Once he confirmed Meizo’s purpose behind this journey, Kan allowed himself to gradually lower his guard. He talked more and, when they broke for camp in the evenings, started sharing hunting and cooking responsibilities with his companion.

He soon found out the consequences.

“Another?” Meizo asked as he offered a second roasted quail, smoldering under a layer of black ash.

Kan had barely succeeded at willing his protesting stomach to accept the earlier piece of atrocity consumed. The spit in Meizo’s hand might as well be a sword aiming for his life. He fought off the urge to wince. “Thanks. I’ve had plenty.”

“Everyone tells me I’m bad at cooking,” Meizo said cheerily, “it’s nice to find someone who enjoys my food without complaints. Whenever you want more, just say it.”

Kan thought he’d prefer starving. Who would expect a shaman, with the ability to turn live animals into golden roasted perfection upon a simple word, to create such hideous dinner? “Why don’t you use spells for it?” he asked. “If your power isn’t bound by the regeneration of Ichor, why not chant your talismans into making food for you? Even the priests at the Shrine do it for holy feasts.”

“I might not be restricted by Ichor, but there are always other constraints,” Meizo replied with a mouthful. “Time, tools, raw materials, the strain on your body. Spells aren’t magic. They come with a cost. Why waste precious resources when my worldly skills suit me just fine?”

How Meizo developed such a voracious and all-forgiving appetite was beyond Kan. He shifted his eyes away from the sight of the shaman digging into a third burnt quail. “You need raw materials for talismans?”

“Sure I do. Only those priests at the Shrine draw glyphs by solidifying Ichor into substance form. I can’t think of worse ways to squander their already limited reserve.” Meizo rolled his eyes dismissively. “When shamans create symbols, we bind the Aura from the materials. We do enhance them with Ichor, though in the end, the source of power lays in those components. We merely call it forward.”

That caught Kan’s attention. “Everything you bind needs to contain Aura? There can’t be so many Artifacts in this world.”

Meizo waved a hand in a big arc. “Aura is omnipresent. Every object has it, living or dead. Artifacts are just the purest and strongest among them. Any shaman can make a strong talisman if you put an Artifact in his hand, but the best ones can make the same talisman out of, say, this spit.” He raised the branch in his hand.

Kan thought if such a talisman could char demons as much as Meizo did those quails, it’d be in extremely high demand. “How many shamans at the Temples can do that?” he asked instead.

“None since the passing of Grand Master Shen,” Meizo said, a sudden wistfulness in his voice. “Manipulating Aura on this level requires decades of cultivation of the mind, well beyond what most apprentices have the patience for these days. Soon it will become a lost art.”

Kan made a note of the name.

* * *

Nights grew steadily chillier farther north. Kan tucked his bedroll tighter around his body, thinking of the days at the Shrine when he never knew cold. Ichor had kept him warm.

Meizo was asleep, his light snores rising with a regular rhythm above the chorus of insects and the distant howling of wolves. Kan harrumphed, made sure he heard no pause in the snoring pattern, then closed his eyes and turned his awareness inward like the day he faced the creatures in the woods.

Aura is omnipresent, he repeated silently, and he reached for it.

The sensation during the attack had been clear and fresh. It had spoken of danger, like a seductive whisper from a stranger pretending to be a friend. Though he didn’t know what to expect from the Aura of other presences, he tried anyway, searching for a subtle voice echoing at the edge of his consciousness.

Dark space hung around his awareness like a shadow, thick and viscous, and the heaviness pushed back as he probed forward. He trod carefully, keeping his attention focused. Here and there he felt the faintest existences brushing past, but when he tried to trace them, the feeling was gone. Everything was quiet, muffled, hushed. All he found was silence.

Think, Kan told himself. He had tracked down the demon Aura by following its whisper filled with biting malice. What if a peaceful presence had a different voice, calmer and more subdued? What if it didn’t have a voice at all? How could he sense it if he didn’t know what to look for?

His days at the Shrine came rushing back. Meizo had said that the same principle applied to divine resonation, a ritual everyone at the Shrine performed after reaching the Third Stage. Kan couldn’t attempt the proper proceeding anymore, not while his Ichor was still depleted. Instead, he recalled the awe and peace, the ray of light that brought glory to the rituals, and concentrated on the memories.

They came mixed with bittersweet moments of his past, and he pushed those aside, not letting his mind drift through reminisces. He focused on the divine feeling and searched for the ray of light in the darkness. The thickness around him seemed uniform at first, coated in an unvarying black, but as he delved deeper and looked more intently, the layers started to separate. He advanced slowly, examining every step in every direction, until finally the shadow thinned and swayed, and parted as he nudged the rest of the way through.

His awareness floated free in a dimly lit expanse, filled with vague outlines of softly illuminated features. He approached the nearest one. It had the shape of an umbrella, with a thick and straight stem and a giant canvas top. Under its cover lay several smaller ones the size of mushrooms. They glowed a pale green and when Kan moved closer, he could feel a gentle warmth radiating from the large one overhead, like a caress from a loving parent.

It was the big oak tree he slept under, Kan realized, shielding the shrubs growing beneath its shade.

Scattered clues starting connecting in his mind. The Aura of demons was a whisper of deception and danger; the Aura of gods was light bringing an end to the darkness; the Aura of the oak trees was protection for the young. They all took different shapes and forms, yet each form reflected the nature of their owners.

Was this the true meaning of Aura? A glimpse into the owner’s purpose and desire?

Kan pushed higher, taking in his entire surrounding from above. It glowed as if lit with a thousand lambent lights, pulsing in a restful harmony. Some shapes were the same ones he saw earlier in the evening—a steadfast rock, a slender running creek—and some were unfamiliar, like the oak tree’s umbrella. Some were singing, some were weeping, and some darted through the shadows in the distance, flashing bright red. Wolves, he reckoned.

Relief washed over him. When Meizo first spoke of replenishing his Ichor, it sounded too good to be true, and Kan didn’t want to get his hopes up just to be disappointed later. But now he’d seen it. He could sense Aura, which wouldn’t have been possible without Ichor. Somewhere, at the Temples or not, lay a way for him to get his power back.

Kan was so overwhelmed with excitement he almost laughed out loud. Then he remembered he had no voice, his physical body still wrapped in a bedroll in the forest.

He’d been gone for too long, and Meizo might notice at any moment. The shaman had made it clear that training could only commence once Kan enrolled as an apprentice at the Temples, and under no circumstances would he impart any knowledge to non-apprentices. Kan had been inconspicuously extracting tiny bits of useful information from their daily conversations, and he wasn’t going to let the shaman discover his intention.

He carefully pulled back his awareness. The sound of the forest returned along with Meizo’s snoring, rising and falling in the same rhythm as before. He let out a breath. The shaman’s Aura wasn’t in his earlier vision, and he didn’t know if it was intentionally hidden or not, but he was content so long as Meizo remained oblivious to his adventure.

Kan opened his eyes. The oak tree that was an umbrella minutes ago arched over him, stretching its gnarled limbs high and wide. Moonlight filtered through the canopy, beams of silver lighting up the night.

It was whiter and brighter than he’d ever remembered.