14

In general, it was hard to call what he was doing drawing. It was more like an excavation. A magical seal was created with a shovel, which dug a small circle around an oak tree and dug shallow trenches in the form of rune signs. The longer Linael dug, the more fear was in the eyes of the outlaws. And when he put the shovel away, stunned Skipper again, and dragged him to the center of the runes, even the other prisoners had their hairs stand in a...

And when the knife glinted in his hand...

Sacrifice was not a pretty sight. Linael took no pleasure in what he was doing. He'd done many unpleasant things in his long life by human standards, but killing sentient beings before the orc war was not one of them. He had ceased to feel any piety for killing, but he still did not like to do such things. But he had to. And he put his needs above the desires of the Humans, much less the enemies who were going to kill him without even trying to engage in dialogue.

All five of the criminals gave up their lives. Their bodies dried up under the effect of the ritual, turning into dry, rotting mummies. Their life force flowed over to the gnarled oak tree. The tree's leaves grew lush green. The dry branches came alive. Huge acorns swelled on the branches.

And one would have been glad that the ritual had gone perfectly, but Linael was not concerned with that. He looked sadly at the shovel, sighed heavily and began to dig. The bodies had to be disposed of, and so did the traces of the ritual. He had much more digging to do.

It was not until late at night that he finished cleaning up the evidence of the crime, and then he returned to the parking lot. Here again there was work waiting for him, because the bandits had scattered all his belongings.

In the morning Dmitry woke up late. His whole body ached, his muscles groaned, and his left leg ached incessantly. In such a broken state, he slowly began the movements of the training complex. This was followed by the preparation of a breakfast of leftovers that the uninvited guests had no time to transfer. Only after that did he head to the tree.

The oak had grown a little overnight. The acorns on its branches were the size of his fist.

Linael moved close to the trunk and embraced it. He closed his eyes shut and sank habitually into a meditative trance. Reaching for the oak's life force in his mind, he touched it almost immediately. Prana was very different from plant lifeforce. A turbulent whirlpool in a small pond, not viscous molasses. Scooping a handful from it was almost as easy as controlling his power.

Dimitri dove into the maelstrom, which made controlling his energy even easier. He began to absorb the prana spilled around him and direct it in a thin stream to his soul. He concentrated clearly on the task of activating the true vision.

After a few moments of such manipulation, the world blossomed with other colors. The elf revealed his soul in all its glory. Parts of it shimmered in different colors, but this was purely a personal perception. Everyone perceives the subtle world from his own point of view. Some feel it in the form of smells, some hear different shades of sounds. There are those who taste it. Most magicians see the subtle world.

The physical body and the life force associated with it were perceived as foreign inclusions. They did not correspond at all to harmoniously developed parts of the soul, which were responsible for communication with the astral, for mind and emotions. But the magical and immortal parts could not be seen behind the black opaque veil. It was as if they were encased in a cocoon of dark energy. Closer inspection revealed that the cocoon was composed of many threads, as if a giant caterpillar had nested in the elf's soul.

This was something Linael had never seen before in all his magical practice. Nor had he ever heard of anything like it. Although it is theoretically possible to create something like that with the soul, but one must have a great power to influence reality. Unfortunately for the elf, that was exactly the kind of power that the spirit-gods of the orcs possessed.

The joyful thing about everything I saw was that the soul parts were there, which meant that all I had to do was to figure out how to break the cocoon and regain access to magical power and immortality.

It could have been much worse if those pieces had been torn out of the soul. It is also possible, because only the heart of the soul is indestructible, and other layers grow around it.

There was stil some life force in the oak. Linael tried to probe the black cocoon. To do so, he twisted bundles of prana and poked them in different places like an octopus. The bundles spread out on the surface of the cocoon into a multitude of thin threads. These threads tried to find gaps and penetrate inside the cocoon. Nothing happened. Then he gathered all available power into a single monolith in the form of a spear with a sharpened endend and directed all prana to maintain the spear. The concentrated life force hit a single point. The cocoon sagged, but did not budge. For a moment, the elf thought he saw a barely perceptible gap between the threads. For a brief moment, he felt a drop of mana come from it. Quite tiny, as if a drop of water had burst out of a large lake. If he hadn't tried to notice everything he could, he might not have paid attention to that crumb.

Suddenly the stream of prana was exhausted. The surrounding life force began to thicken and slip from the ghostly hands. Realizing that the available resources were depleted, Linael deactivated his true vision and fell out of the trance.

His body was covered in stick sweat, his legs trembled with exertion, his muscles cramped. And no wonder: in the few hours that have passed since meditation, to pass through the body the entire life force of one person is ,as if a nerd who had never held anything heavier than a fountain pen had unloaded a carload of coal in a day. He would not die, but he would not feel well.

Despite the unpleasant consequences, a wide, happy smile never left Dmitry's face. He rejoiced like a child at his success. Magic and immortality are with him, just out of reach. And the cocoon is not monolithic - it could well be broken. Which means it's only a matter of time before he regains his former capabilities.

That day he lay back in his camp. It wasn't until the morning that Dima hitched up the wagon and went home. On the way he was swayed, his leg was hurting and his body felt weak, like a sick man. Therefore, he did not reach the village house until evening.