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Chapter 96- Aura Control
🕑 Added 2023-09-16 22:59:00 +0000 UTCArthur was taking a break, his feet resting inside one of the crystal lakes that had given this layer its name. The water was both cool and soothing and possessed properties that helped relax the mind. At least that’s what identify had told him, a skill he still needed to upgrade.
Elysium waters (Uncommon)- Water that has a soothing effect on the mind. Used in many alchemical procedures. Note- This water is only a replica of the real thing.
The item’s description raised so many questions, though Arthur didn’t let it concern him. Knowing whether or not the Greek mythological paradise existed would not help him with his task in any way. He’d been at it for days now and was halfway through his third, yet his progress left a lot to be desired. Alyssia had told him to expect such slow results due to his explosive aura growth and strength, but it didn’t really make him feel any better. Arthur sighed, closing his eyes as he tried to enter the meditative state Alyssia had taught him. It sounded suspiciously like yoga and was the only thing Alyssia had taught him that he’d excelled at.
The only thing period.
Something about letting him try things on his own first before she decided to tutor him personally. Apparently aura control was always taught like this in her home world. People came up with unconventional methods when they didn't know what they were supposed to do. Enough techniques had come out of that, some of them revolutionary, that it had become standard procedure to teach like this.
Meditation was... well, not bad. He was a professional at ignoring his problems and pretending like they didn’t exist, definitely not the correct way of going about it, but the method worked for Arthur. And if it wasn’t broken, he didn’t need to fix it.
You're base existence is as a soul. Strip away all the excess, and that's what you are. Everything on the system, from your stats and skills to your titles is a numerical intuitive representation of your soul. That’s why you might notice your physical appearance changing with your status, nothing too drastic, but enough that you notice something.
Arthur mulled over Alyssia’s words for the hundredth time. It was all stuff he'd already figured out, but hearing it put succinctly into words helped confirm things. There was probably so much more to it than Alyssia had told him, or probably even knew herself. If the soul and the body were so intrinsically linked, it reminded Arthur how impossible his dreams had been. Rize had been dead for around seven months now, which meant that decay and decomposition had already started. Even taking True Soul death out of the equation, her soul would have decayed far beyond repair.
Arthur quickly put a stop to that line of thinking. Breathe. Focus on breathing. In and out, in and out. Nothing but the flow of oxygen into his lungs and through his bloodstream. The release of carbon dioxide. These problems and worries were beyond his scope of control and there was nothing he could do about it now. The issue with Rize’s soul being irrevocably damaged was a non-factor now, in light of the things he now knew, and worrying about it would only serve a self-destructive purpose. Still, I wonder what I can do with my soul affinity. Healing souls should be possible, right? As long as they're not dead at least. Except that he still hadn’t been able to use a lick of soul magic. I need to fix my soul ASAP.
In and out. In and out. He tried to picture his troubles falling off of him like leaves during autumn, except it turned out he was more an evergreen than a deciduous tree, his concerns and anxieties stubbornly clinging to him like blood-sucking leeches. His next steps in taking an axe to entire branches of his metaphysical sense of self were decidedly NOT the way to go, and he quickly lost the little bit of serenity he’d managed to gain.
“For fucks sake!” He cursed, smashing his fist into the ground in frustration. His high physical stats in conjunction with the soft soil near the lake meant that his entire arm ended up buried in the mud due to his tantrum which only served to incense him further. Grumbling, he tried to pull his arm free but only ended up submerging his other from where he’d used it to brace himself against the soft earth.
He controlled himself.
He breathed in. And out. No matter how much he might want to, destroying the ground he stood upon would do little to assist him with his task of learning to control his aura. One that had been troubling him since forming Bhai Giya with Alyssia 24 hours ago. Or was it 48? He'd lost track of time.
Mostly due to the fact that Alyssia had been so ambiguous with her description of what he should be doing. Aura; a projection of your soul onto your surroundings, a feat that no one should be capable of until they gained a class unless they were specifically trained in the art like me. That's what makes your aura so terrifying. If you can master it, one day it’ll become your greatest strength. It sounded like great advice until you realised it told him absolutely nothing.
That much Arthur could at least understand. Aura was basically a means of dominating your surroundings or more aptly, a way of claiming the space around you as your own. There was probably, no definitely so much more to auras, but this was all Alyssia had seen fit to tell him, asserting once again that telling him too much might hinder his natural training pace with preconceived notions. She had, however, told him that those sufficiently versed in aura usage, could read others and glean information from them and that Arthur was pretty much an open book currently that was being narrated by David Attenborough.
The assignment Alyssia had tasked him with was apparently the most basic. Or as Alyssia had put it, Even a thunder-duck eventually figures this out. Well, it turned out that Arthur wasn’t as skilled as a thunder-duck. No matter what he tried, he couldn’t condense his aura, his every attempt at it so far resulting in nothing but failure and a throbbing headache.
It’ll probably take you years to truly master aura control, and we don’t have time for that. That's why you're going to have to have to learn to control the distance your aura affects. The smaller and more condensed it is, the more difficult it’ll be to read for others. Like jamming information on a smaller piece of paper. It gets scrambled. If you can bring it down to half a meter, you won't have to worry much until you meet someone above level 200.
Simple words and a simple explanation. The one thing it lacked was a description of how to get shit done. Whether by intention or not, Arthur wasn’t too sure, Alyssia had all but disappeared since giving him his target. No matter how much he searched for the Alverin woman, he couldn’t find her, only traces that she’d been in the area in the remains of cookfires and a few footprints. Arthur finally managed to free himself from the earth's grasp, through a combination of dexterity, technique and trial and error.
Mostly trial and error, but what did the means matter when you got the result you desired? Arthur really needed to change the way he handled things. He lay down on the ground and closed his eyes, a meditative pose he found suited him far better than the uncomfortable seating position Chinese movies depicted monks meditating in. Sitting with his legs crossed in such a weird fashion was a surefire method to put them fast asleep.
He opened his eyes and actively released the full potency of his aura, something that had become blessedly easy after the hundredth or so time. His first few attempts had only resulted in a splitting headache. This was something Arthur could at least say he now excelled in, and he marvelled at the nineteen meters his aura now covered, two more than his first successful attempt. Increasing his aura’s coverage sadly, was the exact opposite of what he was trying to accomplish, though he did feel a tinge pride of in his progress.
Arthur once again closed his eyes and attempted to compress his aura. If he was ever asked how such an experience felt, he’d describe it as trying to reabsorb shit once it left the rectum, quite a colourful description and frankly just as difficult if not more so. It was like trying to fit a few gallons of water in a tiny mug, a literally impossible task without causing spillage to occur, and that was exactly what happened to Arthur's aura.
It compressed down to eighteen meters for a mere half second before exploding outwards to reach 20 meters and then returning to its standard 19-meter diameter. Arthur wiped the sweat of his brow with the back of his hand. Though his aura exertions had taken him a half minute, it left him exhausted in a way few physical tasks could. Like spending an all-nighter completing maths homework that contained more letters than numbers. Arthur sighed in exhaustion. This was his nine-hundredth and-thirty eighth attempt. His nine-hundredth-and-thirty-eighth failure, and no matter how positive he might try to be, it grated on him.
Especially when he remembered Alyssia’s smug face when she described her own prodigious advancement speeds in learning aura usage. She probably had an actual fucking teacher instead of the bullshit advice she left me with, Arthur cursed internally. 'It should feel natural. Just go with the flow,' did not constitute proper teaching, and it was only the woman's disappearance that kept him from throttling her. Albeit she hadn't truly started teaching him yet.
Arthur sat up and looked around at the scenery. Maybe he was taking too many breaks, but he doubted the missed time would affect his learning speed much. In fact, he didn’t think he’d get very far even if he dedicated an entire month to learning aura compression. It had reached a point where he was starting to think that Alyssia was messing with him. There was absolutely no way she could expect results from him in three days. Not when he was somehow getting worse as time went on.
Getting to his feet, Arthur stretched languidly enjoying the blissful sensation of his spine popping into alignment. There were few things in the world as satisfying as cracking your back after a long time spent without movement. He strolled around the lake to get some blood flowing back into his legs as he thought of what he was doing so wrong. He had only one problem with his aura control, a simple one that he just couldn’t work around.
After so much time trying to master his aura, he had learnt to read it. Nowhere near as proficient of course as Alyssia who had spent years mastering the art, he could barely inspect his own aura, never mind anyone else's, but he was proficient enough to figure out why he was struggling so much with his aura compression. His aura was a projection of himself. Within it, he could sense his strengths and weaknesses, his ability to manipulate water, his talents in the healing arts, and even his forcefully awakened shadow affinity, which was represented as a skulking trait that lay hidden within his aura’s depths.
But just as he was still unable to use soul magic, he was unable to sense its presence within his aura. In his sphere of perception, it appeared as a blank spot, an… absence of something that he knew should be there but simply wasn’t no matter how much he might try to find it. Without even being able to sense its presence, affecting it in any plausible way was simply impossible. He couldn’t affect what his brain told him didn’t exist, in spite of all his attempts at persuasion that it WAS indeed there. He couldn’t deceive himself, it seemed, no matter how successful he might have been in doing so in the past.
Things pertaining to the soul were inviolable in every sense of the word. For now at least. After attempting aura compression another two times, Arthur decided to give it a rest. He was getting nowhere, and his most recent attempt had caused a backlash that left him dizzy and kneeling for minutes. Alyssaia hadn’t told him anything about an injury or permanent harm being a result of his specific training, but Arthur was pretty sure he’d find a way to break all known conventions and somehow cripple himself if he continued any further with aura manipulation today.
It was much better if Arthur used his time to learn how to use his magic properly, something he’d actually had some success in, instead of continuing down this fruitless pursuit any longer. Sitting on the ground, Arthur clenched his left hand, forming a natural absence of light within its centre, a shadow like the first time he had used magic to inflict himself with an injury, Arthur drew on his ether reserves, and poured the ethereal energy into his shadow bomb skill, 248 to be exact, a number that had been proven through trial and error to be able to get through his absurd investments into constitution and not harm him too badly. Completing that skill was another thing on his to-do list. Arthur released his magic, and a localised shadow bomb exploded within his clenched fist. A blast that could crack concrete in a half-meter radius was only able to cut about a half-inch into his flesh. Wincing, Arthur opened up his hand to see the gory mess his spell had caused. It wasn’t a pleasant sight, his entire palm crisscrossed with cuts that reached the bone in some places, a grizzly wound that would have probably made him faint from shock before the arrival of the system.
As things currently were, he barely registered the pain it caused, a mere annoyance that hindered his focus a little. Getting to this point, however, had taken a long, long time. Arthur’s smile was halfway between a grievance of pain and a smirk as he prepared himself once again to use some magic. It was time to do some regeneration. Without the system’s assistance.
