121 - The Spirit Path

It took Woden a few more minutes to set up his lab, and he muttered the whole time he did it. From what Arielle could gather, he wasn’t ever really sure where anything was. He had murmured guesses, and he often had to physically retrace his steps to remember where he’d put something. He also put together a lot of things that shouldn’t be, for example, a sample of weeds and some animal teeth in the same cabinet.
Arielle stood to the side while he opened drawers, sifting through them, and then ran his hand through his hair. Some of the shorter strands stuck up and didn’t go back down. He moved around the room like a gust of wind, clattering, scraping, and cursing accompanying him.
Every once in a while, he would stand still, hand stroking his chin and then stare at the ceiling as though the answer was there.
But to be fair, his method worked somewhat. He managed to gather a growing number of reagents and solutions on his table. But he made an even bigger mess in the process, not returning the items to where they were taken from, and as he went through his bookshelf, he just left the rest of the unselected tomes lying out on the side.
Arielle walked over there and began to arrange them, glancing at their titles before deciding where to put them.
“What are you doing?” Woden asked after some time.
“Organizing,” she said. “Do you prefer alphabetical order, or reverse alphabetical order?”
He raised an eyebrow. “Neither. I know where everything is.”
“Doesn’t look like it,” she said, and his cheeks pinkened. He pushed his glasses up his nose and cleared his throat.
“It’s fine. I have everything.” He gestured to the table that now had several apparatus, herbs, and chemicals sitting to the side, including rune-making equipment. “Well, not everything. I’m sure there might be other things we need, but I can get it at the market later. Okay, let’s start. Now, as you know, there are several problems with healing dragons. One, they are immortal, so they frequently do not require healing. Two, they do not appreciate unauthorized humans getting close. And the third is that they are huge, so making a potion for them would be quite…significant. Oh, and four, their anatomy. It would be easier to have a dedicated dragon healer work on them, as they are the true anatomy experts, but I don’t even know if those exist.”
“So it’s hopeless,” Arielle asked.
“Not if the commander believes in it. What has she discovered with her research?”
“She has a theory about the nature of the disease. She thinks it might be caused by…” Arielle knew not to mention mini-orbs, much less the free mini-orbs. “A charge imbalance.”
“Hmm.” Woden rubbed his chin. “Interesting concept. There was a scientist once who claimed that most magical illnesses can be traced back to a charge imbalance. It was disproved, though.” He picked up a book and began to sift through it. “Does she have the spell form for this disease?”
“It can take multiple spell forms. She thinks the problem is prolonged exposure to an offensive stimulus, which can affect the dragon’s anatomy, causing the charge imbalance that we know as agitation. Then prolonged agitation weakens its immunity so it becomes a vicious cycle.”
He brushed his chin. “Ah. So that’s why you wanted to learn more about dragons’ anatomy.”
She hesitated. Then she nodded.
“Well, with dragons it’s a little complicated. Because we rarely come upon injured or dead dragons, they haven’t really been studied in depth. The closest thing to their anatomy is–”
“Phoenixes,” she commented.
“Exactly, which I know quite a bit about. However, there are notable differences, particularly with their size and certain aspects of their magic. And of course, immortality, which comes down to their soul composition. Phoenixes are not quite as immortal as dragons who are fully resilient. For a dragon to be affected by something like that, it’s usually extremely fatal, and at which point…” He shrugged.
Arielle sighed.
“Does she know the cause of this agitation?”
“I’m not sure,” Arielle said because talking about the ritual might be a step too far. “But she did say that even if she takes care of the source, the dragon might die anyway thanks to how much damage has been done to its system.”
“Really?” Professor Woden leaned against the desk. “Dragons are very resilient. It’s strange to think of agitation having that effect on a dragon. They have an immunity to it, and it really doesn’t even last that long.”
“She thinks that prolonged contact weakened the immunity,” Arielle repeated.
“I suppose. We don’t really have a good understanding of how agitation works, so that’s as good a theory as any. Anything else she mentioned?”
Arielle was about to shake her head, but then she hesitated. She didn’t know if this other detail would be relevant or not.
It might be. It might not be. It might also be dangerous to talk about.
However, she had to make sure that, if the dragon was to die, she had exhausted all avenues for support.
“What if excess charge caused by the agitation somehow managed to also charge other essences that might reside within?”
“Within where?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Wherever essences reside in a dragon. Like maybe it’s body or its soul?”
“It’s soul.” He paused, digesting that. “Well then that’s a form of soul magic, isn’t it?” he said. “Interesting. Hypothetical charge imbalances altering the magic of the soul.”
“Is that possible?”
“I’m not sure. Usually it doesn’t work that way. Dragons hold a lot of magic in their souls, but the magic usually moves outward, not inward, except perhaps through the blood, which takes conscious effort rather than being a side effect of poisoning.” He circled his hand in the air. “Agitation is a defense mechanism dragons instill in their environment. It can strain their system, but it doesn’t usually poison them the way it does other creatures. It wouldn’t make sense for it to do that. Not to say that the Commander is wrong…but for the cyclical relationship that you have posed, the charge imbalance goes back in to influence the soul? It’s not normal. It would need a different pathway for that.”
Arielle remained silent, while the professor picked up another book and began glancing through it.
“Dragon cores aren’t exactly like ours. They’re much stronger in some ways but may be weaker in others, although that’s not exactly a popular take.”
“What do you mean?”
He waved a hand. “No, I’d rather not. I don’t want to be mistaken as a conspiracy theorist. Although given your theory…” He tilted his head to the side in thought, falling silent.
Arielle was curious about what he had to say, and she wondered if she should ask for further clarification or assume he didn’t want to talk about it.
But then he continued without further prompting, “There’s a sect of non-magic users called the Divine Hand sect, who believe in the ultimate balance of things. Every push comes with an equal but opposite pull, and with strength comes an equal but opposite weakness. They believe that every single powerful creature must have a terrible weakness that would be easily tolerated by a less powerful creature. For example, Phoenixes are allergic to some insect bites. Did you know that?”
She shook her head.
“It will not kill them, but it will render them ill for some time, which is often mistaken as irritability. It’s the heavens’ way of instilling balance. The Divine Hand of the Universe. However, no one takes such theories seriously because it’s more wishful thinking than reality. If it were true, then power would be a lot more balanced, wouldn’t it? And immortality probably wouldn’t exist. A lot of the sect’s theories have already been disproven, and the idea that a dragon has a weakness that could be tolerated by a mortal is seen as blasphemy. The Divine Hands say that there is such a weakness, but we just haven’t found it.” He coughed once before he continued. “They believe that this divine theory works on something they call the spirit path.”
“The spirit path?”
“Yes. You see, with each spell performed, there is waste energy generated within the body. Qi. That’s what we use to assign attributes in the human realm and organize builds. But creatures like dragons and trolls and elves don’t have a system, so where does their qi go?”
“I don’t know. Where?”
“That’s the question. The prevailing theory is that the qi simply flows to your strongest attribute, or it strengthens everything equally. Or with enough meditation, you can control it yourself. However, the Divine Hand sect believes that all magic comes from the soul and the qi are left over charges from the spells we cast. As they gather, they become something they call the spirit path, which determines the flow of the magic from the soul to the organs and assigns that balance I was talking to you about. It’s a lot more than that, but that’s a very summarized version of it. A constant cycling relationship. If a spirit exhibits too much strength, it assigns its weakness. They think it also controls immortality; however, it’s confusing because immortality breaks this law, unless the creature has a truly ridiculous weakness.”
“I see.” She didn’t actually understand and wasn’t sure where he was going with this, but Professor Woden tended to go on tangents before he got to the point.
“Don’t repeat this in most other places,” he said. “Not everyone believes in the existence of a spirit path. There’s obviously a connection between the soul and the body which is controlled by soul magic, but we don’t accept that it exists as a separate entity that is enacted upon by the ‘Universe’ and ensures the balance I spoke about. In fact, so many things in the world disprove the theory of ultimate balance that the sect lives by. For example, similarly ranked creatures of a given species tend to have similar strength and soul compositions, but even when they become stronger, their weaknesses remain the same. And again, not every animal has an ‘equal’ weakness. Some creatures are simply superior in every single way.”

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“What does that have to do with the charged particles and the dragon agitation?”
“Well, it gives us a separate pathway for which the dragon is being affected by the agitation. Not a direct poisoning. It’s not that the agitation is hurting the dragon necessarily. The build-up of excess charge generated by the body could simply be feeding into and disrupting the spirit path of the dragon, thereby affecting its immortality and causing it to be vulnerable to things that we do not otherwise note or even understand. For example, our atmosphere.”
Arielle frowned. This was very confusing and bizarre. “You’re saying that…the agitation is causing the dragon to become…allergic to air?”
He smirked. “I’m not saying that for sure. I don’t know what it’s allergic to. Only that, if your theory is correct, and this is caused by an excess charge affecting the soul, it would be doing that through the spirit path, which is something the Divine Hands sect has spoken about. Now, again, this is one of the theories that was disproven, but they once believed imbalanced cores led to imbalanced charges in the body that disrupt the spirit path and cause all sorts of problems, like the leakage of magic from souls outward, vice versa. I don’t know if this has happened, and we haven’t seen imbalanced cores have any effect on the slowing mortality of mages before. But then again, humans don’t really hold that much magic in their soul, at least comparatively. But for a dragon that holds a massive amount of soul magic, the spirit path would be far more influential and important if it existed. Conversely, there’s also the possibility that the imbalance of charge is a result of the spirit path forcefully trying to get rid of the extra charges, so that it can regain a smooth path once more. That would mean, of course, that it would get rid of anything contributing to the excess charge. For a dragon, that would be mostly Calor, and the Calor from the soul would be functionally different from the Calor in our atmosphere, hyperactive, supercharged–”
“Yes,” Arielle blurted out immediately, her eyes wide and bright. “I think that’s exactly what’s going on.”
He looked taken aback by her vehemence. “Ar…are you sure? All of this is very esoteric and again, a borderline conspiracy theory.”
She cleared her throat.
“Yes, but I think Vittoria–I mean, the commander…I think she mentioned similar things.”
“She did?” He looked doubtful, but Arielle nodded frantically.
“Yes. So now, where do we go from here?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m a fairly scientific man, as you can probably tell. I like to run experiments. But with this…” He exhaled, but then his chin went up as though suddenly remembering something. “Actually, once my Phoenix fell sick from a termite bite, and though I knew it wouldn’t die, it caused the creature a lot of discomfort. It refused to eat and was quite cross with the whole affair. I tried a lot of potions that seemed to ease its pain and finally summoned a shaman, one of those who believe in spirit paths. He helped me make more potions that helped significantly.”
“Interesting.”
“He spoke about the different spirit junctions and ensuring that those junctions in particular did not have the charge imbalance and were strengthened enough to reclaim the flow. We’ll need a continuous spell for that, so a potion works well. And that makes it easier, because we don’t have to worry about healing the entire body. Dragons are immortal. They should always heal as long as their souls are still working. So if the spirit path is the problem, then we just need to take care of that.”
Arielle was starting to get excited. She wasn’t sure she understood much of what the Professor had just explained, as it seemed beyond her understanding. Or maybe he simply had not explained it very well. But what he had described at the end did fit what she’d observed. The dragon’s Calor had been supercharged so much so that an extra free mini-orb escaped. “The potions you created for the Phoenix, would they work on the dragon?”
“No,” he said. “But it would be similar enough. A dragon would simply require more complexity and larger recruitment of essences. However, I’ll need to run some tests first. I mean I could, but I don’t want to impose on–”
“No. The commander won’t mind,” Arielle said hurriedly. “She would be happy for your help.”
“Good,” he said and picked up a notebook. He drew something that was far off from the intended spell form Arielle had made. She knew it wouldn’t be exactly like the serpents, since the dragon was a different creature, but the part with the charge neutralization had to be similar.
Arielle made a face.
“No?” he wondered.
She cleared her throat. “I don’t think that works. The Calor there wouldn’t allow for a bond with an excess positive charge.”
“Ah, you’re right. How clever you are.” The next structure he grew was even closer to what she wanted, but she said, “How about this goes here instead? And you curve the structure like that?”
“Why?”
“Because it looks better. And I think it’s close to what Vittor–I mean the commander drew.”
He gave her an odd look, then frowned. “A potion like this might be tricky to get right. We’ll need something to amplify the effects. Sparrowleaves? No, that wouldn’t work in a cold-blooded environment. They also don’t do well with rootbark…” He murmured to himself. “Give me a few days. I’ll run some experiments and get back to you.”
“Thank you,” Arielle beamed.
“No, thank you.” His eyes glowed in excitement. “And the commander, of course. If this works, I would like my name as the second assistant, at least, on the report.
“I’m sure she wouldn’t mind,” Arielle said, hoping that was true.

---

“You did what?”
Arielle winced at the tone of Vittoria’s voice.
“Are you asking because you did not hear me? Or because you’re upset?” Ari asked because she had given Vittoria a thorough report of her activities, and she truly didn’t want to go over it again.
“Don’t joke around right now, Arielle. I’m not in the mood.”
Vittoria truly did not sound amused. In fact, her voice sounded annoyed, and Ari was sure the portal bird would frown if it could.
“I’m not joking,” she said. “Thanks to Professor Woden, we might get the dragon cure pretty soon.”
“Arielle…”
“I know you’re concerned. But I don’t think he caught on at all. He thinks the report will be written by you.”
“And since when did I start contributing to the scientific community?”
Ari blinked at her. “You don’t?”
“Of course not. All the experiments I run are for my own benefit. Besides, I don’t have much faith in this professor of yours. Most of what he spat out were conspiracy theories. Like that Spirit Path thing is ancient mystical nonsense that has already been disproved.”
“Yes, but the result he described was exactly what I saw. So maybe it’s not exactly nonsense.”
“You told him what you saw?”
“Of course not. I was very subtle.”
“You don’t have an ounce of subtlety in you, Arielle. Not a sliver of deceit.” She said it like it was an insult.
Ari considered the tips of her boots, forming shapes on the ground of the cave. She bit her lip as Vittoria continued.
“What on earth am I going to do with you, girl?” she muttered. “I give you instructions, and you just do whatever you want. You’re already skirting close to the edge, and you get yourself in even more trouble.”
“How is the snake? And Sir Spendulon”
“Don’t change the subject, Arielle. I’m scolding you.”
“Yes, but you can do it after you tell me about the snake and Sir Spendulon.”
Vittoria sighed. “Sir Spendulon is fine. He seems to like Inara more than the fake Arielle, so she’s keeping him company for now. And as for the snake, lucky for you, Cat agreed to make the healing potion. Are you happy now?”
Arielle nodded, and Vittoria narrowed her eyes.
“You’re not supposed to just agree to that. I was being sarcastic.“
“Oh.” Even that didn’t ruin her mood. Things were looking up. The snake was going to get healed. The dragon might get healed too.
“Is there anything else I should know about?” Vittoria asked.
Arielle thought about it and nodded. “Yes.”
Vittoria sighed again. “Alright. What is it?”
Arielle had decided to ask Vittoria about the blue orb. She had tried three different spells before she’d called Vittoria. Each one had once again been changed differently, and she thought perhaps Vittoria would help her see enough of a pattern to tell her what the orb was.
“What is it, Arielle?” Vittoria repeated, while Arielle figured out how to break the news.
“There’s something I have,” she said. “You cannot ask me how I have it. And you cannot tell anyone else about it.”
“What is it?”
Before she could answer, that sense of doom returned.
Wrongness tainted the air, the prickle at the back of her neck warning her that she was being observed, hunted.
The creature that haunted the cave, the one that Vittoria had been trying to find, was back.
“It’s here,” she said, hopping to her feet.
“What?”
“The thing. The wrongness. It’s here.”
She looked around, and Vittoria’s bird spread its wing and took flight, searching for it.
The blue orb was now hyperactive once more, and Arielle wondered what to do. She couldn’t use [Sensate]; it had been too much for her to handle the last time. She hadn’t yet figured out how to reduce the effects.
Was there another sensing spell she could use?
“I feel it,” Vittoria said. “But I don’t see it.”
A thought occurred to Arielle. “Maybe because it’s not really here.”
The first time Arielle had sensed the wrongness was after practicing abyssal spells with Valeria. Maybe this thing was an abyssal creature, but by its very nature, it didn’t truly exist, at least not in this plain.
It was haunting her from another.
Well…that presented another host of problems. She was fighting something she couldn’t detect.
Unless…
She had one way of enhancing her detection.
Arielle thought of the first group of light spells she had formed with the blue orb. One of them had seemed to give her an odd vision. Would it help here?
It was a long shot but worth a try, as Vittoria tried to use other light spells to see into the dark.
She tried it again, recruiting the blue orb into her simple light spell.
Once again, her vision turned into odd blacks and whites. She peered around, and then a flash of something crossed her path.
“There!” She pointed at the corner, zeroing in on the inky black that clung to the walls. “It’s there.”
Vittoria attacked without question.
Arielle’s black-and-white vision picked up Vittoria’s light beam. But it didn’t affect the creature.
It didn’t reveal it either.
“Where is it?” Vittoria asked as she held the light in position. “Is it still there?”
Yes, but Vittoria’s beam wasn’t able to touch it.
Arielle had a thought.
Instead of ending her spell, she reformed it with the Phasewalker method and combined it with Vittoria’s light beam with the blue orb attached in between.
At first she was concerned that it wouldn’t work, or it would hurt her, and she was ready to break the spell and take the backlash if need be.
But the light flickered and blasted straight to where she sensed the thing.
Suddenly, a screech filled the space, and the wrongness disappeared.
The creature was gone.
She exhaled, wondering if she’d managed to kill the creature permanently or simply drive it away.
“What the heck was that?” Vittoria questioned. “And how did you know where it was? And how did you manage to hit it?”
Arielle took a second to recover before she spoke again. “Well, as I was saying, there is something I have. And you cannot ask me how I have it.”