I stared at the tunnel a bit confused before quickly putting together what he had done. “Oh, so I assume this goes pretty deep then? Are you going to close off the top?”

He nodded. “I can actually make it so it looks perfect since I can reproduce the grass that was on top of it as well.”

That was good. This way the entrance would be completely indistinguishable from before and Damien wouldn’t be able to find if even if he checked right where he last felt the life energy from our blood.

Viktor conjured a rod of wood and then quickly covered it in what looked kelp. He then conjured a normal rock and another shiny mineral. He struck the two together and I realized the mineral was flint. Once he got a spark, the plant instantly caught fire, a green flame erupting from the stick.

Viktor looked up at me and smirk. “Feral Riverweed is extremely flammable and once you learn about it, conjuring it with a bit of nature magic is no trouble at all. I’ll go first,” he said as he made his way down in to the tunnel. I followed closely behind as the entrance to the tunnel was sealed completely. Green light illuminated the tunnel as we made our way through it.

Right now, the path we were taking was fairly straight and didn’t slope too greatly, but that changed pretty quickly. Eventually, we came upon several additional branching pathways. There were two to our left, one ahead of us, and three to the right. We turned right and headed down the middle-most of the three tunnels. We continued on a little longer before we came to more turns.

It continued on like that for a while until we finally came to a different branch in the pathway. In front of us and on both the left and the right of us were a new pathway, but they all seemed to lead straight in to a wall. Viktor motioned for me to stop and I did so. A seal appeared on the ground and from it came what looked like a small wooden sled with two seats on it.

“What is that for?” I asked, eyeing the sled curiously.

Viktor chuckled. “Well, I wanted to make sure it was really hard for someone to not only get to this point, but also to get past this point, so I placed three serious drop-offs as the last obstacle. The sled is going to ensure that we get the proper momentum and don’t end up just falling to our deaths. Although you could simply float us down and fly us over, but that’s not as much fun.”

I rolled my eyes at that last remark, but didn’t argue. I climbed on to the sled in the back seat. Viktor moved behind and pushed it forward to where it was partially over the edge of the drop. I was keeping it balanced on the solid group, but once he sat down, we would be sent flying downwards. Just as that thought occurred to me, Viktor took his seat at the front of the sled. It teetered a little, but we weren’t instantly sent over. It slowly tilted forward, filling me with a little bit of panic and fear. Rollercoasters had never been my favorite thing.

Before I could protest, however, the sled jolted forward, dropping us down. We fell almost a hundred feet before I saw the track about to curve. I realized if there was a ceiling above us, we would be smashed right in to it. I then noticed the wedge of stone that seemed to be in place to turn our sled to the side. When we hit the wedge it sent us to the right, sliding us up the wall and across the ceiling before sliding us back down on to the floor where we continued to rush forward.

I saw a seal form on Viktor’s hand and then, in the distance, a green light very similar to that of the torch he held in his hand appeared. The light was faint, but was quickly glowing brighter. I could see an opening approaching. I panicked for a moment, not knowing how we were going to stop since we were still going relatively fast. However, my question was answered shortly as the two of us slammed in to a wall covered in something that felt a lot like cotton, but was clearly not cotton. The red color was the big tipper.

We climbed out from the wall of red fluff to be met by a large opening that had been carved out underneath here. There was nothing inside of here except for the wall of red fluff and the lit torch on each wall. The light was fairly ominous right now, but I didn’t feel very unsafe since I was with Viktor.

He formed another seal on the floor at the far left side of the room. From the ground sprouted up several tree branches. They twisted and reshaped to form something that was close to a bench or a low table of sorts. It was pretty simple, but it did liven up the room a recent bit. After the table had finished being formed, three clay jars started to take form atop the table. Each of them had a ring of some black material around the middle of the jar. There was a faint green glow in the center of the black strips, but I couldn’t discern the source.

Once the construction of the jars was completed, Viktor sat down next to them and looked at me. “Sit,” he said, a strange amount of authority in his voice.

I did as he said and locked eyes with him.

“These are essence vessels. They’re essentially like a normal jar, but the material they’re made of allows them to properly hold and contain essence for extreme amounts of time. However, these are going to be what is going to help us train with the.” He pointed to the glowing black strip around the vessel. “This is an inhibitor band. It is designed to block out and mask the presence of the essence, especially the life energy, making it much harder to sense.”

I nodded. I was starting to put together what kind of training we would be doing now. “So, I’m assuming you want me to manipulate the essence inside of the vessels?”

Viktor shook his head. “Not yet. First, you need to be able to even sense the life energy within the essence in these jars.”

I frowned. “But I can already sense life energy.”

“Not well enough. If you need an example, I’ll show you.” He placed his hand over the middle jar and formed a seal over all three of them. Essence flowed forth from the seal, slowly filling up the jars with swirling masses of glowing energy. “Try and sense the energy in this jar. Not the essence. The life energy.”

I nodded and closed my eyes, focusing on the space around me. I wasn’t that far from the table where the jars were, so it wouldn’t be too difficult. Or so I thought. As I scanned around the room, the only life energy I could sense was the energy contained within my own body. My eyes shot open and I shook my head.

“I told you you couldn’t sense it. That’s what you need to work on for now.”

“But I don’t need to be able to feel the life energy. I can already feel the life energy inside myself and I can even control it to a degree. That’s what I need to be focusing on right now, not-”

“Avien, do you want to die?!” Viktor shouted. His faced had turned red.

“No… I-”

“Damien is out to kill us, don’t you understand that?! You need to be able to defend yourself because pretty soon, I’m not going to be able to! He’s learning a lot faster than we are and you still struggle with the fundamentals! If you can’t help yourself, you’re going to die. I don’t want to see that again…” I could see the tears starting to stream down his face.

“What do you mean again?”

“Every time I go to sleep, I have the same nightmare… You being killed by Damien. I like to tell myself that it won’t happen and that we’ll stay ahead, but he just keeps adapting and hurting us more. I can’t lose you, Avien…”

I walked over and placed my hand on to his shoulder. He looked up at me and I smiled. “Look, that’s not going to happen. I’m not going to die on you, promise.”

He sniffed, wiping the tears from under his eyes as he attempted to better compose himself. “You need to be able to sense even the faintest signature of life energy to be able to better control it. The more you can feel it, the stronger you can control it. This is exactly how I learned to feel and control life energy, albeit we’re doing this in a much harder fashion because we don’t have much time. By tonight, I need you to be able to move your entire body with just the life energy in your blood.”

I wanted to argue that that simply wasn’t possible, but I couldn’t. I had to try and every second I wasted arguing was a second that could easily be spent training.

Viktor pulled out a stick and drew a line on the ground. “Sit behind this line. Until you can sense the life energy in all three jars, you are not allowed to eat.”

I walked over to the line and sat behind it. The line was about five feet from the table with the jars. It was even farther than where I’d been sitting before. I closed my eyes and began to focus. I tried to push my aura further outwards so that it at the very least encompassed the area I needed to sense within. It didn’t take too long before I had the aura covering the entire room. It was a little draining to maintain my aura at such a size, but anything less would be useless to me right now.

For almost two hours, I just sat there, concentrating. I had tuned every other part of the world out and was focusing entirely on the life energy all around me. Unfortunately, life energy was a lot harder to sense than essence. Essence contained many components. It was mostly just life energy and natural energy with a bit of some other energy mixed in. Usually, an apprentice would focus on the essence as a whole which was easy to do since sensing the natural energy inside of essence was extremely simple, provided it was from your body or just generally the same type of essence you possessed.

With life energy, it was a completely different story. Life energy was something that seemed like it would be easy to sense on paper since it was contained by every single thing that possessed life, but that only made it harder. Life energy was so fluid that it could take almost any form and was so abstract that it had very few actual unifying characteristics to make it easier to sense.

I was able to sense the life energy in my body because it shared many of the same qualities as my natural energy in my essence. With someone else’s or even the essence around us, it became exponentially harder. I had to sense life energy of an opposite essence type from another person. If there were any shared traits between Viktor’s life energy and mine, they were the only things that unified all life energy.

As I sat there, I could occasionally feel a ripple within the field of my aura, but I couldn’t quite pin it down. After another hour of training, I opened my eyes, contracting my aura and falling to the ground.

I had to think of something different to try and feel the life energy in the jars. Then something occurred to me. My aura was the manifestation of my own essence which I usually visualized with natural energy, but I could also ignore the natural and other energy to just feel the life energy. That way I would have a better feeling for my own life energy. When that would come in to contact with any other life energy, the contrasting features would feel different, but whatever was the same I would be able to feel.

I shot to my feet and got in to my meditation pose once more, closing my eyes and focusing as I tested my idea. It was easier said than done though. I first had to properly feel the natural energy in my essence and once I felt that, I needed to completely ignore it. Now that that was done, my aura was only life energy. I could feel it perfectly. It felt just like when I felt it inside my body, but stronger and more defined. Somehow, my hours of trying to sense the life energy in the jars had actually helped.

To finally test my idea, I pushed my aura outwards, still ignoring the natural energy and feeling only the life energy of the essence. Once it covered the room, I focused on the abnormalities around me. Eventually, I found three distinct signatures that were very different from everything else. I focused in on the differences, assessing and noting them before finally trying to find the similarities between my life energy and these signatures. It was hard to focus on that, but eventually, I found them and I knew what to look for.

I ceased my ignorance of the natural energy in my aura and once again tried to sense the life energy inside of each of the jars in front of me. I had thought it would be easy now, but I still couldn’t quite sense the life energy. I could feel something, but that wasn’t good enough for me. I needed to be able to clearly feel exactly what it was.

Two more hours passed and the feeling continued to grow. Occasionally, it would fluctuate slightly and I would lose the energy, but then I would quickly regain it. I had retracted my aura to make it even harder to sense the life energy so that I no longer could use my method of finding abnormalities.

Eventually, after another hours of staggeringly finding the energy, I felt it clearly. The pulse of life energy. My eyes shot open and I was immediately confused. The table and the vessels were much farther away than the line that I had started from. I turned around and found that my back was only a few inches from the wall. I had to be at least thirty feet away from the jars now, yet I could still perfectly feel the life energy within them.

I turned to my left and saw Viktor smiling. “Well?”

I nodded. “I can feel the life energy within the jars perfectly.”

He chuckled. “I figured you could, but I also had to push you a lot harder than anyone ever should be, especially without food. I was slowly moving you backwards ever ten or so minutes to constantly increase the range of your sensing and the difficulty of sensing the life energy inside the jars. Now, show me what you can do?”

I nodded and closed my eyes, taking a deep breath before opening my eyes once more and forming a seal on my hand which I used to target the life energy inside of my blood. I first moved my arm to straight above my head. It was so easy and felt so natural. It was a bit jittery, but it wasn’t exhausting. I then moved my other arm, then my leg, then my other leg. I could move my entire body with just life energy.

Viktor beamed at me. “You did great. Now, let’s go get some dinner. Damien won’t be active right now and I’m sure you’re starving.