Chương 207: Recovery

She moved away from me, and I got dragged along. Distant from my soul, Miflin started recreating that space we used last time. As soon as we were perfectly encapsulated, she said: "Go, activate your Accelerated Perception skill."

"Master, with my reduced stats I don't think it's a good idea to do it. I already have trouble as it is. If I have to split my focus and consume my mana this way, our session would end even sooner than if I didn't use the skill," I told her. It really would be counterproductive in these circumstances. It wasn't because I was lazy or couldn't bear the strain, even if it would be annoying to have to start the day with a massive headache.

"Don't you think I knew that already? Who do you think your master is? Go on, try to use your skill and see."

"The paintings?" I asked. She just nodded to me with a slightly displeased expression. I activated my skill and felt my thoughts accelerate, the world outside remained the same, giving the illusion of time slowing down. There was basically no strain. No, I could feel my mana getting consumed rapidly, but something was replenishing my mana nearly as fast, and my mind was capable of functioning at this high speed even with my lowered attributes.

I tentatively cranked up the power of my skill, and the results were excellent.

"See? Have a bit of faith in your teacher, now we have time to work on your fundamentals." She then proceeded to create a nail made of aura, but contrary to her golden-white one, this was an angry red.

"Start with this: gather your aura and try to grind down the nail. It would be harder than you think, and no pulling it out directly, it wouldn't improve your control if you cheat."

"You mean to put that thing int- argh!" The red nail flew like lightning and pierced my chest.

"Fuck, what the hell is this?" I shouted. The nail was painful. Despite this being a projection, a vessel, I felt the pain in my aura somehow, and damn, if I had real eyes they would be leaking tears of pain by now.

"It's your training, the nail contains part of my aura. It will try to corrupt yours, actually it already started. Given the difference between me and you, it would be impossible for you to remove normally, but I am magnanimous and reduced the potency for your training. It would still try to take over your vessel, like a virus, or a parasite. It would infect all of your form. Stop it, or be consumed." What kind of fucked up training was this? Would I die if I failed?

My first instinct was to pull out the nail, but as my hand reached for it, I stopped. I had to do this the proper way, so I let my hand down and focused. Damn, the pain was distracting, but the invasion of my vessel was so evident that I could feel all of it, and my aura was actually already fighting against it by itself, trying to destroy it, assimilate it. But it proved impossible by itself, so I put effort into taking control of the aura in my vessel and started to grind down the nail, or at least I tried.

It wasn't working at all…

"Not like that, infuse your aura with your will and circulate it in your vessel in this way." She conjured a replica of my current vessel and showed me how my aura was supposed to move. There were too many flows creating patterns and ripples, it was impossible to replicate at first glance.

"How the hell am I supposed to do that? There are at least ten simultaneous flows!" I asked her.

"Of course I don't expect you to replicate it perfectly, but start with circulating your aura in this way, follow the main flux, then when you get that down, try to imitate the others too." I tried that. The pattern wrought by the main flow of aura was hard to glimpse between all the twists and turns it did in between the others. I observed for some minutes, slowly starting to move my aura in the same way. The pain was getting stronger though.

Not only that, the nail stuck in my chest was seemingly sprouting roots, very slowly, but surely. Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings. I had to be faster. I started pushing the aura in my body, imitating the pattern very roughly, but I was not capable of feeling if the effect was helping or not. But there was something, it was doing something, just nothing like it should have.

"That's a disaster, you need to be more precise. Move just a part of your aura, not all of it. This way, following the pattern, you would create a resonance. It would be fine even if you managed to mimic half of the main flux by the end of this lesson, so take your time, but know that the pain would only get worse the more time passes, the nail's spread won't stop." I gritted my metaphysical teeth. It was already starting to get painful. I would complain if I didn't promise myself to stop doing that.

Instead I redoubled my efforts.

"Mmm… you are messing it up already at the fifth node, fix it, quick."

"I don't even know what you mean by fifth node," I said while smoothing out the aura flux. My aura for some reason wasn't happy to be pushed around like this, I felt like it wanted to spread, not be forced into this motion.

"This," she said while highlighting a particular bend in the flow in my copy. That is the fifth node? But it doesn't look like a node, it's like the twelfth bend of the flow…

"What makes it a node? Because I can't really pinpoint the previous four."

"It's a point of resonance. For you it is still basically impossible to recognize, but you will, in time. At the beginning you would get a more intuitive understanding, you would become capable of 'guessing' more than feeling where the nodes are, but in the future you will actually be able to create the resonance you want and with that, effects."

"Sounds something similar to casting spells," I said while correcting another section of the flow. I was taking this piece by piece instead of trying to recreate everything at the same time, like when learning a poem: memorize a verse, then the next, repeat it until you get it down, then learn another verse. I proceeded like this until my flux of aura went absolutely out of control, ruining my work and destabilizing my own vessel. I had to clamp down on the energies or basically risk exploding from within.

"What the hell was that?" I said while recoiling from the pain. Damn, the aura together with the nail were really making this hard.

"That was a mistake."

"Thank you, Captain Obvious, I want to know what happened," I replied with annoyance.

"You forget yourself, I am your master and you will show me the appropriate respect, or these lessons will be cut short." Her voice had steel in it, the friendly and bubbly Aureal shopkeeper was nowhere to be found. Damnable bitch, respect this and respect that. I would respect you if you actually taught me how to perform that recovery technique before stabbing me with a parasitic nail. Who the fuck teaches in this way?

But I needed her, she needed me too, but the difference in our positions was like the earth and sky. I was basically fighting for survival, she was not. Whatever her goals were, she was not in any real danger, and she knew it. I knew it too, so I swallowed the humiliation.

"I apologize, master. I just wanted to know why my approach was flawed."

"Better, much better." She said with a smile, her tone returning friendly as if what happened a second ago was a distant dream. She was crazy, wasn't she?

"To answer your inquiry: aura doesn't work modularly, at least not when concerning fluxes. The main one you are trying to copy creates the right resonance when it's complete, not before. If you go step by step or miss some nodes, the result is usually quite catastrophic. If you did what you did just now with your real body, there would have been serious internal damage." Great, so messing up with my aura is a good way of killing myself.

"But this technique has a lot of parts, isn't that a modular approach?"

"It may seem so, but you will see that many of these other fluxes can't coexist with the main one alone. You would need to create them in pairs or more simultaneously, otherwise the whole structure would destabilize." Damn it, this was going to be hard.

"Retry, and remember, the flux must be complete to have the desired effect. Even if shoddy, you would still get a resonance, then you would be able to fix it piece by piece, but first you have to complete it and maintain it." I retried. It was hard, really hard. Maybe if I had all my stats I would find this easier, but at least it would make for a good exercise, if it wasn't so painful.

"Why didn't you tell me all of this before, master?"

"Because experience is the best teacher."

"We have a saying about that: experience is the harshest of teachers, first it tests you, then it explains the lesson," I said while trying to complete the flux.

"Mmm… I like it, but it forgets to mention how much more you learn, despite its harshness."

"Oh, you would be surprised to know how many people don't learn from their mistakes… master." She nodded as I added the honorific at the end.

"If you still have enough spare attention to banter maybe I should speed up the nail's spread." She said, and I felt the dastardly thing erode my vessel faster, spreading much more quickly than before. I bit down any remark I wanted to say. Now I really had no more focus to do anything else, so I lost myself in the ebbs and flows of my aura. I would do it, despite this crazy mentor I found for myself trying to kill me.