“The third and final step comes in three parts.” Malina began and she stepped back, letting the can fall from the ceiling to her feet. She'd catch hell for the dent in the ceiling, she was sure, she just wasn't sure if it would be overshadowed by her teaching children about the process.
“Condense. Spiral. Fractal.”
“Once you master increasing your aura and master being able to mold your aura, you can move on to the first stage. The first and roughest stage of this step has someone condense their aura down, looking inward as they have done so many times before and distilling their soul to the absolute essentials, shrinking their aura to near nothingness compared to what it has been before.”
Malina made her way back aground the desk and took a seat in the chair. “Then, when the aura is truly condensed and you are defenseless and vulnerable, everything comes back. The empty space within you that used to be filled with aura is once again filled with new and pure aura, returning everything they distilled. Each time this process is done, the users aura is permanently increased.”
Malina leaned forward and cast her eyes over the students. “But this is rough, the process takes longer each time and just one increase can take up to a week. You won't perceive it, to you it will seem like a day, maybe a bit more, but when you finish the process your body knows it's been a week. Starved of food and water, sustained by cannibalizing distilled aura, you'll feel like death. Each time there's less and less improvement, more and more time to increase. That's why the next stage exists, a more efficient form of increasing aura, but something impossible to do right out of the gate.”
Malina idly scratched at the wood of the desk with her fingernail, careful not to damage the material. “The goal, the true goal, of this stage is molding your aura, to take the lessons learned in the second step and stretch them to their extents.”
“Each person's aura fills their body and shines a bit past it, protecting them, but it's generally person shaped if it hasn't already been manipulated. Here, you must change the shape of the inward aura while keeping the outward aura in its shape. If done correctly, the shape will hold and become permanent, if not it will very, very, very painfully snap back to its original shape.”
“The inward aura,the shapeless form you first see when you begin the process, must be twisted, turned, and broken into a galaxy-like spiral shape, a spiral that continually spins within you. The direction of the spin doesn't matter, what matters is that each arm of the spiral feeds into the outward aura, continually refilling it as its broken away and rebuilding the aura taken from the center of the spiral. This continually spinning spiral will create a well for aura to be pulled from when broken away on the surface and a space for aura to be rebuilt while the aura spiral is protected by the outward aura."
"If you thought starving your body of food and water was rough, this process takes two weeks. To straight weeks of meditation, pain, and mind bending boredom. Unlike the first step, you don't only perceive a day or two, you need to be completely conscious through the entire process in order to keep the inner aura from breaking form. This step has killed those who make even a small mistake and permanently injured others.”
“Successfully completing this stage, though? That's the greatest accomplishments an aura scholar or master can achieve. The ability that allows one to stand against insurmountable odds without flinching. But it isn't the greatest achievement.”
“You condense, you twist and turn your aura,and now you have to do both, simultaneously. Because the greatest thing a scholar or master can do is to start the process over. Turning inward to the spiral, meditating on it, condensing it, condensing it, condensing it, and finally taking that spiral and twisting it into a spiral made of spirals. This fractal has innumerable wells of aura, innumerable arms to feed the outward aura and into other wells of aura.”
“It doesn't matter the experience of the person attempting this, it doesn't matter how prepared they are, this process breaks nearly every single person who attempts it, taking a month alone just to complete it and causing indescribable pain to the body in the process. You need to carefully mold your aura through the pain for a month straight. No food. No water. No sleep. No breaks. If you compete this step without dying, you'll wish you had. Your body will be starved and emaciated, the only preparation that can help with this is fasting. There can't be any outside help, feeding you, providing an IV drip, no. This has to be done alone. Any outside influence could disrupt and corrupt the entire process.”
“But what do you get for enduring that pain? You get to join the ranks of world class hunters and huntress who have a fraction of the aura you do, you can walk up to a Death Stalker and let it do whatever it wants to you and come out unharmed, you can do things some people only dream of.”
Malina leaned back in her chair and looked over the class again, her eyes narrow. “What you don't get is invincibility, you don't get immortality, and you don't get to ignore the consequences of your actions. These people can die, just like anyone here, if taken by surprise or if they deplete their aura. They don't get to live forever, they don't get to ignore rules and laws because they're stronger.”