After the second day of travel, Trisaldan and the other two -- Eildan and Orelme, as I finally learned their names were -- decided they felt comfortable enough with me to begin the process of teaching me how to interact with the ishuar. There were some surprises for me in this process. The first and foremost being that it was very apparent that this was not an internal process, and that meditation apparently had nothing at all to do with it. Instead, Trisaldan would call out what appeared to be at random moments for me to "pay attention, now", and would review with me once an equally apparently random amount of time had passed what I had observed with my senses.

It quickly became apparent that he was less interested in the more obvious senses like sight, sound, and scent -- and more interested in things like whether I felt disoriented or any other more ineffable experiences. He'd even slapped me on the shoulder a couple of times when I tried to turn my attention inward when he called out, saying "What you're seeking cannot be found within you, for it is not there." This was all very frustrating compared to my preconceptions of how learning how to do magic was supposed to work -- but then I supposed that was rather the point; if it worked anything like how I had previously imagined, I would have gotten somewhere with that… probably. Some corner of my mind kept reminding me about that "nastigram" that I'd gotten the last time I tried to do the generic isekai mana manipulation thing.

It was to my great annoyance that I didn't realize until halfway through the morning of the third day that I could probably make the whole process go faster by having Eildan call out at random intervals for me to pay attention to my senses just like Trisaldan was doing, so that I had a closer baseline of action that was similar to whatever the older warden was trying to get me to notice. Over the midday rest, I even managed to explain the request to them in a manner that made it clear that they actually thought it was a decent idea -- but one they'd never actually thought of for teaching this sort of thing before. Chalk one up to the spirit of scientific endeavor: there's a reason we have control groups in studies.

That afternoon and early evening, each time Trisaldan called for me to "notice", I tried to rule out anything I could also have noticed when Eildan called for my attention. Since it wasn't anything obvious like the sound of leaves rustling, or changes in light level, or temperature or humidity shifts… that left me focusing on the sort of thing that was far, far more subjective.

I mentioned once or twice a sense of being watched, or of being accompanied by something. The sort of feeling you usually get when you've just watched a horror movie and have to go to the restroom or kitchen in the dark -- like your brain is preparing you for a jump-scare of seeing a clown's face out of the window as you pee. Only, more generic; not from a place of fear. Trisaldan smiled and nodded but neither confirmed nor denied that was what I was supposed to be 'feeling'. The bigger challenge, however, was now that I had begun to notice this not-alone-ness, I sometimes began feeling it even when Trisaldan didn't indicate I should. I even caught a whiff of it a couple of times when Eildan called me to my senses.

The fourth day, we actually started going slower than the previous two -- this was entirely my doing. I felt like the training exercises of our trip were starting to get somewhere, and to be frank the experience of developing a new skill entirely unaided by any aspect of the System was in a strange sort of way exhilarating even though it was frustrating. I began trying to see if there were some other way I could narrow down this sense I seemed to be developing, throughout the course of the day. I tried all manner of things, including trying to get a feeling of what sort of company it was, or if its position changed as I moved.

I did get a bit of a glimpse after twenty or so attempts at differentiating the kind of "presence", but I still had no real way of knowing if it was in my head or not. The only real solid hint I had to go on was the six of those times it was because Trisaldan was the one who called my attention to it. In those cases, I knew it would have to be something I associated with nature -- the scent of pollen in spring, the warmth of summer in grass fields, the astringent sting on the eyes of pine sap, the color green or brown, and so on.

I wasn't at all sure I was getting anywhere until suddenly, in the middle of the afternoon of the second day of my sensory-training, I felt something just click. I didn't know if I had reached out to it, or if it had reached out to me -- but all of a sudden I was completely and entirely certain that there was something directly beside me. It somehow felt exactly like a seedling breaking through soil from an acorn, but parched for water.

Without even thinking about it I touched that feeling with my thoughts in exactly the same way I would when seeking to understand a given alchemical essence, and just as with my alchemy, I found my mana bar depleting. The difference being, however, that when I tried to stop, that feeling somehow didn't let me.

Trisaldan suddenly was there, grabbing my shoulder and yelling in my ear. The complete shock of which startled me away from my focus on that seedling-sensation and back onto him. By the time that happened, a full quarter of my mana bar had been depleted. I noticed, however, that Trisaldan was smiling at me, as were the other two.

There was something harder than I had anticipated behind the middle-aged elf as he spoke to me in quick, clipped tones. "By Rishuata, I've never seen someone find the ishuar so quickly! And to develop so strong a bond with the first you connect with, it's quite impressive. But quickly now, Sir Vincent, you must contain the connection in your thoughts, or it will grow into them fully. For some they imagine a wall around the sensation, for others they tie it to some other experience or even to an act, like holding a certain rock. This is essential, sir: I can only constrain the new connection between yourself and the ishuar for so long. I can't give you the answer for this, you must work it out yourself.". His voice got more urgent as he went on. "The one thing you mustn't do is try to push it away. Only sorrow comes from this, both for you and it! Contain, but do not reject."

I nodded, stunned at his forcefulness, waving away my hunters that were bristling with irritation at how aggressively the apparently older man was laying hands on me. I thought briefly about his words and realized that I'd had my conception of what ishuar meant wrong all this time. Or maybe it was better to say that my understanding of what mana was and how it worked was what was flawed. Or both. In any case, what I was "connecting" to wasn't to some passive field of energy. It was to something that existed entirely within that omnipresent energy. To, for lack of better terms, a nature spirit. One that was now, apparently, attempting to possess me. But that I was supposed to contain rather than reject. But how was I supposed to do that?

After a few moments, an idea hit me: connecting to the spirit had been remarkably like "knowing" alchemical essences -- and doing so consumed mana from my reservoir. Which, if there were spiritual entities that were comprised entirely of mana, meant that I had been literally expending portions of myself just like I was when using sanguinism. And just like with sanguinism using up blood, if I wanted some fluid to be in my system but not contaminate my blood altogether, then what I really needed was some way of having this spirit's mana resident within my own mana but separated from it. In the case of blood and other fluids, that was how the blood-brain barrier worked.

But mana was conceptual, not physical. So what could be the conceptual equivalent of a blood-brain barrier or fluid cyst membrane? I was stuck on this thought for what felt like an interminable period of time before I realized that my alchemy experience actually already gave me part of the answer to my dilemma. What I needed wasn't a barrier, per se, but a sort of mental "filtering" loop that would isolate and strain out the ishuar-ness of my mana and my me-ness of my mana, concentrating the ishuar-ness back into itself just like I did with my alchemy.

Conceptualizing myself as another vat of psychedelic fluids, I concentrated on the isolation of what I now understood to be a nature-spirit, focusing on condensing the rest of my mana such that the spirit would essentially "rise to the top" like oil on water. I wasn't so much visualizing this -- the visual metaphor clearly wouldn't cut it -- as trying to re-frame my existing experiences to being applicable to this new dilemma. Again, I found that I lost all sense of time as I focused on feeling out my own mana's essential makeup with the senses my alchemic experience had given me.

I could not have said exactly how long it was until Trisaldan clapped his hand on my shoulder again and said, "Well. That was certainly a unique experience. You don't do anything in a familiar manner, do you. I can see that you've contained the ishuar quite well, as its presence no longer grows in intensity within you -- but I haven't the foggiest how you've managed to do so while leaving it so… loose. Like a cloud around you, but yet connected. You'll have to tell me what you did; I'm sure it will be enlightening."

I looked up around me and noticed that while it was deep into late afternoon, I had completely lost track of how late it had been before I got myself voluntarily possessed by a nature spirit unwittingly. It certainly felt like the whole process had taken several hours, but it couldn't have been more than just one.

I realized as I looked around me, however, that a great number of things now seemed intuitively obvious that clearly weren't before. Like how old the trees around me were, and that everything around me was "properly" natural -- it was an almost homey feeling -- except in the direction of my manor, which felt like there was an itch in my head. Further thought exposed that it was the spirit within me that was reacting in that way, and with that additional realization I began to grapple with which sensations were the spirit's and which were mine. The ease with which I could now tell trees apart, for example, was one of those things I could definitely get used to in terms of its aiding my navigation in the more "trackless" parts of the forest. Finding my way back through any stretch of forest seemed like it would be as easy as navigating the neighborhood I'd grown up in. It wasn't that I had some compass in my head giving me my bearings so much as I just knew where everything was in relation to everything else.

All in all, I would have said that this whole "getting a little bit possessed" thing wasn't actually all that bad, so long as I could get a better handle on the differences between the thoughts the ishuar was putting in my head and what I was "normally" thinking. Which truth be told was hardly the worst existentially numbing thing I'd grappled with since coming to this new world. The only thing that really worried me was that I could now see that my mana bar had a small portion at the top that was a deep forest green instead of the blue I was familiar with. That was a little troubling.

~~------------~~

The following day was if anything even slower-going than the day before. Trisaldan kept checking me over to make sure that whatever I had done to contain the spirit in its process of possessing me was stable and not likely to fall apart. The poking and prodding by his ishuar was rather annoying, especially as he kept asking me to do random things or try to feel various emotional states to check for different kinds of instability.

The part that was actually kind of awesome, though, was where under his guidance he had me try to feel the spiritual presence of the plants and wildlife around us. In so doing, I discovered that there was actually quite a good deal more of the latter than my earlier jaunts through the forest had led me to believe. Turns out, there's an entire ecosystem of critters with varying degrees of presence with ishuar and they were rather adept at vacating the premises as we approached. The rabbits or hares and the spiders I knew about. That there were far more raccupines than I'd thought however was quite the surprise. If I had to guess, the solitary one I'd found was injured and starving and that's why it made for me.

Getting a feel for what the spirit within me enjoyed doing and getting it used to what I wanted it to do was another process altogether. After carefully picking up a clod of dirt with a few blades of grass, for example, I was able to push my mana through the spirit and into the grass, causing it to grow on its own into a strand of rope -- a process that went faster when I added my sanguinism blood letting into the mix. Just that one act cost me about half of my mana, though.

Still. Little tricks like that were things I could pick up further over time, and I hardly needed to be out in this forest just to learn them further. With a little prodding on my part, I convinced the three elves to up the pace to make up for the lost time training me on this little voyage, and with that, we were back at my manor after just under another day. My ishuar at first was unsettled by how different everything was, but it didn't take long for it to adapt to my way of thinking about the manor as safe and more importantly, under my control. It was good to finally be home. I could only wonder if the elves knew what my real motivation for wanting to learn how to work with ishuar was, if they would have decided I wasn't worth the risk of allowing to live. After all -- just because I wouldn't use what I was planning to create on a person, didn't mean I couldn't. Strictly speaking, I’d need to make two creations for the plan to work, but the design of a new ant caste was probably the simpler of the two as I’d already done that before.