted it inwards. The individual zones of his Aura brushed and overlapped across one another as he did so.
It made him instantly and grievously ill. The complete lack of external Aura coating his skin made each brush of the breeze as painful as the cut of a knife. His body was already too sensitive and frail to exist in the world without that constant protective coating.
Just fixing the problem he had brought upon himself took a few hours, and the shock he’d received forced the Elves to squirrel him away in a hollow to return to normal human standards. He went over the process in his mind—where had he gone wrong?
At first, the overlapping Auras had fought one another. They weren’t supposed to occupy the same space! Rather, they weren’t supposed to occupy that same space yet. His bones had electrified, his muscles frayed, and his skin had endlessly crawled until the Wood Elves found the right person to help the ailing High Human.
Dimi-tree to the rescue!
He was an unnaturally tall crafter Dwarf ferrying poultices and potions. It wasn’t the hammer-toting leather apron-clad man’s normal profession, but his reputation of being ‘able to fix everything’ forced him to saddle up and prod the stick people out of the way on his path to the patient. “Move, Elf!”
Essence wasn’t able to solve this problem and Ember was being… stubborn. Something about the human ‘learning his lesson’. So, well-crafted mixtures became the go-to, and who knew drinkable concoctions better than Dwarves?
The eight-foot-tall, auburn-haired smith that looked like two normal-sized Dwarves stacked atop one another kicked Oak out of the hollow with a deft boot on the rump. The trickster tried to offer another ‘special blend’ for usage, but the Dwarven all-rounder wasn’t having any of it. “Unacceptable!”
Applause accompanied Oak’s screams along her lengthy flight path, though she was saved by her pink puffball clouds just before impact with Big Mo. Five Elves each held up a bleached chunk of bark with a charcoal number on it. They judged the height and distance on a score from one to ten, since Oak-punting had become something of a sport over the last season.
Two sevens, a three from the snooty judge, and two eights tallied up a final score of thirty-three. Dimi grumbled under his breath upon glancing at the score. His deep tone was despondent; he’d do better next time. “So close to my high score.”
Artorian’s body and external Aura cooled off after drinking a stiff ‘potion’ that tasted conspicuously like titan’s foot rum. After being gut-punched by the ‘healing’ salve, his overlapping Auras begun mixing not as oil and water, but as a pleasant stew.
As a welcomed surprise, Artorian’s external and body Auras sterilized certain impurities in one another that even the Elves hadn’t noticed until the mixing began in earnest.
Ember shrugged as if that was a normal outcome. Dimi barked at her, “Would it have hurt to tell someone that would happen, Fire Soul?”
“There should be no issues.” Ember shrugged nonchalantly. “He can’t combine anything; this should help his fine control later. It will also make him start listening to me.”
Relaxing and returning to equilibrium, Artorian’s external Aura extended past the outer edge of his skin as was normal. Relief washed over the crowd. Artorian coughed and looked around, “For whoever is writing this down, in addition to
my external Aura, I now also feel my body Aura as well. I’d say control is at the speed I normally have with Aura.”
Two theories tested and proven; what a joyous day! That there had been a body Aura layer at all was cause for celebration! When some Elves tried it, moving Essence through their body Aura layer was like pouring water into sand and hoping it came out at the bottom. Not using the Aura layer meant they used the body directly, as they had been all along. This showed that Aura did have three individual fields that corresponded to the body. The inner Meridian field, the middle body field, and the external Aura field.
“Also, Ember. It appears that you are wrong. I was able to combine two of my Auras!” The Essence that moved through Artorian’s now combined Aura layers turned the ‘sand’ into ‘pebbles’, allowing ‘water’ to go through more easily. Unfortunately, there was an… unintended side effect as he felt queasy. “Oh… oh dear. I think I did something very bad.”
Artorian thought he’d felt ill before. He’d been wrong. Due to the rebalance, all his internal organs had decided to start shutting down as his body and meridian Auras shifted out of sync. Apparently a partially combined Auric body was a big no-no. Ember was furious when he had not tried to stop it, and the Elves simply didn’t believe it when he kept repeating that he had forcibly combined only two of his three Auras. The joined Aura overwhelmed the Meridian Aura. Sending Essence spiraling along his body through improper channels.
Hawthorn and Birch had tackled their human posthaste. Abyss with the hard landing! They were fully aware of his organs failing from such a disastrous, sudden, and intense change. Artorian thought he’d been just fine… at first.
Then it felt like he was drowning on the inside. Unable to breathe as his left arm went numb and heart beat irregularly. Epidemic internal failure was no joke, and he belched out blood as groups of Elves held him down with triage teams. Groves with healing gifts jumping out of standby. Unfortunately for Artorian, that meant Oak was present.
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