“Stop daydreaming.” Hagar nudged me with one sharp elbow and flicked her eyes toward the front of the room, where Professor Ishigara was outlining some obscure technique that made absolutely no sense to me. “You need to learn this.”
“Whatever,” I whispered back.
“Mr. Warin,” Ishigara called from the blackboard. “Perhaps you would like to demonstrate since I see you’ve been so attentive during my class.”
“Honored Professor,” I stammered, “I’m afraid I may not be the best example for the other students.”
“Nonsense,” she snapped. “Any errors you make I will correct. It will be a learning experience for us all.”
“See?” Hagar snickered as I squeezed past her toward the aisle. “You should have been paying attention.”
She was right, and that irritated me even more than getting called out. Things weren’t going my way, but that wasn’t a reason to give up. I’d always pushed myself to reach my goals. Delamination shouldn’t stop me from working toward advancement. I straightened my shoulders, stiffened my spine, and marched down to the professor.
“Very good,” she said. “As you can see from the notes on the board and the reading you were assigned last week, soul scrivening is not complex. It is, however, rather delicate. Grafting the wrong aspects to your core can be very unpleasant.”
“Uh, yeah,” I agreed, suddenly nervous. I should have paid closer attention in class.
“We’ll only be doing a temporary graft today,” the professor said. “Let’s start with something simple. Please graft an armored aspect from this helm to your core, Mr. Warin.”
With that, Professor Ishigara produced an old-fashioned plate helmet. It was composed of a durable, yet lightweight alloy and its surface was covered in flowing waves of scrivened protection. The item’s aura held dozens of armored aspects. Any one of them would have been sufficient to stop a sword’s blow or an arrow’s strike.
The professor watched me warily, as if she wasn’t sure what I might try. I glanced at the notes on the board. Most of them were indecipherable to me. The few I did understand were related to aspects, a subject that I was practically an expert in. It looked like the first step involved pulling the aspect into my aura. Easy enough.
I took a deep breath and extended my hand toward the helmet. I stopped at the point where my aura overlapped with the helm’s. Before I’d been injured, it would’ve been easier to do this with my serpents. Now, I needed to be close to the aspects I wanted to take.
I steeled myself against the pain I expected and activated the Thief’s Shield technique. Fortunately, the technique alone didn’t require much jinsei or pressure my core enough to cause further damage. In my prime, it would’ve been a simple matter to rip every armored aspect out of the helmet’s aura and into mine. At the moment, though, it was a strenuous effort to transfer even one aspect.
There was no pain, though, so that was a relief.
“Very good,” Professor Ishigara said grudgingly. “You may begin the grafting process.”
Which I totally would have, except I had no idea what the grafting process entailed. I tried to imagine a scrivening stylus drawing simple binding loops between my core and the armored aspect snared in my aura. It seemed like a logical way to go about it and netted me absolutely zero progress.
“You’re overthinking,” the professor explained in a condescending tone. “I can see your jinsei flickering all around your core. Bring the aspect closer to your core before you begin the binding circuit.”
That, of course, made perfect sense. It was one of the reasons I had trouble with scripting. There was a conceptual element to the art that I had a difficult time wrapping my thoughts around. I always wanted to do things the hard way, when I should’ve been looking for ways to make every task simpler.
My undamaged aura was at the same level as my core, so manipulating the aspect trapped within it wasn’t difficult. After a few seconds I’d maneuvered the armored aspect into position. Then I imagined a thread of jinsei stitching the aspect to my nearby core.
The sacred energy flowed out of my wounded core, pierced the perimeter of the aspect, then looped back around. A second loop, then a third bound the aspect even tighter to me.
“You’re almost there, Mr. Warin,” Professor Ishigara said, sounding faintly surprised. “Not the most efficient work I’ve ever seen, but I suppose it will suffice. Do you have enough jinsei to complete the task?”
I did not.
There was enough sacred energy in my core for another loop, maybe two. From the progress I’d made so far, I’d need at least four more binding circles to completely anchor the aspect. To further complicate matters, the binding circuit I’d created took up space in my core. There wasn’t room for me to cycle any more jinsei into my core without straining it and risking further delamination.
I mulled over the problem in search of a solution. There had to be some way to increase my core’s capacity.
Advancing to the next level of mastery would do that. It might also shred my core into itty-bitty pieces. I needed something simpler, and safer.
The Borrowed Core technique would let me connect to a rat or other small animal and use its core to gather aspects and channel more jinsei into my own. If I did that, though, I’d overload my core and damage it even further.
And then it hit me.
I reached out with the Borrowed Core technique and found the biggest, healthiest rat in the area. Through our bond, I convinced the rat to come closer until the only thing between us was the floorboards beneath my feet. Our auras overlapped just slightly.
Perfect.
I very carefully directed a thread from my reserves of sacred energy toward the rat. The Borrowed Core technique seemed to help the process, and it took only a fraction of the jinsei I’d used on the aspect to stitch a binding pattern around
