Under the cover of the night I, Lavenna Lapress Mehliac, have started my experiments. You see, during today’s test because of a certain mistake I had to store a considerable amount of magic power that my bracelet had accumulated inside my body. And when I did that it was at that moment I felt the way the mana was moving inside of me, accessing my blood vessels, penetrating my muscles and the feeling was oddly familiar. To be precise, it was a long forgotten technique that I used to rely upon well before I started even my first attempts on using magic. Though I called it a technique, to me back then it was something instinctual and I used it before I developed more efficient and powerful capabilities so I’m not to blame that I forgot about it. The name of the technique is “spirit sense”. It doesn’t rely on the mana-absorbing abilities of the soul and, therefore, cannot provide a detailed picture of the environment; its efficiency is extremely low and it’s completely reliant on the strength and size of the soul of the user. Basically it allows a person to make use of the disturbances of the arcane energies in the atmosphere by feeling those disturbances with their very soul. It’s comparable to trying to make sense out of your surroundings by relying on the sense of touch. You can see why I forgot about it, right?

Well, the thing about this technique is that if a soul’s aura is wide enough and the soul itself is strong and sensitive enough it can allow to make rather detailed and vivid pictures. To an average mage this method of sensing would be utterly useless, especially with the great variety of other methods to feel the magic powers. To make use of it one would have to have a truly monstrocious soul like, for example… mine! I really wouldn’t want to brag, but I think that my soul could easily rival a higher deity or a Duke of Hell in power and, with the modifications I made to it to be able to reincarnate with my memories intact I had to seriously compress it and because of it now my soul constantly releases a lot of particles of pure spirit energy creating an incredible aura around it. Honestly speaking, with how powerful my soul is I’m quite surprised to be born a human. But since there’re many things I still don’t understand about this world and its rules I will let this mystery slide for now.

You may ask, how can it be that in your previous life you used spirit sense subconsciously but don’t now? Well, you see, souls and bodies and the connections between them are rather tricky business: even after studying souls and their effects on minds I’m still not quite sure how it all fits together. I can only say that there’re many unexpected factors in play so one of the first things I did when I felt that my soul was creating a connection with the body was to tone that connection down to moderate levels as I didn’t know whether or not a strong connection will fry my nervous system. And as time went by I kinda forgot to strengthen it. What? No one is without faults and I had more important things to do, like, I don’t know, learning the language? Analyze the new environment? Or maybe try to decide how I feel about having new family and whether to accept them or not? As you can see I had some issues that diverted my attention a little.

So, without further ado, let’s get started, shall we? Well, there isn’t really much to do, I just have to strengthen the connection between my soul and my body. I just have to concentrate on my soul, feel it and… with lack of any better words, accept it. So I sit and meditate. I feel my soul, it’s like a small sun around me, it can give life and it can take, it has power but has little reason, like primordial gods and titans, it simply lives among the chaos of the universe, no it is that chaos, it was born in it and never been anything else. I can feel it, I am a part of it. I feel the bond between the material world and the world of spirits grow in me and then it clicks. I suddenly feel more. Not only in the sense that I feel the things around me, no, I myself am more. It’s hard to describe but it’s as if the world around me is not something separate from me and I almost can’t find the line where I end and the world begins.

There’s also an unexpected side to this ability: It lets me feel the arcane energies the way they are. To elaborate on that, it would be appropriate to explain what those arcane energies are. So, there’s that pure mystic magical energy called mana. It has many properties and I’m plenty sure that calling mana an energy would be incorrect from a scientific point of view as it also carries the properties of a particle and a wave but, unlike light, it can also affect the reality in many, sometimes unexpected, many times illogical ways. Though rather than saying that mana is illogical it’s more correct to say that we are, I believe. I am a firm believer that mana is some form of metaphysical universal constant and and that our world runs on some underlying metaphysical principles and concepts, like change, stillness, direction etc, and the rest is being “filled in” by the world itself by trying to make sense out of its own existence. And, as there’re only those underlying principles and concepts our version of reality is one of many possibilities, so whenever we use magic, or in other words, access mana we access those possibilities. This kind of worldview is very popular between withes and sorcerers as our arts rely on many things that outright deny common sense and it’s more convenient to think that we didn’t deny it but replaced it with another.

But enough of that. The arcane energies exist because of mana. When mana ends up in the material world, it becomes unstable and changes until it finds a form that ‘fits’ it. And those forms are what we call the arcane energies. The examples of the arcane energies are: devilish miasma, human qi, divine power, and even mana crystals, though it’s really hard to call a crystal an energy. Well, I’m no scientist and I don’t care, mages all over the universe have been calling them energies and I’m no exception.

So, those energies have different properties and there’re both merits and demerits to using them. For example the devilish miasma is extremely toxic to humans, and non-devilish life forms in general, in large amounts. It actually caused me a lot of inconveniences in the previous life as I had a high affinity with it despite being human which led to me being ostracized but I prefer not to remember those days.

Speaking of energetic affinities, souls have a natural ability to process the arcane energies and extract mana out of them and then use that mana for different things, such as magic. Though most of the time a soul can process one or two types of energies which is what we call an affinity.

Now that I think about, it kinda reminds me of the elemental affinities mother was talking earlier. Maybe they use different forms of… I’ll ask mother to show me some elemental magic tomorrow and see, or should I say, feel it for myself. Though if the theory proves true than I will most certainly be able to declare that the humanoid creatures that I’ve been mistaking for humans and one of whom is me are most definitely NOT human, at least judging by the standards of my previous life. And also, if it turns out to be true I may get a few ideas on how to use magic on my own, but without a soul.

Hehehe, I’m so excited!