200: Prana Current

Vir started slowly, taking great pains to monitor the orb as he worked. There was so much going on, the task was easier said than done. Even finding the crisscrossing inscription ribbons was a chore, though after a full half day of simply staring at it, he’d learned to discern them—at the risk of going cross-eyed.

Seeing nothing obviously amiss, Vir upped the flow, cycling prana in his palm with both his blood and pranites.

Prana flowed into the orb as it should’ve, the inscription rings glowing as they hungrily soaked it in.

Vir stopped, waiting to see if the orb would crack. When it didn’t, he continued.

It cracked ten minutes later.

One moment, it had been charging fine, and the next, it was broken.

Vir forced himself to breathe, taking several moments to let his anger and frustration pass. If he’d failed while in a positive state of mind, anything less than his best would be guaranteed to result in a broken orb.

For the next hour, he studied the broken remains, but to no avail. He wasn’t able to glean any hint as to why it’d shattered.

Picking up his second orb, he tried again, starting slowly, bringing the orb to within only a few inches of his eyes.

There were so many ribbon rings that the orb was nearly submerged in them. When prana flowed into the inscriptions, they lit up.

Each ring seemed to be isolated. What purpose they served, Vir couldn’t know. He couldn’t even begin to guess.

It was only after staring at the inscriptions for another hour—and wondering if he’d gone insane—did he find a clue.

While some of the inscriptions happily soaked up prana, others rejected it. Once they’d reached capacity, they seemed to actively resist any more prana, shunting prana heading their way.

Just like blood saturation.

Vir quickly found several more rings that had stopped accepting more prana.

Each ring had its own maximal prana capacity. And, like his own blood, there were limits. Attempting to exceed those could very well damage them, similar to how his blood cells burst when filled with too much.

The knowledge was useful—Vir simply had to avoid filling those rings. Unfortunately, he had no idea how to do that.

Pulling prana into the orb was more like opening a dam, allowing a torrent of water to rush through. Turning it on was easy. Controlling where the water went was another thing entirely.

The task would have been trivially simple—if the orb was inside his body, like a tattoo. That way, Vir could control the flow, directing it to the proper inscriptions.

As it was, prana outside of his body was entirely beyond his control. And if the inscription rings were already saturated with such a low level of suction force, they might very well break and crack when Vir upped the flow.

Charging the orb slowly wasn’t an option, either. At this rate, it’d take him a year of continuous charging. He needed a better way.

So he did the only thing he could—cycle blood in his palm, hoping it would redirect some of the flow away from the saturated rings. He used the pranites, because they responded more easily to his directions, and also because he could freely move them in any pattern he wished without worrying about messing up his blood flow.

The result left him underwhelmed. The flow had shifted, just not in the way he wanted to. It was like trying to direct the surging flow of water with a single valve. If he had ten, he might’ve been able to accomplish his goal. One was simply insufficient.

To Vir’s dismay, splitting the pranites into multiple loops diluted their attractive power to such a degree that they became useless. Worse still, he had to grasp the orb with the tips of his fingers to have enough control points to direct prana the way he wanted to.

Ten fingers—ten circulation patterns. Maintaining so many circulation paths strained Vir’s mind, but that was hardly the worst issue facing him. Grasping the orb with his fingers meant he could no longer circulate prana in his palm to create an attractive effect.

Previously, prana would enter his palm from the air on all sides, which meant about half went through the orb and became trapped there.

Now, the miniscule amount of blood and pranites he cycled near the tips of each finger pulled prana in ten different ways, diluting the attractive force even further. Pressing his wrists together helped, but both the flow rate and his degree of control weren’t even close to enough.

Vir found Ashani’s last syringe of pranites, and, after some fumbling, managed to inject himself, hoping the extra prana machines in his body might get him there.

They didn’t.

If Vir was going to overcome this problem, he’d need something on another level entirely. Something that would allow him to magnify the force of his attractive current a hundredfold.

Of course, there’s nothing like… that?

Except there was. Decoupling prana flow from blood flow.

Vir had first gotten the idea at Balindam, when he’d witnessed the Pagan Order’s non-magical light—what they called electricity. It had always remained just an idea. He’d never been sure if it could be done. Not until Ashani had outright asked him why he wasn’t doing that.

If only it were so easy, Vir thought, idly willing prana to decouple from his blood. Yes. Just like that. Transferring prana across blood cells would be so…!?

Something felt different. Strange. Vir frowned in confusion at his own body. Then his jaw dropped.

He was doing it!

Prana surged freely through his body, liberated from his blood. It felt similar to taking control of his pranites, except this prana had no weight to slow it down. It moved as fast as his mind could control.

And it’d taken nothing more than a thought.

How!? Vir thought incredulously.

Hadn’t he done exactly that dozens of times prior? If it was this easy…

The truth dawned on him.

Pranites. It has to be!

Ashani’s pranites had been flowing within Vir’s body for weeks now. They’d healed several major injuries, and Vir suspected they were active behind the scenes, too.

Healing. But not restoring him as he was.

Vir didn’t know why he never registered it. The pranites wouldn’t have known about Vir’s body composition. They were Imperium constructs. Created by the race of gods—for themselves.

The pranites weren’t simply healing him. They’d altered his body into the physiology of the gods.

The realization washed over Vir like a wave. He couldn’t prove it, of course. Not without Ashani confirming. But if true… What did it mean? Were the pranites only changing his body? Or were they altering more? Like who he was?

I don’t feel any different, though, Vir thought. His hunch told him they weren’t altering his identity, and his hunches had rarely led him astray in the past. Still, the tiny machines had certainly done something to his body. Perhaps restoring it to its ideal state?

The Imperium denizens in Ashani’s memory sequence looked nearly identical to humans. But humans had never learned to decouple prana from blood. Vir knew—he’d seen records of mejai who’d tried.

He also wondered how demons differed from humans and from the Imperium race.

Vir’s skin was still the same hue, and he felt as healthy as ever. Prana surged within him, making him brim with vitality.

While there were no doubt other changes, Vir could ask Ashani more about that when she awoke. The current, as Ashani had called it, offered him so many possibilities that it made him giddy. For now, he concentrated on increasing the current in his fingertips, moving prana according to Parai’s Barrier pattern, only in reverse, to pull prana into him.

It didn’t work. Or rather, it did, but it felt like the pattern was now fighting itself, with some parts attracting, while others repelled.

Does being unbound from blood break the principle that allowed the old pattern to work?

Vir couldn’t know, but he did discover that changing the pattern was far less an ordeal than before. In fact, he could alter it as he wished, feeling no pain at all.

After trying various patterns, he found that the simplest one—a basic loop—functioned best. Vir wasn’t complaining. Loops were far easier to control than complex patterns, especially in numbers.

He supplemented this with another loop current in his palm, hardly believing the amount of attraction force his hands now generated. The palm pulled, and the fingertips directed.

I can do this! he thought, taking control of this new ability.

He upped the flow, cycling prana faster and faster. Unlike before, when his body had burned out from moving around so much of it, no such issues bothered him this time. Either Prana Current simply didn’t cause burnout, or the limit was far higher.

It wasn’t the only limit that had been raised. The rate at which the magical energy moved through his body boggled his mind. There wasn’t much blood at all in his fingertips, and yet the attractive force sucked in more prana than his palms had before.

With ten finger points, directing prana into the orb became more tenable, though it was still far from easy. Vir concentrated single-mindedly on the task, guiding the energy away from the sensitive patterns and funneling it into the ones that soaked it up.

The issue was one of quantity—there were dozens of patterns within the orb. No matter how fine his control, some prana still leaked into the filled inscriptions, stressing them.

As he increased the current and upped the flow, the problem only grew worse. At this rate, he’d break the orb. So he doubled the number of current loops in his fingers, which doubled his control of the prana.

Simple though they were, maintaining twenty at once took incredible concentration. On the plus side, he pulled prana at a rate unlike ever before, surging so much, it became visible. At this rate, he doubted he’d need to keep up the effort for long.

Unfortunately, the more of the orb he filled, the more inscriptions saturated. Which in turn, forced him to keep redirecting the flow in an endless game.

The game might’ve been endless, but Vir was more than happy to play it.

The hours passed, and one by one, the inscriptions filled. Despite his best efforts, Vir’s charging rate slowed. He tried forming even more currents to shift the prana flow, but there was a limit to how many his mind could handle.

He reached it… and exceeded it. Were it only for a moment or two, all would have been fine. But he’d been concentrating for hours. He caught it too late.

Prana surged into an already-full inscription… and the orb cracked and shattered.

“Damn you to Ash!” Vir roared. All that effort, wasted. And now he had one less orb for Ashani. Only two remained. One empty one, and Ashani’s partially filled core.

Vir closed his eyes, taking a long, deep breath. Then he meditated.

When he tried again, he’d need his mind to be right. This wasn’t a task that could be rushed. It didn’t matter if it took days. He’d endure.

He was so close, he could taste it. He wasn’t about to fail again.