Ashborn Primordial

Chapter 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, hed learned to discern themat 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 shouldve, the inscription rings glowing as they hungrily soaked it in.

Vir stopped, waiting to see if the orb would crack. When it didnt, 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 hed 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 wasnt able to glean any hint as to why itd 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 couldnt know. He couldnt even begin to guess.

It was only after staring at the inscriptions for another hourand wondering if hed gone insanedid he find a clue.

While some of the inscriptions happily soaked up prana, others rejected it. Once theyd 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 usefulVir 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 simpleif 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 wasnt an option, either. At this rate, itd take him a year of continuous charging. He needed a better way.

So he did the only thing he couldcycle 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 mightve been able to accomplish his goal. One was simply insufficient.

To Virs 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 fingersten circulation patterns. Maintaining so many circulation paths strained Virs 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.

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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 werent even close to enough.

Vir found Ashanis 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 didnt.

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

Of course, theres nothing like that?

Except there was. Decoupling prana flow from blood flow.

Vir had first gotten the idea at Balindam, when hed witnessed the Pagan Orders non-magical lightwhat they called electricity. It had always remained just an idea. Hed never been sure if it could be done. Not until Ashani had outright asked him why he wasnt 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 itd taken nothing more than a thought.

How!? Vir thought incredulously.

Hadnt he done exactly that dozens of times prior? If it was this easy

The truth dawned on him.

Pranites. It has to be!

Ashanis pranites had been flowing within Virs body for weeks now. Theyd healed several major injuries, and Vir suspected they were active behind the scenes, too.

Healing. But not restoring him as he was.

Vir didnt know why he never registered it. The pranites wouldnt have known about Virs body composition. They were Imperium constructs. Created by the race of godsfor themselves.

The pranites werent simply healing him. Theyd altered his body into the physiology of the gods.

The realization washed over Vir like a wave. He couldnt 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 dont feel any different, though, Vir thought. His hunch told him they werent 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 Ashanis memory sequence looked nearly identical to humans. But humans had never learned to decouple prana from blood. Vir knewhed seen records of mejai whod tried.

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

Virs 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 Parais Barrier pattern, only in reverse, to pull prana into him.

It didnt 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 couldnt 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 onea basic loopfunctioned best. Vir wasnt 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 didnt cause burnout, or the limit was far higher.

It wasnt the only limit that had been raised. The rate at which the magical energy moved through his body boggled his mind. There wasnt 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 quantitythere 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, hed 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 hed 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 mightve 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, Virs 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 hed 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 Ashanis partially filled core.

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

When he tried again, hed need his mind to be right. This wasnt a task that could be rushed. It didnt matter if it took days. Hed endure.

He was so close, he could taste it. He wasnt about to fail again.