The next morning, Cera awoke to the sound of Falron making food, realizing she’d slept a bit longer than anticipated. Unfortunately, she’d also managed to drool on her tail in her sleep, so she’d have to clean and brush it again.
After a short meal with Falron, she decided to just clean the tip, since she couldn’t heat up enough water to warm the entire tub yet. With a smaller area to clean, she was able to just use the bucket instead, soaping up the end of her tail before rinsing it and beginning to dry it on a towel.
For these past weeks, drying her tail had to be the worst part. Waterlogged tails were sad, heavy, awkward things that could barely move, compared to the wonderfully fluffy things that they should be. And she most certainly lacked the skill with magic to dry her tail that way, meaning that a towel was the only option.
Around half an hour later, she finally returned to her room, damp tail ready for brushing, and prepared her makeshift alarm again, frowning as she held her foot over the dull knife. Despite her best efforts, it was still extremely easy to get distracted and lose track of time while brushing her tail. This time, however, she managed to keep her focus, and was done brushing shortly after starting.
With a quick hug of her tail, she stopped and put everything away, then went to inform Falron that she’d be busy working on her soul again. While she’d been making progress with it, she had noticed the improvement to her mana was becoming less and less as she progressed. Instead, she thought, there must be something else associated with what she was restoring.
Before testing, however, she wanted to get more done, and went to lie down on her bed before focusing inward once again. She spent several hours doing her best to mend more of the damage before finally getting up again and going outside, hopeful that she could manage her other natural ability.
Searching inside again, this time in the space between her energetic body and her soul, she groped around for anything other than the illusion skill she’d found earlier. Nearly half an hour later, as she was about to give up, she finally felt her mind catch on something, and a tiny flickering spot of fire, no larger than a candle flame appeared in front of her.
She felt somewhat silly going outside for such a tiny flame, but how was she supposed to know where it would appear relative to her, or how large? Casting about the same area in her mind, she swiftly picked up how to move it around, but was unable to increase the size, only make it appear or vanish. Similarly, it wasn’t just an endless ability, instead draining her as if she were jogging.
Pleased with her success, despite the limitations, she returned inside and showed Falron that she’d finally succeeded. After a moment of celebration, they went back to their own tasks—Falron resuming the book he was reading, and Cera returning to her bed to think about the future.
Since Falron had spoken of the magic academy, she’d been considering how she could manage to get there and deal with the risk of being found out as a non-human. The illusionary method likely wouldn’t work for long, as someone was bound to see through it, if she could even manage to get it working well enough to walk around with it.
On the other hand, physically trying to hide her kitsune features wouldn’t work: her tail was far too large and fluffy. She might be able to hide it down the leg of her pants and act like it was a deformity, but that would attract even more attention she didn’t need, so it wasn’t a realistic option.
Yet another idea, and one she preferred, was magic. If she was right, it would be possible to twist healing magic into a form that could alter the body from its natural state. Using that, she would be able to merge her ears and tail into her body, and produce human ears, making her visually indistinguishable from any other human, unless someone checked her mana flows, which would inevitably be altered significantly from such a situation.
For now, though, she needed to continue her work on the basics. Since her mana capacity was slowly reaching a limit, and it would take time to improve, she wanted to revisit the idea of storing mana within her body itself. Knowing that sufficient amounts of mana in one place wanted to expand violently made this idea somewhat risky, but what kind of mage would she be if she didn’t accept risks with experimenting on herself? Certainly not the kind that grew until they could accomplish the feats she had in her prior life!
With such thoughts in mind, she focused on her energetic body once again and began to draw forth mana, slowly compressing it into her hand, carefully paying attention to it as well as her physical hand at the same time. It didn’t take long before the mana began to strain at the confines of her flesh, and her hand began to ache.
She kept going, however, enforcing her will upon the trapped mana, forcing the roiling mass to stabilize and stop moving. Eventually, however, her hand began turning purple, and she ceased her efforts, instead focusing internally to feel what was going on in more detail. As she had expected, flesh didn’t appreciate large quantities of mana being pumped into it, and she could feel it slowly damaging her hand.
Instead of panicking, she simply shrugged, having expected similar, and created a small but intense flame, much like the one she’d shown Falron before, and began to extract the mana, feeding it to the fire. She didn’t expend all the mana, however, retaining a small amount before beginning to heal her hand, reversing some of the damage that had occurred, though she was unable to handle all of it with her limited skill and knowledge.
Fortunately, she’d been able to judge the amount of mana that was safe to maintain easily enough, and her hand was no longer suffering more damage, so it would heal in time. For now, however, it was tender and sore, though that was still better than some of the things she’d done to herself in the past. Now, however, she actually cared about her body, and found herself worried at how easily she’d gone and damaged herself without really caring.
Clearly, she needed to adjust her thinking, so, while pushing herself a tiny bit more than was safe, she frowned, then dialed back to a safe amount again. She then thought long and hard about her views on experimenting on herself, and remembered what she told Falron about not experimenting too much too quickly.
After a while, she sighed and shook her head, unable to completely change her mindset, even though she dearly wanted to. The idea of being able to replace anything that was damaged was too ingrained from her prior life. So she instead decided against any kind of risky experimentation for now.
Instead, she slowly began to fill her entire body with mana, but only until the safe limit she’d determined. In theory, this would help her body adapt to holding mana, allowing her to slowly increase the amount she stored over time. Even if it didn’t, it was still another pool of mana she could draw from, though that didn’t help her regeneration any.
While waiting for her slow generation of mana to fill her body, she summoned up the tiny flicker of foxfire above her palm and played with it, focusing her mind intently on it until she managed to momentarily make it flicker into a square. She wanted to see if it was safe to touch, but held back on trying, since she didn’t want to damage herself any more than she already had.
She could tell, however, that there was a great deal she could do with it, in the future at least. There was a great deal of potential hanging around the thread of power she could currently interact with, after all. She just had to heal further, and learn how to use what she sensed to alter the foxfire.
Eventually, she began to grow tired and got back up, leaving her room only to spot Falron asleep in his chair. She walked over and gently shook him awake, catching his book as it began to fall and slipping the bookmark into place for him.
Cera then headed to the kitchen to make a meal for them, since Falron seemed pretty tired today for some reason. Not long after, the two of them ate, and she cleaned the dishes before heading to bed, hearing Falron head to bed as well.
It didn’t take long for her to fall asleep as she gently stroked her tail.
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