Of course, there’s nothing like… that?
Except there was. Decoupling prana flow from blood flow.
Vir had first gotten the idea at Balindam, when he’d witnessed the Pagan Order’s non-magical light—what they called electricity. It had always remained just an idea. He’d never been sure if it could be done. Not until Ashani outright asked him why he wasn’t doing that.
If only it were so easy, Vir thought, idly willing prana to decouple from his blood. Yes. Just like that. Transferring prana across blood cells would be so…!
Something felt different. Strange. Vir frowned in confusion at his own body. Then his jaw dropped.
He was doing it!
Prana surged freely through his body, liberated from his blood. It felt similar to taking control of his pranites, except this prana had no weight to slow it down. It moved as fast as his mind could control.
And it’d taken nothing more than a thought.
How? Vir thought incredulously.
Hadn’t he done exactly that dozens of times prior? If it was this easy…
The truth dawned on him.
Pranites. It has to be!
Ashani’s pranites had been flowing within Vir’s body for weeks now. They’d healed several major injuries, and Vir suspected they were active behind the scenes, too.
Healing. But not restoring him as he was.
Vir didn’t know why he never registered it. The pranites wouldn’t have known about Vir’s body composition. They were Imperium constructs. Created by the race of gods—for themselves.
The pranites weren’t simply healing him. They’d altered his body into the physiology of the gods.
The realization washed over Vir like a wave. He couldn’t prove it, of course. Not without Ashani confirming. But if true… What did it mean? Were the pranites only changing his body? Or were they altering more? Like who he was?
I don’t feel any different, though, Vir thought. His hunch told him they weren’t altering his identity, and his hunches rarely led him astray in the past. Still, the tiny machines had certainly done something to his body. Perhaps restoring it to its ideal state?
The Imperium denizens in Ashani’s memory sequence looked nearly identical to humans. Although humans had never learned to decouple prana from blood. Vir had seen records of mejai who’d tried.
He also wondered how demons differed from humans and from the Imperium race.
Vir’s skin was still the same hue, and he felt as healthy as ever. Prana surged within him, making him brim with vitality.
While there were no doubt other changes, Vir could ask Ashani more about that when she awoke. The Current, as Ashani had called it, offered him so many possibilities that it made him giddy. For now, he concentrated on increasing the current in his fingertips, moving prana according to Parai’s Barrier pattern, only in reverse, to pull prana into him.
It didn’t work. Or rather, it did, but it felt like the pattern was now fighting itself, with some parts attracting, while others repelled.
Does being unbound from blood break the principle that allowed the old pattern to work?
Vir couldn’t know. He did discover that changing the pattern was far less an ordeal than before. In fact, he could alter it as he wished, feeling no pain at all.
After trying various patterns, he found the simplest one—a basic loop—functioned best. Vir wasn’t complaining. Loops were far easier to control than complex patterns, especially in numbers.
He supplemented this with another loop current in his palm, hardly believing the amount of attraction force his hands now generated. The palm pulled, and the fingertips directed.
I can do this! he thought, taking control of this new ability.
He upped the flow, cycling prana faster and faster. Unlike before, when his body had burned out from moving around so much of it, no such issues bothered him this time. Either Prana Current simply didn’t cause burnout, or the limit was far higher.
It wasn’t the only limit that had been raised. The rate at which the magical energy moved through his body boggled his mind. There wasn’t much blood at all in his fingertips, and yet the attractive force sucked in more prana than his palms had before.
With ten finger points, directing prana into the orb became more tenable, though it was still far from easy. Vir concentrated single-mindedly on the task, guiding the energy away from the sensitive patterns and funneling it into the ones that soaked it up.
The issue was one of quantity—there were dozens of patterns within the orb. No matter how fine his control, some prana still leaked into the filled inscriptions, stressing them.
As he increased the current and upped the flow, the problem only grew worse. At this rate, he’d break the orb. To combat that he doubled the number of current loops in his fingers, which doubled his control of the prana.
Simple though they were, maintaining twenty at once took incredible concentration. On the plus side, he pulled prana at a rate unlike ever before, surging so much it became visible. At this rate, he doubted he’d need to keep up the effort for long.
Unfortunately, the more of the orb he filled, the more inscriptions saturated. Which in turn, forced him to keep redirecting the flow in an endless game.
The game might’ve been endless, but Vir was more than happy to play it.
The hours passed, and one by one, the inscriptions filled. Despite his best efforts, Vir’s charging rate slowed. He tried forming even more currents to shift the prana flow, but there was a limit to how many his mind could handle.
He reached it… and exceeded it. Were it only for a moment or two, all would have been fine. But he’d been concentrating for hours. He caught it too late.
Prana surged into an already-full inscription… and the orb cracked and shattered.
“Damn you to Ash!” Vir roared. All that effort, wasted. And now he had one less orb for Ashani. Only two remained. One empty one, and Ashani’s partially filled core.
Vir closed his eyes, taking a long, deep breath. Then he meditated.
When he tried again, he’d need his mind to be right. This wasn’t a task that could be rushed. It didn’t matter if it took days. He’d endure.
He was so close, he could taste it. He wasn’t about to fail again.
46IMPERIUM FABRICATOR RIBBON
Vir took his time, spending the next days alternating between charging the orb and taking breaks to cycle prana, sleep, and eat.
Though charging Ashani’s core took a toll on his mind, it was the prana cycling that left him exhausted. He’d wanted nothing more than to spend every waking hour he had working to revive the goddess, but he knew from experience that his attention would eventually slip. When it did, the orb would crack.
He was down to two cores. He couldn’t afford to make mistakes.
And so, he rested, ate, and took breaks regularly.
Just that taking breaks didn’t sit right with him. Not when Ashani’s life was on the line. So instead, he used those hours to expand his prana capacity beyond the ambient density.
At least the pain took his mind off the guilt. How would he explain that two of her precious wolves were now dead because of him? That he’d ignored his promise to her and delved into the Yaksha’s lair? Only success would make those sacrifices worth it.
Especially since those sacrifices had brought about personal gains for him.
As he’d discovered, a single Prana Current loop running around the perimeter of his body worked far better than Parai’s reverse Barrier pattern to attract prana. It confirmed his theory that Parai’s techniques, while both beautiful and complex, were still inferior to Prana Current. His ancestor had been forced to move his blood to move his prana. Vir was no longer bound by that restriction.