“So, a healer then?” The young arcanist asked once the glooming dread on the room settled down.

“I’m not fully qualified as such, but I can do some patching and first aid,” I added. “My healing is stronger when applied to myself rather than others.”

“Then what’s the point of being a healer then?” A bit hard-headed, wasn’t she?

“I am no healer; I have simply been taught like such and can-do healing,” I explained. “I can save people from mortal wounds, but I won’t be as effective as a trained healer, and possibly leave scaring and other secondary byproducts behind.”

“Hopefully there will be no need for your healing. Our healers here in Lan’el are more than capable, even if they aren’t as high starred as you.” Tir’ne Shyz intervened.

“If that’s all the questions, then we can begin with the presentations. Don’t take all day, you all have work to do.”

What soon followed was a quick barrage of names, professions, and miscellanea that I couldn’t even be bothered to process. If I ever needed to remember their names, I just needed to peer into True Recall’s memories. If I need to know their affinity, I could simply look at their souls.

The only names that stuck were that of Aln and Sheel, the fuchsia man and the young arcanist, respectively. Aln was also an arcanist, which wasn’t surprising as half of all ellari were. Being ellari was almost equal to saying you were in touch with the Arcane.

“Alright, now that we are done, get your asses up and go back to work, you had enough rest.” First Sergeant Shyz ordered. “As for you, Private Nightfallen, follow me.”

I did as instructed, but a sprout of doubt appeared in my mind.

“I’m just a Private even when I’m part of the Vanguard Order?” I asked him neutrally, as to not imply I had delusions of grandeur.

The soldier snickered. “Ranks don’t follow power. They follow the chain of command, discipline, and knowledge; and you are a newbie. We have a lot of soldiers that are just Privates like you, even when they are of the ninth star or higher.”

Now that I recalled, Ikail Natas, the crazed hemomancer, was also a Private. Huh. I thought the Ferilyn Meritocracy would push hard for mages of the high star to be at the top of the chain of command, but it seemed they valued more competent people than strong buffoons. I could respect that.

“I have a question of my own, Private.” Tir’ne turned to look at me. “Can you fly?”

“Fly?” I was going to ask why, but I felt I was acting too unlike a soldier should by now. “Yes, I can... sir?”

“Don’t need to be so rigid.” He chuckled. “Though I value your intention. No one here’s going to ask you to look up them and talk them fancy, you are still a ten-star mage, and that power is to be respected.”

“Why did you need to know why I need to fly then?” I followed his advice.

“The Ceaseless Storm has commanded me to restrain your military training for the time being,” Shyz explained. “The why is beyond me, but I can’t have you do nothing if you are going to live here. So, I want to have you on overwatch duty there.”

He pointed up high to a needle-thin tower. The tower was around thirty meters high and had a small platform at the top, it was being held by a meter-wide whitestone pillar. Such an impossible structure could have only been created by a geomancer.

“You don’t fear heights, do you?” The First Sergeant commented as I looked at the top of the needle-watchtower.

“I do not.”

I could spellcast both Slow Fall spells in a fraction of a second, and the seven-star Ungravity spell only took me a second. So, any height short enough that didn’t allow me to spellcast those spells wouldn’t even hurt me.

“But I do not understand the need for this,” I told him.

“Why? Is the ten-star mystic too important for such trivial matters?” The soldier, curiously, taunted me. He could have dismissed me as he was my superior, but he decided to joke.

“No, I mean that this is rather inefficient.”

“How so?” Shyz frowned his brows in confusion.

“As a mystic, I can sense every soul around me, so being at a top of a tower is rather useless. And I do possess divination spells in my repertoire.”

“Can you distinguish a passerby from a suspicious person with your soul thingy?” He gave me a look saying: “you can’t, can you?”

“I can, it’s pretty easy to distinguish the intent of people at my level,” I explained to him.

The First Sergeant gave me a sharp look. “Can you then identify the power of a person? To tell if they are a menace or a person with negative ideas that can do no ill?”

“Also, can do that,” I replied as a matter of fact. “That’s how I can tell that you are a high ten-star arcanist.”

“Hmm…” Tir’ne guided his hand to his chin, pondering the possibility. “How many people can you detect at a given time?”

“There’s no limit?” I had found no upper limit when I had scanned souls on the River of the Damned. I gave a quick pulse to my surroundings. “I detect one-hundred and eighty-three soldiers, plus twelve civilians on a three-hundred-meter radius.”

Tir’ne whispered in amazement. “Woah, that’s certainly some range. And those numbers feel about right.” The soldier closed his eyes for a moment. “Tell me, what’s the effective range of this magic?”

“Effective range? I had never tried; the district should be easy enough.”

“The whole Lan’el district?” I nodded. “I’ll be damned then. Can you maintain this for an indefinite period?”

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

“On a small scale? I’m already doing so. For the whole district, I would need to be concentrated on the task alone. Further away I could only do it in short pulses.”

“Can you go even further?”

The Soul Sight spell was an incredibly potent one, for its low difficulty. In the spiritual plane, it would technically have no limit, as space wasn’t truly a thing, but I was using it simultaneously on the corporeal plane, which was affected by space and had a lot of interferences present.

“Hmm…” I audibly pondered. “Ferilyn could be doable. But such pulses would be difficult and far between, maybe once a minute.”

“Wait a moment.” Tir’ne covered his mouth with his hand. “Are you telling me you can have a scan of the whole country?”

The man wasn’t conscious that Ferilyn was a small island as far as landmasses went. It would be straight-up impossible for me to keep a watch on the Tilean continent or just the Houtz Imperium for that matter. That, or it was just his patriotic ego talking.

“Once a minute.” I reiterated. “I guess mentalists, aeromancers, and lumenmancers could do the same with their respective divination-type spells.”

“Can I see that in action?”

“Sure, but it won’t be very useful. I’ll just detect a lot of souls, that’s all.”

“Try it, nonetheless.” Shyz insisted. “Such detection spells can be especially useful in warfare.”

“Alright. Give me a minute then.” I complied, even if I was highly against the notion of war itself.

I sat on the ground, as my body would likely tumble to the ground once I began casting, my whole mental capabilities being relocated elsewhere.

As I peered into the spiritual plane, I recalled what I had done on the River of the Damned. I had read the afterlife, the very threads of reality, to find Marissa. Back then I wasn’t limited by a physical body, and also had access to unlimited mana. But I didn’t want to scan the whole realm of death, only a city.

The mana on my soul began to be consumed even when I had yet to do anything. Mystic’s Dominion flared up, readying for the pulse I was going to unleash.

I wasn’t an expert on divination spells, far from it. The only one I knew was Soul Sight and its upgraded versions, I just had sweetened my curriculum before when I told otherwise to Shyz. And even if I liked to say that casting a spell a thousand times would make me an expert in this magic field, the world worked differently. In this case, it was better to cast a thousand different spells once.

Comprehending the spiritual plane was complicated. Space wasn’t a thing, yet it was somehow present. There was a distance between the souls, even if I couldn’t measure it. It was difficult to even define what constituted Ferilyn.

Surprisingly enough, the Violet Sky helped me with that.

Contrary to popular belief, the Violet Sky was powered by Ferilyn’s leylines, not the High Arcanist’s mana pool. That meant that the dome spell was like a diluted leyline. And leylines could be perceived on the spiritual plane.

Inside a sphere of indefinite size, all ellari lived.

Some beams of impossible power, a singularity of energy, showed in my sights. Some were high enough to pierce across the sphere, whilst others were so ingrained into the depths of the world that they stayed outside. A dim pillar marked the center of the spell. That pillar was none other than the Arcane Sanctum’s artificial leyline.

A fifth of my soul mana pool vanished.

Hmm… there was too much interference with the leylines, it drained my mana like crazy, even if I was only looking.

I couldn’t tell how much time had happened, but Mystic’s Dominion finally unleashed a colossal pulse of Soul Sight. In a way, a spell with a range far bigger than the Violet Sky itself as it permeated further on than the sphere, but not by much.

Darkness embraced me.

“Eh?” I groaned in surprise, finding myself on the corporeal plane.

“What?” Shyz looked at me. “Is something wrong?”

I looked at my surroundings. How?

“I… someone interfered with my spell,” I explained to him. “I manage to encompass Ferilyn in my mana, but before I could inspect the souls in detail, someone dispelled my sight.”

“I’m not sure what that entails, as I’m not versed on soul magic, nor divination spells for that matter. But my opinion as an arcanist, it could be that the leylines have passively undone your spell.” He offered me a hand and I took it, getting up from the ground. “It usually happens to geomancers when they have to do underground constructions.”

“It wasn’t the leylines, I was careful with that.” I already knew what the mana singularities could do. “And it wasn’t a complete spell as such, but a veil of mana. Leylines can disperse surrounding mana, but my whole Soul Sight has collapsed.”

Who could have done so?

“Did you at least get something from your attempt, boy?”

“Not much, I could only detect the most powerful souls on Ferilyn, as they outshine everyone else,” I told. “But because of the dispel, I couldn’t even point their locations.”

“Powerful souls, eh?” He snickered. “How many did you see?”

“Everyone from the eleven-star and upwards.”

“Only that?” The soldier looked at me with disappointment.

“I wasn’t joking when I said that powerful souls outshine everyone. Maybe I could have sense also mages from the ten-star, but I was cut off before I could pry further.”

Outshine was also a wrong term. Souls did shine, but their luminosity wasn’t correlated with their power. Size was also a nice indicator of a mage’s power, but they didn’t have to have colossal sizes to be powerful. The inverse was also true. I had a soul far bigger than I even considered possible, but I wasn’t that powerful. A good metric to guess someone’s power from their soul would be to correlate the two factors into a formula.

I just did it by eye and a pinch of instinct.

“Hmm.” The First Sergeant scratched his ears. “This dispelling looks like someone who was protecting against divinations then.”

“I guess so.” But who could protect against soul divination?

“How many souls did you see then?” He inquired. “I guess not many as eleven-star mages are scarce.”

I had a single instant to examine all the souls in the spiritual plane. Such colossal amounts of information couldn’t be retained easily, even if the souls in question were few and far between. Thankfully, True Recall aided me with that.

“Let me see…” I tapped into the gathered information. “The first pings I got were obviously the Ceaseless Storm and the Arcane Veil. Huh... curious.”

“Huh, what?”

“Nothing, I had never compared both souls, and I have just noticed that the Veil’s soul is far bigger than the Storm.”

“Really?” He mumbled in surprise. “The Ceaseless Storm is the strongest mage alive, only behind the High Arcanist himself.”

“Soul’s size does not correlate to power.” I lectured. “Well, that’s not totally correct. They do, but the strength of the soul does not correlate well with the Starry Tier.”

“Then what does it mean to have a big soul then?” He asked with true curiosity and interest.

“That depends, I guess.” I didn’t have the answer myself. “But even then, it doesn’t matter much if one has a bigger soul or not. The size of my soul far eclipses that of the heroes of Wyrm’s Landing.”

Now that got a reaction out of Tir’ne. “If your soul is that big, does that mean yours is the biggest on Ferilyn?”

I closed my eyes and reinspected the data. “No. There are at least three people that have bigger souls than mine.”

“Do tell.” The man was heavily invested now.

“Well, obviously the High Arcanist.” The twelve-star arcanist had a power that was difficult for me to comprehend. And his soul reflected that. “The magnitude is actually surprising for someone who isn’t a mystic.”

“That is the only mage of the twelfth star for you.” The soldier said with pompous pride as if he was talking of his own achievements.

“A bit less sizeable, but not by much, we have my mentor. She’s of the eleventh star and a mystic, so it makes sense that her soul rivals that of the strongest mage in the world.”

But my soul was usually bigger than Alatea’s… It was only after the mana capacitator absorbed a chunk of my soul that she was able to surpass me in size. Huh. My soul at its full potential was bigger than the High Arcanist's soul. Unfortunately, one just couldn’t overcome quality with quantity.

“And the other one?” Tir’ne commented. “You said you detected three more people.”

“Yes. It’s a colossally big soul, maybe even bigger than the High…” My words died out.

I had found out who had broken my Soul Sight.

A being of a soul far vaster than anything I had seen before. Someone who surpassed an eleven-star mystic and the most powerful mage alive. Someone I had been looking for for almost a decade now.

The Author.