The next day, the dragon girl once again suffered a thorough beating at the hands of the endurance instructor before being taken off the training grounds. As she resisted, she caught the man’s robe, and his hood fell back to reveal his face. He was a manborn with blond hair and blue eyes. That surprised me somewhat. From his immense strength I had expected him to be demonborn or similar. He must have been using essence to reinforce what he lacked physically.
While the children were initially horrified at seeing the girl beaten so violently day after day, they gradually got used to it as part of their routine. At the very least, they realized that they could avoid the same fate simply by obeying the adults. That was exactly what the adults had been waiting for. The children had learned that obeying their elders meant an easier life. I spurned that line of thinking. I was not like them. Whenever I found the time, I would meditate and continue to look inward.
✦ ✦ ✦
At last, I found some success with channeling essence. It happened during endurance training when I was in a bout with another child, a snakeborn girl.
“Take this! And this! And this!” Her knife and purple hair were a flurry of movements, her expression oozing a sense of superiority. She had little skill in brandishing her weapon, but her raw physical strength fed into her speed, limiting my ability to fight back.
This girl had awoken her essence, seemingly using it to make herself faster. Though I was able to dodge her strikes, I struggled to find an opportunity to go on the offensive. We kept changing positions over and over for close to a minute. Suddenly, she fell out of her stance. I didn’t want to miss my chance, and I jumped in, closing the gap between us, thrusting my knife into her chest.
“Okay, you got me. I lose. Congratulations.” Though she threw her hands up in a show of surrender, she didn’t seem especially frustrated by her loss. Checking to see what had caused her to lose her balance, she looked down at her feet. “Ugh, lizard blood! Gross...”
She had slipped on a puddle of the dragon girl’s blood that had been left behind during the daily beating. The snakeborn’s disgust seemed to be targeted toward the dragon girl herself rather than the fluid on the ground. She scooped up some sand and used it to scrub away the blood that had stuck to her body. Only when all traces of it were gone did she ready her knife again.
“Well, that was disgusting.” She sighed. “C’mon, let’s go again.”
I didn’t reply. I readied my own knife and studied her. It was then that the strange misalignment I felt whenever I sat and meditated clicked into place.
“Oh.”
It was like my field of vision had expanded, a bit like when I noticed the existence of my pit organ. Up until this point, I had understood essence to be an invisible sixth sense. Now, it blended with my other five senses, becoming something I could see and hear. My essence was visible when I looked at myself, seeping out around me and flickering like the flame of a candle. When I looked at the snakeborn girl, I could see her essence too; it was more plentiful than mine. Hers wasn’t wavering much either. She must have been controlling it consciously. If my essence was a torch, hers was the fire of a gas burner. The difference was stark.
The snakeborn girl dominated me for the rest of our bouts. I wasn’t used to the newfound sensation within me, and it dragged me down. I didn’t mind, though. It was the starting point that allowed me to familiarize myself with essence.
✦ ✦ ✦
The problem reared its head during the next day’s essence training. Just being aware of your essence was of no use in combat. It was meaningless until you were able to draw it out from yourself or fill your entire body with it. In training, we learned that to bring your essence out of yourself was to release it, and to allow it to wrap around your entire body was to charge it.
Releasing your essence only increased your strength by a tiny bit, but practicing this technique allowed you to get used to controlling it. Charging essence powered up your body and was the secondary step to releasing it. Ordinary people constantly emitted essence without doing anything. I was the same. Releasing essence meant purposefully increasing the amount you discharged, but I found that difficult. I looked on envious of the kids who went straight from recognizing their essence to being able to release it.
Frustratingly enough, I found it easy to reduce the amount of essence I emitted. Apparently, that required a different sort of skill, one we were told we didn’t need to know about yet. I probably would have had an easier time if I had struggled with both increasing and reducing essence. Then I would have decided that controlling essence was beyond me and given up.
As I could purposely tone my essence down, it made no sense that I couldn’t do the opposite. I kept quiet about my struggles as I practiced, doubting I would get out of here alive if the adults discovered I was useless.