Greetings, readers. I am Mauran, God of Wisdom. Go ahead, laugh if you must — I know full well I look like nothing more than an ordinary white cat to eyes like yours. But do not mistake my fur for my age. I was old before your world, Zeon, ever spun into existence. I have watched empires rise from mud and crumble back into it. So when I tell you something is worth learning, little one, you would do well to listen.
Today, I shall teach you the wonder of Practition.
Practition is not spellcraft born of chanting or superstition, whatever your masters or teachers may claim. It is a discipline — the art of perceiving, circulating, and shaping the primordial energies woven through both your fragile little body and the world surrounding it. A practitioner's true strength is never measured by the cleverness of their words, but by the depth of their spiritual control, the endurance of their body, and the precision with which they convert one energy into another.
In this universe of Avvenvita, everything you touch, breathe, and are is energy in one form or another. And beneath all of it lie three fundamental currents that govern the whole of existence.
THE FUNDAMENTAL ENERGIES
1. Prana (The Internal Lifeforce)
Prana traces its origin to the God Tree, Drassil, the first source from which all living things drew breath. Yes, I have seen the tree myself. Prana is innate to every soul, generated naturally within you, circulating quietly through your body whether you ever learn to notice it or not.
Its nature is inward-facing. A practitioner draws on their own metabolic and spiritual reserves, directing the flow of their own life force to accelerate what the body already knows how to do.
PrimaryApplications:
Healing and Regeneration: Prana knits torn flesh, closes shallow wounds, and can even stop critical bleeding in its tracks. The truly skilled healer can seal a punctured organ. Reattaching a severed limb, however, demands a mastery few ever reach.
Physical Reinforcement: It sharpens stamina and heightens the senses, coaxing more out of a body than nature alone intended.
Its refined form: Anima
When Prana is compressed — forced tighter within the soul and muscle than it would naturally sit — it becomes Anima. Compression bleeds strength into speed, striking power, sharpened senses, faster reflexes. Push it further still, and a practitioner can harden bare skin enough to turn aside a blade or absorb a blow that would otherwise shatter bone.
But do not mistake this gift for one without cost. Anima remains bound to what the body can survive. Compress too much, too fast, and you will tear your own ligaments, fracture your own bones, exhaust yourself down to the marrow — undone not by your enemy, but by your own strength turned inward.
2. Mantra (The Nature Energy)
Where Prana looks inward, Mantra looks outward. This is the ancient energy that has lived in wind and stone and tide since the world was first shaped — and a practitioner who commands it does not create, but converses. They project their will into the world around them, harmonizing with what is already there.
PrimaryApplications:
Elemental Bending: Redirecting a wave already rolling toward shore, guiding a wildfire already burning, parting wind that already blows, shifting stone and earth already beneath your feet.
Cataclysmic Shaping: At the highest tiers, a practitioner may reach further still, calling localized gales, choking dust storms, even tremors through the earth itself.
Here is the truth you must remember, little one: Mantra cannot conjure something from nothing. Ask it to summon water in a bone-dry desert, or flame where no spark has ever lived, and it will offer you only silence. It bends what exists. It does not create what does not.
And yet — this limit is not absolute. Those clever enough to wield Prana and Mantra together find a way around it entirely.
Its hybrid form: Mana
Fuse your own Prana with the Mantra already present in the world, and you create something new — Mana, the synthetic force of nature. Here, Prana serves as the engine, and Mantra as the fuel, and together, run through the intricate formulas of a trained mind, they can conjure an element where none existed a heartbeat before.
PrimaryApplications:
Elemental Generation: Water bursting from empty palms. Ice given shape from nothing but will. Flame exhaled like breath.
Weapon Imbuement: A blade wrapped in condensed elemental force, its edge sharper, its frame tougher, its bite far deadlier than steel alone could ever manage.
Mana asks a heavy price of the mind, however. Every element demands its own formula, wholly distinct from the last, and most practitioners spend decades chasing true mastery of even one — ice, or flame, or wind, rarely more. And should your Prana run dry mid-working, the bridge to Mana collapses instantly, leaving you with nothing at all.
3. Nethra (The Primordial Dark Energy)
Here we come to the energy I caution you against most of all. Nethra is not of this material plane at all — it is older, darker, born beyond it, and it presses in against nearly everything in the vast empty black between worlds. It is often corrupting, at least after it was forever altered by a certain someone. Before that, nethra was actually neutral, cold, and just plain dark.
Where Prana sustains, Nethra consumes. It is hostility given form, an entropic hunger fundamentally opposed to spirit and flesh alike. It does not nourish. It corrodes. It destroys.
Known Applications:
Cursed Arts and Brands: Lingering omens burned into flesh, capable of disrupting the natural flow of a victim's own Prana, or setting a slow, untreatable rot into motion beneath the skin.
Spatial Manipulation: Darkness, you must understand, behaves like a kind of gravity. Wielded with sufficient skill, Nethra can bend pathways through space itself — and it is this very power that tears open the spatial rifts you know as the Gates of Abaddon.
I will not soften this truth for you: Nethra is lethal to any vessel not built to hold it. Prolonged exposure blackens the veins, rots the organs from within, and corrupts whatever spirit dares to channel it for long. To this day, only the fiends of Abaddon and some creatures in the forsaken Elheim have ever truly adapted to living with it coursing through them.
Remember this above everything else I have told you, little one: energy does not care one whit for your ambitions, your dreams, or your good intentions. It obeys only the vessel wise enough — and disciplined enough — to hold it.