That fateful time has come again, a new release for my adoring fans. I feel obligated to warn you all that this chapter is going to be exposition central, more so than what I've done in previous chapters, but after this chapter the amount of "stuff happening" will increase, so bear with me.

As Always Please comment whether it be constructive criticism or opinions on how much you hate vera (You'd be surprised how often I get that), also give me more ratings, I'd like to climb the Penguin Ladder.

visit my website @ Youkouadvent.wordpress.com for more frequent updates... thats about it.

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I feel lightheaded, a sudden stroke of dizziness. I fall, the stress of being forced to learn how to actively control my psychometry has put an ungodly amount of stress on my mind. My conscious is hazy.

The young fox girl steadily approaches me, her footsteps a metronome.

“Come now filthy mongrel, is this all that you can do? Doth thou not wish to learn of thy father’s fate?” Vera chants at my side.

“I... know,” I manage to mumble. Just breathing has become difficult, I can barely see, but it's better than my last life. My sight hasn’t left me here, using every vestule of energy left in my body I attempt to continue, beginning to reach out to the next item from the formerly gargantuan pile.

“Almost there… only one more vision,” I groan pitifully.

I barely have the energy to sit up so instead of wasting it I place my hand over a dagger the color of the evening sky. Red, the color of a blazing conflagration, a phantasmal existence, a weapon that cannot be touched.

Can’t be touched.

“Call… name… Only… single step… further… at ...  precipe…”

A voice long forgotten voice rang in my head. Words muttered statically.

The world goes black.

Warmth, the wispy tendrils of regeneration wraps around my spirit. Refreshing springs of life energy pulsate from the wisps as my spirit gluttonously sucks it all in like a sponge.

Colors explode wildly in my mind. Reds and greens dance a vicious tango of carnage, violently reacting, feeding off of each other and crashing into each other even more dazzlingly in turn. Icy blues and whites begin their somber tango, complementing one another, moving neither fast nor slow in their waltz of permissive frost. What is destroyed by the previous pair is halted in time by those following. Even purples, golds, yellows, and greys mark their way through my soul’s perception; moving with fairy like grace, passing and sharing life to all scorched and frozen areas, rejuvenating what had once been a wasteland of the soul. One Time. Two Times. Ten Times. Twenty, even surpassing one hundred, the many colors interacted, weaving together, and eventually the many colors converged into a mass of ink black “space.”

“...thy… be… t… Fi...lthy….Beast! Wake Up thee insufferable dog!” Vera’s words snap me out of my trance.

“Honestly, what ever is this one to do with thee being such a weakling, we only made thou lay-to thy Psycho-whatever a measly one hundred and eighty-nine times for a period of ten seconds each. Dost thou wish for this one’s good name to be tarnished! What would grandmother think of us were we unable to train a single mutt such as thee.” The white-haired heiress prattles on just close enough to me that I’d be able to grab her in an instant and just far enough that she wouldn’t be in the range of any of my more mundane movements if I chose to commit to them.

“Thank you for healing me,” I acknowledge her assistance and wait for the inevitable tongue lashing.

“Thou hast best not waste thy thanks on us, we had nay choice but to heal thee, more importantly what manner of freakish beast art thou, the sen-ki we used to heal thee with hast completely vanished. We cannot feel yea a trace of it from your body so thou hast completely absorbed it in an instant. That should be simply impossible.” Vera declares full of conviction, though it's hard to take her seriously when all she does is scream at me.

“Why would it be impossible? I watched the energies converge. Since I saw that doesn’t that mean it's possible?” I rebuke her, traces of irritation beginning to show in my tone.

“Converge! Thee truly art blind to the ways of the spirit, the elemental essences that inhabit sen-ki are in opposition due to their natures, for thee to say that they hast merged is the same as to say water and oil were to mix.”

“I’m not going to argue with you, just tell me… did I make the quota?”

“Nay, thee were close, yet tales from one’s past shall stay elusive to thee for at least one day further.” Shiki, who had previously been sitting to the side meditating after giving us the incentive of a history lesson on my mother, a subject that Vera was surprisingly enamored by.

Apparently my prospects in the mystical category are actually passable in her eyes, which just means that I get to be worn to the bone by her three times a week in addition to my daily physical training.

“Dost thee know wherefore this child is so adamant that the restorative elemental essences in his body were fused together?” Shiki questions Vera, and though her expression hasn’t exactly changed much from when she had been sitting on the sidelines, she gives off a different feeling from the indifferent airs she’d had on earlier, her switch to teacher mode has been flipped.

“Firstly, explain the process used to cast the healing spell.”

“We started off by collecting elemental essence of water and fire, the water for its restorative nature and the fire to invigorate the energy that waned due to exhaustion. Then we gathered earth and wind elemental essence and allowed used them to strengthen the natures of the water and fire essences respectively .Then we bound all of the energy together using our “will” to heal the pathetic mongrel.” Vera answers immediately, filled with confidence.

“By diffusing and then reinforcing the original water and fire elements with earth and wind essences thou made a group of “higher elemental essences” that carry the characteristics of the supplemental elements. Because the original elements of water and fire suppress each other it would be for them to be merged under normal circumstances, yet since they were strengthened and purified by the supplemental elements the suppression effect not only carried over but was greatly strengthened to the point whence the “will” that thou used disconnected the elements and fulfilled the spell with them separately.”  Shiki analyzes while giving Vera a smile of approval.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

“Excuse me, but what does that mean exactly?” I can’t help but ask since it seems rather important.

“To put in terms thee may understand, consider fire and water as two people going in opposite directions, by adding wind elements to the fire and earth element to the water, we’ve increased the distance between the two people possibly even one hundred fold.” Shiki replies patiently to which I respond with a courteous nod of understanding.

“I know that I saw the energies come together though, what does that mean?”

“It means you’re a devil, or rather, thou hast inherited the blood of thy father who must have been a devil.”

“Must have been?”

“What? Dost thee expect that I know everything?”

“W-well no, its just that I don’t really understand what a devil is.”

“To explain devils we must first examine mana. Mana is the word used to describe the presence of all elemental essence that exist in the world that art used to perform supernatural feats. When a person is born, they art given a set of elemental affinities, generally fox-clan members art relatively average in their affinities for elements that aside from light and darkness. In rare cases there will be a child born who has superior affinity for one element, which tends to be fire in most cases, that pup Boqin was one such being born with superior affinity in the Earth attribute.”

She stops for a moment, giving me time to absorb the lecture, and after a couple minutes of silent rumination I ask her to continue.

“Mana is inherently neutral, this is true for all of the elements that make it up, including both darkness and light. ‘Tis a natural force that fills the world, some areas, such as mountains, certain forests, and places of historical importance, hast a high potential capacity to hold mana. Yet, just because the environment is of a quality that it can effortlessly hold great amounts of mana dost not mean that its inhabitants art all able to, in areas that gather up enormous amounts of mana the animals art affected and may become inherently able to manipulate the mana present in their bodies consciously if they art able to do so then they may evolve into spirit beasts. The foxes in this village were born through such a method long ago. We’ll come back to that later.” With the way that Shiki is spitting out information it’s evident that she truly loves to teach, regardless of how difficult to approach her position of power leaves her seeming.

“Maybe she really likes giving lectures,” I sigh internally under the strain of having to process large amounts of information in such a short time. Vera wrinkles her nose unpleasantly in my direction.

“Thou just thought something rude,” she declares but is silenced by a single sharp look from her grandmother.

“What dost thou think happens if a living being is unable to process the excess mana that these environments radiate?”

“I’m not sure… do they explode?”

“Remember that mana is a sort of spirit that is present in all manners of life, having more mana in thy system than thy body’s container can hold is a glass of wine overflowing. If thy body is supplemented with slightly more mana than it can process it will try to purge the energy, the most efficient way is to cast a spell. This method only works when the excess mana present in the body is only barely more than thy body’s maximum, in the case that ‘tis fractionally more than what thy body’s container can carry, the mana will begin to change the organism’s body so that it may be able to contain it. The problem with this is that since the organism is being forcibly changed from scratch it must go through a process to recreate its body from scratch, this step is generally far too painful for most animals to stay conscious throughout. Animals and plants that have been restructured by mana like this art known as demon beasts.”

“Between Spirit Beasts and Demon Beasts, which art stronger?” Vera asked, for the first time seemingly genuinely interested.

“Humans hast seen fit to categorize the two beings into multiple tiers, starting from the weakest being 1 stars known as “Child Eaters,” 2 stars known as “King Killers,” 3 stars known as “War Enders,” 4 stars known as “Lost Nobles,” and finally the strongest 5 stars called “Ragnarok. Generally speaking when comparing Spirit and Demon Beasts at the Child Eater and King Killer tiers, demon beasts tend to be stronger partially due to their naturally overflowing bloodlust and partially due to the fact that most lower tiered Spirit Beasts tend to lean towards pacifism. On Higher ranking Spirit Beasts art far more powerful than Demon Beasts of a similar ranking, presumably due to far higher degrees of intelligence found in Spirit Beasts as opposed to Demon Beasts.”

“The names give off a sinister feel, but how strong is each tier?” I request earnestly.

“The actual amount of power able to be displayed by each individual spirit beast, but if I had to give the average strength of each tier, ‘Child Eater’ tier species art easily able to kill a dozen adult human males in an instant. ‘King Killers’ art able to destroy large homes of brick with a single punch. ‘War Enders’ art strong enough to split seas with a thought. ‘Lost Nobles’ hast been known to destroy small cities in a single night, and ‘Ragnarok’ tier beings art said to be able to destroy islands in the blink of an eye.”

“If the worthless mongrel and I were to be ranked in accordance, whence wouldst we be placed?” Vera’s eyes sparkle with unbeforeseen brilliance at the concept of knowing where her strength reaches currently, so much so that she was kind enough to include me.

“You would rank amidst the upper reaches of the ‘King Killer’ tier, the boy strength should be within the bounds of an late ‘Child Eater.’ The small elder answers immediately, most likely having guessed the question would come beforehand.

“Many animals hath low intelligence and as such are more likely to become demon beasts rather than spirit beasts, but what doth thou believe would happen if another organism that wasn’t quite an animal is infected by the overflowing mana of the enviorments that give birth to spirit and demon beasts?”

“An organism that isn’t quite an animal but is intelligent… do you mean humans?”

“Aye, similar to how excess mana in animals and plants can give birth to Demon or Spirit beasts, excess mana in human beings gives birth to beings known as Devils. Unlike demon beasts who operate purely on instinct, devils retain their intelligence from their lives as humans. Not to mention that all Devils art at least ‘War Ender’ tier with most being able to use magic.” Shiki concludes satisfied by both the quality and quantity of knowlege she’d managed to teach today.

“Are you saying that my father was human?” I inquire to no avail, as the fox elder replies with an informed, “I’ll tell you more once you’ve earned it,” before shooing me off to go home for the day.