There is use of an asterix in this chapter. If you don’t completely understand the explanation given, scroll to the bottom of the page to the afterword and look for an explanation with an asterix in front of it.

DIdn't release yesterday unfortunately, and forgive me for that. However, unless I give prior notices, which I did in the beforeword in Chapter 7, I will try hard to release a chapter a day.

-Waffle Fluff

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I, Sephtis, at the age of 2 ½ months am able to do magic.

Well… I have more time to expand my maximum ‘aura’ capacity and control now. I guess I can cast magic because of my previous attempt to release aura in the corner. I guess that the pain that I experienced at the time had something to do with opening my ‘aura’ exits?

I decide to put off questioning how and why I am suddenly capable of using ‘aura’ in my mortal body although I still believe in my previous hypothesis. Instead of thinking too deeply into it, I just decide to train in ‘aura’ manipulation.

As time passed, I noticed something that I was incapable of noticing in my ‘soul body’. Manipulating and changing the ‘aura’ into different elements is tiring, incredibly so. I probably was incapable of being tired in my soul body because… Well, it’s not an actual physical body capable of feeling tired.

When I began to run out of ‘aura’ in that body, I just felt the lack of ‘aura’ and nothing else. However it seems that this fact differs when applied to when someone owns a physical container for the soul known more commonly as a body.

Honestly though, after I discovered this fact I felt like it would be a positive, because if I tire myself out, I get sleepy and if I get sleepy then my soul gets sent back to hell. I discovered this when I was able to sense ‘aura’ clearer after shedding the layers around my soul, but hell possesses a large amount of highly concentrated ‘Death Aura’ which shaped all the particles into particles with attunement to ‘Death Aura’.*

Because of this quirk about hell, I find it far more comforting being in an area filled with ‘aura’ and particles of the same element as my natural one and in turn find it easier to receive better insight into how ‘Death Aura’ works. It also helps me with increasing my overall ‘aura’ capacity due to the high concentration of ‘aura’ continuously placing strain on my soul and correspondingly, the creator of my ‘aura’.

Luckily for me though, unlike peeling soul layers which requires you to be in a meditative cross-legged position to succeed in doing so, increasing capacity and increasing your control over your ‘aura’ doesn’t necessarily require a meditative position.

I experimented with this and it didn’t seem to change when I stood up and exhausted my ‘aura’ compared to when I was meditating and using my ‘aura’. Even running and releasing ‘aura’ had the same degree of difficulty, although it was far harder to run and control the ‘aura’ precisely similar to the principle of trying to shoot a moving target while running. Basically, it’s possible but I don’t have the control as of this moment.

Of course, my theory was made using my soul body as I can’t actually verify it with my physical body at this time.

The next few months were pretty repetitive. Eat, expend ‘aura’, sleep, expend ‘aura’ in soul body, awake and repeat. For a long while, Julie watched over me with expectation and I even heard her try to convince people that I could talk. Needless to say, she lacked evidence and failed her attempts.

I was tempted to speak again just to see how she would react, as I realised her expression at that time was amusing. But I held back and didn’t actually talk because I knew that it would cause some problems in the future.

I overheard a few conversations and learnt a few things about this world and where we live in general. Of course, the information was limited and I wished for a bigger, broader and better source of knowledge such as a book. An interesting thing I learnt was that I was actually asleep for an entire week, but I never actually realised this when I was asleep.

I guess when you feel close to unlocking certain secrets, time becomes trivial and you lose your concept of it. During all my ‘aura’ expenditures that I did to make sure my ‘aura’ capacity increased, I never once tried to use ‘Death Aura’. This was mainly because I had experienced it first hand, and it wasn’t a pleasant thing to use in the mortal plane.

However, I did play around with only ‘Death Aura’, when in hell with my soul body. It was interesting to manipulate and play with and it had quite a few unique characteristics. Whenever I compressed it into a small sphere and brought it near my soul body, parts of it vanished.

I lost my left arm in my first arm, but strangely enough it didn’t hurt, and it took me a few seconds before I realised that it was actually destroyed. I didn’t feel anything other than inconvenience from it being gone however.

After waking up and going back to sleep again and coming to hell in my soul body however, I had my arm back. I was curious enough to almost be tempted into destroying large portions of my soul body just to see how much it could withstand. But I doubt that even if I actually tried to do so, I would be capable of it.

My ‘aura’ capacity is weak and although my ‘aura’ control is improving steadily, it is still incredibly lacking as it has only been a few months since I have been able to push ‘aura’ out of my body.

I also became capable of walking, or at least some similar type of movement at 5 months. The reason I am hesitant to call this walking is because my body felt slightly stronger from increasing ‘aura’ capacity but nowhere near enough to give me the power to support the weight of my body at the time.

Because my strength was lacking, I decided to use ‘aura’ to influence the wind and basically force my body to take each step. However, I believed forcing myself to walk when my body isn’t ready wasn’t an incredibly smart idea and tried to avoid walking via that method. Even the few instances in when I did walk with wind manipulation, I also had to make sure that some parts of my body were slightly hovering to minimize the possible damage.

It required a lot of ‘aura’ in general and also control near my current upper limit so needless to say, it was tiring and difficult. Still, it helped me understand how the element of wind can get controlled by my ‘aura’.

I spent most of my time practicing ‘aura’ control as I had done so since the beginning, with one day/night being dedicated to ‘aura’ capacity.

More time passed and I turned 3. There were no birthday celebrations for me or anyone of that age group. There were a few farewell celebrations where some older kids left to seek their fortunes.

Other than that and the few discoveries I made in the past 3 years, the months were similar to before very repetitive. I was mainly mute during those times and only began talking in simple one word sentences when I turned 2. These sentences were mainly dominated by ‘sleep’, ‘eat’ or the occasional ‘no’. I was capable of standing up and walking normally at 10 months old.

It was clearly a far quicker development than anyone else of my age group, so I decided to lay low and I even found that I preferred my wind ‘aura’ manipulation as a far more fun and interesting method than just placing foot after foot and occasionally swinging my arms for balance.

My ‘aura’ capacity increased by a lot compared to the initial amount that I possessed, however my greatest achievement was definitely in control. I was now capable of selecting incredibly small amounts of particles at a time to inject my ‘aura’ into and control the elemental particles with. As an analogy, if I could affect a minimum of 1000 particles when I tried to affect only one, resulting in a waste of ‘aura’ I can now affect 8 particles as opposed to the previous thousand.

Of course, when I say that I only mean that my control increased dramatically and I can now affect about 0.8% of the particles I could before. However, the actual amount that I am affecting is still far too large for me to count. That is how small the particles are and how hard they are to control.

I still had a long way to go, to become anywhere near as good at manipulation as Betty is.

Speaking of which, I never heard from Betty or Lord Death ever again after Lord used ‘reaving’ and ‘imposing’ upon me so that I could understand them.

It was a slow life, here at the orphanage. Very few people actually visited, with the very few being product suppliers which apparently gave us discounts since they knew Grandma personally and some were previous cared after children.

About 4 more children were accepted into the orphanage and just like me, they were left outside the doorway on the steps before Grandma picked them up and brought them to the baby room. All the children that were brought were all a young age less than 4 months of age, and the previously crowded baby room was now relatively empty.

The previous cradles were refashioned into makeshift beds by the older kids and all of us had to convert to them in one way or another. Honestly, I hated it. But not because of the transition itself, which seemed a main problem for the other kids, but rather because of how uncomfortable they were.

The problem that I have with uncomfortability is that if it isn’t comfortable, that usually means it’s harder to fall asleep, and that impedes the growth and enhancement of my ‘aura’ when it comes to the element of death.

Although the death element appeared to be very inefficient, requiring and exhausting double your target’s ‘aura’ capacity to be capable of killing them as Betty stated, he also slipped in that there are many sub branches which can ‘temper’ the skills.

This likely means that they would be made more efficient, and since I looked forward to that, I had played around with my ‘Death Aura’ to see how I could temper them. Although difficult, and with no test subjects other than myself, I managed to make a few improvements.

As my control improved and my ‘aura’ capacity increased, I discovered that I can actually manipulate my ‘Death Aura’ to surround my body. If anyone came too close, I could condense it at their location and it would act as a sort of repellent and everyone would avoid coming close unconsciously due to fear.

I hypothesised that fear of death is so powerful that it could probably even make people avoid questioning my existence if concentrated strongly enough. It would be a sort of unconscious mental attack that would theoretically make me undetectable to anyone who is far weaker than me.

I had to test this on someone, and when I was certain that I was capable of containing my ‘Death Aura’ from accidentally imposing on someone outside of my control, I had proceeded to activate ‘Fear’s Illusion’ on an unsuspecting victim.

Yes… I called the spell that makes people avoid me ‘Fear’s Illusion’, as I thought it wasn’t half bad. The unsuspecting victim was a toddler similar to my age, and I tried to sneak past him while applying ‘Fear’s Illusion’ on my whole body.

It was successful and I could actually get past him without him noticing. When I walked into a range of 3 metres from him however, he looked shocked as to him, I simply appeared out of thin air.

I made a mental note on the results of the experiment but my curiosity wasn’t sated. It was highly likely that the only reason he didn’t notice me was because he was too young to have sufficient internal ‘aura’ to notice me.

I thus tried to cloak myself in the illusion before coming into the room that Julie was in. She noticed me immediately as I entered, with the illusion doing nothing to conceal me.

At the time I sighed and left the room, leaving Julie with a befuddled look.

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*Difficult to explain. Basically refer to the explanation on ‘aura’ during [Chapter 4 - An explanation] and how a particle can become shaped to be more effective with a certain element. All the particles in Hell are shaped to be more effective with Death Aura. Hope that helps.

Also, expect a chapter to be released eventually about a more indepth guide to 'aura' which will probably assist you guys in understanding the concept of this book's magic.