Inari’s Gift

Sitting alone outside, Cera let her mind wander about, finding nothing unusual within herself, even after the most extensive searches.  No matter how she went about it, mana simply emerged from the faint network of energetic structures deep within and then cycled through her body calmly.

After several hours of hunting, getting more and more frustrated as time moved on, she finally remembered something quite important.  Kitsune were not simply magical creatures, but also spiritual ones.

Remembering the horrible experience of being placed into this new body of hers, Cera was reluctant to even look at her soul.  It took nearly half an hour of working herself up to it before she managed to focus in the direction of her spirit.  What she saw certainly didn’t fill her with much confidence.

She’d done extensive modifications to her soul in her prior life, and it looked like all those modifications had been crudely torn out, and without anything to take their place, to make it worse.  Instead, her spirit resembled a battle-torn wasteland, full of craters and jagged spikes.

Despite this, she kept moving her senses from place to place as she pulled her tail up and hugged it, trying to calm herself.  As she did so, she attempted to get an understanding of how damaged she was.  As she looked around, she spent some time trying to figure out how to mend herself, even if she wouldn’t be able to remake her modifications anytime soon.

Eventually, the sun began to set, and she shakily stood, leaving her work for future Cera to return to.  She then shook out her sore limbs and circled back around the cottage before reaching the door.  After a moment of thought, she knocked on it before opening it.  As she entered, she spotted Falron sitting beside the fireplace, another fire slowly crackling away, reading a book.

“Figure out anything, or just stopping for now?” he inquired, pulling out a bookmark and placing it between the pages.

With a groan and several pops, the old man stood and began to hobble to the kitchen, straightening up after his knee cracked halfway there.

Cera answered his question as she winced at the noises, having experienced a lesser version of what he was going through in her prior life, “I found a lot of damage to my spirit, and have no idea how I’ll recover.  I couldn’t find any hints of what to do, either.”

Falron turned into the kitchen, and her ears easily picked up his actions of beginning to prepare dinner.

As he worked, Cera took a seat, listening as his voice carried through to the main room, “I was afraid it might not be easy.  Typically, you have family able to teach you how to do things that are considered natural, like speaking, walking, that kind of thing.”

Though he couldn’t see it, Cera found herself nodding before she replied, “I suppose that is one way to look at it.  I’m thinking it is related to my soul, so I’m going to focus there more next time.  I’m worried about all the damage I saw, however.”

She sighed and shook her head before deciding to see if she could help and headed to the kitchen.  Within, Falron was cooking what looked like a mighty good, mighty large steak.  She paused a moment, deciding she couldn’t really help.

After a bit of thinking, she asked, “If you don’t mind me asking, where did you get the meat from?  I know it doesn’t stay fresh for long.”

He simply pointed toward the other side of the room, across from the well, where a chest sat, and responded, “I’ve got an ice-chest over there, have to fill it up every now and then, but magic is a handy thing.  Takes a while to thaw the meat out first, but it keeps for a lot longer when you can freeze it.”

Cera nodded before yawning and leaning against a clear patch of wall, and began to wait quietly.  A while later, Falron pulled the steak out and set it on a plate before cutting it in half and moving the rest to a second plate.  After he grabbed knives and forks for each of them, Cera moved forward, startling the man, who had thought she had left.

“I can carry those for you, Falron.  I shouldn’t be useless, after all,” she remarked as she carefully took everything from the man and carried it back to the fireplace and its comfy chairs.

She let him pull out and set up the folding tables before placing each of their meals down and getting ready to eat hers.  She quickly found that her fangs felt perfectly natural, having been too distracted to notice them the time before.  Somehow, she seemed to naturally avoid biting herself, even though she hadn’t had any real practice with having fangs.

While she considered that oddity, she continued to eat, quickly finding herself with an empty plate.  She looked up and saw Falron looking at her strangely.

“Sorry if I seemed disturbed or anything.  I was just thinking about how strange it is that I have the natural ability to handle this body.  I’ve never had ears that twitch back and forth like these, but I can turn them to focus on different things.  I can swing my tail around without thinking about it.  I can even eat without biting myself, despite never having fangs before.  It’s just weird,” she explained with a laugh, shaking her head.

As Falron nodded, she stood and gathered both their plates and utensils before heading back into the kitchen to wash everything and save him the trouble.  Not long afterward, she returned and sat near the fire with him in silence for a time.

Eventually, Cera found herself needing to use the toilet, and found herself surprised she hadn’t needed to before, given it had been over a day.  After a quick question to Falron, she headed to a small room against the outside of the building.  Within was a simple outhouse-like seat, with a pit below it.  Oddly enough, however, it smelled faintly like the woods outside.

After finishing her business, Cera looked around, finding a lack of toilet paper, which only halfway surprised her.  Instead, she found a small stone with a cord attaching it to the wall, and, curious as to what it was for, injected some mana into it.  This revealed that the stone vibrated at a very high speed, making a clear buzzing noise.  Meanwhile, she watched as a bunch of grime on her hand and arm turned into a small cloud of filth that quickly fell to the ground.

“How odd…  Ultrasonic cleaner of some sort?  That seems unusual compared to everything else,” she pondered aloud before holding the stone against herself, quickly cleaning the residual waste and letting it fall into the pit below.

Having finished and cleaned herself, she returned to the living room and asked Falron, “How do you keep the toilet clean?  It actually doesn’t smell bad in there, which surprised me.”

“Oh, I suppose that might be new to you, too.  It is normal to collect a bit of slime from the forest, and it consumes the waste.  You just burn the slime once it gets too large so it won’t overflow.  I’ve got a vent on the outside for that; burning slime isn’t a smell you want indoors,” he explained with a faint chuckle.

Cera nodded at the explanation before simply sitting in silence with the man once more as she further studied her soul.

After a while, Falron spoke up, “Perhaps once you figure out your abilities, you should go to the capital, where a highly-regarded magic academy resides.  It isn’t looked down on so much once you get out of the rural areas, after all.  I found it quite helpful when I was younger.”

Cera nodded before replying, “That does sound like a good idea, though I’d want to be certain I could handle myself if exposed first.  In my prior life, I focused heavily on defensive magic, so I assume I should be able to figure it out very quickly here, once I know the basics.”

Falron hummed under his breath for a moment before inquiring, “What sort of defenses did you use?  There are many methods, after all.”

Thinking back to her experiences in the past, Cera smiled and answered, “Shields, armor, reality warping, cloaking, reactive interception.  My favorites were the armors I produced, as they fit against the skin and act passively rather than needing active attention to maintain.”

“Armor?  Now that is one I haven’t heard of before.  And reality warping sounds impossible to me, I must say,” Falron responded with a frown.

Cera chuckled before remarking, “Consider it a specialized form of shielding.  You take a normal shield, modify it to sustain itself, then shrink it into a small plate.  Repeat many times over, then combine the plates together into a suit of armor.  There are much more complex methods, of course, such as weaving shields together or having different types that interact with each other to form a stronger whole.”

Falron rubbed his chin as he considered her words before he spoke again, “That sounds incredibly complex.  I do hope you don’t bring such maddening ideas into every aspect of magic.  Honestly, that level of skill is frightening compared to what I’ve encountered before.”

Laughing, Cera answered, “No, no, that was my specialty.  I actually was very poor at most aspects of magic.  But when it came to defense, I was incredibly confident in my skills.  Could you show me how to form a basic shield, please?  I should be able to improve on it quickly.”

After a moment to sigh, Falron gave in and began to project a shield, explaining, “The basic shield consumes a very large amount of energy if you want it to protect you physically as well as from magic, so I’m uncertain how well you can use it.  You first need to form a shape with mana outside of your body, then try to solidify it as much as possible while focusing on the bond your mana has with itself; that way, it is harder to tear it apart and pass through.”

With a hum, Cera thought for a moment before immediately deciding on several changes.  She first created a network of several nodes, connected with lines of mana, focusing her entire will on them with the concept of the crystalline nature of metal, then filled in the gaps with sheets of mana meant to flex and transfer the force of a blow to the firmer skeleton.

As the barrier came into being, she felt an intense drain on her mana, though it was less than when she’d formed the blow-torch flame before.  It used up nearly all of her power, but it was simply bound up rather than being expended.

Falron frowned at the odd appearance of her small barrier, then flicked a tiny bolt of ice toward one of the edges, nodding in approval as the barrier held firm and the ice dropped to the ground with a blunted tip.

“That is incredibly odd looking, but I guess it is effective,” he remarked, seconds before Cera absorbed the barrier and then formed one according to his instructions.

This time, she could feel mana bleeding off into the air, actually feeling the lack of cohesion holding it together.  With a frown, she immediately reabsorbed it as well.

“Yeah, that is very inefficient.  I’ll be able to do far, far better in time.  You should try what I did, Falron,” she remarked before explaining her process to the man.

It didn’t take long before he had replicated her barrier, and he looked at it appraisingly as it floated in the air before him.

“You said this is similar to how metal is composed at the smallest level?  Is that why it seems so much stronger?” he questioned as he poked at the nodes and their connections.

Cera nodded, remarking, “Yes, in my old world, we were heavily restricted in what magic we could do, so we focused on the physical world around us, studying it as deeply as we could, then using that to produce tools to study even deeper.  Magic was essentially a lost art, and acted upon an invisible world that few ever noticed.”

Falron waved his hand, dispelling his shield, then hummed and responded, “That sounds most strange to me.  But I suppose it might explain your oddities.”

“In time, I might be able to surprise you even more, if I can replicate even a fraction of what I used in my old world,” Cera replied with a laugh.

A moment later, she shook her head before continuing, “Actually, I should probably get some rest.  I put a lot of effort into trying to figure things out today, and I’m quite tired.”

“Sure, I’ll still be up for a while if you need anything,” Falron remarked as she got up and headed to her room.

Upon reaching her room, Cera pulled off her simple clothes and lay down in bed before she pulled her tail around in front of her and hugged it tightly, smiling as she did so.  Eventually, she relaxed and fell asleep, still cuddling the fluffy appendage.

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