A genius can master things faster than anyone else. A prodigy sees through a thing and creates something new. One is expected, and the other is a fucking monster!
~Arawn, God of the Dead
Sione/Crow spent the first day in Unhulde inside his dorm, which was more like a little villa. It was a three-room, two-story house with a backyard surrounded by high stone walls. His house was part of a more extended structure that he overheard the others call an Octoplex since they portioned eight residences out of each building.
Overall, it didn’t matter. The sect layered each residence in formations, some of which canceled noise and prevented spying. Crow only gave the formations a cursory glance because they lacked elegance, and anyone with a bit of skill could bypass them. He assumed the disciples had created and maintained them.
Regardless, he spent the first day going through Sione’s memories and cultivation methods. Crow sighed at how sad the boy’s life was, and the lack of substantial techniques was disheartening. The truth was Sione’s physique and natural talent made him core disciple potential—or would’ve had he survived. The other two boys he killed had considerably higher comprehension, but that was because of the resources they were given. Even still, the level of understanding was lacking. Crow decided their insights were more detrimental than helpful, so he didn’t bother scanning through them.
Other than evaluating the actual cultivation method, he ignored the trash abilities. The way they consumed ghosts was the only thing worthy of his interest. He’d already suspected, but it was a blend of Spirit and Body cultivation. It wasn’t anything he wanted to use. It gave him insight into his Ghostly Aura and how to elevate it using a more pure form of energy. The higher the purity, or closer it was to Origin, the less mana ghost-related techniques would need.
Myriad of Beasts and Myriad of the Dead were almost mirrored techniques, and Crow stumbled upon their creation by accident. The Myriad of Beasts targeted vitality and fire or energy, but the forms of transformation were eerily similar. It was the reason the two Auras worked together because the spell structures were the same, but—
“Shit!” Crow cursed under his breath. “The Aura Cube is all wrong—my entire thinking is wrong. My mistake is I misunderstood what Aura was. Ghostly Aura, Seeding, all the shit I was thinking about originally is based on a lack of information.”
Crow sighed and cleared the desk of all his notes. On a piece of parchment, he used a quill and sketched a new shape that focused on the power of three. It came out looking like a three-dimensional Awen. From three corners of the shape, lines were drawn toward a singular point. Next to that singular point, he wrote the word ‘Origin.’ Connecting the three base points with lines, he wrote next to each corner Mind, Body, and Spirit.
After he finished, Crow stared at the tetrahedron shape for an hour and contemplated. Ignoring the idea of Aura, he went a step further and asked himself what a Domain was. Books claimed it was an area of time and space that a cultivator could control, but Crow’s experience gave him a unique perspective—cultivators were stealing from Heaven, and it didn’t like it. That was why a domain created so much pressure and taxed the user’s mana so heavily.
An epiphany struck. The Druid Circle was drafted from concepts of Domain but wasn’t invasive. The genius behind it was mind-boggling because it harnessed the natural order as determined by the Heavens. Crow could use it without being suppressed because it maximized his power in an area rather than claim it as his own.
If he was right, a domain was a combination of Aura and the power a Druid Circle represented. Those Circles were elemental in nature, and… hmm, he was missing something still. There aren’t two aspects to a technique, but three. The technique’s formation is the model, the foundation of everything that follows. The Druid Circle or Elemental focus is the technique’s visual shape. Then Aura is the controlling logic that allows a cultivator to bring the ability to life. The intimidating force behind a spell is Aura, which is why its oppression is higher the more the cultivator comprehends it. (AN: Shamelessly stole the Model-View-Controller concepts from software development, haha)
Crow felt like he’d been drenched in cold water as his mind sharpened and refined this idea more and more. Based on everything he just extrapolated from reverse engineering a domain, he realized he’d need to unlearn everything he understood about techniques. Other cultivators wouldn’t have an issue following masters, but Crow knew he’d already embarked on his own path.
The initial idea about stripping a spell, ability, or technique of its elemental affinity was required if he wanted to pursue his epiphany. Auras… there were only three because anything else was influenced by the elements, and he had the Druid Circle to fill in that part of his new techniques. These three were the Aura of the Mind, Aura of the Body, and Aura of the Spirit.
Aura of the Mind represented the Sage—a purveyor of Knowledge and the Arcane. It was the pursuit of understanding the Truths of this world. It also represented his consciousness and, to some extent, his subconsciousness. Sage’s Mind was a pure example of the Aura of the Mind. It might be considered a pinnacle ability maximized by this Aura.
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The Aura of the Body represents two main aspects: Vitality and Physicality. Physicality was also represented by concepts of transformation, which was the heart of his Myriad of Beast technique. Silver-Eyed Crow was a physical transformation, but its other abilities were affected by the other auras. It meant to maximize the potential of his crow transformation, he needed to activate all three auras simultaneously. However, if he just needed to turn into a flying beast, only the Aura of the Body was required.
Aura of the Spirit was a concept that Crow lacked knowledge of. The best he could claim is that it represented the supernatural, metaphysical, subconscious, and intangible. Touched on the idea of inner-self and probably had the greatest impact on influencing the world around him. Spirit allows a person to surpass the limits of Mind and Body. Like the Body, it also had concepts of transformation. Ghosting was an excellent example of a Spirit transformation because it turned the physical into the metaphysical.
Understanding all that, if he analyzed his Tetrahedron Aura, there were four points: Origin, Mind, Body, and Spirit. This thought surfaced again because if he broke down the Ghostly Aura, it existed inside the tetrahedron near the triangular plane made by three points: Origin, Body, and Spirit. It wasn’t an ability that relied on the Mind but required physical and metaphysical transformation while also sealing his vitality to become more of a ghost.
The beauty of his Ghosting abilities was that the mana used was close to the purity of Origin energy. Meaning he didn’t require much influence from a Druid Circle to influence it. That might also be because he’d refined his body using Ghost Mana, but that wasn’t much of a problem now.
More importantly, developing a mana-less technique wasn’t terribly complicated. In the technique’s formation, he’d have to target the elemental aspects and clean them. And, he had heavenly flames and didn’t require a Druid Circle to fill his techniques with localized mana.
The scratching of a quill against parchment was the only sound that followed for the next few hours as he jotted down all his thoughts. Patterns and more patterns, technique breakdowns, and more filled pages and pages. Technically, he didn’t need to write any of this down but was thinking about donating his notes to the Druid Order.
When he was done, there were only two burning questions he couldn’t answer without practical knowledge or experience. The first was cultivating each leg of the Soul Trinity. Mind and Body were covered reasonably well, but his Spirit cultivation was severely lacking. The question he had was, if they kept growing would that impact his Auras and techniques positively or negatively. The last question was about technique behavior based on the Druid Circle elements provided. By that, Crow knew that a Wood Mana Vine spell would not have the same use or behavior as a Flame Mana Vine spell. Further, if it is influenced by the Vitality aspect of his Aura of the Body, the Wood Mana Vine would absorb its target’s vitality. Fire was more destructive, so he doubted it’d absorb vitality, but it might burn years worth it—prematurely aging the target.
Crow didn’t bother speculating on that too heavily because it was best to experience it and adapt. The final step in his restructuring process was to use his vision abilities to scan his body and map out the new shapes. The best part was this appeared to be augmenting his Mana Sense too. It felt like the energy around him was practically crackling. That was how sensitive he’d become.
When he hit a bottleneck, he’d spend time Soul Carving a few small wooden tokens. Based on all his thinking lately, he realized that Soul Carving was good at equalizing the Soul Trinity energies inside him. It consolidated and advanced each branch with emphasis on the weakest ones.
Two days passed Zoe brought him food and updates on things happening around the sect. Especially information on the boys Crow killed. So far, no one associated Ku with Sione. In fact, it was almost like no one knew Sione existed at all. Zoe was called in to answer some questions now and then, but coached by Crow, she avoided suspicion.
“I’m not sure what you are doing, but you obviously need a break,” Zoe said.
“Huh?” Crow said, looking up from the parchment he’d been scribbling on.
“You need to leave this room and take a break,” Zoe emphasized. “I know you do your normal workout routines, which you shouldn’t let anyone see, but tomorrow I’ll bring you to Unhulde’s Stacks—the library. I think it might help.”
Crow didn’t think so, but he was curious for other reasons. There could be things in there that would help him expand his Ghost-related spells. Those interested him because they were the closest to mana-less techniques as he could get.
“Alright, we can do that.”
“One more thing…” Zoe hesitated. Her Shield lit up, and she removed a small piece of paper she handed over to Crow. “D-do you think you can locate these things?”
Crow eyed the list, and his brow furrowed while looking at the strange combination of items. Most of them weren’t hard to get a hold of, but the ore at the top of the list was something he’d only read about. The other things he’d at least seen or knew where he could find them.
“Everything except maybe that top one,” Crow said. He explained he had a faction and a stockpile of wares on the list. “Can I ask what these are for?”
Zoe lifted the lacy choker on her neck and revealed a strange writhing tattoo hidden underneath.
“What the fuck is that?” Crow asked after seeing it move as if it was alive.
“A parasite passed down through the Witch Covens that choose not to become Hex Witches. One ritual sacrifice, and this goes away along with my humanity. That list is something my Coven divined to remove our slave collars. We sisters want to escape the clutches of this sect, and those items are the only way I know how to do that.”
“Are you certain this would eradicate that thing?” Crow asked. It’d be a lie to say he wasn’t repulsed by the organism. It appeared to be slowly constricting Zoe’s throat to the point she’d be barely left alive in a few years unless she could out cultivate the strange thing.
“There are always unknowns with scrying, but the results were inordinately strong as if the Heavens were trying to help us.”
“Heavens, eh?” Crow muttered his question but couldn’t entirely stop himself from sneering. “We have a plan then. I’d like to go to the library early, so be back here before it opens.”
“It opens at four in the morning…” Zoe grumbled.
“Good, I’ll see you then. You are welcome to stay here, but either way, get some sleep,” Crow laughed at seeing her wounded puppy face.