The Dao of Magic

63 - Probe

I breathe in the salty air again as the wind messes with my hair. I look at the frozen figures around me as the ship rocks back and forth. I am sitting on the deck while guiding my students. I am looking over each frozen person on this ship, comparing their aura with what I perceive as their soul.

The small girl Selis picked up is a good example, the sphere I perceive as I pour qi into her brain is pitch black. The aura I perceive from her is untainted though, just very frail. The frailty comes from shock and trauma. A person that is focusing inwards, shutting themselves in their mind, doesn't shine as brightly as a mentally healthy individual.

I retract the qi from her brain and peer inside the Tree, looking at the fish from my experiment. The fish that are in a dense concentration of positive mana have very dark grey souls. They are very faint, as they barely have any thinking capacity, but it clears some things up.

What I see as a soul is a simple indicator of what kind of mana type is most common in their environment. Whoever designed this world - and I don't believe that this planet is natural for a second - has done a crappy job. I sigh a bit at the weirdness of this system and mentally move on for now.

I mark the little girl with a small light emitting formation above her head and move on to the rest. A third of the slaves locked up have nice-feeling auras, the rest are all in varying states of brokenness. The captain is an excellent example of a broken aura and should illustrate a good point.

You are what you eat, but you also are what you do. If you break things often, that starts to reflect on you. Constantly breaking things like a person's will, marriages, families, lives and even things like virginities all leave a mark. The captain feels so wrong that I would not be surprised if he murders entire orphanages daily.

I do a cost-benefit calculation of letting the guy live, and come to the conclusion that this world is a better place without him. I have long since perfected the most optimal way of killing someone, so I recall the spell I have developed for this exact purpose. It is an extremely small formation, its only purpose is plugging up the nerve communication channels.

There are microscopic little gates that allow one neurone to communicate with another in the places where nerve cells touch by sending salt ions through them. This little formation shuts those down in a specific area. Preventing any nerve communication from happening in the heart is a very cost effective way of making sure it won't ever beat again. I don't want to spend more qi than necessary to kill people like this scumbag on pure principle.

None of the crew in rags or any of the soldiers are wholesome people, so I mark none of them. Bord stomps back on deck, carrying two stiff forms on his shoulders. He carefully lays them down on the deck, making the neat rows of frozen figures a little bigger. I stand up as he walks back down the stairs.

I have been thinking about what to do with this collection of poor souls, but I think I have come to a conclusion. I will need to advance my schedule once again, but this quicker pace will also open up a lot of possibilities. A lot of things I have observed on this planet just don't make sense to me, and something is giving me the heebie-jeebies and an odd sense of urgency.

I pull my drone from my spatial ring as the students gather the marked slaves, leaving only empty chains behind. I stop looking at the growing rows and focus on the metal plane in my hands. I have been wanting to modify the camera for a while now, and have been slowly testing new designs in the background of my mind.

Making sure that a simple camera keeps focus over a variety of distances is seriously troubling to figure out. I can start adding telescoping lenses and such, but I want to keep the thing as simple as possible for now. The camera is the simplest camera I can make, a dark room with a pinprick to let light through.