Prana saturation was another interesting idea he wasn’t familiar with. It didn’t really make sense that mejai lost the ability to use magic when they saturated. Rather, wouldn’t it be the opposite? Something to look into later.
He took a seat on the sand and crossed his legs.
“What are you up to now?” Maiya asked.
“Sorry, but I need to concentrate for this. I’d appreciate it if you could stick around though. It might be a little dangerous.”
“What aren’t you telling me?”
“Nothing. Don’t worry about it.”
Maiya huffed, but he ignored her. His friend would watch over him as he did dumb things to his body, even if she disagreed.
And what he was about to attempt certainly was dumb, given the last time he’d done it, he’d blacked out. But he was smarter now. Over the past week, he’d refrained from experimenting with altering his blood flow. It’d taken every shred of discipline he could muster, but he’d managed it.
He’d used the time to steadily refine his ‘light touch’ prana control, as he called it. As the prana density built up within his body, it became harder to control as more and more of it wanted to escape into the air and ground. And that made for excellent training.
His finesse grew by leaps and bounds, as did his ability to influence smaller and smaller streams of prana, coaxing it to stay within his body with the gentlest of pressure. Before, he could only direct the main arteries within his body, but now even his digits were within his control.
The only time he’d released his grip over the prana in his body was when he slept. That undid a good deal of the day’s buildup, making it a constant—and losing—battle.
That’s why he’d prioritized maintaining the ability subconsciously. It hadn’t been as difficult as he’d thought. When his thoughts were solely occupied with preventing prana leakage at all waking hours of the day, his subconscious mind took the hint.
As the days wore on, he found that the ability became ingrained in his muscle memory. He hadn’t even realized when his subconscious mind had first taken over. He’d gotten distracted by something, breaking his active control over the technique. But instead of deactivating, the technique lingered on, continuing to prevent prana from dissipating.
After more practice, he’d even kept the ability active in his sleep. Of course, subconscious Light Touch—a Vir original—wasn’t as effective as actively maintaining the technique, but the inflection point had come just a couple of days ago. Thanks to his relentless hours of practice, the amount of prana that leaked out had steadily decreased, and that applied to both the active and subconscious variants. Both versions now prevented enough prana from leaking out that his body could maintain a headway against the leakage.
Which was to say that his body was now always topped up on prana, even when he wasn’t thinking about keeping the technique active. Though, he hadn’t bothered to squash all the leakage just yet. Retaining that final twenty or thirty percent took vastly more effort, for lesser gain. He had bigger things to worry about.
Like mastering the ability to direct prana within his body.
Maiya sat opposite him, gazing at him, looking as if she hoped to learn something. Without Prana Vision, he doubted it’d do her any good, but if that made her happy, he wasn’t about to tell her off.
Vir closed his eyes and looked inward. One downside to his newfound stamina was that his heart never seemed to pump as fast as it did before. Which, of course, hampered Prana Vision.
That would change now. Instead of gripping the prana in his neck with a death grip as he’d done on Bakura’s ship, he leveraged his newfound control to apply a far gentler touch, redirecting some of the blood bound for other areas of his body to flow through pathways that led to his head instead. He applied only the bare minimum of pressure, doing as little as he could to achieve the results he wanted.
And it worked. It worked so well, Vir could hardly believe it. He didn’t feel pain. He didn’t black out. Instead, the prana obediently followed his intent, traveling up through his neck and into his eyes.
The effect was immediate. Prana Vision flared brightly. Perhaps not the brightest it’d ever been—he wasn’t seeing any black prana in the ground—but there was always time for improvement. This was his first attempt, after all.
That could come later. There was a higher priority item he wanted to work on: learning his first Talent.
And he had a pretty good idea of how to do exactly that.
45LEAPS OF PROGRESS
The key lay in the concept of prana equilibrium. Prana wanted to stay at the same density everywhere. That was why his body leaked prana—because his body had a surplus and his surroundings were nearly empty. What would happen if he created a pocket completely empty of prana, within his own body? It stood to reason that whatever meager amount of black prana there was in the ground would be drawn into him.
But doing something like this required even more control than what he’d needed for activating Prana Vision. There, he’d done the bare minimum necessary to alter his blood flow into his eyes. Here, he’d have to do nearly the opposite. He’d have to go in with a heavy hand and evacuate all the prana from an area of his body… which meant evacuating the blood as well. Which sounded incredibly dangerous.
Thankfully, he didn’t have to do it for long. When Riyan had used Leap, prana had entered his body and powered the ability all within the blink of an eye. Not nearly long enough to do damage to his body.
Taking a deep breath, he looked over at Maiya, who peered at him intently. “Alright, I’m gonna give this a go,” he said, standing up.
He got into an athletic stance, as if he was about to lunge forward. Then he took control of as much blood as he could in his left leg and tugged.
The blood obeyed his command, with the majority leaving his leg. Vir sent a pulse of prana up to his eyes, causing Prana Vision to flare up. He still couldn’t see any black prana outside of his body, but he did see motes of Black Affinity prana enter his body through the soles of his feet… and got stuck there. He felt nothing, but he could see it.
And to his surprise, there was more prana entering his foot than he’d thought there would be. How far underground was he pulling prana from to get to this level?
He didn’t know, and that wasn’t all that relevant right now. Now that he had this surge of prana in his body, he expected something to happen… but it didn’t. What’s more, no matter how much he wanted the prana to go further into his body, it refused.
Vir immediately released the blood he’d held hostage from his legs, allowing it to return to its normal path, and fresh blood to refill his legs.
That was when he had his next flash of insight—the black prana that had been stuck in his foot now rushed into his body.
Of course, he thought. His blood carried almost all the prana in his body, and he’d removed most of it from his leg for this experiment. Which posed a conundrum. He needed blood to ferry black prana to his leg, but in order to pull prana from the ground, he had to evacuate his leg of prana—and thus blood.
Hang on a moment… Something didn’t add up. His body was pretty full of prana to begin with. Despite this, the prana he’d pulled from the ground had no issues entering his bloodstream.
Which meant his blood could handle even more prana… Perhaps only for a short time, or maybe for some other reason, but he could oversaturate his blood with prana. He was sure this was what happened to Riyan as well when he’d used the ability.