“I suggest focusing on Leap, High Jump, Empower, and Blade Projection. The first two are self explanatory. Empower increases the weight and speed of a strike, and Blade Projection is one of my favorites. As for rarer ones, Shadow Blend is highly coveted. It allows one to melt into the darkness, becoming invisible—so long as they do not move.”
Several sounded pretty understandable to Vir, and he had some ideas on how to accomplish them… all except for two. Shadow Blend would be incredibly useful, though he had no clue how to even go about learning something like that.
“Blade Projection?” he asked. That one seemed more doable.
“Some things are better shown than told,” the man said, producing a shortsword from under his robe. Why did he carry a sword in his own home? Because he was Riyan, of course.
Their instructor took a combat stance and swiped into the air, aiming for the side table next to the sofa.
“Did you see it?” he asked.
“See what?” Maiya said. “All I saw was you slice at the air—oh.”
One of the ceramic cups on the table cracked in half, despite never having been struck by the edge of the blade.
Vir narrowed his eyes. He’d sent blood to his eyes in anticipation, so Prana Vision had been active while the man performed his slash. He had seen something. A blade of Earth prana had extended past the edge of his blade, striking the cup.
He didn’t know how to accomplish such a thing. Riyan’s prana had clearly extended past the confines of his body to Empower the blade. Every time Vir tried to grasp prana outside, he’d failed. Clearly, Talents didn’t quite follow the same rules as orb-based magic. Tanya herself had said that mejai had to hold orbs to charge and trigger their spells, yet Talents broke that rule.
The big question now was whether he ought to reveal what he knew. With enough effort he felt confident he could convince Tanya that his ideas about Talents using magic had merit. Especially if he managed to learn new Talents in quick succession.
But what would he gain from it? Past Riyan and Tanya, what ramifications would it have if this knowledge became widespread? Would he be revered? Or would he be hunted? It could very well break the foundation of humanity’s understanding.
No, best to keep this close to his heart for now. He’d tell Maiya of course, but since she couldn’t use Earth or Black Affinity prana anyway, it likely wouldn’t help her much.
Vir would have to think for himself from now on. He really couldn’t take any existing knowledge as fact anymore.
Because if everyone was so wrong about there being only six affinities, and if they were wrong about Talents, he had to wonder… What else were they wrong about?
46APEX PREDATOR?
Vir glared at the enormous log about to smash into him. With a deep breath, he jumped into the air, sailing high above the ram, and effortlessly bypassed the obstacle, albeit probably not in the way Riyan planned.
His knees shuddered from the impact when he landed on the other side.
High Jump was the second Talent he’d learned, after Leap. It had come easily, as the ability was almost identical to Leap. After gathering prana within him—the hard part—instead of focusing his intent on darting forward, he merely positioned himself to jump up. Now, he could easily jump as high as most of the buildings in Brij.
In fact, the two Talents were so similar that Vir wondered why they even had different names. The underlying activation principle was identical, except he shunted the prana into slightly different muscles and crouched a bit differently. Apart from that, it was just a matter of ‘willing’ himself to either move up or forward, altering the amount of prana used.
The light of the sun had long given way to darkness, and the Magic Lamps embedded into the walls had flickered to life hours ago. With a long day of effort done, he hopped onto the wooden pole that led down to the beginning of the course, landing softly on the sand.
Wiping the sweat off his brow, he departed the training dome for the warm bliss of the grotto, grimacing as he showered off and slipped into the tub. Grimacing not only due to pain and soreness, but because he’d been forced to use a Talent in the training dome.
While perfecting Leap, he’d run into a terrible problem. Consecutive usage of his Talents depleted the prana in that area. His recently honed Prana Vision only confirmed what he felt. There was hardly any black prana left within the dome, and from what he could tell, it did not return, at least not with any alacrity.
Which meant Talents were far less reliable in the training dome now. He’d outright failed to activate Leap a few times on account of that. If the same happened when he needed High Jump to avoid a hazard, he’d be in serious trouble.
He’d even tried to draw on the prana within his body to power Talents instead of relying on ground prana, but that proved impossible. The issue was that activating the Talent meant commanding his prana—and thus his blood—to move away from his leg. He then had to allow prana to come back to the leg without also letting his blood return, or there would be no supersaturation effect. The bond between blood and prana was not so easily broken. If he could’ve managed that, it would at least allow him to ‘pre-charge’ a Talent by consuming prana from his body.
As such, Vir abandoned the use of Talents entirely while inside the dome. It hadn’t been an easy decision since Leap made the obstacle course far safer and easier to navigate. He now relied on his Talents only for emergencies.
This did not bode well for him—both for the course, and in general. Mejai rarely ever had to worry about depleting the prana of a region. Riyan had said it took entire armies to accomplish that feat. And if he could access any of the common affinities, that would be true for Vir as well.
Instead, he was stuck with a far more exotic and rarer affinity that he knew next to nothing about. Other than it being nearly nonexistent.
Condensation gathered on the rock roof, forming droplets that plopped down onto the pool. It was the only sound in this serene slice of utopia.
Vir sunk deeper into the hot spring pool, allowing his worries to melt away. He couldn’t do anything to change the world’s prana composition, so there was little point in fretting over it. He’d simply have to adapt and overcome. That he could use magic at all shocked him even now. After spending his whole life without magic, he was grateful he could do at least that much.
And besides, his eyes had already turned to other Talents on the horizon. Light Step, Blade Projection, and Empower all called out to him.
Closing his eyes, he let his body float on the surface of the water and meditated. Clarity of mind came easily in the hot spring. Maybe it was the sense of weightlessness, or perhaps the soothing warmth.
Vir’s mind wandered to Riyan. The man claimed his Balar Rank was 150, and while the Talents he’d shown off were impressive, they seemed incomparable to Tanya’s Blizzard spell. And Tanya had several other spells in her arsenal. There was something else about the man that had to give him that kind of rank. Was he hiding his more powerful Talents? Or was it something else entirely?
Alas, it wasn’t like he would ever tell Vir, even if he asked. All he could do was concentrate on his own development.