Light rippled across my body as the Heighten Senses enhancement flared to life, and I focused on the sensations across my empty palms. After every few seconds of uneventful meditation, I increased the flow of mana to my enhancements, hunting for the feeling I knew would eventually appear. My overstimulated skin tingled as I became intensely aware of every thread out of place in my shirt and each strand that ran wild in my overgrown mop of hair. I know you’re there. Let me find you.
At some point, my heightened senses passed some unknown threshold, and I suddenly felt a gentle weight over my entire body as the air itself came into focus. Faint wisps of motion played over my upturned hands in lazy swirls, constantly shifting in and out of sight. Found you. I sent a rush of mana excitedly down my arms towards the new sensation, but as soon as the energy reached my fingertips, the swirling air rippled away, and the mana pooled against my skin as it had before. Opening my eyes, I stared down at my hands suspiciously. Huh.
I repeated the process twice more, increasing my Heighten Senses enhancement after each failure. Just as I felt like my body couldn’t handle more sensory input without shutting down, I found the answer to my problem: the act of pushing my mana towards the surface of my skin was physically repelling the air around me. Of course I was failing before. The harder I tried to channel my mana outwards, the harder I pushed away the medium I was trying to suffuse. While the explanation was immensely satisfying, I still didn’t have a solution to the problem.
If I can’t actively force the mana out, I guess I need to let it...diffuse out passively? I let my enhancements fade away with a metered breath. I had told Lia I’d been doing this for a century; it was time to prove I’d actually learned something from it.As the mana began to flow around my body, I ignored my usual routine of looking inward and instead focused on the boundary at my skin. Though the concept had rarely come up in our studies, I knew the issue was in the unconscious barrier that separated my mana from the outside world. Through my experience activating both Lia and Marin’s mana reserves, I had learned that the body held an outward defense against foreign energy, but my current focus proved that this outer barrier held a second purpose.
“I have control of my mana,” I stated out loud to myself. “I don’t need to lock it inside anymore. It won’t run out if I let the barrier down.” Though the proclamation made me feel foolish, the potential of it affecting my subconscious mind was too important to pass up. “I’m going to lower it now, for a moment.” It took a moment to visualize the barrier I so often ignored, but I soon held a picture of it clearly in my mind. I prepared a spike of energy as I had done when activating Marin’s mana for the first time, then pressed up against the wall around a single fingertip.
A flash of panic tingled down my spine as the mana in my hand began to dissipate, rushing out from the newly opened hole like a burst dam. The sensation only lasted for a heartbeat as my subconscious sealed the leak, but it was all I needed to prove my hypothesis was correct. “I saw it!” I shouted, jumping to my feet in a joyful rush. The image was burned into my mind as my celebration continued; in the brief moment before the connection was severed, a shimmering, translucent cloud had formed around my hand as the mana suffused outwards in all directions. “It works! I knew it would work!”
When my fist-pumping subsided, I immediately set out to replicate the sensation. Knowing that my body would naturally attempt to close any leaks allowed me to prepare a method to combat the stoppage, and each attempt at the new ability stretched out longer than the last until I was able to stave off the closure indefinitely. It still set off a primal alarm within my head each time the barrier was broken, but the fear lessened with every subsequent breach until the mental warning was reduced to a gentle reminder.
The resulting cloud of mana that formed around me with each activation was much more difficult to control than my usual Detection, and it came with its own unique oddities. It required a constant stream of new energy to maintain a continuous cloud; if I reduced the amount of mana flowing from my fingertips, the edge of the cloud became fuzzy and indistinct as natural currents carried the suffused air away from my influence. Likewise, if I stopped the flow entirely, I had only a few moments until my connection to the cloud was entirely lost and the energy burned away into the atmosphere, unable to be reclaimed.
It was clear from my initial experiments that the technique would require days of practice to gain any real competency, but it only took minutes to realize what I had truly discovered in attempting to improve our Detection spell: air magic. The issue that had halted my progress in the area for days was now my greatest asset; with the slightest suggestion from my channeling, the suffused air immediately flowed in any direction,
