The look of surprise on Riyan’s face filled Vir’s veins with catharsis.
Riyan aborted his attack, killing his momentum. But Vir had already committed. He dove through the air, straight for Riyan.
Realizing Vir was on a collision course with him, the man did the only thing he could. He cheated.
Riyan Leaped away, leaving Vir sailing straight at an empty post.
He could’ve recovered. He might have thrown his katar away and grabbed the post. He might have twisted his body and somehow stepped onto it.
He did neither. He crashed spectacularly into the post, his arms doing little to protect him. Then he tumbled onto the sand.
Riyan loomed over him. “What happened?”
Vir looked up at him, cradling his wounded forearm. “Do that again,” he said. “The Talent you just used. Do it again.”
Riyan cocked a brow, clearly expecting a different reply. “Leap? You have seen it before.”
“Humor me. Please?”
The Ghost of Godshollow shrugged, then activated his Talent. To Vir’s eyes, it looked like he’d simply disappeared and reappeared a short distance away, but the grains of sand that had Riyan kicked up told a different story. He’d moved really, really fast. Inhumanly fast.
But that wasn’t what made Vir’s eyes pop.
“Are we done here?” he asked his mentor.
Riyan nodded, setting a Heal Skin orb against his forearm, repairing most of the damage from his earlier injury. “You have come far, boy. But you’re still green. We will duel twice a week from now on, and I expect you to grow and perform at a higher level with each consecutive fight. Do not disappoint me.”
With those words, he left the training dome, leaving Vir alone to reflect on their duel. He wasn’t angry or frustrated at his loss. Far from it.
Because he’d just seen something. Something that couldn’t possibly be, and yet clearly was. Something Riyan had outright denied—yet was true.
The man said Talents didn’t use magic—had said it so confidently that Vir never even thought to question it. And yet, Prana Vision showed a steady stream of Earth Affinity prana leave the ground and enter his body through the soles of his sandals, flaring brightly the moment Riyan Leaped.
The realization crashed upon Vir with the weight of a Godhollow.
“Talents aren’t gifts from the gods!” Vir whispered. “They’re magic. Earth Affinity magic!”
He looked down, deep into the earth which overflowed with prana. His blood circulation wasn’t quite enough to show him the black prana that lurked down there. But he knew it existed. Perhaps only in tiny quantities, but it was there.
And so it stood to reason he could tap into it, just the same as Riyan had.
Vir plopped down onto the sand, crossed his legs, and began to meditate.
42EQUILIBRIUM
Only a few minutes remained before Vir’s heart stopped pounding in his chest, dulling the effects of Prana Vision. Settling down on the warm sand of the training dome, he got to work, determined to use every moment he had to its fullest.
He thought back to what he’d just learned. When Riyan activated the Talent Leap, Vir had clearly seen Earth Affinity prana being sucked from the ground into his body. The prana had then pooled within his legs, flaring brightly. And then Riyan lunged forth with inhuman speed. When he’d finished, the prana in his leg was nowhere to be seen.
It had all happened so fast, but Vir figured he’d start slow. First, he needed to get the prana into his body, and that was where he ran into his initial hurdle—there was no prana. Or, there was, but there was so little that he couldn’t even see it unless Prana Vision was at full capacity.
He understood from prior experience that the black prana only showed up underground, or in the ocean. There wasn’t a shred to be seen in the air, so Vir reached out blindly with his will, attempting to seize motes of black prana from the sand below in the same way he’d done with the prana within his neck.
It didn’t work. No matter how much he exerted his will, nothing happened. It could’ve been because there simply wasn’t any prana down there to begin with… Perhaps he wasn’t pulling from the right place. Maybe he needed to target the prana more accurately—but being unable to actually see the prana posed a problem.
Maybe his approach was doomed from the start.
Vir mulled over his options, staring idly at the black prana that continued to leak out of his body into the air… and into the ground.
Hang on a sec… He didn’t need to find prana underground! He had it within his own body, steadily leaking out. He could simply grab onto that and yank it back in. Of course, even if he did, it’d be a tiny trickle of prana, whereas Riyan had sucked in a torrent to perform Leap.
Well, it was a start. And he could at least see these motes of prana as they left his body, though they disappeared from Prana Vision’s sight after they’d traveled a mere handspan into the ground.
Vir aimed at one of those motes… and pulled.
And pulled, and pulled, and got nothing. He tried again, this time tugging at the prana before it left his body. It responded just fine. Yet the moment it left him, he lost control of it entirely.
Tanya’s words echoed in his mind. She’d said it could take over a year to learn how to control prana. Time Vir didn’t have. Then again, she was talking about manipulating prana in the air, while Vir was trying to pull it from the ground.
The woman hadn’t even mentioned ground prana, though that made sense if he thought about it. She claimed only six affinities existed. If she didn’t know about Earth prana—which, together with Shadow and black prana, were the only affinities within the ground—then she couldn’t possibly be aware of prana existing underground.
Vir punched the sand. Another dead end. And supposing he did find a way to pull black prana into his body, would it be enough? Black prana wasn’t present anywhere near the quantities of Earth prana. While it felt more potent to his senses, that was pure guesswork. For all he knew, it may not be enough to power Talents at all.
But this wasn’t all a waste of time. He’d actually done something interesting, albeit inadvertently. He’d successfully yanked black prana back into him, essentially stopping the mote of prana from leaking out.
That was just a single mote, and thousands of motes left his body every second. Vir’s curiosity was piqued. Which meant there would be no stopping him until he’d had his fill.
The last two times he’d taken control of his prana, he’d blacked out. Then again, he had stopped blood from flowing into his head, and then tried to force it where it didn’t want to go. Not the brightest idea, in hindsight. This time around, he used a much lighter touch on a much less important limb—the tip of his finger—gently nudging the mote of black prana back into the blood from which it leaked.
The mote remained there, coursing through his body along with his blood. Vir tried it again and reproduced his earlier success. It wasn’t hard… it just wasn’t all that useful when literally thousands more motes leaked out continuously. He started shoving multiple motes of prana back into his body as they left, turning it into a kind of game. One where he tried to see how many he could put back before he lost them forever. He soon learned that this was not a game he’d ever win. At best, he could stuff a handful of motes back at once, which was a drop in the ocean. And to do even that, he had to split his attention half a dozen different ways, all while juggling motes of prana at the same time. It did not scale well.