Chapter 128: Training [3]

Alden stood, brushed dust off his coat in several aggressive passes, and looked at him. "That thick layer. And the pressure he released." He gestured at the training ground. "And what you did earlier, stopping my attack with one finger. What is all of that? It’s not mana."

"No," Ulvakor said. "It is not mana."

He held up one finger.

"There are two fundamental forms of energy. The first is Mana. You already understand Mana. It’s the base energy used to cast spells, strengthen the body, activate abilities. Humans and Vampires both use it. It’s learnable and common."

He raised a second finger.

"The second form is different. It is the advanced form of energy. The energy used by Primordials."

He let the sentence sit for a moment.

"We call it Rai."

Alden repeated the word quietly. "Rai."

"Yes." Ulvakor lowered his hand. "Rai has three stages. The first is Basic Rai. This is the awakening stage, where you learn to perceive and feel Rai within yourself. Once that awareness opens, your senses change fundamentally. You stop sensing people by their presence or their mana output. You start feeling their internal energy directly."

He glanced sideways. "That is how I knew you were watching from the archway this morning. I wasn’t sensing your mana. I felt your internal energy from the moment you stepped into the corridor."

Alden remembered crouching behind the stone wall, trying to stay quiet, being called out anyway.

"So Basic Rai detection bypasses concealment," he said.

"Completely. It also refines your combat instincts, the way your body responds before your conscious thought catches up."

He raised his hand again, and then without much ceremony, released.

BOOM.

The floor rose up and met Alden’s face.

Except the floor hadn’t moved. He had. The pressure that came off Ulvakor in that single instant drove him flat against the marble before he could brace for it, the weight of it pinning him down and flattening his coat against his back.

"This is second stage of Rai, Advanced Rai," Ulvakor said from somewhere above him, his voice entirely conversational. "Projecting your Rai outward as a physical presence. At sufficient development, it allows you to create force without spells, defend without techniques, and exert pressure on opponents without direct contact. What you’re experiencing right now is called Rai Presence."

Alden tried to push against the floor.

"OKAY I GET IT CAN YOU STOP?"

He slammed his palm against the marble. "I AM BEING CRUSHED INTO THE GROUND RIGHT NOW!"

A brief pause.

"Oh." The pressure vanished instantly. "My apologies. I didn’t quite calibrate."

Alden peeled himself off the floor and stood up coughing, putting distance between himself and his trainer while giving him a look that had a lot of feelings in it.

Ulvakor continued without missing a step. "Mana cannot replicate Rai Presence. That is one of the core distinctions between the two energy types. Mana is less dense, less fundamental. Rai operates at a deeper level."

Alden finished brushing himself off. "What about the coating? The orange layer on his hands."

"That is called Rai-Kin. The user coats around their body, their weapon, or their strikes in Rai, making them exponentially harder and more destructive. When Severian caught your blade, the Rai-Kin on his palms was denser than the steel itself. The sword couldn’t survive the contact."

"So that’s why it shattered," Alden said.

"And why my finger stopped your attack earlier. The small amount of Rai I released at that point exceeded the force behind the strike."

Alden was quiet for a moment, turning this over.

"Wait." He looked up. "What about the barrier? The dimensional barrier protecting the lower kingdoms and one-fourth of the world from the Asura, the one you were explaining yesterday. Is that the same principle?"

Ulvakor’s eyes lit up. "Go on."

"If Rai-Kin is coating something in Rai to make it resistant and stronger, and the barrier around the lower world is maintaining a protective layer around entire territories—" He paused. "Is that just Rai-Kin on a massive scale?"

"Exactly right," Ulvakor said. "When a single person applies Rai to their own body or weapon, it is Rai-Kin. When that same principle is projected outward and sustained at a scale large enough to enclose territories, maintained by beings of sufficient power, it becomes what we call the Mantle Layer."

"And the Mantle Layer is maintained by the Four Supreme Lords," he continued. "Only those with a black core can hold Rai-Kin strong enough to protect it."

Alden went quiet again.

’The black core means they are Arcanaeum, at the final stage of power scaling... The barrier protecting every living human and vampire from the Asura isn’t a spell. It’s four individuals maintaining a Rai-Kin projection around the entire remaining territory of the world continuously to keep the Asura from coming through.’

The weight of that settled in a way that took a moment to fully land.

’That’s what the Primordials are doing. Not just existing in Apothesis. Holding a wall against something that would end everything below.’

"There’s a third stage of Rai," he said.

"Mastered Rai." Ulvakor nodded. "At this level, you are no longer limited to the Rai stored within your own body. A Mastered Rai user can draw from the Rai present in the surrounding environment. Energy exists in everything around us. Nothing is truly empty. At this stage, you can replenish your internal reserves during combat. Essentially limitless energy. There are upper bounds. But compared to someone relying only on their internal pool, the difference during a long fight is immense. And at the physical level, Mastered Rai allows your strikes to reach a point where direct contact alone can destroy the internal structure of what you touch."

Something in Alden’s memory clicked.

The Grand Selection. Aurora, the Celestial Monarch, resting her palm against the stone armrest of her throne while watching the selection. The hairline crack that appeared in the marble under her hand without any spell, without any visible technique.

She hadn’t been trying to break it. She had just been resting her hand there.

’That crack in the throne. She wasn’t doing anything. She just touched it.’

"Mastered Rai, passively, at rest." Ulvakor watched his face. "Now you understand the gap."

Alden had understood it intellectually before this. He had stood in the Grand Selection chamber and felt the pressure of four Assembly leaders looking at him and understood in a physical, visceral sense that these were not beings in the same category as anything he had encountered before.

But this was different. This was understanding the architecture of it. Why they were different. What the energy actually was and how it worked and what the three stages represented.

Mana was not just a weaker version of Rai. It was a fundamentally different class of energy operating at a shallower level.

He looked at the shattered fragments of the sword still scattered across the ground.

"So this is what Windsky is going to teach me?" he said.

Ulvakor had been watching him process it. He waited until the sentence finished before he answered.

"Every other Assembly in Apothesis has a specific focus." He spoke slowly, letting each one land. "Veyne trains physical power. Celestial trains magical precision. Empyreon trains swordsmanship."

He looked at Alden directly.

"Windsky also has a focusing element."

The wind moved through the training ground around them. The cloud ocean stretched in every direction below the island’s edges.

"The Windsky Assembly," Ulvakor said, "specializes in Rai."