Luke Everhart
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Chapter 144 - There Is No Magic
🕑 Added 2024-12-23 11:31:01 +0000 UTC“Keep going. Just sit down on the floor!”
“Wow…” Tuk breathed.
“Is this all of us?” Viy asked, taking in the sheer amount of apprentices gathered in the room already.
They had arrived at the location for their night and first proper aura class, and now found themselves within an enormous room, dark gray from wall, to floor, and to the tall ceiling stretching high above their heads, where a bright white gray circle shimmered at the very center of the ceiling.
“Just how big is this ship?” Tuk asked, looking around with his mouth unashamedly wide open.
As they followed the rest of the apprentices, Nar noticed that at regular intervals on the floor, there were lines on the floor colored in bright green, drawn in perfect circles.
Ahead of them, the apprentices were being made to sit down on the floor in row after row.
“This has to be all of us,” Kur said, looking around as they sat down. “Almost a thousand apprentices, like Tys said.”
Nar sat down next to his party leader, and internally grimaced when Cen sat right next to him.
The caster had been insatiable with all of her questions about Nar’s class change, only stopping short of demanding him to tell her about his new skills when they found themselves mired in a massive crowd of apprentices, all trying to use the same one lift to go down to the Aura Hall.
He tried to pretend that he couldn’t notice her intense stare, and instead pretended to be examining the room they now found themselves in.
The first thing he noticed was that the dark gray walls weren’t actually smooth. They were made of a pattern of hexagonal panels of some kind, and straining his [Sight] to look at them better, Nar got the impression that they were made of something soft, and somewhat fuzzy, rather than metallic. And the longer he stared at those panels, the more he had a sense of an off feeling.
“What’s wrong?” Kur asked, following his gaze.
“Uh? Oh. Nothing,” Nar said. “Just those panels on the wall. They feel kind of strange.”
“They do?”
“I feel it too,” Cen said, though her eyes were aimed at the ceiling instead. “They feel… Quiet.”
“That’s it!” Nar said. “Almost as though they were…”
A loud clapping cut him short and they searched for the source of it.
“Good evening, apprentices,” the Master of Aura spoke, from a raised section of the room, which she shared with three other people. “I hope you are all ready for tonight’s exercise.”
“Finally, something practical!” Mul whispered.
Nar rolled his eyes. How had the brawler not learned the lesson from earlier.
“Tonight, we are going to be starting you all on the basic aura foundational learning that will be the basis for all of your aura usage for the rest of your lives,” the master said. “You’re fed, and you had a chance to rest and to look at your gains, especially your skills, which will be fundamental for tonight’s practice. And in fact, for the whole of the Intro Weeks.”
Nar clenched his jaw to keep it from dropping.
Damn it I forgot!
In all the excitement of Tuk’s situation, he had forgotten to check his new skills!
What should I do? he wondered. Will she know if I look at them now? And how did she even do that last time?
Could the master read minds? With all the strange and wondrous sights he had seen, he couldn’t fully dismiss that idea. But with a thousand apprentices gathered, surely she wouldn’t be able to read a single mind amongst them all, right? Much less while speaking at the same time?
He sighed quietly, trying to relax.
No use in risking it. I’ll just have to look at them later… And hope for the best.
“Before we get started, we will need to go through some important theory,” she announced. “But before that, allow me to introduce the people behind me, as well as all of those standing around you.”
She half turned and pointed to the first person, though figure would’ve probably been a better way to describe said person.
Whatever species or gender they were, they were covered all in some sort of flowy red garb that hid everything and anything that lay underneath. Even their face was covered in a thick red and impenetrable veil. Other than the canteen staff, who dressed in their white uniforms and hats, she was the only person Nar had seen so far not wearing the uniform of the Scimitar.
“This is professor Dur, Teacher of Offense,” the Master of Aura introduced. “She will be in charge of teaching you direct, offensive uses of aura. Think fireballs, lightning bolts, ice spears and the like.”
“Wow…” Cen breathed, at Nar’s side, eliciting a smile from him.
“Next, we have professor Vawrinanys, who will be your Teacher of Buffs and Debuffs.”
Professor Vawrinanys was unlike any other sentient that Nar had ever seen.
For starters, she stood on four legs that ended in hooves. She wore an elongated pair of uniformed trousers that covered her bottom half, and from the bit he could see of her upper half, which was that of a woman, it was mostly covered in soft looking brown and auburn fur. Her neck and face were framed by it, and her hair was a blend of hair and fur, with two pointed ears rising from it. Her eyes were completely black, and atop her head, sat a short pair of branching horns.
What in the Nexus is she? Nar wondered.
“Lastly, we have professor Lop, Teacher of Aura Mastery,” the master introduced. “He will be the one guiding you through these first two weeks, and you will only see the rest of us again, starting from the third week and onwards.”
Professor Lop was a small guy, with very, very white skin and visible pink blood vessels marking his cheeks. His skin reminded Nar of the canteen staff, but that was where the similarity ended. The man was as short as Mul, built skinny like Tuk, and his eyes were a disconcerting fleshy red opaque color.
“As for the various people standing around the hall,” she said, opening her arms wide to encompass the entirety of the room. “These will be your instructors, working under me and the teachers behind me. You will address them as instructors and afford them the same level of respect that you give me and the teachers with me. Is that clear?”
A mumbled chorus of yeses rang out.
“You mean, yes, master!” she barked.
“Yes, master!” Nar shouted at the top of his lungs, alongside the others.
What in the pile? Nar thought, shocked. I didn’t mean to do that…
“Better,” the master said. “Now, let’s quickly get through the theory bit. There is a lot of work to be done tonight.”
Was that [Presence] again? Nar wondered, as the master made another screen show up in front of her, and the wall behind her, and the lights dimmed.
He took a surreptitious glance at Kur and Cen, but they didn’t seem to have noticed anything out of the ordinary.
Am I just imagining it?
“Alright, consider the diagram before you,” the master said, raising her arm to the massive screen behind her. “These are the 9 Comprehensive Aetheric Attributes.”
The diagram in question was an intricate affair, with flowery decorations and lines, motifs, the Crystal’s and twenty-four other symbols drawn across them, which Nar recognized some of from their morning lecture about the War of the Light and Dark.
“As with earlier, it becomes easier to explain what you need to understand by starting first with the aether side of things,” she explained. “And so, we have [Channeling], [Attunement], [Projection], [Potency], [Control], [Capacity], [Conductivity], [Absorption] and [Steadfastness]. There is a tenth attribute, [Enlightenment], but that one is shared between both aethermancers and auramancers, and thus is held in separate.”
As she spoke, each of the circles in the diagram came alive in different colors, and the names of the attributes appeared inside them.
“While our [Aura] attribute manifests directly in our UIs as the gray bar you know, or a different color, if your affinity is unlocked and already affecting changes within you, for an aethermancer, since the aether they use does not belong to them, their aether bars represent their [Capacity] attribute instead. And as its name implies, [Capacity] is the measure of how much aether an aethermancer can store in their aether reservoir, their counterpart to our aura cores.”
Uh… So, all this time I’ve been looking for [Aether] and the damned attribute doesn’t even exist?
Nar shook his head. Had he not been in class, he would’ve probably laughed.
“Your professors of Nexus 101 will go into greater detail considering attributes themselves, but for now, suffice to say that while this is the sum of all the attributes that govern an aethermancers path, for us, the list is as follows.”
The screen flickered, and the diagram disappeared. In its place was a single circle with a single word within it.
Murmurs spread throughout the gathered apprentices.
“That’s right. All we have is [Aura],” the master said. “Like I told you this afternoon, aura comes from within, and is thus not governed by the System. It is merely adapted into it. This means that while an aethermancer has all of those attributes to aid them in using the aether within their bodies, we auramancers need to take a much more hands on approach. The best we got, are skills, uninspiringly named the 3 Skills of Aura Governance. These are, as you might have guessed, the passive skills [Mastery] and [Aura Channels], as well as the active skill [Meditation].”
She flicked to another image, and this one had the 3 Skills of Aura Governance on one side, and the 9 Comprehensive Aetheric Attributes on the other.
“[Mastery] can be said to be the equivalent of [Control], [Projection] and, arguably, [Potency], from the aetheric side,” she said, and as she spoke, lines connected the four she had enumerated. “[Aura Channels], through which you will learn to cycle your aura, can be considered the equivalent of [Conductivity], and again arguably, of [Potency]. Now, most if not all of you might have been mistakenly using the term “channeling” when reaching out for your aura. This is the word that the System sometimes grants us during the Climb. However, we do not channel anything! [Channeling] pertains to taking into yourself the aether from Creation and the Spirits. Our aura comes from within! It is ours! So, we cycle it through our channels, we do not channel it. And yes, I know how that sounds, and fear not, we will be addressing this starting tonight. I’ll explain more in a bit.”
Damn… That was intense, Nar thought. She really cares about that whole aura versus aether stuff. And that [Mastery]... I remember seeing that skill in the gains! That must be the one. But my [Aura Channels] skill was upgraded to [Pathways of the Champion] though…
“Lastly, we have [Meditation],” the master continued, in a calmer tone. “This one correlates to no aetheric attributes. It is neither [Channeling] nor [Absorption]. It is the act of reaching deep within our souls through various means and methods, depending on one’s path and affinity, and refilling our core, those balls of light you’ve seen, with the energy from our souls. And as for [Capacity], we don’t really have an equivalent. Our [Aura] attribute reflects the growth and size of our core, and while our UI aura bars have a number attached to it, it is possible to draw directly from the soul, bypassing our cores. I don’t advise you to do this, however, as it can lead to aura exhaustion, burning of your channels, and even core collapse. At best, you will be extremely tired and will need to use [Meditation] to heal your burns. At worst, you can die, your bodies unable to handle your souls' direct energy in such purity and quantity.”
Nar gulped, and he felt Kur and Cen looking at him out of the corner of his eyes.
“Well,” the master said, in a lighter tone, and the screens disappeared and the light returned to normal. “That was the bigger chunk of it. The last thing we need to consider for now is affinity and the elements. These are what many of you wrongly believe to be called “magic”. Fire, lightning, ice, light and darkness and many, many, infinite others. The origin of the word magic is not known, but it's so prevalent amongst Climbers that scholars hypothesize that it is a very, very, ancient word, and one whose meaning has been lost through the eras and the Great Resets that follow the end of each. Regardless, from now on, you will cease the use of this word. The aethermancers hate it, and for us, it is simply our auras.”
“No way…” Cen whispered. “So, there was never any magic?”
“Just like there was no [Aether],” Nar risked whispering back.
“We were just following a lie,” Cen said, her eyes wide. “We risked all of that… And it was never even possible to reach.”
“Guys,” Kur whispered in warning.
“And so, what are affinities and the elements?” the master continued. “Well, affinities are, shall we say, the flavor, the colors, the aspects of your souls. These are the things your soul relates to the most. The things that are a core part of who you are. Or the things that you most desire and dream of obtaining or becoming. Your likes and dislikes, hates and loves, memories, experiences, family and lack thereof. Victories and defeats, losses and gains. All the wounds to your souls, as well as the scars that healed behind them. It is all these, and much, much more. Your affinities are an intrinsic part of yourselves, just as much as your souls are. And elements, they are the same, except being flavors of the Radiants and the Source’s aether.”
She folded her arms behind her back, and considered them all.
“There is, however, one stark difference between affinity and the elements,” she spoke, in a lower tone. “For aether is to receive within oneself, while aura is to be oneself. And what this translates into, is that while the elements are to be commanded, for affinity, it means to embody the living aspect of that affinity. One commands the fire, the other is the fire! And we may not have their attributes, but we can do things with our aura and affinities that they can only dream off… Provided you are strong enough, of course. One only starts seeing the difference at the much higher levels.”
Her words sent a shiver down Nar’s spine, and he remembered about the God of Lightning from earlier.
Maybe being forced into aura wasn’t so bad after all… I mean, my goal’s still power anyways. I can probably deal with the rest later…
“A few of you have already unlocked your affinities, and understand that these are going to be crucial to shaping your paths. Over the next weeks and months, you will see drastic changes coming to your paths, mostly through new or upgraded skills, and to a much lesser extent, attributes. Your [Meditation] skill might also change,” the Master of Aura said. “As for those of you, the majority, who are yet to unlock your affinities, don’t worry. While you will not unlock your true potential until you have discovered your affinity, we will be providing you with plenty of opportunities to discover them through moments of enlightenment. That is to say, sudden flashes of insight that will pave the way to you understanding who you are in a much greater and deeper way. In most cases, a single moment of enlightenment is enough to unlock an affinity. In some others, several are needed. Regardless, remember that the journey of self-understanding is exactly that, a journey. And one that never ends.”
Then, they all jolted when she clapped her hands.
“Alright, that’s enough talking,” she said. “Time to start doing. In our classes earlier today, you were all surprised to find out you won’t be accessing your aura as easily as you were able to during the Climb. Like I explained to you, you could only do that through some external help. Now, you will need to control your own aura properly.”
The master scanned the crowd of apprentices and Nar could have sworn that her eyes came to rest upon him.
“Some of you might have noticed that your control over your auras had gotten patchy by the time you reached the gates. That was because you were using too much aura and the mercy granted to you in controlling it was being affected by your proximity to the outside.”
Is that what happened? Nar wondered, gulping in relief as the master’s eyes drifted away from him, and remembering his unruly aura. It did go a little out of control near the end…
“To be a true auramancer, you will need to master your aura, and a great deal of that comes from increasing your [Mastery]. As you saw, you are now limited in how much aura you can use all at once by your [Mastery] passive skill,” she said. “This means that even if you have ten thousand aura points available in your bar, if your [Mastery] is only set at 50, all that aura will be wasted. Useless. Out of your reach. In sum, you need to increase your [Mastery]. However, before that, we need to get rid of those pesky [Aura Channels]. And to get started, I want everyone to get up, and go sit down inside one of the green circles. Now! Come on!”
Nar shared a look of stunned confusion with Kur and Cen, then they rushed to do as the master had ordered them. The stampede of a thousand feet reverberated within the enormous hall, and everyone looked for a circle to claim.
Comments
Lucas Onderwater
Hahaha 😅
Gabriel Victor
Heh, Nar's going to get rebuked for forgetting to check his skills, I bet.
