Though he had no basis for it, Vir simply couldn’t shake the awe-inspiring image of healing rapidly during a fight—possibly even closing up mortal wounds.
He’d had a few thoughts on how to accomplish that. The technique relied on moving blood—and thus prana—in a very specific pattern. He didn’t understand the principle behind it, only that this particular pattern dramatically boosted his body’s regular healing mechanisms, clotting and closing wounds faster than normally possible. It also gave him more vitality, as if he’d supersaturated his body with prana.
There was more. The faster he moved his blood, the more effective it was. He’d already reached the limits of how quickly he could safely channel blood and prana with his current body, so that part wouldn’t pose a problem.
Likewise, expanding his blood vessels was a skill that had become very familiar to Vir after mastering Empower. He never stopped practicing, even after learning the ability. Now, it took mere days to expand his larger pathways. The smaller ones only took hours. Doing so came with its risks, but he was well past playing things safe.
Vir took a deep breath and started with the smallest pathways on his back, expanding only those used by Parai’s technique.
The whole time, he kept a keen eye on his body’s Ash prana with Prana Vision. Because prana was locked to blood, if he did rupture a small pathway, Prana Vision would be the first to tell him. Any leakage where it shouldn’t be meant something had gone wrong.
Vir took his time, carefully nudging the pathways open bit by bit, allowing more blood to flow through them.
Meaningful expansion would take time, but even a small improvement would tell him whether this strategy bore fruit.
Once he’d completed, he activated Parai’s technique, sending blood flowing faster and faster.
With no wounds to heal, the technique did little apart from tingle and make him feel full of life, but there was no denying it, his blood now cycled slightly faster.
Yes!
From now on, he’d work on expanding his pathways during every waking moment until he entered the Ash.
While pathway expansion was a slow process, it wasn’t his only idea. Cycling blood faster was good, but ultimately, Vir suspected it was the total amount of cycled prana that determined the ability’s efficacy. In which case, supersaturating his blood before cycling it ought to boost the skill as well.
Of all the ideas he’d had, this was among the safer ones, and so Vir boldly pulled prana out of his feet, creating a suction that drew Ash prana from the ground into his legs. Carefully guiding the supersaturated blood up his legs into his back, he cycled the blood according to Parai’s technique. The result was instantaneous—the tingling sensation grew stronger, and his sense of vitality soared.
If only I could do this to my arms and legs!
Empower, Leap, and High Jump flooded his limbs with prana. Parai’s technique cycled prana according to a pattern.
Could it be that my existing Talents and Parai’s technique are related?
Rather, Leap and Empower now felt like a brute force application—akin to an amateur bashing away at a sculpture with crude tools. Parai’s technique merely took that prana and channeled it in a more efficient manner, aligning the blood flow to maximize the effects of the prana like a master would.
No, that wasn’t quite right. If the Talents he knew were the beginner version, then Parai’s channeling technique would be an intermediate step at best. What really excited him was decoupling prana from blood. That would allow him to cycle prana through his body as rapidly as he wanted—almost like the electricity the Pagan Order used for their non-magical lights. Unfortunately, Vir couldn’t be sure if that was even possible, or if it was merely a delusion on his part.
Working on the assumption that Parai’s channeling technique was an evolution of his existing augmentation Talents, he flooded prana into his legs as he would when using Empower. Then, instead of triggering the ability, he allowed the prana to dissipate.
When activating Leap, High Jump, and Empower, prana selectively filtered into certain muscle groups. He’d learned early on that channeling prana into certain muscles yielded far better results than others.
What if I use that as the foundation, and apply the pattern on just those muscles?
There was a certain form to Parai’s technique. Almost like the runes inscribed within magical orbs—the overall structure was both geometric and beautiful in a way. It reminded Vir of the prana lines in Valaka Amara. At the time, they appeared to serve no purpose other than being beautiful, but now Vir wondered whether their form actually supported their function.
The structure made it simpler for Vir to copy the general form. The details were another matter entirely. Parai’s back technique had blood travel along tiny pathways, and Vir had found in the memory vision that the technique failed to function very well unless most of those smaller pathways were intact.
Regardless, he began with the larger pathways since they were easier, moving the blood in his calf muscle according to Parai’s technique.
The first issue he hit was that the pathways in his leg didn’t match those of his back. At all. Which meant replicating the technique was impossible.
Instead, Vir sought to preserve the overall form of the circulation path, even if the exact details weren’t quite correct. To do this safely, he first had to omit smaller parts of the pattern from his back technique one by one, analyzing which omissions caused the ability to cease functioning, and leaving out only the ones that had a small impact on its efficacy.
After many dead ends and backtracking, he finally had a simplified version of Parai’s technique that was only about two-thirds as efficient, but less than half as complex.
Now comes the hard part.
From experience, he’d learned that moving blood in a localized region along smaller pathways usually bore little risk. It was the experiments near his heart and head that could kill him. But even if it didn’t kill him, the pain of forcing blood where it didn’t want to go wasn’t anything to dismiss.
Vir gritted through the pain, aborting his attempts when his body refused to do what he asked.
Slowly, just as he’d done in the memory vision, he carefully molded the circulation of his leg’s blood to Parai’s pattern, copying over one detail at a time, modifying it as little as possible to work with the blood pathways already there.
He augmented this by expanding some of the paths to better fit the technique, and after several hours, managed something that more or less resembled the pathway he used on his back.
Dunno what it’ll do… or even if I’m about to destroy my leg.
Vir didn’t have the luxury of convalescing if he did injure something. Then again, neither did he have the luxury of entering the Ash without every advantage he could muster.
Gritting his teeth, he went for it, channeling a trickle of his body’s own prana into the pattern.
He’d been fully prepared for agonizing, debilitating pain. Nothing of the sort happened. In fact, nothing much happened at all. His muscle behaved as normal. Vir tried channeling more prana through. Then even more.
Something was wrong. He was channeling nearly as much prana through his calf muscle as he did for his back, yet he felt only the barest tingle from his legs.
Instead of injecting even more prana, Vir analyzed his blood circulation with Prana Vision.