Aether Beasts

"Did you get a nice long rest?" Zirani asked coyly the next day as Sandra and I entered the dining room.

"I think you already know we did," I replied as I took a seat next to Misty who was purposefully averting her gaze from me. In fact, there seemed to be a slight pink blush on her cheeks, which looked more prominent due to her pale skin.

"It was great." Sandra smiled. "But arent we starting training today, I don't think we need any distractions."

"Indeed," Zirani said, bemused. "And Aiden's can be quite a big distraction."

Misty coughed loudly and I held back a snort of laughter.

"In all seriousness, though," ZIrani said." I've prepared all we need for now."

With a flourish of her hand, she placed down six potions, two in front of each of us. One was a pale blue in color while the other was dark red. Each liquid was held in a simple glass cup that I recognized from the alchemy set I'd bought. The faint smell of sweetness drifted off from the pale blue elixir, while the red didn't seem to have any apparent smell.

"These are the two elixirs we will be using most for the starting period of our training," Zirani explained. "The blue is an aether gathering elixir while the red is body strengthening elixir. The blue you drink while the red is poured into water, which you then soak in."

"You made these that quickly," Misty said in awe. "I've heard these take days to make and are expensive to boot."

"Please, these are some of the most simple alchemical elixirs out there," Zirani said. |At least they are beyond the great scar, I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that they are uncommon in the plains."

"Where are we going to find the water for the red elixir?" Sandra asked.

Zirani smiled. "That's easy, I will shape a bathtub out of wood. Then all I'll need is a water core and some time. A simple watering enchantment will be no challenge."

"You can do enchantment as well?" Misty sounded shocked.

"I'm over four hundred years old," Zirani pointed out. "And I'm from beyond the great scar. For heaven's sake, Misty, I'm a Zigan, a jungle queen."

Misty lowered her head. "Sorry."

"No need." Zirani shook her head. "I wasn't scolding you. Now, each of you take a blue elixir and follow me outside. Today I'm mostly just going to go over what I want each of you to do and a few integral things you need to know about the arcane. Once you have my instructions, every day you will follow them. If I want a change, then I will come to you. Lets me make this clear, I expect every ounce of your effort. We cannot afford to waste time here, and waste this opportunity."

Unlike her usual tone, Zirani's voice held no hint of warmth, just command. This was Zirani the teacher, not Zirani the friend.

The three of us made our way outside, and away from the treehouse to a nearby location with plenty of open space. It was obvious from the way the girls were looking around that there were still nervous, which was a sentiment I shared. That abomination had been quite disturbing, especially once we'd found out it wasn't an aether beast.

"All right, the goal is simple," Zirnai began. "I want all of you at the second level of infusion and up a density stage in your first core before we move up from this floor. I'm going to teach each of you a meditation technique that my mother taught all her children when they came of age, it is a secret kept close to my family and the green court, do not, and I mean, do not ever share it. At best we'd be killed if I returned and they ever found out, at worse we been given to the blood drinkers."

I winced. That didn't sound like a nice way to go, although did she mean vampires? She'd never called them blood drinkers before, but I suppose it was an apt term,

"No don't mean vampires Aiden," Zirani said, apparently having read my thoughts. "Blood Drinkers or Crimson leaf leeches as some know them, are a type of carnivorous plant."

"A plant that drinks blood?" Sandra asked.

Zirani nodded. "The funny thing is that vampires do value them highly as the blood is stored in blood sacs and the blood the plant drains mixes with a syrupy liquid in the plant and gives it a nice and unique taste, or so the vampires have said, but that's off-topic, back to the meditation technique. Firstly I want each of you to practice this technique for an hour in the morning as soon as you wake, and after a long training session or expenditure of aether. Lastly, will be just before you head to bed, and you will sue it with another elixir I will have prepared that should also give the technique a dual purpose."

I tried to keep up with what she was saying, but a lot of it went over my head, although luckily Zirnai made it clear she'd help and explain things in more detail when it came time to actually do the task. I understood the idea of meditation even though I'd only heard about it a few times, but the talk of dual-purpose elixirs wasn't as clear to me.

"In the plains, you don't really have meditation techniques," Ziirani noted. "I've no doubt there are some exceptions like border cites mostly likely and probably a few other outliers, but where I'm from, almost everyone uses a meditation technique, even if it's just a basic foundation technique. These techniques serve the purpose of allowing more aether to be pulled in quickly and condensed into your core. Tell me what aether do you pull from the world around you at all time, just by breathing?"

"Pure aether," I answered.

"Correct, though a more appropriate term is colorless aether," Zirani said. "As there is nothing pure about the aether in the northern plains. This colorless aether is absorbed into your core and mixes with your essence to create affinity aligned aether. For Aiden, it's nature aether, while for Sandra it's dark aether, and Misty's is of course a mutated mix of multiple types. The colorless aether enters your core and essence then comes back out in a different form. What you probably don't know is that whenever you pull colorless aether into your core, some remains there and gets absorbed into your essence, strengthening your essence, but you cannot do this alone. We call this Aether Dilution."

Zirani raised a hand. "Over time if you don't absorb any essence into your core and mix it with the essence you already have to strengthen yourself and only pull in colorless aether then your essence becomes diluted. It's a slow process and probably even slower in the plains, but it does occur. Dilution of essence can lead to many problems one of which is a lower transformation rate from colorless aether to affinity-aligned aether. Where you could have gained enough aether for two techniques before, because your essence is so diluted, now you can only produce enough for one. Essentially the colorless aether you put into your core won't translate into the same amount of affinity aligned aether as it once did."

"So we need a balance?" I asked.

"Exactly," Zirani said. "We need to make sure there is a balance of colorless aether and essence. This meditation technique is best used when you have access to both, which is why those core we collected from the few beasts we killed will come in handy. Always keep one on you and wherever you meditate, using the technique I'm about to teach you, pull in essence from the core while using the technique, that way you will get both colorless aether and essence at the same time. The technique will do the rest, and you will see an immediate improvement and growth."

It was things like this that reminded me just how old she was. She didn't look like a four-hundred-year-old aether beast, and there were times I forgot that, but things like this, the knowledge she held, always made it clear once more, just how lucky I had been to run into her. Without her I would have remained in the plains, never knowing about any of this. I'd been blind before I'd met her and I hadn't even known it.

"Think of your core like your lungs," Zirani said. "Your breath in one thing, but another comes out, although you probably don't know about that. Just think of it as a living transformation. You absorb colorless aether into it, and your essence changes it into affinity-aligned aether."

I asked a few questions as did Sandra and Misty, mostly for her to clarify a few things, which she was more than happy to do, but once we had nothing left to ask, she finally got to teaching us the meditation technique.