Months Pass

A few months had passed since Kasa's departure. My promise to write her a letter remained unfulfilled since she never sent me one. Maybe she put me in the back of her mind already. At least I hope that's the case.

I spent the last few months razer focused on finishing my goals. As a result, I was able to accomplish far more than I originally believed possible. I was invovled in 4 main activities, talking to Lucan; practicing my soul techniques, specifically Az; talking to the prisoners; and going to the Adventurer Guild.

I was talking to Lucan to better understand my body and its relation to magic. I had a general idea, I'm immune to certain types of magic, but I wanted specific details such as which types, how, and why. At first, Lucan refused to help, but my persistence overcame his resistance. As we kept experimenting, he started to take interest in it himself.

The magic used on me was split into two categories, physical and internal. Physical magic referred to types of magic that influence real life, such as summoning a fireball, while internal magic referred to types of magic that affected a person's internal energy, like illusion magic.

To summarize what I've learned so far, I'm vulnerable to types of magic that affects the surrounding and immune to magic that effects internal energy. For instance, if someone created a fireball and threw it at me, I would burn to a crisp. On the flip side, if someone creates the strongest illusion in the world to trap me, it would not affect me. There were some exceptions to the rule, for example, gravity affects the physical world and internal energy, but the gravity magic tested on me was ineffective. As a side note, it was interesting to learn that ki and internal energy are two sides to the same coin, they're both methods of manipulating internal energy. While there were differences between how they worked, in my case, Lucan believed the same rules which applied to mana would hold for ki.

These findings led me to even more questions, such as how people used tracking magic on me, how I was affected by Lucan's tracking magic, and how the princess recognized me at the auction. For some of these questions, Lucan had an answer.

"To track you, someone who cannot hold mana, an intermediary must be created. The intermediary must be something easily replaceable, and something you would carry on you without fail. In your case, the only possible solution was to allow your clothes to be embedded with mana..."

"Regarding my illusion magic, it falls closer into the domain of physical rather than mental magic. To be honest it's misleading to refer to it as plant illusion magic, a more appropriate name would be plant movement magic."

For other questions, I was still left with questions.

"Why Princess Ailsa could find you? To be honest I don't know the exact reason, but I would assume it has something to do with the princess herself than anything else."

While it was a bit offputting when he told me he didn't know the reason for the princess tracking me, at least it meant that most other ki users wouldn't be able to do the same. Furthermore, my last question was more for curiosity's sake, it's not like I'm ever going to deal with her again.

On the other hand, learning how tracking magic was applied was a huge relief. Originally I thought I would have to get help from a wizard to escape, but it seems that I can just change my clothes instead.

As an unintended side effect of asking Lucan other questions, I gave up on using daggers. Almost all of the actual combat techniques using weapons revolve around wrapping the weapon in ki or mana, just stabbing someone with a knife will seldom work. Therefore, because Az only augments physical strength, I decided to pivot into trying to learn hand-to-hand combat.

Besides learning through Lucan, I gained some experience through training sessions at the local Adventurer Guild. Although I could apply for any type of training after I turned 10, I was rejected from most sessions due to my inability to use mana or ki. As a result, the only training sessions I could attend were the plant and monster identification course. They were simple courses that lasted 2 weeks at most and detailed dangerous monsters, poisonous plants near Alvaine. At the end of each course, we received a small guidebook, which was helpful as a reference.

Honestly, I was disappointed with how little I learned from the guild, but it wasn't too surprising. If I got injured while I was doing their training, they could be held liable.

Since the adventurer guild wouldn't teach me any combat-related techniques, my only option was to try my luck with the prisoners. As a result, I restarted my visits to prison.

The first time I entered the prison, there was a multitude of different reactions. Some people were glad to see me, others were surprised, some made jokes about my return to prison, and others thought my visits were an urban myth.

I used my original strategy of bribing them with food. It worked the first time around, so there was no reason it couldn't work the second time. However, I decided to refrain from asking them about combat techniques immediately, l didn't want them to suspect I was just using them. Currently, I felt like I had garnered just the right amount of goodwill to ask.

Although I couldn't practice combat techniques yet, I made sure to continue practicing Az. To my surprise, I was facing little to no resistance for forming my other soul veins. At the moment, I had created approximately 80% of the required amount of soul veins. However, I had little success on the reinforcement part of Az. No matter how hard I tried it was almost impossible to get over the disgusting feeling that came with it. Furthermore, the feeling only worsened as I formed more veins. However, I was still successful in progressing the technique.

After finishing up my practice on Az, I left my room to go to the prison. However, I had an interesting encounter as I left my room. It was one of my siblings, Fyn.