44: The Prana Within

NOTE: Apologies for messing up ch 42. I accidentally mashed 42 and 43 together & released them both as 42. So here's 44, an actual new chap for today.

Vir flipped the hourglass, setting it onto the obstacle course’s first platform. Then he launched into action, sprinting over the first balancing beam, jumping onto the next beam in seconds. The third beam came and went, and he was at the rotating wooden sword posts.

After he’d mastered the timing, these posed little challenge, and the obstacle blurred as he moved through it, each step perfectly placed and perfectly timed to avoid the hazards. That said, no matter how proficient he became, there was an upper limit to how quickly he could clear this course, dictated by blade timing.

Vir lunged for the wooden wall on the far side and bounded his way up onto the next platform.

The swinging axes that came next were slightly more interesting. He’d long ago committed the blade timing to memory, but soon realized that there were more optimal ways through this course. Initially, he’d stopped in between blades wherever the gap was large enough. This allowed him to rest and recover his stamina… but it ultimately meant he was wasting time.

Not today. Vir literally dove into the axes headlong, seamlessly transitioning into a somersault as the massive wooden blades whooshed by just inches away.

From the somersault, he kicked off into another dive, and cleared the course. The entire obstacle hadn’t even taken fifteen seconds. When he’d started, it took him fifteen minutes.

Next up were the monkey bars. Nothing dangerous here, apart from the fall down to the sand, now a good ten paces below. Riyan’s dome of horrors comprised of multiple levels, usually with three different obstacles occupying a single level, with stairs or a ladder up to the next higher level. The higher he went, the harder they got, and the danger of falls multiplied.

Vir didn’t bother to grasp each monkey bar—too slow. Instead, he threw himself through the air, catching every other bar with preternatural grace.

The monkey bars led to a challenge that had stymied him for the longest time… All until the past day or two. He lunged from the final monkey bar onto another horizontal bar. This course was brutal, but not in the same way of the previous courses—it required strength. Explosive strength. And stamina. All things Vir was terrible at. Or at least, had been terrible at.

The metal bar sat on V shaped holders at each end. Above him was another pair of V shaped holders, and another above that. This course was basically a ladder, only every rung had been removed, leaving only the supports for the rungs in place. In order to ascend, he had to draw on every ounce of upper body strength he could muster, leaping upwards with the bar in his hands. He had to not only leap a full pace upward with the bar, but he had to place it within the V holders. If he missed… well, it was a long fall all the way back down to the sand.

Actually, his fall would be even worse. This obstacle sat directly above the spinning blade posts—the second obstacle. So if he fell, he’d land right into that death trap. He knew exactly how that felt… he’d learned it firsthand. Many, many times.

But things were different now. He wasn’t the same person he was just a week ago. He’d changed.

Vir grasped the metal bar and launched himself upward. It was like doing a pullup, but with far more speed and power. As he flew upward, he quickly raised his hands as high as they could go.

Clang!

The bar slotted cleanly into the next set of supports. Success… Now he just had to repeat the feat five more times.

Every rung became harder and harder as his muscles tired. But Vir was not going to fall into those bladed posts. He drew upon every ounce of strength he could muster and threw himself up.

Clang!

The left support caught. But his aim was off with the right one. It slipped out of its groove.

Vir saw the right side of the beam fall in slow motion. If he did nothing, the beam would slip off its other groove, and he’d fall.

No Badrakking Way!

Vir shifted his left hand further left on the bar and torqued it with every shred of power he could muster. The right end of the beam whipped up and fell into its V-shaped notch with a clang. He’d done it.

Vir straddled up to the next platform. In the past, he’d be heaving and retching by this point, but now he merely wiped the sweat off his brow, calmed his breath, and prepared for the next hurdle—the tightrope arena.

Nine tightropes, each a few paces in length, all arranged in a grid, suspended high above the sand below. Three across, three long. And above them, over a hundred blades of all sorts that randomly extended downward, mounted on a wooden lattice framework.

His goal was at the other end—a pole Riyan had installed that allowed Vir to descend back down to the first level. This wasn’t the end of the course… but it was the halfway point. He had to make it.

Vir hadn’t yet memorized the timing of these blades. In the past, he’d sit for hours, plotting out strategies and paths through. But he’d had a realization recently: life was not kind. It wouldn’t let him prepare and plan for every situation. He’d need to trust his instincts, and he’d need to adapt.

He took a deep breath and bounded out onto the tightrope. Immediately, a blade descended from above. If he dodged it, he’d lose his balance and fall. Vir immediately hopped over to the tightrope to the right, where the pattern repeated.

Vir’s balance was perfect. He bounded from one rope to another. Sometimes he leaped backward to avoid blades, his feet always finding balance.

It wasn’t just his endurance. Literally every physical capability he possessed had improved drastically.

Jumping into the air, he executed a flawless front flip to land on the next tightrope. He’d flipped over the sword that had dropped from above, bypassing the obstacle entirely.

Except this time, swords began dropping from the ceiling even before he’d landed on the next tightrope.

There was no hesitation in his movements. Vir immediately adapted… and jumped onto the pommels of the swords, axes, and maces that had fallen from the ceiling. All suspended by ropes… which made for excellent handholds.

With a final front flip, Vir landed on the opposite platform and jumped onto the smooth wooden pole, straddling it to control his descent back to the sand.

When he was five paces from the ground, he kicked off of the pole, somersaulted in midair, and landed on the tips of his toes.

“This isn’t fair. How is this fair?” Maiya said, aghast at his performance. “How is this even possible? You’re cheating. You have to be cheating! Just when I finally start improving thanks to all the training we’re doing, you go and do this!”

Vir laughed, wiping a trickle of sweat off his brow—he wasn’t even breathing hard. He walked over to the hourglass. Two ticks. A whole minute faster than last time.

“I gotta say though, Maiya, your acrobatics really have gotten better. And your Kalari too. You’re smarter about how you fight these days. You really have improved.”

“You’re just trying to rub this in my face, aren’t you?” She huffed, pouting. With her hands on her hips, she looked more like a bandy puppy, barking with everything it had… but the result just made her look cute instead.

“Wasn’t enough beating me in a sprint, was it? Then you had to go and beat me in our endurance race, too. And now this… I deserve an explanation.”

Vir put up his hands, conceding. “Alright, alright. Just wanted to have a bit of fun with this, is all. You’re gonna be leaving me in the dust with your magic pretty soon. Figured this was the last chance I had to show off. And it wouldn’t be much fun if I told you the trick right away, would it?”

She’d witnessed his transformed capabilities several times, but he’d held back his secret until now, much to her chagrin.

“I dunno about that. I’ve hardly made any progress with my magic. And I still can’t even detect prana. Tell me! Tell me how you did it. It was a trick after all, wasn’t it? What, have you been faking your poor stamina all along? I find that hard to believe. You’re not that good of an actor, Vir.”

He shook his head. “No. It’s got to do with prana, Maiya. There is prana inside my body. It’s just… different. And it was always leaking. Leaving me dry and empty inside. I just plugged that leak, and now my body’s full of it. That’s really all it took.”

It was obvious in hindsight—Prana was the energy of life. His body was constantly being sucked dry, so of course he’d suffer for it. He’d just never realized that his lack of stamina was caused solely by prana starvation.

As his prana steadily filled up, his physical abilities had multiplied. And it didn’t even end there. His muscles had already grown larger and more solid in this past week alone. He was still on the scrawnier side, but he certainly wouldn’t be for very long if his body kept packing on muscle at this rate. Vir wondered how much his physical development had been crippled by growing up in a prana dry environment. At least he could undo all of that now.

“‘That’s really all it took’, he says. Vir… that’s not possible. Tanya tells me that the prana inside your body’s always at the same level as your surroundings. And here,” said Maiya, gesturing to the surroundings, “there isn’t much prana at all. I even asked her about it. She said a lot of famous mejai have tried to boost their body’s prana to try and power orbs. But it’s useless. You simply can’t control the prana in your body well enough to do that. Not even the strongest mejai… and what’s worse, you’ll end up saturated with prana, which apparently makes it impossible to use magic at all for a while.”

Vir’s brows furrowed. It surprised him that Tanya knew about equilibrium, though he supposed it was a pretty basic concept in the end. But being unable to control the leakage? That was… surprising. Was he unique, somehow?

He shook off the thought. Vir wasn’t conceited enough to think he was special. He was probably just messing with things expert mejai had tried and abandoned for good reason. But until and unless he found those reasons himself, he’d persist. He had to.

Prana saturation was another interesting idea he wasn’t familiar with. It didn’t really make sense that mejai lost the ability to use magic when they saturated. But he shelved those thoughts, for now. He had something he had to do.

He took a seat on the sand and crossed his legs.

“What are you up to now?” Maiya asked.

“Sorry, Maiya, but I need to concentrate for this. So, uh, I’d appreciate it if you could stick around though. It might be a little dangerous.”

“Vir? What aren’t you telling me?”

“Nothing, Maiya. Don’t worry about it.”

Maiya huffed, but he ignored her. He knew his friend would watch over him as he did dumb things to his body, even if she disagreed.

And what he was about to attempt certainly was dumb, given the last time he’d done it, he’d blacked out. But he was smarter now. Over the past week, he’d refrained from experimenting with altering his blood flow. It’d taken every shred of discipline he could muster, but he’d managed it.

He’d used the time to steadily refine his ‘light touch’ prana control, as he called it. As the prana density built up within his body, it became harder to control as more and more of it wanted to escape his body into the air and ground. And that made for excellent training.

His finesse grew by leaps and bounds, as did his ability to influence smaller and smaller streams of prana, coaxing it to stay within his body with the gentlest of pressure. Before, he could only direct the main arteries within his body, but now even his digits were within his control.

The only time he’d released his grip over the prana in his body was when he slept. That undid a good deal of the day’s buildup, making it a constant—and losing—battle.

That’s why he’d prioritized maintaining the ability subconsciously. As it turned out, that hadn’t been as difficult as he’d thought. When his thoughts were solely occupied with preventing prana leakage at all waking hours of the day, his subconscious mind took the hint.

As the days wore on, he found that the ability quickly became ingrained in his muscle memory. He hadn’t even realized when his subconscious mind had first taken over. He’d gotten distracted by something, breaking his active control over the technique. But instead of deactivating, the technique lingered on, continuing to prevent prana from dissipating.

After more practice, he’d even kept the ability active in his sleep. Of course, subconscious ‘light touch’ wasn’t as effective as actively maintaining the technique, but the inflection point had come just a couple of days ago. Thanks to his relentless hours of practice, the amount of prana that leaked out had decreased steadily, and that applied to both the active and subconscious variants. Both versions now prevented enough prana from leaking out that his body could maintain a headway against the leakage.

Which was to say that his body was now always topped up on prana, even when he wasn’t thinking about keeping the technique active. He hadn’t bothered to squash all the leakage—he had bigger things to worry about.

Like mastering the ability to direct prana within his body.

Maiya sat opposite him, gazing at him, as if hoping to learn something. Without Prana Vision, he doubted it’d do her any good, but if that made her happy, he wasn’t about to tell her off.

Vir closed his eyes and looked inward. One downside to his newfound stamina was that his heart never seemed to pump as fast as it did before. Which, of course, hampered Prana Vision.

That would change now. Instead of gripping the prana in his neck with a death grip as he’d done on Bakura’s ship, he leveraged his newfound control to apply a far gentler touch, redirecting some of the blood bound for other areas of his body to flow through pathways that led to his head instead. He applied only the bare minimum of pressure, doing as little as he could to achieve the results he wanted.

And it worked. It worked so well, Vir could hardly believe it. He didn’t feel pain. He didn’t black out. Instead, the prana obediently followed his intent, traveling up through his neck and into his eyes.

The effect was immediate. Prana Vision flared brightly. Perhaps not the brightest it’d ever been—he wasn’t seeing any ‘black’ prana in the ground—but there was always time for improvement. This was his first attempt, after all.

He’d do that later. There was a higher priority item he wanted to work on: It was time to unlock his first Talent. And he had a pretty good idea of how to do exactly that.