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Spirit Dancer
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Kylia looks at us more pointedly than usual.
>"Just to make sure you understand the most important point, I'm going to repeat it. It's just an estimate, but the best estimate is that there is a one out of ten chance you will die. That's each for both of you. If you have to process only a single thing I've said tonight, let it be that."
"I understand. Tell me about this 'experience.'"
She takes a deep breath.
>"Okay. See, your body keeps your soul from drifting off into the land's own pool of mana. When your body dies, your soul gets let out to either mix with the land, or to run back to its native homeland and get absorbed there. Here's a popular metaphor - imagine your body is a boat, and on that boat, your soul is a puddle of water with its own shape and sense of identity. Your body - the boat - stays afloat and lets your soul, this puddle of water, stay out of the ocean. A dead body, then, is like a sinking ship, where the ocean floods in and mixes with your water, and your water is dispersed into the rest of the ocean as you lose your sense of shape and self.
>"What this procedure is doing is dragging your boat down just far enough so that the top of the boat is exactly level with the water. When it's like that, the ocean can rush in, but only at knee level, and your soul can keep itself from beind totally absorbed while using the boat's railing to keep itself from behind pulled out completely off the boat. Any deeper and the boat will just completely sink, and any less and the ocean can't rush in. That feeling of your water being touched by the ocean is the 'experience' I'm talking about, having your soul mingle with the ocean of the dead, because in a way, that's what mana stealth is. It's letting go of the 'shape' of your soul for a moment so that it resembles the ocean, or removing the metaphor, it makes your detectable mana indistinguishable from the air around it. Remember that even though people call it 'hiding' your mana, you're camoflauging your soul. Let's say you're trying to blend into this wall. Mana stealth would be looking exactly like this wall, but if you were to literally hide your mana, people would see a kobold shaped hole in the wall.
>"Anyways, experiencing this won't show you how to let go of your shape at will, but it will show you what it's like so that you have a sensation to chase rather than just stumbling around blindly hoping you figure it out. That's why it should be done here in Erja Nokol, so you can figure out exactly what this ocean is like, as mana stealthing here is a bit different than mana stealthing in other lands. We can do it in another land if you like, since figuring out how to do here is still easier after you learn how to do it elsewhere, but this is the direct route, and I'd question why you're doing an operation like this if you didn't want to take the most direct route as possible."
"Because our souls are supposed to be trapped here if we die?"
>"If you care about that. It's not like your scattered soul will have a consciousness to care, so it's more if you care about where the remnants of your soul is. It's true that it does take longer for your soul to scatter away in Erja Nokol's ocean, but it still happens." She finishes her lecture.
"And during this experience, could enemy necromancers yank my soul away?"
>"The experience happens so fast that even if they had a soul wizard looking at the right spot at the right ocean, they'd only see your soul poke its feet in for a couple of seconds, and that's it. A southern wizard would have to have been spending weeks to prepare a spell like that, and be able to find your soul poke inside in the span of a few seconds, and it's just too many ifs. It's possible, I understand your concern, but seeing that happen would easily be the wildest disaster I've seen in my entire life, and that's saying a lot."
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